Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [1]
Studs is better than the authorities that rule him. He’s sensitive; he hates hurting people, though he often does so. A natural athlete, he can take profound pleasure in the motions and sensations of his body, always more resistant to social programming than the mind. He increasingly longs for yesterday, to be as he was, even as he knows he’s “never really been happy,” because only in youth does the body function as an interpreter of lost languages. Inarticulate as he is, in the privacy of his own mind, he’s an embryonic street-corner poet who can imagine himself as a cloud or a whale—metaphors come unbidden to him at those rare moments when he is at ease.
Studs know none of this. He equates poets with “pansies.” In his perennial fantasies of a better tomorow, he can conceive of it only in terms of being more important, more impressive, more noticed than he is, of becoming a star; he allocates nothing to the needs of the interior self, rushing everything into the display window where it often languishes unsold. I had never before read a book which acknowledged how much of life is consumed in the unsuccessful management of embarrassment and shame, how incessantly most of us use mental comparison shopping—am I better than he is? Is today more successful than yesterday?—as an impoverished replacement for thought. By the time I finished the book, I cared for Studs more than I had ever cared for a literary character, because I knew him better, better than he knew himself, better, I suspected, than I knew myself. Reading Studs Lonigan is depth work, as restorative as it is startling.
In the 1970s, after I had moved to New York and began teaching Studs Lonigan as the centerpiece of a course on the 1930s at Columbia University, a friend introduced me to James Farrell, then in his seventies and living in an extremely modest East Side apartment. He was still writing every day from 8 A.M. to 12—“Noon?” an acquaintance asked. Farrell looked surprised. No, he meant 12 midnight. “The night is passing,” he wrote in a late novel. “I shall change the sentence. The night is in process. I shall change the sentence again.” His characters were just as real to him as I had supposed. He kept a collection of heavily annotated notecards near his “study” (a table holding a typewriter and facing the window, placed at one end of his kitchen), one card for each of the characters in his vast Balzacian chronicle of American life.
What struck me most about Farrell, the man, was his sweetness. His enormous ambition, his hard-won knowledge of the evils of the world, were matched, indeed, over-matched, by his willingness to trust, his sheer capacity for hope. On one of my visits to him, he said he was tired. Would I mind if he took a nap? Of course I didn’t, I said, expecting him to retreat from the small living room into his smaller bedroom. Instead, he lay down on the sofa before me and fell asleep. Mere acquaintance as I was, for a precious half hour, I kept watch over the man a few still called America’s greatest living novelist.
James Thomas Farrell came out of a “plebian” environment,