BOOKS
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New York in mind (though of course "not only" New York but also
America and Russia and the whole awful world
is
intended); if so, one
must marvel at the author's infallible grasp of the half-truth only.
The Joker
is the fictional expression of some kind of confusion of
soci–
ology and politics. We win or lose our liberty in the sphere of politics.
But "the
city"
is a sociological thing that has nothing to do with liberty
or tyranny. Anyhow, most novelists are best advised to leave such sub–
jects alone. Kafka is one of those writers whose example is always a
bad one for others to follow. (Shakespeare was another.) I remember
Malaquais as a vigorous and interesting writer; clearly,
The }oker
is
an aberration, "literature" in its worst sense.
,The Face of Time
is
the best thing I have read by James T. Farrell,
a simple book about an Irish family, the Q'Flahertys, living in Chicago
back in the first years of the century. Farrell is passing into his "late
period," one gathers from this novel, and from a disarming little essay,
"Reflections at Fifty," that he recently published in the
New Leader;
his whole concern in
The Face of Time
is
with simplicity and truth,
the only things one cares about as one gets on. In this book there is
none of the painful literary effort, the turgid, humorless writing, which
one remembers as marring his earlier novels. Now all the sentences are
simple declarative almost to the point of childishness; the author never
intrudes on the thoughts and talk of characters, in which the slow de–
structive flow of time is mirrored, holding it all up to us with a com–
miserating impartiality.
He is dead set against literature; the truth, and only the truth,
matters. And clearly the novel is true; this is how it must have been.
Yet something is lacking, you realize, when you find the story just
managing, or not quite managing, to keep your attention as you go along
in it. The life that Farrell portrays is sad, and one is moved, and yet
the novel makes you impatient; surely these people saw their lives as
something more than this, why should the novelist see less than they?
Much of what we mean by art is lacking, and the meaningfulness of art.
The Face of Time
gets its name from a phrase in a poem by Yeats.
The art that is wanting in the novel, fills the poem to overflowing:
Although I shelter from the rain
Under a broken tree,
My chair was nearest to the fire
In every company
That talked of love or politics,
Er,e Time transfigured me.
