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By Root 1435 0

U.S.S.R. In the mid-1930s, the Book-of-the-Month Club picked up the New Russia Primer, a study comparing Russia and America to the latter’s detriment. Three new editions of Karl Marx’s Capital were issued between 1929 and 1936; by some estimates, Communist Party membership in the U.S. rose from nine thousand in 1931 to twenty-five thousand in 1934. A new genre, the “proletarian novel,” detailing the hardships of the working class and the maleficence of capitalist bosses, produced some fifty books between 1931 and 1935. The fact that today we know how economically unsuccessful and genocidally repressive the Soviet experiment was should not diminish our appreciation of a historical moment when the United States actually entertained alternatives not generated by its own example. America has lost more than it has gained by its insistence on its right, a right only available to a superpower, to see itself, as no other nation ever has for long, only through its own eyes. The 1930s were quite possibly the most intellectually active and exciting years of America’s history, and Farrell was at the center of the debate.

Though Farrell was for a few years in the early to mid-1930s what was known as a “fellow traveler”—someone who shared certain of the Communist Party’s goals and ideas while refusing membership in it—he advanced almost from the start a moderate position (a moderation seldom recognized amid the passion with which he defended it). Rejecting both the high art-as-tradition creed of the self-styled Humanists led by T. S. Eliot and the Soviet example of literary realism advocated by New Masses editor and author Michael Gold, Farrell called for an art both engagé and free. He observed Stalin’s homicidal “purges” of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s first hand when he joined the American defense committee for Stalin’s greatest adversary, Leon Trotsky, who was first exiled, then assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin’s agents, a man whose work Farrell admired until his own death. To his mind, no thinking person could idealize the Soviet Union after such open exhibitions of Stalin’s totalitarian rule. Even more important, because Farrell was first and last a writer, he knew that great novels are in some sense “accidents”; no real writer can work in the conscious service of any ideology. Farrell always refused to say that Studs was a victim of his environment; the cause of his plight had been “left uncertain.” Studs’s story was a “biological and social tragedy,” in Farrell’s words; Studs himself, as all living people, considered closely, must always be, a “mystery.”

Farrell’s novel is an astonishingly accurate depiction of a cross section of urban America from 1914 to 1931. Every detail he offers can be verified. Red Kelly, one of Studs’s pals who gets a city job as an alderman in the late 1920s, finds his paycheck stopped in 1931; the city of Chicago, near bankruptcy, did, indeed, stop paying its teachers and some of its municipal officials in the early 1930s. And the novel, of course, contains a critique of the American way of life, but its power comes from the fact that it is never actually spelled out. Farrell offers no portraits of the ruling class; since his characters never directly encounter any “cockroach capitalists,” as proletarian novelist Jack Conroy called them, some of whom were still making fortunes in the Depression years, they don’t appear in Studs Lonigan. Nor does Farrell provide the real facts of the infamous Chicago race riots in the summer of 1919 that form a significant episode in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, volume two of the trilogy, though he undoubtedly knew them: more than thirty blacks were killed and hundreds more brutally beaten in a week of violence that two later Chicago historians have described as a “pogrom” conducted—largely by Irishmen—against blacks.

We know the actions and racial views of Studs and his friends are profoundly wrong. They attack and terrorize the “shines,” who, they say, are invading their neighborhood—“give a nigger an inch, he always [takes] a mile,” is