The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [459]
It was never uttered just this way by any young tough. In this manner Farrell has taken the boredom out of the repetitiousness of his characters’ ideas. The very monotony of the day-by-day and year-by-year record of Studs’ life sears into one’s mind. As in other novels about the twenties, the trilogy has as a leitmotif the sense of boredom and time dragging along in a decade when leisure weighed heavily on many people. Farrell intended this to further reflect a civilization changing from unrestrained individualism in an economy of scarcity to corporation collectivity in an economy of unused abundance that left a person mentally twisted by its shallow symbols and myths and its interrelated sex and money lures and that made a commercial traffic of culture. The perverse outlets it provided for Studs’ natural, impulses were inadequate compensation for his lost sense of self-importance and the feeling that he lacked control of his own destiny. As his life moved toward inner and outer chaos, he did not lose the sense of tradition; it was simply no longer viable in American society.
Time has its little and great ironies. Andy Le Gare’s letters to Danny O’Neill in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan afford a view of what the transitions of time have done to Studs as seen through the eyes, ironically, of a recent immigrant full of admiration for him just when Studs is declining in vigor. Changes in space are subject to time’s power, as in the irony of Studs’ decline after his family’s move to a better neighborhood. Some characters become more confirmed in their stereotyped ideas as they ossify with age; others, like Studs, come to a dim realization too late of what life may have done to them, and of what they have done to themselves. Mentally, after Young Lonigan, Studs is continually going backward in time as time goes forward. Indeed, almost throughout the rest of the trilogy he looks back on his grammar school days with pleasure, forgetting his original hatred of the institution. He clings to the memory of Lucy, for she is not only his first love, but also symbolizes the innocence that admonishes him from the past.
As a tired old man near thirty, fearing death, Studs develops more consideration for people, but his nerves play havoc in his relationship with his “pure” girl, Catherine Banahan. She is not an unattainable ideal for Studs, as was Lucy. Cloyingly respectable, Catherine will take chances against the mores; but, bearing kinship with that of Roberta Alden of An American Tragedy, her sweetness is adulterated with the recriminations of Puritanism. As to be expected, this “de-cent” girl is cursed by Mrs. Lonigan while their loved one is dying. Farrell is saying in Judgment Day that, contrary to the symbolic sexual freedom in the works of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and O’Hara, the final links with the Puritan tradition in America have not been broken except with a sense of guilt.
Studs’ return to the Church does not give him faith in his future progress on earth nor in the future immortality of his soul in Heaven. He believes in and dreams about a hell because his life has been one. The future holds no hope for him. There is something of the quality of the great Russian novels in Studs Lonigan, especially the feeling one derives that Studs is groping through a maze. It is the same feeling we get about Sherwood Anderson’s characters and about Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths. Dostoevski demonstrates that human beings are actively attracted by both good and evil. However, he believes that the salvation of society is to be accomplished by individual reform. In Dreiser and Farrell the former idea is prominent, but the latter is rejected: Studs, for example, is attracted to both the poolroom and the Y.M.C.A. But in Farrell’s opinion it is a matter of chance whether a youngster in certain Chicago neighborhoods becomes a Danny O’Neill rather than a Studs Lonigan. The inevitability