The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [454]
Devoid of social graces, his youthful behavior contrasted with the seeming suavity of his schoolboy friend, Paul Caron, whose traits are distributed among several characters in the trilogy and upon whom the Sanine-like Ed Lanson of the Danny O’Neill series, and of Ellen Rogers (1941), Boarding House Blues (1961), and other works is partially based. The late Caron never lost an opportunity with a girl, having a line or two from Swinburne ready to spout. Farrell traces the tree-scene, when Studs kisses Lucy, which recurs in Studs’ reveries throughout the trilogy, to the chance he himself once muffed of sitting in a tree with the lovely sister of one of the models for Lucy. Farrell excelled rather in feats of prowess at St. Anselm’s Grammar School and earned letters in sports at St. Cyril’s Carmelite High School (now named Mount Carmel). Short, like Studs, and bespectacled, he compensated by such exertions for his lack of success with girls. Like Studs, too, he had a sense of his own destiny, but such parallels diverge as Farrell grew older and set himself the task of heroically making himself a thinker so that he could be an intellectual doer.
When Farrell attended De Paul University in 1925 for a semester, working his way and paying his grandmother five dollars a week for room and board, he wanted to become a lawyer. But though he continued to major in social sciences at the University of “Heathenology,” as Father Albert H. Dolan, his high school teacher, called the University of Chicago, he realized that to enter the profession of law was, at least for himself, merely to engage in conformity and hypocrisy on another level of American life. No doubt his pre-law training -reinforced his interrogative view of the world. The book that stirred him to think that he might have something to say in fiction was Sherwood Anderson’s Tar. And his efforts to write about what he considered a conglomeration of small towns making up Chicago were encouraged by a genteel professor of English, James Weber Linn—the Professor Saxon of My Days of Anger (1943). Under a fierce compulsion to set down the story of Danny O’Neill, Farrell left the university in 1927 and tramped with Paul Caron to New York City. Like a Balzac character he wanted to shake his fist at the world and proclaim, “Henceforth there is war between us!” He did so—silently.
But he knew that he was not yet ready to tackle the Danny O’Neill books. His mind was also fermenting the idea of another novel about his old neighborhood. Instead of Studs he would have Vinc Curley as the hero. Vinc, later reduced like Danny to a minor role in the trilogy, is an imbecile who suffers more than the other members of the marginal group from the gang’s transferred self-hatred and fear. But Farrell dropped this idea as again too subjective to handle.
Not able to sell anything in New York, Farrell returned to Chicago, where between 1928 and 1930 he composed stories whose characters, incidents, and methods preceded their use in the trilogy: “Mary O’Reilley,” “A Casual Incident,” “Helen, I Love You!” “The Scarecrow,” “Saturday Night,” and other pieces. The most notable, “Studs,” which he wrote in 1929 after attending the real model’s funeral, earned great praise from Professsor Linn’s advanced composition class. Farrell showed the manuscript to Professsor Robert Morss Lovett, a well-known liberal who influenced Farrell’s generation and who was later to be mentioned in the trilogy. Lovett thought well of it and advised expansion into a novel. When Farrell’s story about Danny O’Neill, “Slob,” appeared in the June, 1929, Blues, Clifton Fadiman, then an editor at Simon and Schuster, inquired whether Farrell had written a novel.
Given such impetus, Farrell began discussing his ideas for enlarging “Studs” with his college friend, Mary Hunter, novelist Mary Austin’s niece and in later years the “Marge” of radio’s “Easy Aces” and also a play director, who had been present at the inception of the story. Future biographers will see her as an important influence