The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [460]
Danny O’Neill and a few others are dialectic opposites to Studs in overcoming their environment. Studs was unprepared by his upbringing to make a choice—he sees no distinctions. The will he thought he exercised upon his future in Young Lonigan is shown in Judgment Day to be a complete self-delusion. Farrell is too good a novelist to impose a pattern of strict causation upon the behavior of his characters. But there is an over-all behavioristic design of stimuli and responses in the trilogy that makes for its curving structure, the rise and fall of an average American. Danny himself has, so to speak, conditioned kinks in his heart from his acrid youth. That a Red Kelly could become a successful politician is the sinister irony of Farrell’s realism. For those of the gang who become respectable and prosper are simply Patrick Lonigans with a new veneer. Farrell implies that they will operate opportunistically and perpetuate social forces that lead to the tragic life of a Studs Lonigan. Excellent scenes in Young Lonigan that seem to have no unifying purpose attain the depth of purgative art in Judgment Day. Farrell saves Studs from future suffering and at the same time punishes him for sins almost totally prescribed by his society. The tragedy is not in any single dramatic incident, but in the accumulation of a lifetime of small defeats and frustrations. The shape of the whole is the most satisfying of any realistic city novel I have read, and Studs’ death does not seem at all fortuitous. The ending moves me to tears even more now than when I read it years ago.
While he would not deny the ultimate victory of time over all things, Farrell believes that much can still be done in a material way to loosen time’s hold upon man. Symbolically, at the end of the trilogy, he has Studs’ drunken father watching a parade of the unemployed, and implicit in the scene are the patterns of conflict that are soon to ensue between labor and management. Certainly, the scene carries more importance than even Farrell credits it with; in writing on April 21, 1958, to English instructor David Scott Sanders, he remarks:
“…it was a change and lightened the heavy mood of Judgment Day for me.”
The social character of our times has superannuated the Marxist political schemes that informed the thirties and has substituted other kinds of socioeconomic and political adjustments. But events have not erased the relevancy of the brotherhood among men that Studs’ father senses in the marchers. With all of Farrell’s depressing assessment of man throughout most of the trilogy, there is a kind of moral norm suggested in this May Day scene that goes beyond the too-committed imagination that may read activist politics into the novel at this late date. Rather, one should see that though the novel does not portray a profound faith in men, it does have faith in man’s improving himself. Farrell continues in the belief that every battle for life can be won without denying humane values. Then death’s defeat of men will not be the defeat of Man.
PHILIP ALLAN FRIEDMAN
California State College at Los Angeles