The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [438]
In The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan he rationalizes the decline of his potentialities and releases repressed desires in Prohibition alcohol and fornication with Catholic girls. His fall in Judgment Day symbolizes the larger fate suffered by the middle-class Irish in the blackest years of the nation’s history. It is further exemplified by the lot of his father. Patrick Lonigan, who in business shares the values that his son conformed to in leisure activities, loses all his money when the inflated stock market declines precipitously. Farrell knew how to tap the substratum of events both big and small for the underlying as well as the manifest impacts upon the consciousness of ordinary people. Influenced by George Herbert Mead’s discussion of human reverie in his article ‘The Nature of Aesthetic Experience” (International Journal of Ethics, July, 1926) and the writings of Freud and other great thinkers, Farrell provided movies, newsreels, headlines, interior monologues, and letters of other characters to create the objective world of Studs Lonigan, within the depths of whose consciousness history is also being made. Ironically, just before his death, Studs blames himself for his sad plight. Farrell wrote to his brother Jack, a psychiatrist, on February 7, 1950, that his “outburst of remorse” and “his appealing to his mother” tell “close to everything about the psychological structure of Studs.” But, as Farrell makes clear, the ghoulish figures that plague Studs in his dying fantasy with their narrow mouthings are actually part of the world that infected and diseased his conscience.
Farrell, like his intellectual guides—such as Mead, best known for Mind, Self, and Society, C. Judson Herrick, who set down his experimental conclusions in The Brains of Rats and Men, University of Chicago sociologists Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, and others, and John Dewey, whose Human Nature and Conduct crystallized for him the intention of Studs Lonigan places more importance upon the learned responses of people than upon their “original nature.” Studs plays several roles in an effort to find the “self” that Mead speaks of; it is the process of his growing up. But his roles have been limited and his brain conditioned, as Farrell maintains, by the “spiritual poverty” of his environment.
Judgment Day shows us a prostrate economy that has not only undermined and terrified the leaders of industry and politics; it has sapped the morale of the little businessmen and put fear and anxiety into the hearts of the younger generation. It must be remembered that America could not face its riddling fears; it tried hard to avoid dealing with its own self-created economic and social tragedy. The populace continued in cultural deprivation to be dosed with sedatives such as dance marathons, illegal betting, uplift lectures, demagoguery over the radio, and movies about hero-gangsters with submachine guns or with legal briefs and property titles who always seemed to obtain the most luscious female companionship. These plus the verbal aspirins of advertising and the best-selling literary anodynes of historical or contemporary escapades could not prevent the cultural vertigo of the twenties from leading to suicides, bread lines, and Hoovervilles in the thirties. As Marxian as Farrell became when in 1934 he was composing the last volume of the trilogy, he did not need to load his -story with melodramatic contrivances. Right before his eyes society had become progressively more savage than any novelist could have imagined and made believable. Farrell’s quite unforced indictment is that American civilization was not worth much if it could not help the Studs Lonigans to follow healthier and happier ways of life.-
Coming from a poor family, James Thomas Farrell, not less than Studs Lonigan who began on a higher social rung, had been brought up on the American Success Myth that led to spiritual emptiness. The boys he grew up with were ashamed to be themselves; hence they pretended to be