The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [437]
While Wall Street in the twenties was hatching golden eggs and even soda jerks were gifted with the Midas touch, millions were still toiling for security. The business ethos that dominated the smug middle class and pervaded the thought of the laboring masses regarded Success as the prime virtue of a man. This meant in Studs’ case that when young he must use his fists and when older he must make a lot of money. The Law of Success was superimposed on an otherworldly religion; not Jesus Saves but—Money Saves. Life seemed unable to gratify the hunger of the Studs Lonigans for an experience richer than reckless dissipation.
The mundane trivialities and the grotesqueries of living that Farrell minutely details are all noteworthy in producing the impressive and almost clinical picture of a world in gradual decay. Through this attention to the smallest particulars emerges Farrell’s irony, the acid fruit of his compassion for the wayward and suffering Studs. Studs tried but could not come to terms with the reality of the twenties, a life he eventually did not want but which owned him nevertheless. Farrell’s irony in the last analysis is as much an exhibit of his underlying melancholy as it is a means of maintaining the optimism implicit in social protest.
The trilogy, moreover, has an extraordinary authenticity, within its limits, as it focuses upon the big-city Irish and captures their past in movement. Farrell deals with areas never handled so realistically before and rarely since, as Irish immigrants are shown in all the intermediate stages of becoming “Americanized.” Fitzgerald and later O’Hara forgot or shied away from delineating the mass of Irishmen who made up part of the base of the social pyramid. In Studs Lonigan an altogether new American breed is shown, developing out of the assimilation and acculturation processes. By recording their life in Chicago, with all the similarities and contrasts of the human comedy to be found among them, Farrell hoped to encompass the breadth of American culture. Certainly, with this trilogy and subsequent works, he made a powerful effort in this direction. And he has given back to the Irish the dignity of truth about themselves.
The cleverest storyteller, the most far-ranging imagination, cannot create the sources of inspiration. It was an essentially transplanted peasant culture that rooted Farrell’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer. He was born on February 27, 1904, in Chicago, where, as in no other American city until mid-century, there was a continuous inflow of poor national and minority groups, and corrupt politicians to woo them. In Studs’ eyes Chicago did not have the romantic aura that impressed Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. In his vain search for meaning and a sense of belonging he took for granted the physical aspect of the city. Farrell, therefore, devoted fewer details to pictorial impressions of the city than to animating sociological concepts of urban existence, the key to examining his “hero’s” relationships.
In Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets we see a teen-ager of the lower-middle class going through one of the most difficult periods of his life. At the parochial school graduation the easy incantation of the unctuous Father Gilhooley functions like Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby Dick. In a sense Father Gilhooley foretells the doom of Judgment Day. But this old-fashioned politician of the spirit, who believes that the boys and girls have received a “fine” Catholic education, does not understand the youngsters. Neither do their families, with their prefabricated emotions, understand them sufficiently to inspire any confidence in parental advice. Studs’ father confuses his own youth with that of his son; his mother allows her religious views to interfere with her common sense. As a result the poolroom gang supersedes all other influences. Studs must perforce reject the values of his religion, his school, and his family to seek the nod of recognition from his peers, without realizing that they, too, are part of the sociocultural swamp, though slightly away from the center of stagnation. The streets educate Studs; he is, as Farrell once wrote,