Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [460]
And by his bedside was a kneeling mother, sobbing and praying, two sisters crying, a brother with his head lowered hiding a solemn and penitent face, a father sick and hurt, and an impatient nurse.
Lonigan went to the kitchen. He poured himself the remains of a bottle of whisky and gulped it. He sat by the table, his face blank, his mouth hanging open. He heard his wife scream.
The two daughters led the hysterical mother out of the room, and the nurse covered the face of Studs Lonigan with a white sheet.
1929-1934
Epilogue
THE work that was to become Studs Lonigan evolved from a short story I had written in which the hero had died young. As the story grew into a novel, I asked myself what Studs’s life had been like during his short years. I had planned a novel of one volume, beginning with the night of Studs’s graduation from grammar school in June of 1916. But as I wrote—for some twenty months—I had written most of what was to become the first two volumes of this trilogy, Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, revising and rewriting some chapters a number of times.
In revealing Studs’s life day by day, I realized that his life itself was not so unusual; that the most unusual thing about him was his early death.
In February of 1931, I submitted what was then the first section of this work-in-progress to publishers as a separate novel. At the time this was a carefully revised manuscript of about one hundred and eighty pages. The novel was published as Young Lonigan by Vanguard Press in April of 1932.
I planned to develop the remaining pages of this work as a sequel that would end with Studs’s death.
But before that sequel was published, I read and reread, including James Joyce’s Ulysses. I also continued with other writing. Between Young Lonigan and the sequel, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan , Vanguard Press published my second novel, Gas-House McGinty.
Following the conclusion of this novel, I resumed work on The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, which was already in first draft. The final chapter described a wild New Year’s Eve party. I knew this had to be the end of the book and that the death scene I had planned for Studs would not work here. I would have to write a third novel.
Thus, the trilogy.
It was my plan to devote almost the whole of the third volume to the dying consciousness of Studs Lonigan. The setting would be the Day of Judgment as forecast in the Bible.
I began to write Judgment Day in 1934. I knew I would need an introductory chapter in which I could place Studs on his deathbed, thereby leaving the rest of the book to his actual dying.
The book seemed to write itself. I wrote hundreds of pages, introducing the Great Depression in which we were living, before I came to Studs on his deathbed, including a chapter in which the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, would be administered.
Finally, I reached the stage where Studs was to die.
Later, James Henle, President of Vanguard Press, and I agreed that this scene seemed an unnecessary tour de force after the episode of the last rites. I deleted it.
For years I hoped to publish this section either as a small volume or as a story. But any question of such publication was ended abruptly in December of 1946 with a devastating fire in my New York apartment. Books, letters, documents, and manuscripts were burned. Firemen had thrown out charred and smoking papers into the back yard. There had been only one copy of the rough draft manuscript of Studs’s death, of which I was able to recover some half-burned fragments—about thirty pages. These are the pages published here as an epilogue to this edition —the first appearance of this fragmentary work in