Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [2]
Farrell’s first task, as he described it in a letter of 1977, was “a willed effort at becoming alienated.” Like the Danny O’Neill character in Studs (Danny later became the subject of a major Farrell pentology), Farrell worked his way through the University of Chicago, shedding his Catholic upbringing as “lies,” in Danny’s word, absorbing the works of William James, John Dewey, Freud, and other leading psychologists and sociologists, while voraciously reading American and European literature: H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Herman Melville, and James Joyce were critical influences on his literary development. He was sure that the “greatest achievement in the world was to earn for yourself the right to say—I am an artist.” “Slob” (1929), his first published story, was also his first rendering of the real life “Studs Lonigan,” a young man he had known growing up in Chicago; the first volume of the Studs trilogy, Young Lonigan, appeared in 1931, the last, Judgment Day, in 1935. Farrell had spent 1931 in Paris with his first wife, Dorothy, trying the expatriate life and discovering it had little meaning for him. His subject, pressing on him with a weight and a grandeur almost inconceivable today, was America, and in 1932 he returned to make his home in New York City, where he remained until his death in 1979.
Despite the critical neglect that befell Farrell in the 1940s and 1950s, an era of record-breaking American prosperity whose beneficiaries were largely uninterested in literary reminders of those they had forgotten or wronged—a neglect that continues in various forms to this day—Farrell’s was a classic immigrant success story. By his own unaided efforts, he had gotten what, in his words, “a son of Groton acquires as if by natural right,” an education in the fullest sense of the word. Later critics might dismiss him, but his productivity testified that he didn’t believe them; when he died, Farrell left over fifty books of stories and novels behind him, roughly one for each year of his writing career. There can be no doubt that after the 1930s Farrell used overproduction as a substitute for the adequate critical support he failed to find; writing itself became the primary means of fueling his motivation to write. But if writing was, as Farrell believed, a principled act of rebellion against, to borrow the title of a later book, A World I Never Made, defiance of his critics constituted in itself a victory.
Farrell never saw himself as in any sense defeated, yet, in a country which has built itself on the fact and myth of individual success, Farrell’s great subject from first to last was failure. He thought of titling one early collection of stories “Chamber of Horrors,” and Studs Lonigan, like much great American fiction from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, is, among other things, a horror story. For Farrell, as for Wright, terror was meant as a wakeup call, the wailing siren, the gunshot, that tells people they are in an emergency zone. He wrote with a political, personal, and artistic intensity by and large foreign to today’s postmodern novelists, to expose wrongdoing and wrong thinking, to chronicle the hopes and fears of those who