Clock Stopper

By -- Stefan Kanfer

OLIVE AND MARY ANNE

by James T. Farrell

Stonehill; 212 pages; $8.95

"Morris lit a cigarette. A woman in red walked by. She looked fresh; she seemed to be untouched by the sweltering heat. Morris stared after her. God, to have a woman like that!"

The cadence of the prose in Olive and Mary Anne is reminiscent of boots on pavement. The themes are not much subtler: an heiress slides into boozy decay; a proletarian poet recollects his childhood in an orphanage and his sexual initiation; a Communist seeks to tear down institutions--and dreams of dominating women. It scarcely matters what time is assigned to these stories; the author's clock has stopped in the '30s, when naturalism reigned and bourgeois society was the ordure of the day. The revolutionaries of that epoch now resemble entries on some tarnished armed services memorial: Edward Dahlberg, Benjamin Appel, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell. Of them all, only Farrell is still doing business at the same old stand. His ear for dialogue remains metallic (" 'And now, to no self-neglect,' he said, raising his glass and drinking"). His plots are, as always, mere runways for their adrenal characters. Yet, nearing 74, Farrell shows no signs of flagging energy, and he has lost none of his familiarity with the details of grief. His working people seem to have jobs, not roles; his drunkards sometimes stink of excess, but never of self-pity.

Understandably, there was a time when Farrell was a lodestar of the non-Communist left. His Studs Lonigan trilogy is a genre classic, a cluttered memoir of graceless Irish poor whose lyricism and potential are crushed in the struggle to survive. H.L. Mencken called their creator "the best living novelist," and Critic Alfred Kazin noted respectfully that "Farrell was the archetypal novelist of the crisis and its inflictions ... all the rawness and distemper of the thirties seem to live in [his] novels."

But the social realism that flourished in depression was exhausted by prosperity. In the ensuing decades. Chicago's backwaters were described in livelier manner by Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow. Farrell gradually dropped out of sight, his books published but ignored by critics and readers who had moved on to other themes, higher styles. The old pro stayed on his outworn turf producing characters who still dumbly battled circumstance, like cuttlefish trying to redirect the tide. Olive and Mary Anne is the fixture as before. Its five tales are confined to the standard Farrell inventory: lives with insufficient love, the sorrows of gin, childhood wounds carried for a lifetime. Yet the stories cannot be easily dismissed or forgotten. Farrell's approach, like that of his mentor Theodore Dreiser, consists not only of primitive human drama but also of profound human sympathy. In this, his 51st book, the drama is crude but the sympathy incalculable.

Olive and Mary Anne seems unlikely to win the author a vast new public. Audiences will be attracted by another, larger project. NBC has plans for a high-budget miniseries based on Studs Lonigan--a kind of Hibernian Roots. The notion of commercial television popularizing an old radical is an irony too strong even for a James T. Farrell character--and just right for this neglected author.

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