The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [455]
At this time his college professors viewed him as a tempestuous radical; his classmates regarded him as a Dreiserian and Nietzschean iconoclast. His friend Joe Cody later declared that Farrell sometimes terrified him. Farrell was by now a fiercely assertive child of the Enlightenment who quoted Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” and was published in Haldemann-Julius’ Debunker. He stayed away from his family. Once he was verbally stung by the model for Red Kelly, who accused him of not taking care of his mother. But Farrell was ashamed of her and could not abide her religious fanaticism. He scorned regular work, sleeping in flophouses, borrowing textbooks from Joe Cody, working only out of dire necessity, and writing at demon speed. He still went “night-hawking” with college friends, but he was also hunting up literary material. As in his earlier years, he hung around the section of his neighborhood park called the Bug Club, the counterpart of New York and San Francisco’s Union Square. He described the club in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and imbued one of its characters, John Connolly, with ideas derived from the university’s sociologists. He could also be seen at Jack Jones’ Dill Pickle Club, near Chicago’s North Side, and at other forums where he could listen to speakers of various shades of thought. Only a few people understood and sympathized with his drive to produce a great work of art at machine-gun speed. He wanted fame; he wanted to rid the world of injustice. Add to this the fact that his worsening eyesight made him fear that he might go blind before he could accomplish his goal and it is no wonder that he sometimes tried the nerves of others by his self-centered determination.
With a relentless will to carve his literary niche, Farrell did some critical pallbearing in an unpublished notebook-article of 1928 on the aging giants of American literature who had meant so much to him when he first entered college. He lambasted Sherwood Anderson for turning erotic peculiarities into “emotional slup” full of “neurotic melodramatics and sexual pyrotechnics.” Although he believed An American Tragedy to be a great novel in spite of its skull-cracking details of exploration into social uncertainties, he thought that Dreiser gutted his novels with conventional and stereotyped formulations of character. Farrell was trying to forge a style that would be consonant with empirical revelations, and he admired Hemingway’s expression. But ideas were more important to him than style, and he was concerned with shedding the feathers of an older naturalism as represented by what he considered to be Dreiser’s woozy thinking about the insoluble mystery of life.
Religion, as Farrell implies throughout Studs Lonigan, is ineffective not only because it points to values mainly to be realized in the hereafter, but also because it fosters resignation and blindness in the face of ills that beset mankind. Thus when Danny O’Neill is a university student, he declares like Nietzsche that God is dead and that his early education was made up of lies.
In line with his developing philosophical and sociological naturalism, Farrell perceived that in the 1930 printed version of the short story “Studs” the unnamed narrator, who was later to become Danny O’Neill, has too romantic a view of the dead hellion. Studs is remembered for having had the strength of nonconformity that the narrator wished for in himself. As early as 1916, the year the trilogy begins, Farrell had known the prototype of Studs, who was three years ahead of him at St. Anselm’s. In a self-analyzing mood following his mother’s death early in 1946, Farrell wrote to his publisher,