Studs Lonigan

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

James Thomas Farrell (1904—1979) was known for his many novels depicting lower-middle-class Irish-Catholic life. Born in the South Side slum section of Chicago, his stories deal with the poverty, bigotry, vices, and frustration he encountered. Farrell's naturalistic style echoed the crudities of his chosen milieu, and it was a source of controversy when his work was originally published; however, the powerful, cumulative effect of his writing helped make
Studs Lonigan
, his magnum opus, a classic.

 

Ann Douglas teaches twentieth-century American studies at Columbia University. She is the author of
Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s
and has written numerous articles and reviews on American culture.

TO
MARJORIE AND JAMES HENLE

 

Whose encouragement was so helpful
in completing this trilogy

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Young Lonigan
first published in the United States of America by The Vanguard Press 1932
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
published 1934
Judgment Day
published 1935
Studs Lonigan
published 1935 This edition with an introduction by Ann Douglas published in Penguin Books 2001

 

Copyright James T. Farrell, 1932, 1934, 1935
Introduction copyright © Ann Douglas, 2001
All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-50316-4

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Reading
Studs Lonigan
for the first time was a revelation to me. From the opening lines, this story of a young “punk” of Irish immigrant origins growing up on Chicago's South Side in the early decades of the twentieth century held and stirred me as few books ever have. In
Studs Lonigan,
the conventional barriers between life and art seem to disappear; the words, while powerful in their own right, also serve as evocations, markers of realities stronger, sharper, than language can convey No obvious authorial voice intrudes between reader and character. I was inside Studs's life, and his world became the only world I had. This, I kept feeling, was real and moving, as close to my consciousness as that intimate stranger, my own body.

The novel selects its moments carefully—the first book covers five months of Studs's life in 1916 when he is fourteen; the second details various key episodes, a kind of cinematic montage, between 1917 and New Year's Day, 1931; the third again tightens its focus to concentrate on six months in 1931, the year of Studs's death at the age of twenty-nine—yet within these limits, everything is there: all Studs's conflicting thoughts and feelings, his actions, his moods down to a microshift, and always how he appears, or rather thinks he appears, to others. A creature of the first and largest mass culture society in history, Studs knows no way to live but before an audience, sometimes real, more often imaginary. Everything else, the happy, magical times swimming in Lake Michigan with a pal or sitting in a tree in the park with his girlfriend Lucy, even as he hopes that they will redirect his life, open up a different and better future for him, turn out to be mere respites from the relentless, contradictory imperatives constantly issued to him by every authority he recognizes: be a God-fearing Catholic, his world scolds, be masculine, “hard,” “tough,” and never “soft.”

Studs is better than the authorities that rule him. He's sensitive; he hates hurting people, though he often does so. A natural athlete, he can take profound pleasure in the motions and sensations of his body, always more resistant to social programming than the mind. He increasingly longs for yesterday, to be as he was, even as he knows he's “never really been happy,” because only in youth does the body function as an interpreter of lost languages. Inarticulate as he is, in the privacy of his own mind, he's an embryonic street-corner poet who can imagine himself as a cloud or a whale—metaphors come unbidden to him at those rare moments when he is at ease.

Studs know none of this. He equates poets with “pansies.” In his perennial fantasies of a better tomorow, he can conceive of it only in terms of being more important, more impressive, more noticed than he is, of becoming a star; he allocates nothing to the needs of the interior self, rushing everything into the display window where it often languishes unsold. I had never before read a book which acknowledged how much of life is consumed in the unsuccessful management of embarrassment and shame, how incessantly most of us use mental comparison shopping—am I better than he is? Is today more successful than yesterday?—as an impoverished replacement for thought. By the time I finished the book, I cared for Studs more than I had ever cared for a literary character, because I knew him better, better than he knew himself, better, I suspected, than I knew myself. Reading
Studs Lonigan
is depth work, as restorative as it is startling.

In the 1970s, after I had moved to New York and began teaching
Studs Lonigan
as the centerpiece of a course on the 1930s at Columbia University, a friend introduced me to James Farrell, then in his seventies and living in an extremely modest East Side apartment. He was still writing every day from 8 A.M. to 12—“Noon?” an acquaintance asked. Farrell looked surprised. No, he meant 12 midnight. “The night is passing,” he wrote in a late novel. “I shall change the sentence. The night is in process. I shall change the sentence again.” His characters were just as real to him as I had supposed. He kept a collection of heavily annotated notecards near his “study” (a table holding a typewriter and facing the window, placed at one end of his kitchen), one card for each of the characters in his vast Balzacian chronicle of American life.

What struck me most about Farrell, the man, was his sweetness. His enormous ambition, his hard-won knowledge of the evils of the world, were matched, indeed, over-matched, by his willingness to trust, his sheer capacity for hope. On one of my visits to him, he said he was tired. Would I mind if he took a nap? Of course I didn't, I said, expecting him to retreat from the small living room into his smaller bedroom. Instead, he lay down on the sofa before me and fell asleep. Mere acquaintance as I was, for a precious half hour, I kept watch over the man a few still called America's greatest living novelist.

James Thomas Farrell came out of a “plebian” environment, in his words, of “spiritual poverty.” He was born on February 27, 1904, in Chicago to a struggling family of second-generation Irish Catholic immigrants. In 1907, his father, James Farrell, a teamster, unable to support his growing family (his wife had fifteen children, six of whom survived), placed young Jim with his maternal grandparents, both born in Ireland, both illiterate, but living in relative comfort in Chicago on the income donated by their more successful children. In 1915, his grandparents moved into the South Fifties, the neighborhood chronicled in
Studs Lonigan.
Although his parents had periods of relative prosperity, at one point living in an apartment near his grandparents, much of their lives passed in various squalid homes in Chicago's Irish shantytown.

Farrell's first task, as he described it in a letter of 1977, was “a willed effort at becoming alienated.” Like the Danny O'Neill character in
Studs
(Danny later became the subject of a major Farrell pentology), Farrell worked his way through the University of Chicago, shedding his Catholic upbringing as “lies,” in Danny's word, absorbing the works of William James, John Dewey, Freud, and other leading psychologists and sociologists, while voraciously reading American and European literature: H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and James Joyce were critical influences on his literary development. He was sure that the “greatest achievement in the world was to earn for yourself the right to say—
I am an artist.”
“Slob” (1929), his first published story, was also his first rendering of the real life “Studs Lonigan,” a young man he had known growing up in Chicago; the first volume of the
Studs
trilogy,
Young Lonigan,
appeared in 1931, the last,
Judgment Day
, in 1935. Farrell had spent 1931 in Paris with his first wife, Dorothy, trying the expatriate life and discovering it had little meaning for him. His subject, pressing on him with a weight and a grandeur almost inconceivable today, was America, and in 1932 he returned to make his home in New York City, where he remained until his death in 1979.

Despite the critical neglect that befell Farrell in the 1940s and 1950s, an era of record-breaking American prosperity whose beneficiaries were largely uninterested in literary reminders of those they had forgotten or wronged—a neglect that continues in various forms to this day—Farrell's was a classic immigrant success story. By his own unaided efforts, he had gotten what, in his words, “a son of Groton acquires as if by natural right,” an education in the fullest sense of the word. Later critics might dismiss him, but his productivity testified that he didn't believe them; when he died, Farrell left over fifty books of stories and novels behind him, roughly one for each year of his writing career. There can be no doubt that after the 1930s Farrell used overproduction as a substitute for the adequate critical support he failed to find; writing itself became the primary means of fueling his motivation to write. But if writing was, as Farrell believed, a principled act of rebellion against, to borrow the title of a later book,
A
World I Never Made
, defiance of his critics constituted in itself a victory.