The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [442]
With a relentless will to carve his literary niche, Farrell did some critical pallbearing in an unpublished notebook-article of 1928 on the aging giants of American literature who had meant so much to him when he first entered college. He lambasted Sherwood Anderson for turning erotic peculiarities into “emotional slup” full of “neurotic melodramatics and sexual pyrotechnics.” Although he believed An American Tragedy to be a great novel in spite of its skull-cracking details of exploration into social uncertainties, he thought that Dreiser gutted his novels with conventional and stereotyped formulations of character. Farrell was trying to forge a style that would be consonant with empirical revelations, and he admired Hemingway’s expression. But ideas were more important to him than style, and he was concerned with shedding the feathers of an older naturalism as represented by what he considered to be Dreiser’s woozy thinking about the insoluble mystery of life.
Religion, as Farrell implies throughout Studs Lonigan, is ineffective not only because it points to values mainly to be realized in the hereafter, but also because it fosters resignation and blindness in the face of ills that beset mankind. Thus when Danny O’Neill is a university student, he declares like Nietzsche that God is dead and that his early education was made up of lies.
In line with his developing philosophical and sociological naturalism, Farrell perceived that in the 1930 printed version of the short story “Studs” the unnamed narrator, who was later to become Danny O’Neill, has too romantic a view of the dead hellion. Studs is remembered for having had the strength of nonconformity that the narrator wished for in himself. As early as 1916, the year the trilogy begins, Farrell had known the prototype of Studs, who was three years ahead of him at St. Anselm’s. In a self-analyzing mood following his mother’s death early in 1946, Farrell wrote to his publisher, James Henle, that for a while he had admired the original Studs, who took him under his wing. Unlike Farrell’s, Studs’ father was a prosperous man of the middle class, a plastering contractor. Studs “was a melted real and ideal brother-father image” as an “alternative to the Farrell images in my mind,” wrote Farrell. He said he wondered whether Studs could whip the boy on whom the sneaky Red Kelly was patterned, and that he felt no qualms about the possibility of Studs’ beating up his eldest brother, Earl, who not only was his father’s favorite but also failed to be the protective person Farrell wished him to be. After a time the real Studs became less friendly toward Farrell and treated him as a “goofy kid.” Later, having outgrown Studs and Red, Farrell confessed that he nevertheless felt intense reactions from early years the few times he met them.
Early in 1931, Farrell’s boyhood acquaintance, the novelist Lloyd H. Stern, read a draft of Studs Lonigan and said, “Jimmie, there’s too much here for one book.” Taking his suggestion, Farrell divided the draft into two separate volumes. He sent Young Lonigan to Simon and Schuster. Clifton Fadiman returned the manuscript with a brief letter, dated February 4, 1931, saying that though he thought the material was genuine, he felt that the writing was crude and the irony heavy-handed. Four other publishing houses also rejected the manuscript.
Meanwhile Farrell and his campus sweetheart, Dorothy Butler, eloped to Paris. (I do not wholly agree with Professor Edgar M. Branch, who also having had access to Farrell’s post facto letters and diaries, notes in “James T. Farrell’s ‘Studs Lonigan’ “ that both Dorothy and a girl Farrell met in Saratoga in 1933 have “qualities” that can be found in Catherine Banahan of Judgment Day. It may be that Catherine is the result of Farrell’s changed feelings toward Dorothy, as reflected in Studs’ ambivalence toward his fiancee. But according to my knowledge there is no real similarity between the two women. Farrell divorced Dorothy in 1940, the same year he married actress Hortense Alden, by whom he has two sons. They, too, were divorced, in 1955, and in that year Farrell remarried Dorothy, from whom he is now separated again. But 1931-32 with Dorothy, despite the loss of their son five days after birth, was one of Farrell