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By Root 10336 0

it tried hard to avoid dealing with its own self-created economic and social tragedy. The populace continued in cultural deprivation to be dosed with sedatives such as dance marathons, illegal betting, uplift lectures, demagoguery over the radio, and movies about hero-gangsters with submachine guns or with legal briefs and property titles who always seemed to obtain the most luscious female companionship. These plus the verbal aspirins of advertising and the best-selling literary anodynes of historical or contemporary escapades could not prevent the cultural vertigo of the twenties from leading to suicides, bread lines, and Hoovervilles in the thirties. As Marxian as Farrell became when in 1934 he was composing the last volume of the trilogy, he did not need to load his -story with melodramatic contrivances. Right before his eyes society had become progressively more savage than any novelist could have imagined and made believable. Farrell’s quite unforced indictment is that American civilization was not worth much if it could not help the Studs Lonigans to follow healthier and happier ways of life.-

Coming from a poor family, James Thomas Farrell, not less than Studs Lonigan who began on a higher social rung, had been brought up on the American Success Myth that led to spiritual emptiness. The boys he grew up with were ashamed to be themselves; hence they pretended to be “hardboiled,” cruder than they were, and experienced men of the world. There were still some moral fences raised by their elders and by community authorities, but because largely inapplicable to the times, they were not much used. Part of Studs is his author, whose consciousness and observations of others also gave rise to multiple personalities. Some characters, such as Red Kelly and Wils Gillen, are slightly changed in their names for boys that Farrell disliked. On the other hand the “goofy foureyes,” Danny O’Neill, is an idealized version of the author at certain stages of mental growth. More of Farrell’s lustier side has been transferred to other characters or elaborated upon in later autobiographical novels.

Lacerating personal experiences imbued Farrell with a valuable double-angled vision of the Irish in their reactions to urban industrialization. He suffered at the age of three the trauma of separation from his parents, who had too many children and whom poverty and death stalked. After he had spent a few weeks at his grandmother’s, he was brought home. But he revolted against his own mother and screamed until his father took him back. When he saw his grandmother he exclaimed, “Mudder, put me to bed.” Relating this experience to me and others in recent years, Farrell drew a connection between it and the scene in Judgment Day when the ailing Studs, after seeing a burlesque show and having an orgasm, goes home and asks his mother to put him to bed.

Young Farrell became demanding as he was pampered in the atmosphere of his grandparents’ steam-heated apartment, kept up by a bachelor uncle, Tom Daly, who was a shoe salesman, and by one of two spinster aunts who had a cashier’s job. This uncle, Farrell told me, found his way into the trilogy as Studs’ Babbitt-like father. Under thin fictive disguises Farrell later memorialized most of his family as the famous O’Flaherty-O’Neill households in the Danny O’Neill saga, in which the characterizations are only slightly less convincing than that of Studs himself.

Farrell’s is such a classic example of alienation in childhood and youth and of the attempt to purge himself of his past through art that, had he himself not explained it as such in our recorded conversations and in voluminous correspondence with others, I might be accused of inappropriately forcing a Freudian interpretation upon a more variable life. He was ashamed of his parents’ “shanty Irish” existence. He despised his ignorant mother’s pietism; he despised his father’s way of escape from life in drunken bouts of forgetfulness and occasional harshness with him. (Only later did he feel proud that his father had been a hard-fighting, hard-working