The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [443]
Shortly after the Farrells had arrived in Paris, Walt Carmon, managing editor of the New Masses and acting as an agent, submitted young Lonigan to James E. Henle of Vanguard Press. Enthusiastic about it despite the advice of a famous civil liberties lawyer not to risk obscenity charges by publishing it, Henle signed a contract with Farrell. But certain scenes had to be bowdlerized, including the Iris gang-shag; and others, such as a masturbation race, had to be cut entirely. (Later, when the trilogy was published in England, further expurgations were made.) In order to meet “official prejudice” Young Lonigan was issued in 1932 in a special edition, “the sale of which is limited to physicians . social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescents.” An introduction to the novel had also to be solicited from sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher. Only a little over five hundred copies of Young Lonigan were sold during its first year of publication.
The snickersnee of adverse reviews of Young Lonigan, formed an almost deadly counterpoint to the bellowing praises of it. The anonymous critic for The New York Times (May 1, 1932) stated categorically that it is not a novel. Farrell’s defenders saw it as the most important American novel of adolescence since Huckleberry Finn and commended his ear for the idiom. Similarly the reviewers canceled out one another’s evaluations of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in 1934. The book did not sell well either, but notices began circulating in newspaper columns that Farrell was the leader of a new generation of hardboiled realists.
Between the publication of these two novels came many short stories and the novel Gas-House McGinty (1933), a brilliant tour de force about the Chicago Express Company, where Farrell had worked years before, hurriedly written in Paris to fend off starvation at the end of 1931. Farrell was then trying to adapt the techniques of Joyce, Proust, and Hemingway. That year also saw the death of his grandmother; he then felt released to write his family and was simultaneously creating their world. There was so much cross-fertilization of ideas in 1931 that notes for the Danny O’Neill books sometimes went into interchapters of Judgment Day. And what finally became four or five pages of Studs’ dying delirium had originally been intended as a book. Many unused pages became the dream .chapters in Gas-House McGinty. Prompted by Joyce’s feverish “nighttown” hysteria scenes and his own reading of Freud and Mead, Farrell tried to coalesce techniques that would help the reader to enter the inner lives of his commonplace heroes.
As a result, Judgment Day, which contains more reverie, narrative mimicry. and fantasy than the previous volumes of the trilogy, relies less upon the absorbed memories of prototypes than upon Farrell’s transmuting invention. As he wrote to James Henle on December 3, 1934, when he was putting the finishing touches to the work, he wanted to capture the impact of Studs’ world “constantly knocking at the door of his consciousness.” The day that he corrected the final galleys of the book, he also walked in the picket line of the famous Ohrbach strike.
The reviews of Judgment Day were mostly laudatory, and when the trilogy was issued in one-volume in 1936, it was in step with the march of time, the human and social problems of the thirties. Always Farrell hoped that in both his fiction and criticism he was instilling in the reader a meaningful awareness of the human condition. Although Studs Lonigan was not a best-seller in its original edition, it began to reach millions from 1938, when it was first cheaply reprinted. Most of the critics who had had reservations about each volume as it was separately issued immediately succumbed to the trilogy’s cumulative power. They ranked it along with the best of Wolfe and Dos Passos. Communist critics hailed Farrell as a master of proletarian literature, that is, until in his independent Marxist A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), he blasted their mechanistic dicta about