The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [439]
Lacerating personal experiences imbued Farrell with a valuable double-angled vision of the Irish in their reactions to urban industrialization. He suffered at the age of three the trauma of separation from his parents, who had too many children and whom poverty and death stalked. After he had spent a few weeks at his grandmother’s, he was brought home. But he revolted against his own mother and screamed until his father took him back. When he saw his grandmother he exclaimed, “Mudder, put me to bed.” Relating this experience to me and others in recent years, Farrell drew a connection between it and the scene in Judgment Day when the ailing Studs, after seeing a burlesque show and having an orgasm, goes home and asks his mother to put him to bed.
Young Farrell became demanding as he was pampered in the atmosphere of his grandparents’ steam-heated apartment, kept up by a bachelor uncle, Tom Daly, who was a shoe salesman, and by one of two spinster aunts who had a cashier’s job. This uncle, Farrell told me, found his way into the trilogy as Studs’ Babbitt-like father. Under thin fictive disguises Farrell later memorialized most of his family as the famous O’Flaherty-O’Neill households in the Danny O’Neill saga, in which the characterizations are only slightly less convincing than that of Studs himself.
Farrell’s is such a classic example of alienation in childhood and youth and of the attempt to purge himself of his past through art that, had he himself not explained it as such in our recorded conversations and in voluminous correspondence with others, I might be accused of inappropriately forcing a Freudian interpretation upon a more variable life. He was ashamed of his parents’ “shanty Irish” existence. He despised his ignorant mother’s pietism; he despised his father’s way of escape from life in drunken bouts of forgetfulness and occasional harshness with him. (Only later did he feel proud that his father had been a hard-fighting, hard-working man who had participated in the Chicago teamster strike of 1914.) He felt rejected by both parents for separating him from his brothers and sisters; and he came to hate his eldest brother, Earl, for being his father’s favorite as well as for teasing him. He learned his scorching lingo from both sides of a family that had raised cursing to a communicative art. When his father died in 1924, Farrell’s mother, still relatively young, took to religion with greater intensity. In Studs Lonigan Mrs. Reilley bears some resemblance to her, and Farrell probably blended her and his grandmother, the illiterate Julia Brown Daly, a well-known character in the neighborhood, to give us Mrs. Lonigan.
The South Fifties where his grandmother lived—the locale of the trilogy—was no less hateful to Farrell in his youth than the “shanty Irish” block where his parents froze in wintertime in their heatless cottage. In The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan Farrell has Danny O’Neill, now a university student, think: “Some day, he would drive this neighborhood and all his memories of it out of his consciousness with a book.” Farrell does not deny that, for all the boys he knew and tried to flock with, he remained a tormented lone wolf, as is reflected in the treatment accorded Danny by Studs and the gang. Nor does he deny that growing up as he did was sometimes a battle of guts and nerves, developing a high tension in a person. The battleground is dramatized in Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood.