The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [440]
Sociologists call such neighborhoods as Farrell’s “urban interstitial” areas, residential districts going to pot. In The Young Manhood Farrell demonstrates this disintegration by depicting young men of social backgrounds different from Studs’, less stable persons who are transients in boardinghouses and beginning to haunt the poolroom. He shoals further neighborhood decay as the older youths are seen going off to be killed in a “war to end all wars,” and the Negro overflow of racial barriers causes the 1919 race riot.
It is no wonder that Farrell wanted to emulate Balzac, Zola, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, with their juxtaposition of classes and their concept of power; and that in college he took avidly to Joyce’s dissection of Irish life. For one thing, out of the emotional bondage of his formative years came his awareness of money as a shaping factor in human lives, along with the motifs of time and death that underlie and give tragic dignity to the frustrated and culturally pulverized people characterized in his trilogy. For another, his pent-up sexual yearnings in his teens, plus his callowness with girls, who would not give him a second date, reinforced his drive for recognition.
Although H. L. Mencken had crusaded to gain Dreiser and others freedom of expression on all topics, American literature was still genteel in its language and treatment of sex until Farrell anatomized the sexual behavior of the lower and middle-class Irish in his trilogy. His scarifying account of American teen-age sex life in the big city only now is being fully accredited. As late as 1948, according to Farrell’s letter, dated May 22 of that year, to Victor Weybright of The New American Library, witnesses against the trilogy included: “Fundamentalist ministers, a burglar alarm salesman, and a priest from Cardinal Daugherty’s office, saying that he was a personal representative of the Cardinal, and that he found the book filthy.” An Irish Catholic named Ryan, as attorney for the Philadelphia police, defended their attempted ban by quoting isolated passages from Studs Lonigan that would of course have made anyone blanch at the time. Farrell’s impromptu reply to the lawyer at one point was admirable: when young he believed that “all of these feelings and problems” about sex “were only mine. I felt totally isolated. I did not realize that many boys felt the same way.” He unsparingly investigated the sex life of the gang in his trilogy to “tell youth that the problems and even the shames, and the humiliations, and the difficulties you go through, are things worthy of the serious attention of the literate public of America.”
Devoid of social graces, his youthful behavior contrasted with the seeming suavity of his schoolboy friend, Paul Caron, whose traits are distributed among several characters in the trilogy and upon whom the Sanine-like Ed Lanson of the Danny O’Neill series, and of Ellen Rogers (1941), Boarding House Blues (1961), and other works is partially based. The late Caron never lost an opportunity with a girl, having a line or two from Swinburne ready to spout. Farrell traces the tree-scene, when Studs kisses Lucy, which recurs in Studs’ reveries throughout the trilogy, to the chance he himself once muffed of sitting in a tree with the lovely sister of one of the models for Lucy. Farrell excelled rather in feats of prowess at St. Anselm’s Grammar School and earned letters in sports at St. Cyril’s Carmelite High School (now named Mount Carmel). Short, like Studs, and bespectacled, he compensated by such exertions for his lack of success with girls. Like Studs, too, he had a sense of his own destiny, but such parallels diverge as Farrell grew older and set himself the task of heroically making himself a thinker so that he could be an intellectual doer.
When Farrell attended De Paul University in 1925 for a semester, working his way and paying his grandmother five dollars a week for room and board, he wanted to become a lawyer. But though he continued to major in social sciences at the University of “Heathenology,” as Father Albert H. Dolan, his high school teacher, called the University of Chicago, he realized that to enter the profession of law was, at least for himself, merely to engage in conformity and hypocrisy on another level of American life. No doubt his pre-law training -reinforced his interrogative view of the world. The book that stirred him to think that he might have something to say in fiction was Sherwood Anderson