The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [441]
But he knew that he was not yet ready to tackle the Danny O’Neill books. His mind was also fermenting the idea of another novel about his old neighborhood. Instead of Studs he would have Vinc Curley as the hero. Vinc, later reduced like Danny to a minor role in the trilogy, is an imbecile who suffers more than the other members of the marginal group from the gang’s transferred self-hatred and fear. But Farrell dropped this idea as again too subjective to handle.
Not able to sell anything in New York, Farrell returned to Chicago, where between 1928 and 1930 he composed stories whose characters, incidents, and methods preceded their use in the trilogy: “Mary O’Reilley,” “A Casual Incident,” “Helen, I Love You!” “The Scarecrow,” “Saturday Night,” and other pieces. The most notable, “Studs,” which he wrote in 1929 after attending the real model’s funeral, earned great praise from Professsor Linn’s advanced composition class. Farrell showed the manuscript to Professsor Robert Morss Lovett, a well-known liberal who influenced Farrell’s generation and who was later to be mentioned in the trilogy. Lovett thought well of it and advised expansion into a novel. When Farrell’s story about Danny O’Neill, “Slob,” appeared in the June, 1929, Blues, Clifton Fadiman, then an editor at Simon and Schuster, inquired whether Farrell had written a novel.
Given such impetus, Farrell began discussing his ideas for enlarging “Studs” with his college friend, Mary Hunter, novelist Mary Austin’s niece and in later years the “Marge” of radio’s “Easy Aces” and also a play director, who had been present at the inception of the story. Future biographers will see her as an important influence upon his career. In the process of analyzing his old neighborhood with the aid of University of Chicago sociology, he wrote to Fadiman on July 10, 1929, that he was undertaking a novel about the area. He gave details about it, summarizing its characters as “in a sense my old gang” who “drift to the poolroom and its complements as the only outlet of their impulses for the romantic and the adventurous.”
At this time his college professors viewed him as a tempestuous radical; his classmates regarded him as a Dreiserian and Nietzschean iconoclast. His friend Joe Cody later declared that Farrell sometimes terrified him. Farrell was by now a fiercely assertive child of the Enlightenment who quoted Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” and was published in Haldemann-Julius’ Debunker. He stayed away from his family. Once he was verbally stung by the model for Red Kelly, who accused him of not taking care of his mother. But Farrell was ashamed of her and could not abide her religious fanaticism. He scorned regular work, sleeping in flophouses, borrowing textbooks from Joe Cody, working only out of dire necessity, and writing at demon speed. He still went “night-hawking” with college friends, but he was also hunting up literary material. As in his earlier years, he hung around the section of his neighborhood park called the Bug Club, the counterpart of New York and San Francisco’s Union Square. He described the club in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and imbued one of its characters, John Connolly, with ideas derived from the university’s sociologists. He could also be seen at Jack Jones’ Dill Pickle Club, near Chicago’s North Side, and at other forums where he could listen to speakers of various shades of thought. Only a few people understood and sympathized with his drive to produce a great work of art at machine-gun speed. He wanted fame; he wanted to rid the world of injustice. Add to this the fact that his worsening eyesight made him fear that he might go blind before he could accomplish his goal and it is no wonder that he sometimes tried the nerves of others by his self-centered determination.