Tetralogy's End

MY DAYS OF ANSER -- James T. Farrell --Vanguard ($2.75).

In the early '30s, a somewhat owlish Chicago slum boy named James Thomas Farrell decided to make the U.S. slum-sensitive. He succeeded better than almost anybody but Al Capone. Farrell's Studs Lonigan (TIME, Feb. 19, 1934) became a synonym for the smalltime U.S. tough guy. With dogged earnestness, a lot of firsthand factuality (Farrell was born the son of a Chicago teamster in 1904) and a total lack of humor, Farrell painstakingly traced Studs's dingy career and its social context through three slablike volumes. None of the Studs series was quite as good as Volume I, but in the general flatness of U.S. letters, the trilogy raised Novelist Farrell to a knoblike eminence.

Later Farrell switched to a less convincing underdog, Danny O'Neill, a sensitive, bewildered, half-educated Chicago slum boy with intellectual yearnings. My Days of Anger is Volume IV of the O'Neill tetralogy. With a dreary hopefulness, it finishes what A World I Never Made dejectedly began.

My Days of Anger covers the years from 1924 to 1927. They are three of the quietest years in the history of the battling O'Neill clan. There is almost none of the shillelagh-shaking, back-alley bickering, front-step gossip that gives Farrell novels their authentic Celtic charm. Reason: 1 ) age and death are taming and weeding out the O'Neills; 2) Danny is growing away from his feckless family, and Novelist Farrell is busy recording the long, long thoughts of a sensitive boy in Chicago's frustrating South Side. In this book Danny works for the Continental Express Co., takes a prelaw course at night. Later, he attends the University of Chicago by day, tends a gas station by night. He reads a lot, is shy with "good" girls, gets no where with the other kind. He loses his faith in God, his virginity, the grandmother who has raised him. He contracts gonorrhea, socialism, literary ambitions.

Most recognizably human and best-drawn of Farrell's O'Neills is the illiterate grandmother.

When she dies, Danny makes the great decision, prepares to bum his way to bookloving Manhattan. He will never reach it in a Farrell novel: Novelist Farrell is about to drop Danny in favor of a new character named Bernard Claire. Farrell's next book will report Hero Claire's career among Manhattan's intellectuals during the boom years and the depression. Says Novelist Farrell slyly:

"I want to handle the intellectuals with the same attention to human values as I handled the people Studs Lonigan knew."

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