Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [5]
What Farrell prized most in the 1930s, and used as his capital for the rest of his career, was the seriousness with which the Depression forced American artists and intellectuals to reconsider the entire project of the United States, to see it, perhaps for the first time, as part of history, the same history that palpably governed the development of the world’s other nations. Paddy Lonigan is helplessly bewildered as the Depression destroys his livelihood because he has always played by the rules. He is the classic American immigrant, eagerly assimilating, who tends to think more often of his American origins in Shantytown than his pre-American past in Ireland; there is no Irish cultural substratum enriching and guiding his American experience perceptible here. Paddy has staked everything on the American capitalist ethos of individual effort, pulling himself up, as he often boasts, by his own bootstraps; he regards his unsuccessful brother with adopted Social Darwinian snobbery as simply unable and unwilling to make the grade. Unlike its European peers, the overconfident United States provided no unemployment insurance for its workers. People like Paddy Lonigan, hard at work in the world’s richest and most mobile society, by definition do not fail—how, then, can this humiliating fall back into the lower classes from which he came be happening to him?
Studs, starting out with the advantages his father had won, more fully assimilated than Paddy can be, has bought into a deeper American myth. He has many fantasies but few ambitions; the work ethos is not his. Yet he expects immunity anyway. Though the other members of his gang who drank and partied as he did either settle, like Red Kelly, for a modest but blindly self-satisfied niche in the status quo, a phenomenon Studs envies but never admires, or fall one by one by the wayside, victims of tuberculosis, alcoholism, mental illness, and veneral disease, he nonetheless believes, with increasing desperation, that he must be the exception. The laws that govern others cannot finally control his destiny. But they do. Studs’s desperation was Farrell’s inspiration; everyone, his book tells us, is part of history.
We all know that history as we experience it in the form of our own lives has, in one sense, an unhappy ending; however meaningful or meaningless his life, prepared or not, everyone dies. The tension between the day as part of an individual’s ongoing life and the day as that which brings him one step closer to his end is an increasingly obsessive motif in Studs’s thoughts, and his thoughts take on an ever-widening valence. The last book of Studs, set in 1931, includes many more references to outside events and artifacts than the first two: tabloid headlines, movie newsreels, radio talk shows, popular songs and movies infiltrate Studs’s consciousness as never before. As his body decays, he is less able to think or feel in words and images other than those America’s ubiquitous mass culture supplies. But Farrell is also consciously situating Studs as an emblem of the Depression nation. When he tells