The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [458]
The strength, the lasting virtue of Studs Lonigan is that it grows purposively and swells with a compelling force through many fragmentary episodes until a totally constructed world is imprinted upon the reader’s imagination. And everywhere is evident the cost to Farrell of what he handled. The power of the novel’s conception, its underlying structure, is wedded to poignancy as well as to brutality no matter how tritely or unevenly expressed; there is sadness, not sentimentality, over the wreckage of lives, even of those with whom Farrell has the least affinity. Even when we are not at all touched by the feeling itself or the idea presented, we are affected deeply at times by the importance of the feeling to the author, not because of what he says but because saying it means so much to him. He reveals himself and his onetime friends, neighbors, and enemies with fidelity to the “facts” of art.
We still see updated versions of Studs all around us, young men whose minds are a muddle of choking resentments, slack thought processes, and dampened idealism. Their fictional blood brother is masterfully conveyed in all his inarticulateness. Farrell is able, without actually changing Studs himself so much, to alter the impression of the reader, who is at first amused by the pretended “real stuff,” then sees Studs’ gentler side, and so on. The reader sees that an endless mosaic of actions and reactions in his environment gradually re-presses the finer side of Studs’ nature and forms the distinct contours of his split self. There is the one whom the reader knows as a real person while the other is an illusion that Studs has of himself in his daydreams, an illusion shared to an extent by Mrs. Lonigan and Catherine. In part his imaginings make for Studs’ downfall. Occasionally we are too aware of a critical intelligence controlling his thoughts rather than their welling up from below the surface of consciousness. But there is that necessary author’s empathy with his character which comes out of Farrell’s own being.
With a host of minor characters Farrell helps to evoke Studs’ world, giving us such types as the prefascistic Weary Reilley, the simperingly vicious Red Kelly, and the oracular Father Shannon, whose laughable tirades and strenuous exhortations to violence against men of suspected carnal motives toward Catholic girls exemplify the nonsensical prejudices that many possessed and still do. And Farrell makes indirect references to other characters, such as the fanatical polemicist, Father Moylan, who represents Father Coughlin.*
* Farrell’s short novel, Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939), explores the psychology of a Studs Lonigan who is led into fascism by the same radio priest, Moylan, incontrovertibly patterned after Father Coughlin, who had become even more vicious an anti-Semite in public until he was finally stopped by the Church in 1940. The Coughlinite Social Justice, branded Farrell “an animalist out of Karl Marx,” as Farrell wrote to historian Alfred Rosmer on November 11, 1939; “and a Stalinist paper—the Midwest Daily Record (read Wrecker) says I am a fascist and an anti-Semite.” His publisher in ads for the novel quoted the exact statements of these periodicals side by side.
It is a world of insecurity and social horror that he forms and that strikes terror in us and yet appeals by its very amassing of sordidness, as when at the end of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan we see Studs lying in the gutter in his own vomit and contracting pneumonia. The trilogy has what Farrell himself termed, in A Note on Literary Criticism, “persistence value.” Its function is hopefully curative, that is, figuratively having a homeopathic effect upon a rabidly prurient public.
Farrell’s air of objectivity, his almost reportlike method, is unmetaphorical and sometimes monotonous, but serves the clarity of the narrative. And at times he has boiled