The James (T. Farrell) Version

WHEN TIME WAS BORN by James T. Farrell. 64 pages. The Smith. $3.50.

James T. Farrell is the most heroic figure in modern American letters. No one else, in the face of such resolute popular and critical discouragement for so many years, would persist with unsullied vocation so doggedly and prolifically in the lonely and exacting art of fiction. His unrequited passion for literature must be the most gallantly unfortunate affair since an emperor penguin fell in love with Admiral Byrd (and followed him around, hinting with gifts of egg-shaped stones that he would like to join the Navy).

Farrell calls his latest literary enterprise a prose poem. It is neither prose nor poem, but it appears to be an attempt to rewrite the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. The first sentence blithers and blathers and blunders along for five pages and 1,390 words. Reading it can only be likened to the experience of a man who, having lost an election bet, has undertaken to eat a pad of Brillo and is wondering which is the more unpalatable--the steel-wool structure or the pink soapy filling. Sample Farrell: "Time moved slowly backwards through more than one thousand nine hundred and twenty years of A.D., and five thousand years of B.C., through all of the years and years of the Jewish calendar . . . before Hector was a pup, through the Neolithic and Paleolithic ages, back through and before the Darwin man, the Dover man, Pithecanthropus Erectus, and all of the fathers of the fathers . . ."

King James, who got to have his name on the end papers of the most widely read English Scripture, had the humility to seek the collaboration of 47 bishops and scholars in producing his eponymous Version. James T. Farrell collaborates with no one, least of all the reader; his version of the Creation was written in 20 consecutive hours. The anonymous contributing bishops who struggled with the Bible took a little more time.

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