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By Root 10504 0

James Henle, that for a while he had admired the original Studs, who took him under his wing. Unlike Farrell’s, Studs’ father was a prosperous man of the middle class, a plastering contractor. Studs “was a melted real and ideal brother-father image” as an “alternative to the Farrell images in my mind,” wrote Farrell. He said he wondered whether Studs could whip the boy on whom the sneaky Red Kelly was patterned, and that he felt no qualms about the possibility of Studs’ beating up his eldest brother, Earl, who not only was his father’s favorite but also failed to be the protective person Farrell wished him to be. After a time the real Studs became less friendly toward Farrell and treated him as a “goofy kid.” Later, having outgrown Studs and Red, Farrell confessed that he nevertheless felt intense reactions from early years the few times he met them.

Early in 1931, Farrell’s boyhood acquaintance, the novelist Lloyd H. Stern, read a draft of Studs Lonigan and said, “Jimmie, there’s too much here for one book.” Taking his suggestion, Farrell divided the draft into two separate volumes. He sent Young Lonigan to Simon and Schuster. Clifton Fadiman returned the manuscript with a brief letter, dated February 4, 1931, saying that though he thought the material was genuine, he felt that the writing was crude and the irony heavy-handed. Four other publishing houses also rejected the manuscript.

Meanwhile Farrell and his campus sweetheart, Dorothy Butler, eloped to Paris. (I do not wholly agree with Professor Edgar M. Branch, who also having had access to Farrell’s post facto letters and diaries, notes in “James T. Farrell’s ‘Studs Lonigan’ “ that both Dorothy and a girl Farrell met in Saratoga in 1933 have “qualities” that can be found in Catherine Banahan of Judgment Day. It may be that Catherine is the result of Farrell’s changed feelings toward Dorothy, as reflected in Studs’ ambivalence toward his fiancee. But according to my knowledge there is no real similarity between the two women. Farrell divorced Dorothy in 1940, the same year he married actress Hortense Alden, by whom he has two sons. They, too, were divorced, in 1955, and in that year Farrell remarried Dorothy, from whom he is now separated again. But 1931-32 with Dorothy, despite the loss of their son five days after birth, was one of Farrell’s richest literary years. His stories and sections of his book were being published in the best “little” magazines, and his work was being praised abroad by Samuel Putnam and Ezra Pound.)

Shortly after the Farrells had arrived in Paris, Walt Carmon, managing editor of the New Masses and acting as an agent, submitted young Lonigan to James E. Henle of Vanguard Press. Enthusiastic about it despite the advice of a famous civil liberties lawyer not to risk obscenity charges by publishing it, Henle signed a contract with Farrell. But certain scenes had to be bowdlerized, including the Iris gang-shag; and others, such as a masturbation race, had to be cut entirely. (Later, when the trilogy was published in England, further expurgations were made.) In order to meet “official prejudice” Young Lonigan was issued in 1932 in a special edition, “the sale of which is limited to physicians . social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescents.” An introduction to the novel had also to be solicited from sociologist Frederic M. Thrasher. Only a little over five hundred copies of Young Lonigan were sold during its first year of publication.

The snickersnee of adverse reviews of Young Lonigan, formed an almost deadly counterpoint to the bellowing praises of it. The anonymous critic for The New York Times (May 1, 1932) stated categorically that it is not a novel. Farrell’s defenders saw it as the most important American novel of adolescence since Huckleberry Finn and commended his ear for the idiom. Similarly the reviewers canceled out one another’s evaluations of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in 1934. The book did not sell well either, but notices began circulating in newspaper columns