The Return of Studs Lonigan

Sun, 01 May 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The boiler had broken down during the night, and though the young Father got things going again, it takes a while to thaw out an old romanesque church, and the small company gathered on a December afternoon sat in their coats. These were pews once occupied by the Lonigans and the O’Neills”the names James T. Farrell gave these families when he put them into his novels. But that was back in the days when St. Anselm’s parish was Irish and its stained glass windows were new. How long they’d withstood Chicago’s weather and grime. The year was almost over before the mayor got around to issuing, after many petitions and pleas, a proclamation declaring December 18, 2004, “James T. Farrell Day” to honor the centennial of the writer’s birth. A few fans, a couple of students and teachers, and some descendants of the original Lonigans and O’Neills were celebrating their small victory.

Chicago may be the second city, or third, but not in its literary tradition. Think of the twentieth century without Farrell, Theodore Dreiser, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow”all of whom, sooner or later, left home. A prophet is not a prophet in his own country.

The Washington Park neighborhood lies near the lake and the gray Gothic towers of the University of Chicago, but this is a working-class town. On hot summer nights you could smell the sweaty wind from the stockyards to the west, and the smoke from the steel mills all the way to East Chicago and Gary. Though these streets have fallen on hard times, the heavy masonry and brick give the churches, the two- and three-flat buildings, and large apartment houses a look of fortress-like solidity and permanence. They must have influenced Farrell’s prose. Not far from St. Anselm’s, at 58th and Indiana, a sign may soon be going up, renaming the block “James T. Farrell Way.” This was the heart of the old neighborhood: the Mom and Pop groceries, the drugstores where you had to exchange a nickel for a slug to make a phone call, the movies and the pool hall where the gang hung out. The corner. A corner of Chicago that belongs to Farrell, and to his most famous creation, Studs Lonigan.

In celebration of the centennial, the Library of America republished Farrell’s Studs Lonigan . The trilogy had long been recognized as a classic, but now, with the appearance of this new edition, it was official: Farrell had entered the Pantheon of American letters. Reviewers granted the novel belonged there, though to some it seemed dated”Studs didn’t amount to much of a hero, not even an anti-hero, and the racial, ethnic, and anti-Semitic slurs made them wince. Unlike these critics, the world Farrell brought to “life on the page” wasn’t politically correct. Contemporary readers are accustomed to a mudslide of words that couldn’t be spelled out in his day. It’s the epithets that startle now, like a slap in the face”the way he meant them to.

It’s no secret that Farrell came to resent the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Over the course of his long and amazingly productive career, all his other work would be measured against it. The Danny O’Neill series, Bernard Clare ; the novels of the Universe of Time; volumes of short stories, journalism, literary criticism; his steady and persistent portrayal of “the American way of life” through the lives he knew so well. He became a writer taken for granted; he wrote “too much.” (Those thick glasses”crystal balls in his old age”weren’t props; he was driven in part by fear of going blind.) His own favorite novel was his last, the deeply personal Invisible Swords ; but by then not many were paying attention. In the final months of his life, Farrell was signing copies of a new edition of the trilogy for the publisher: another autograph, another dollar. He needed the money. At the same time a television miniseries was portraying Studs, yet again, as the movie tough guy he so longed to be. Fifty-some books on the shelves, and Farrell remained the author of Studs Lonigan .

In the Lonigan trilogy Farrell appears as four-eyed Danny O’Neill, a “goofy punk” who wants to be a writer. Farrell’s eyes were so bad he couldn’t see a ball coming, but something told him where it would be, and he won more letters for sports”baseball, football, basketball, and wrestling”than anyone in the history of St. Cyril’s High. For a time he couldn’t decide between baseball, his lifelong love, or literature. One way or another, he meant to do great deeds, to make a name for himself, a magical name. It was a choice of heroes.

As he soon found out, “to be a young man with literary aspirations is not to be particularly happy.”

It might be hard to appreciate now how bold it was then for a young man like Farrell, from Chicago’s Irish South Side, to take up such a trade. Dreiser, the son of a German Catholic immigrant, was the first American writer of anything near his stature to come from such stock and to bear a “foreign” name. (Dreiser’s older brother, a successful songwriter, changed it to Dresser.) Farrell and Dreiser met in 1936. Farrell, barely into his thirties, had published half a dozen books; Dreiser was a giant of American letters, “the Hindenburg of the novel” in Mencken’s inspired phrase. “A big bulk of a man,” Farrell recalled, “self-centered, not too graceful.” Dreiser was wondering what this young writer wanted from him. Advice, a favor, a loan? What can one writer do for another? In parting, he had to ask”he hadn’t caught his visitor’s name.

By the next time they met, the last time”it was 1944”things had changed. Farrell was famous; Dreiser had become an old man. He coughed and cleared his throat and drank a lot of water, and ranted some about the state of the art. “Farrell, why do people write books like that? Why do they write about drinking? . . . Farrell, that’s nothing to write about. I know all about drinking and drunks.” Dreiser was struggling with his albatross, The Bulwark , and telegrammed Farrell, anxiously soliciting “an honest opinion.” Farrell could always be counted on for that. He was asked to be a literary executor: “I accepted this as an honor.” Yes. Here was a hero of his youth. Farrell’s friendship had been a spar in a storm, and in these late exchanges we can read the isolation of Dreiser’s last years. Farrell had no inkling, in those heady days of fame, that he would become a neglected writer in his time. But that was the name of the game he had chosen to play.

Farrell was not a lesser Dreiser. He never considered himself, as so many critics have, a disciple, and except in his own gloomier moods didn’t agree with Dreiser’s ideas. (Luckily, Dreiser didn’t always agree with his own ideas himself.) Farrell never lost his sense of having to put up a fight, to define himself against . This came with being a writer “of plebeian origin”:

Continue Reading »

Retelling Genesis

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:00:00 -0500

And the life of Sarah was a hundred and seven and twenty years; these were the years of the life of Sarah. And Sarah died in Kiriath-Arba—the same is Hebron—in the land of Canaan; and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham rose up from before his dead, and spoke unto the children of Heth, saying: “I am a stranger and sojourner with you; give me a possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.” (Genesis 23:1-4)

Continue Reading »

First Things RSS Feed - Bette Howland

The Return of Studs Lonigan

Retelling Genesis