The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [457]
Between the publication of these two novels came many short stories and the novel Gas-House McGinty (1933), a brilliant tour de force about the Chicago Express Company, where Farrell had worked years before, hurriedly written in Paris to fend off starvation at the end of 1931. Farrell was then trying to adapt the techniques of Joyce, Proust, and Hemingway. That year also saw the death of his grandmother; he then felt released to write his family and was simultaneously creating their world. There was so much cross-fertilization of ideas in 1931 that notes for the Danny O’Neill books sometimes went into interchapters of Judgment Day. And what finally became four or five pages of Studs’ dying delirium had originally been intended as a book. Many unused pages became the dream .chapters in Gas-House McGinty. Prompted by Joyce’s feverish “nighttown” hysteria scenes and his own reading of Freud and Mead, Farrell tried to coalesce techniques that would help the reader to enter the inner lives of his commonplace heroes.
As a result, Judgment Day, which contains more reverie, narrative mimicry. and fantasy than the previous volumes of the trilogy, relies less upon the absorbed memories of prototypes than upon Farrell’s transmuting invention. As he wrote to James Henle on December 3, 1934, when he was putting the finishing touches to the work, he wanted to capture the impact of Studs’ world “constantly knocking at the door of his consciousness.” The day that he corrected the final galleys of the book, he also walked in the picket line of the famous Ohrbach strike.
The reviews of Judgment Day were mostly laudatory, and when the trilogy was issued in one-volume in 1936, it was in step with the march of time, the human and social problems of the thirties. Always Farrell hoped that in both his fiction and criticism he was instilling in the reader a meaningful awareness of the human condition. Although Studs Lonigan was not a best-seller in its original edition, it began to reach millions from 1938, when it was first cheaply reprinted. Most of the critics who had had reservations about each volume as it was separately issued immediately succumbed to the trilogy’s cumulative power. They ranked it along with the best of Wolfe and Dos Passos. Communist critics hailed Farrell as a master of proletarian literature, that is, until in his independent Marxist A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), he blasted their mechanistic dicta about “art as a weapon in the class struggle,” and, soon after, became a strong anti-Stalinist over the Moscow Purge Trials.
Yet through the years charges have been leveled at Farrell by some critics: that although Studs is a powerfully conceived character; an enduring figure in American literature, the rest of the characters are not subtly enough differentiated, as for instance Studs’ sisters and girl friends; that Farrell depended too much upon memory, his imagination being fatally limited so that the trilogy does not convey the whole density of human experience, as in his sketching of Phil Rolfe’s swift conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in order to marry Loretta and in the superficial picture of their subsequent relationship; that, in fact, his understanding of human relations was too sociological, that he was tone deaf, unable to modulate the speech patterns of his characters; that conciseness was not among his merits in the trilogy. All of these charges contain truth to a degree. An objective defense would ‘ admit them. But such criticism, which would have been enough to relegate other works to a minor place in American literature, is almost irrelevant in the case of Studs Lonigan. The reason for its assured place as a classic lies- elsewhere. It has nothing to do with the fact that Studs Lonigan has become a model for other naturalistic writers, though it is difficult to conceive of such powerful works as Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Jones’ From Here to Eternity and such mere facsimiles as Levin’s Citizens and Motley’s Knock on