Paris Year: Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931-1932

By the time James T. Farrell set sail for Paris in 1931, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and all the other famous American expatriate writers had left. Sick of the Depression and of his hometown, Chicago, he and his pregnant wife of four days, Dorothy, arrived in Paris on the sly, trying to hide their secret marriage from Dorothy's mother. Farrell's mission was simple: to get published. And after many disappointments (mostly due to censorship concerns because of his explicit prose) the Vanguard Press accepted the first of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Young Lonigan, on the recommendation of poet Ezra Pound. Branch, a research professor emeritus at Miami University in Ohio, portrays Farrell as a literary outsider trying to make his way in a strange city. There are meetings with Kay Boyle and Padraic Colum, but Farrell is more worried about the rent and food money than about meeting James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who were also living in Paris at the time. This year also saw the prolific Farrell at work on a proletarian novel called The Madhouse, in which he wrote a first draft of 329 pages in an amazing month and a half (it would later be published under the title Gas-House McGinty). In December 1931 a son was born, but died three days later. Discouraged and worn out by financial worries, Farrell borrowed money to return to America. A friend of both Farrells, Branch had access to Farrell's papers. The result is an in-depth study that brings the artist-in-the-garret clich to life and shows the tenacity and talent that would help make Farrell an important American writer. Photos. (Oct.)