The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [451]
In Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in Chicago Streets we see a teen-ager of the lower-middle class going through one of the most difficult periods of his life. At the parochial school graduation the easy incantation of the unctuous Father Gilhooley functions like Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby Dick. In a sense Father Gilhooley foretells the doom of Judgment Day. But this old-fashioned politician of the spirit, who believes that the boys and girls have received a “fine” Catholic education, does not understand the youngsters. Neither do their families, with their prefabricated emotions, understand them sufficiently to inspire any confidence in parental advice. Studs’ father confuses his own youth with that of his son; his mother allows her religious views to interfere with her common sense. As a result the poolroom gang supersedes all other influences. Studs must perforce reject the values of his religion, his school, and his family to seek the nod of recognition from his peers, without realizing that they, too, are part of the sociocultural swamp, though slightly away from the center of stagnation. The streets educate Studs; he is, as Farrell once wrote, “adjusted to his world” for a time; but these streets are a microcosm of the larger trampling world. He is being initiated into the struggle for power.
In The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan he rationalizes the decline of his potentialities and releases repressed desires in Prohibition alcohol and fornication with Catholic girls. His fall in Judgment Day symbolizes the larger fate suffered by the middle-class Irish in the blackest years of the nation’s history. It is further exemplified by the lot of his father. Patrick Lonigan, who in business shares the values that his son conformed to in leisure activities, loses all his money when the inflated stock market declines precipitously. Farrell knew how to tap the substratum of events both big and small for the underlying as well as the manifest impacts upon the consciousness of ordinary people. Influenced by George Herbert Mead’s discussion of human reverie in his article ‘The Nature of Aesthetic Experience” (International Journal of Ethics, July, 1926) and the writings of Freud and other great thinkers, Farrell provided movies, newsreels, headlines, interior monologues, and letters of other characters to create the objective world of Studs Lonigan, within the depths of whose consciousness history is also being made. Ironically, just before his death, Studs blames himself for his sad plight. Farrell wrote to his brother Jack, a psychiatrist, on February 7, 1950, that his “outburst of remorse” and “his appealing to his mother” tell “close to everything about the psychological structure of Studs.” But, as Farrell makes clear, the ghoulish figures that plague Studs in his dying fantasy with their narrow mouthings are actually part of the world that infected and diseased his conscience.
Farrell, like his intellectual guides—such as Mead, best known for Mind, Self, and Society, C. Judson Herrick, who set down his experimental conclusions in The Brains of Rats and Men, University of Chicago sociologists Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, and others, and John Dewey, whose Human Nature and Conduct crystallized for him the intention of Studs Lonigan places more importance upon the learned responses of people than upon their “original nature.” Studs plays several roles in an effort to find the “self” that Mead speaks of; it is the process of his growing up. But his roles have been limited and his brain conditioned, as Farrell maintains, by the “spiritual poverty” of his environment.
Judgment Day shows us a prostrate economy that has not only undermined and terrified the leaders of industry and politics; it has sapped the morale of the little businessmen and put fear and anxiety into the hearts of the younger generation. It must be remembered that America could not face its riddling fears;