Studs Lonigan (2 page)

Farrell never saw himself as in any sense defeated, yet, in a country which has built itself on the fact and myth of individual success, Farrell's great subject from first to last was failure. He thought of titling one early collection of stories “Chamber of Horrors,” and
Studs Lonigan,
like much great American fiction from Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales to Sinclair Lewis's
Babbitt
, Richard Wright's
Native Son
, and Jack Kerouac's
Big Sur
, is, among other things, a horror story. For Farrell, as for Wright, terror was meant as a wakeup call, the wailing siren, the gunshot, that tells people they are in an emergency zone. He wrote with a political, personal, and artistic intensity by and large foreign to today's postmodern novelists, to expose wrongdoing and wrong thinking, to chronicle the hopes and fears of those who suffered from them, to reach and save, as he put it, “if an antiquated word be permitted, ‘souls.'” He wanted to “alienate” himself from the milieu that formed him only, in the words of his alter ego, Danny O'Neill, to “do battle so that others did not remain unfulfilled as he and his family had been.”

The 1930s were Farrell's great years, not only because his work then found important and enthusiastic appreciation, but because the decade's special circumstances, all the more significant for being anomalous in twentieth-century American history, corresponded to his deepest artistic gifts and needs. The era of the Great Depression (so called because earlier depressions, as various characters in the final volume of the
Studs
trilogy repeatedly remark, paled beside it) was the single moment when the United States collectively faced the prospect of catastrophic failure. Studs always thrills to the sight and thought of the American flag because, as he proudly reminds himself, “Old Glory had never kissed the ground in defeat.” Unlike other Western democracies, with the exception of the Civil War, before the Depression, America had suffered no major losses in its short history—no conquest or occupation by foreign powers, no long-lasting economic setback in its ever-growing productivity and affluence, a material prosperity whose benefits, various spokesmen claimed, would one day reach every (white male) citizen, no matter how humble his origins. The 1910s and 1920s, spurred on by the new automobile industry, the years in which Studs's family finds economic success and he enjoys his own brief moments of glory, saw a peak of American wealth and audacious self-confidence. Europe was finished as a source of funds and fashions—“who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?” a cocky F. Scott Fitzgerald asked. It was an “age of miracles” with “a prize for everyone.” America was to set the global example in modern technology and democratic practice.

Then came the stock market crash of October 1929, when the decade seemed, in Fitzgerald's image, to leap from a window to its death, leaving in its wake one quarter of Americans unemployed, the majority of them the sole breadwinners of their households. Seven billion dollars in depositors' money disappeared amid the failure of some five thousand banks, while the gross national product rapidly declined to half its 1929 level. The new president, Herbert Hoover, whom Studs's anti-Semitic father, Paddy, regards as a mere tool of the international Jewish bankers bent on America's ruin, could do nothing, it seemed, to reverse the collapse of America's economy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, would indeed make a difference, but Studs Lonigan's story, even though Farrell wrote its concluding chapters well into the Roosevelt era, stops in 1931, before FDR was elected.

Some Americans looked abroad for answers, not to democratic Europe, as bankrupted by the Depression as the United States, but to fascist Europe, and to Communist Russia, then attempting under Stalin what seemed to a signifcant portion of the American left the most radical, extensive, and hopeful experiment in collectivist, anti-capitalist, and egalitarian life ever undertaken by a modern nation. People on the right as well as on the left were sure capitalism was doomed. Paddy Lonigan was hardly alone in thinking that an American Mussolini might be the ticket. The all-powerful Chicago newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, whose papers turn up regularly in
Studs Lonigan,
cautioned his readers in 1934 that “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a ‘Fascist,' you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.” One 1930s investigator found between 130 and 160 fascist groups in the United States, mainly comprised of lower-middle class Americans like Paddy Lonigan.

More immigrants left the United States than arrived. A Soviet trading company with headquarters in New York received 350 applications a day from Americans wanting jobs in the U.S.S.R. In the mid-1930s, the Book-of-the-Month Club picked up the
New Russia Primer
, a study comparing Russia and America to the latter's detriment. Three new editions of Karl Marx's
Capital
were issued between 1929 and 1936; by some estimates, Communist Party membership in the U.S. rose from nine thousand in 1931 to twenty-five thousand in 1934. A new genre, the “proletarian novel,” detailing the hardships of the working class and the maleficence of capitalist bosses, produced some fifty books between 1931 and 1935. The fact that today we know how economically unsuccessful and genocidally repressive the Soviet experiment was should not diminish our appreciation of a historical moment when the United States actually entertained alternatives not generated by its own example. America has lost more than it has gained by its insistence on its right, a right only available to a superpower, to see itself, as no other nation ever has for long, only through its own eyes. The 1930s were quite possibly the most intellectually active and exciting years of America's history, and Farrell was at the center of the debate.

Though Farrell was for a few years in the early to mid-1930s what was known as a “fellow traveler”—someone who shared certain of the Communist Party's goals and ideas while refusing membership in it—he advanced almost from the start a moderate position (a moderation seldom recognized amid the passion with which he defended it). Rejecting both the high art-as-tradition creed of the self-styled Humanists led by T. S. Eliot and the Soviet example of literary realism advocated by
New Masses
editor and author Michael Gold, Farrell called for an art both engagé and free. He observed Stalin's homicidal “purges” of the Soviet Communist Party in the 1930s first hand when he joined the American defense committee for Stalin's greatest adversary, Leon Trotsky, who was first exiled, then assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by Stalin's agents, a man whose work Farrell admired until his own death. To his mind, no thinking person could idealize the Soviet Union after such open exhibitions of Stalin's totalitarian rule. Even more important, because Farrell was first and last a writer, he knew that great novels are in some sense “accidents”; no real writer can work in the conscious service of any ideology. Farrell always refused to say that Studs was a victim of his environment; the cause of his plight had been “left uncertain.” Studs's story was a “biological and social tragedy,” in Farrell's words; Studs himself, as all living people, considered closely, must always be, a “mystery.”

Farrell's novel is an astonishingly accurate depiction of a cross section of urban America from 1914 to 1931. Every detail he offers can be verified. Red Kelly, one of Studs's pals who gets a city job as an alderman in the late 1920s, finds his paycheck stopped in 1931; the city of Chicago, near bankruptcy, did, indeed, stop paying its teachers and some of its municipal officials in the early 1930s. And the novel, of course, contains a critique of the American way of life, but its power comes from the fact that it is never actually spelled out. Farrell offers no portraits of the ruling class; since his characters never directly encounter any “cockroach capitalists,” as proletarian novelist Jack Conroy called them, some of whom were still making fortunes in the Depression years, they don't appear in
Studs Lonigan.
Nor does Farrell provide the real facts of the infamous Chicago race riots in the summer of 1919 that form a significant episode in
The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan,
volume two of the trilogy, though he undoubtedly knew them: more than thirty blacks were killed and hundreds more brutally beaten in a week of violence that two later Chicago historians have described as a “pogrom” conducted—largely by Irishmen—against blacks.

We know the actions and racial views of Studs and his friends are profoundly wrong. They attack and terrorize the “shines,” who, they say, are invading their neighborhood—“give a nigger an inch, he always [takes] a mile,” is a proverb in Studs's circle. But we see the riots only through their eyes. Although John Connolly, the left-wing speaker in the park, whom Studs hears and half admires, explains the urban pattern of development whereby the wealthy downtown business center of the city expands, displacing the blacks on its decaying margins, who then have no recourse but to relocate in white neighborhoods, his ideas have no effect on Studs. Paddy Lonigan, wandering in drunken despair around his neighborhood on the day of Studs's death, sees a parade of Communists, black and white people marching together, and realizes with a shock that they're “happy,” but it never occurs to him that they have anything to say to him. In an extraordinary feat of authorial restraint, Farrell adopts, even respects, Paddy and Studs's limits as the novel's limits. If alternatives to their perceptions are fully explicated, how can the reader understand a point of view which posits a well-nigh alternativeless universe?

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 himself despairingly near the end of the book that he's “just made a mess of every damn thing,” he could be speaking for his country as well.

If history is the reality that resists human wishes, if history is, as theorist Kaja Silverman puts it, “what hurts,” its effect a kind of “trauma,” the 1930s may comprise the only fully historical experience undergone by the United States as a nation in the twentieth century. The belief in American “exceptionalism,” its privileged immunity to the human tragedy, the “city on a hill” mythology on which the nation was founded, no longer seemed consistent with the facts. The kind of success for which Studs has been programmed by his community, a form of patriotic individualism paradoxically, hideously, premised on the belief that all individuals should be alike, colliding with a historical moment which (as F.D.R. would see) required collective imagination and broad experimentation, turns out to be a recipe for a most un-American failure. Studs doesn't entirely believe the clichés on which he's been raised—how can he aspire to becoming a stereotype?—but he has little of value to put in their place.

The first two books comprise the story of Studs's miseducation as he is indoctrinated with the pseudo-facts of his own condition. First of all, he is “white,” which putatively makes him superior not only to the blacks moving into his neighborhood, but to the Jews who rent or sell property to them, even to Poles and Hungarians. Because the lines of ethnicity and race—who is white and who is not—were in fact, as they are shown to be in the novel, permeable and shifting, insistence on this point becomes all the more critical. The black novelist James Baldwin once remarked that “No one was white before he or she came to America.” Baldwin, of course, didn't mean that immigrants' skin color changed with their entry to the new world, but rather that their status and self-image did. At home, the Irish were sometimes seen by their English conquerors as closer “biologically” to black people than to white; it was only when they arrived in large numbers in the 1840s in a country where actual enslaved Africans monopolized the stigma of blackness that they could claim whiteness.