Studs Lonigan A Trilogy Comprising Young Lonigan, the Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day by James T. Farrell Penguin, 912 pp., $20 JAMES FARRELL is not exactly forgotten. Last year, in its much-ballyhooed list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, the Modern Library ranked his classic story of Studs Lonigan in twenty-seventh place, and–after a twenty-five-year hiatus–Penguin published a new edition of Farrell’s trilogy: “Young Lonigan,” “The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan,” and “Judgment Day.” But though he’s back in print, Farrell has oddly disappeared from the American canon–despite the attention still paid to such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. The cause isn’t a small output; Farrell wrote more than fifty books. Nor is the cause necessarily quality; devotees claim that his autobiographical Danny O’Neill pentology is better than the Lonigan series. But, somehow he failed to find adequate critical support for his work, and when he died in 1979 his estate was valued at less than $10,000. Politics had a great deal to do with it. The story goes that Farrell determined his bearings at a meeting he had with Whittaker Chambers one evening in 1932. Debt-ridden from a year in Paris and mourning his stillborn child, Farrell stopped by the office of the Communist magazine New Masses to discuss writing opportunities. When the conversation with Chambers turned to the Communists’ belief in using art as a weapon, Farrell is said to have remarked that “neither God nor man is going to tell me what to write.” The publication of “Young Lonigan” came that same year, “The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan” followed in 1934, “Judgment Day” in 1935, and Farrell was for a time the luminary who could avoid towing the party line. Born in Chicago in 1904, James Thomas Farrell was one of seven children in a second-generation Irish Catholic family. Unable to support the large household, his father placed three-year-old Jim with his maternal grandparents, who themselves lived on income donated by more successful relatives. The struggling lower-class existence inspired the creation of Studs Lonigan and set Farrell’s continuing theme of the plebeian writer who’s able to transcend but never completely erase his upbringing. “He remembered himself as a boy,” Farrell writes in “The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan,” “one of the neighborhood goofs. Around the corner, he was now more of a goof than ever. His nostalgias for past experiences in the neighborhood seemed to have died too. He hated it all. It was part of a dead world; it was filthy; it was rotten, it was stupefying. It, all of the world he had known, was mirrored in it. He had been told things, told that the world was good and just, and that the good and just were rewarded, lies completely irrelevant to what he had really experienced; lies covering a world of misery, neuroticism, frustration, impecuniousness, hypocrisy, clap, syphilis, poverty, injustice.” After his Parisian sojourn, New York became Farrell’s adopted home–and the leftist writers and intellectuals of New York his natural audience. A compromise was temporarily established: In return for Farrell’s displaying his Communist sympathies in street demonstrations, the party faithful would tolerate the promising writer’s antagonism towards their cultural policies. THE ARRANGEMENT didn’t last long. Farrell never had much time for Stalinist orthodoxies, and he was quickly drawn to the Trotskyites. He didn’t have the patrician background or education possessed by most of his peers. He attended the University of Chicago on his own savings without graduating, and–as Murray Kempton wrote in his book on the 1930s, “Part of Our Time”–Farrell “was and always would be received as a barbarian in the genteel world of the literary supplements . . . because poverty had blunted his fingertips and left work heavy with passion and deficient of charm.” Nonetheless, the growing reputation of Studs Lonigan allowed Farrell to become something of a mentor to the Trotskyites, their trump against the Stalinist literati, and each volume of the trilogy reached a wide audience. Perhaps the biggest influence on Farrell was the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser. Farrell once criticized another author for having a character smell the altar incense while walking along outside New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral–impossible, Farrell contended, given the distance from the Cathedral’s entrance to the sidewalk, the time of day, car exhaust, and food vendor smells. Farrell and Dreiser had much in common. They were both Chicagoans from poor families who had problems with their Catholic upbringings. Their fiction focused on the problems arising from a rapidly industrializing America with characters victimized by external circumstances. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie are in effect mirrors of their relative surroundings. “The burden of all social problems weigh down most heavily on the areas of lower-class life,” Farrell wrote in a 1946 essay entitled “Themes in American Realism.” “Just as life here is less secure, it also happens that the personality is also less secure. The lack of security commonly exacerbates tempers. The struggle for place, money and social position on the upper rung is often transformed into the naked struggles of individual vanities on the lower plane.” This is what Farrell and fellow dissenters called “Bottom Dog” literature–namely, extending naturalism to other realms. The Communists had their own version. It was called the “proletarian novel,” and it generalized from the particular by using revolutionary expression. The story line usually concerned a community of workers, divided at first, who awaken to the fact that the party is their only true ally against oppressive forces. The typical hero is a naive and innocent laborer who learns that capitalism’s promise of upward mobility is an empty dream. In Murray Kempton’s description, “the proletarian novel was a training school in the manipulation of stiff cardboard dolls.” Farrell tried at first to convince the authors of the proletarian school that they were writing soulless novels, but abandoned the effort–undertaking a series of essays that denounced Stalinist aesthetics in Partisan Review. The first salvo came in early 1936 when he attacked Clifford Odets’s new play “Paradise Lost.” Critics had been smitten with Odets, comparing him to the likes of Chekhov and Eugene O’Neill. Farrell thought such praise excessive. He called “Paradise Lost” a “burlesque” of Odets’s earlier “Awake and Sing!,” suggesting that the new production be retitled “Lay Down and Die.” THE SECOND FUSILLADE came with “A Note on Literary Criticism,” a collection of essays by Farrell about art and the non-Stalinist cultural Left. Farrell had read Leon Trotsky’s “Literature and Revolution” several years before, and the Trotskyite tone of “A Note on Literary Criticism” intensified the growing rancor between Farrell and American communism’s Stalinist dogma, which he denounced as being mechanical and deterministic. “Socialism will slowly, gradually permeate every sphere of human activity; will be correspondingly felt in thought, in literature, in the drama, in all the cultural spheres that compose the Socialist superstructure. But this change is not going to be brought around by fiat; it will not come merely from our wishing, nor through stout assertion that it is already here. . . . The new culture that will grow from a new society will not precede that society, for thought and culture do not precede social changes; at best they guide towards such changes.” In response, New Masses accused Farrell of elitism, calling him a “Phi Beta Kappa Trotskyite,” who lived in an insular world. But all this wrangling was a prelude to what Farrell called the “line of blood.” The Moscow Trials, which began in 1936, were pivotal for Farrell. He became an executive member of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, which sponsored a commission (chaired by the seventy-eight-year-old John Dewey) to visit Mexico and listen to Trotsky’s defense against Soviet charges. It hardly surprised anyone when Trotsky was vindicated by the Dewey Commission. Farrell accompanied the committee to Mexico and was able to hold several conversations with the Russian, who was eventually assassinated by Soviet agents in August 1940. Trotsky’s death deeply embittered Farrell. “The murder proves what it is–criminal political gangsterism as vile as fascism itself,” Farrell told his sister in a letter. “But what a miserable and gloomy consolation it is that the assassination of Trotsky proves that we are right in trying to warn people about Stalinism.” If Dreiser was the motivating force that allowed Farrell to comprehend his humble origins, Trotsky helped him discern the intelligentsia and their shortcomings. Farrell came to believe that it was a class unwilling to question the New Deal’s platitudes. There was little challenge to the paving over of class and racial differences in favor of the “common man.” A new populist pablum was developing in America, and Farrell decided to confront it with a new trilogy that focused upon the urban intellectual environment. His Bernard Carr books presented the contentious relationship between capitalism’s nature and creative ideals. The characters are largely portrayed as having sold out: Their promise is exhausted, whether in the pursuit of communism’s inevitability or the almighty dollar, and what they once clamored to change now imprisons them. The Bernard Carr trilogy effectively severed Farrell’s Trotskyite connections. Partisan Review published Irving Howe’s 1947 article “The Critic Calcified,” which announced Farrell’s literary insignificance. Ridicule came from other circles as well, particularly regarding his World War II stand against America’s alliance with Stalin. He supported the Marshall Plan after the war because “only American wealth and power stand in the way of Stalinist expansion.” His decades-long search for an ideological comfort zone resulted in his becoming a party of one–at a moment in which his reputation needed serious critical evaluation and praise to solidify it. And so he slipped away, not exactly forgotten, but not remembered either. His Studs Lonigan trilogy, however, remains what it was: a defining work of the 1930s, an American classic, and one of the key books we must revive when we tell the true story of twentieth-century literature. Gerald Robbins is a writer living in New York City.
