The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [445]
* Farrell’s short novel, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939), explores the psychology of a Studs Lonigan who is led into fascism by the same radio priest, Moylan, incontrovertibly patterned after Father Coughlin, who had become even more vicious an anti-Semite in public until he was finally stopped by the Church in 1940. The Coughlinite Social Justice, branded Farrell “an animalist out of Karl Marx,” as Farrell wrote to historian Alfred Rosmer on November 11, 1939; “and a Stalinist paper—the Midwest Daily Record (read Wrecker) says I am a fascist and an anti-Semite.” His publisher in ads for the novel quoted the exact statements of these periodicals side by side.
It is a world of insecurity and social horror that he forms and that strikes terror in us and yet appeals by its very amassing of sordidness, as when at the end of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan we see Studs lying in the gutter in his own vomit and contracting pneumonia. The trilogy has what Farrell himself termed, in A Note on Literary Criticism, “persistence value.” Its function is hopefully curative, that is, figuratively having a homeopathic effect upon a rabidly prurient public.
Farrell’s air of objectivity, his almost reportlike method, is unmetaphorical and sometimes monotonous, but serves the clarity of the narrative. And at times he has boiled up a composite slang in the dialogue that is very good indeed, a zoological vocabulary of vituperation and carnality, a sort of street-corner poetry, if you will.
It was never uttered just this way by any young tough. In this manner Farrell has taken the boredom out of the repetitiousness of his characters’ ideas. The very monotony of the day-by-day and year-by-year record of Studs’ life sears into one’s mind. As in other novels about the twenties, the trilogy has as a leitmotif the sense of boredom and time dragging along in a decade when leisure weighed heavily on many people. Farrell intended this to further reflect a civilization changing from unrestrained individualism in an economy of scarcity to corporation collectivity in an economy of unused abundance that left a person mentally twisted by its shallow symbols and myths and its interrelated sex and money lures and that made a commercial traffic of culture. The perverse outlets it provided for Studs’ natural, impulses were inadequate compensation for his lost sense of self-importance and the feeling that he lacked control of his own destiny. As his life moved toward inner and outer chaos, he did not lose the sense of tradition; it was simply no longer viable in American society.
Time has its little and great ironies. Andy Le Gare’s letters to Danny O’Neill in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan afford a view of what the transitions of time have done to Studs as seen through the eyes, ironically, of a recent immigrant full of admiration for him just when Studs is declining in vigor. Changes in space are subject to time’s power, as in the irony of Studs’ decline after his family’s move to a better neighborhood. Some characters become more confirmed in their stereotyped ideas as they ossify with age; others, like Studs, come to a dim realization too late of what life may have done to them, and of what they have done to themselves. Mentally, after Young Lonigan, Studs is continually going backward in time as time goes forward. Indeed, almost throughout the rest of the trilogy he looks back on his grammar school days with pleasure, forgetting his original hatred of the institution. He clings to the memory of Lucy, for she is not only his first love, but also symbolizes the innocence that admonishes him from the past.
As a tired old man near thirty, fearing death, Studs develops more consideration for people, but his nerves play havoc in his relationship with his “pure” girl, Catherine Banahan. She is not an unattainable ideal for Studs, as was Lucy. Cloyingly respectable, Catherine will take chances against the mores; but, bearing kinship with that of Roberta Alden of An American Tragedy, her sweetness is adulterated with the recriminations of Puritanism. As to be expected, this