Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [8]
At one point in the final volume of the trilogy, Studs, pushing thirty, sees a gangster movie called Doomed Victory. Studs is totally absorbed; he identifies with the “tough” hero, Joey Gallagher, as he has never identified with a movie hero before. The plot of Doomed Victory is an amalgam of the three most popular gangster films of the early thirties, Little Caesar (1930), Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932), but the hero himself is most closely modeled on Tommy Powers, the Irish immigrant-gunboy James Cagney portrays in Public Enemy. Both Gallagher and Powers have brothers who are trying to make their way by honest work and whom they consider “saps.” Both have mothers whom they love and who love them but who will not accept their ill-gotten money. Brutal misogyny is part of their game; Joey kicks his woman in the butt, while Tommy grinds a grapefruit in the face of a nagging girlfriend. Gallagher, in sum, is a Cagney hero, and Cagney was the archetypal gangster actor of the early 1930s.
Studs is no hoodlum. Yet other observers felt the link between the two figures. The dance producer and critic Lincoln Kirstein, dazzled by Cagney, believed his cocky, buoyant, vaudeville style was the starting place for an indigenous American dance, and he considered doing a Cagneyesque interpretation of Studs Lonigan. In adidtion to their Irishness and “punk” personas, what Studs and Cagney’s gangster share is something like an external stream-of-consciousness. While usually tracking Studs’s thoughts, Farrell sometimes describes him from the outside, as the camera, of course, views Cagney. No startling contrast emerges, however, because the inside self is a version of the outside world.
The Cagney hero always has a defining gesture or phrase (the playful little punch in Public Enemy, the phrase “Whadda ya hear? Whadda ya say?” in Angels With Dirty Faces [1938]), stylistic flourishes on which he has taken out a patent; his environment supplies his vocabulary, but he adapts and heightens certain of its common properties into trademark mannerisms. Choreographing his environment with his body, as Farrell’s hypothetical title Doomed Victory suggests, Cagney’s gangster achieves a temporary mastery over what has the final mastery over him: street-smart energy finding its form is the vernacular version of class.
Unlike the glamorous WASP icons of stoic alienation played by Humphrey Bogart in the noir movies of the 1940s, the Cagney gangster, a creature of the early 1930s, invariably an ethnic American, moves largely in response to what is outside him. Gangster heroes never have voice-over narrations, a device for interiorizing the story, telling it from a character’s point of view, though noir protagonists often do. Tommy Powers wants what everyone in his neighborhood wants—money, power, sex, and excitement—though he’s more ruthless, skillful, and charismatic in his pursuit of them. In contrast, what the Bogart hero, an elite corps of one, wants is something no one can give him; what he has is the stylized look of inscrutability. He sometimes dies, but he doesn’t have to; his inner life will punish him, though further pain will only enhance his aura. Because the Cagney gangster’s ambitions are open and obvious, he can be humiliated if he fails to sustain them; because the world is his inner life, it can and does destroy him, stripping him of his mystique in the process. Studs leaves the theater depressed and disturbed by Gallagher’s death which, he senses, foreshadows his own. In a world where protest is created out of the same stuff as what is protested, conformity or defeat is almost inevitable.
What makes the last book of Studs Lonigan gripping, even heartbreaking, is that, inadequate as his weapons are, Studs fights this inevitability literally until his last breath, and with growing intensity. He knows the verdict, a foregone conclusion, is in, but he doesn’t accept it. There is no possibility that Studs, as his world collapses around him, can become another Danny O’Neill, thinking his way out of