Angry, Clumsy Man

BERNARD CLARE (367 pp.)--James T Farrell--Vanguard ($2.75)

"What writers belonging to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians acquire at the cost of their youth." James Farrell, a self-conscious plebeian --who has already estimated the cost of youth in the hundreds of thousands of words of his Studs Lonigan trilogy and Danny O'Neill tetralogy -- quotes this remark of Anton Chekhov's at the beginning of Bernard Clare. It is the first of a new series of novels about a young. Chicago-Irish plebeian who fights against odds to make himself into a novelist.

Like everything else Farrell has written, Bernard Clare is sure to be provoking. It will fire the enthusiasts who believe that Farrell's dogged, disagreeable, belligerent honesty sets him far above most contemporary writers; it will confirm his detractors in their view that no amount of sincerity can compensate for so much bad writing.

For the Prosecution. Once again Farrell's satire is "like elephants out for a good romp" (as the late New Republic critic Otis Ferguson aptly described it). The dialogue, as usual, is tone-deaf, and the adverbial crunches devastating (Bernard "winced inwardly"; "'Blah!' the drunk angrily ejaculated").

Similes and metaphors romp hither & yon ("Here I am like a crow, circling, circling around and around, circling and cawing, cawing as I swoop in a downward arc to sink my teeth into the same old dilemma"). And, as ever, at the dip of a rambling pen, the characteristic Farrell brashness melts into oleomargarine

("These people passing, these svelte and stylish women, they didn't even notice him. Little did they think that here went Bernard Clare, who was in love with Eva Stone, and who someday would be a writer, writing of New York, of lovely women gay on its gay Saturday-afternoon autumn streets, gay under the grey skies of New York").

For the Defense. Farrell enthusiasts, on the contrary, will stoutly insist that out of Farrell's graceless prose emerges a true and important period picture. The subject: Manhattan of the flamboyant '20s--which the late Scott Fitzgerald saw from the peak of success, and which Chicago-born James T. Farrell sees from the bottom of the barrel.

This time the man in the barrel is Hero Bernard, who lives among bums and hobos in a cubicle of the "Willis Hotel" (rent: 35-c- a night). First he works in a cigar store where his fellow clerks nourish their starved egos by achieving the maximum of seductions at the minimum of expense. While they dream of the day when they can buy any woman they want, Bernard dreams of deathless love and literary fame. In his off hours he buries himself in the works of Dreiser, Ibsen, Keats and Sherwood Anderson, agonizingly hammers out his own youthful fiction.

Bernard thrills to the popular events of his decade--the Tunney-Dempsey fight, the Snyder-Gray murder. He joins in the terrible moaning of the crowd in Union Square when Sacco and Vanzetti are electrocuted. When, to his own disgust, he becomes a crack advertising salesman, he moves to what he feels are Bohemian quarters in Greenwich Village. As his income rises, his output of fiction drops proportionately.

Final Fate. What Novelist Farrell has achieved is an involved, painstaking chronicle of one kind of city life. He has also tried, without much imagination or success, to express his disgust at the power of money over human destinies.

The most moving pages of the book describe Bernard's love affair with a married woman, who finally decides to give him up and stay with her husband and child. One of her main reasons is that her husband supports her ailing, aged father and mother, whereas Bernard can give her nothing but love.

Adultery aside, Bernard constantly broods over the pitiable efforts of his fellow men to lead a Christian life in a money-crazy world. He walks the streets endlessly, dreaming and puzzling--like all Farrell heroes--over the fate of human beings in a world they never made.

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