James T. Farrell
The Greatest and Most Forgotten Writer in the World
James T. Farrell
So what the heck happened?
In the Spring of 1929, James Thomas Farrell - an on-again / off-again student at the University of Chicago - signed up for an advanced composition course taught by Professor James "Teddy" Linn. Throughout his checkered college career, Jim had done well in his English courses, but usually dropped out or ignored his other subjects. With aspirations to be a writer, he had earlier drifted to New York to hang around the literary scene only to return to Chicago and sign up for another semester.
One story Jim turned in was titled Studs. It was about the funeral of a boyhood acquaintance, William "Studs" Cunningham, who had died suddenly at the age of 25. Studs Cunningham had been a member of the 58th Street bunch, a BMOC in grammar school (which then included modern middle school grades), and as a young man, had been working with his dad as a plasterer. He spent his Saturday nights drinking, playing pool, going to the occasional "can-house", and his Sunday mornings in church. All in all, Jim saw him pretty much as the All-American slob. Then on March 6, 1929 Studs Cunningham went to work, and came back home with pneumonia. He died four days later.
Professor Linn praised the story and read it in class. Encouraged, Jim asked another professor, Robert Lovett, for his opinion. Lovett read the story and suggested Jim expand it into a novel. So Jim began writing, changing the last name of the protagonist, but keeping the characters recognizable enough to irritate the family of the real-life Studs. For what it's worth, Jim got a "B" in Professor Linn's class.
By 1931 Jim had a sizeable book in hand. At the advice of a friend he took the first part about Studs' childhood, titled it Young Lonigan: A Boyhood in the Chicago Streets, and after some delay found a publisher in Vanguard Press. Jim soon married, spent a year in Paris, and despite later promoting the inevitable picture of himself as a starving artist, was invited to live as a guest in comfortable accommodations of the (still-thriving) Yaddo Artists Colony in New York. Young Lonigan was issued in 1932, and two more books soon followed: The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in 1934 and Judgment Day in 1935. The same year the books were bound together and published as the novel Studs Lonigan.
Jim Farrell had begun life an economical step down from Studs - either the real Studs Cunningham or his fictional alter ego. Born on February 27, 1904, as a young boy Jim had once been sent to stay with his grandmother while his parents went to visit some relatives. But when his parents returned and took him back home, Jim kicked and screamed so long and loud the only thing they could think to do was take him back to Grandma. So for a number of years he lived with his grandmother even though his mother and father were only a few blocks away. Paradoxically Jim seemed to have regarded this as being "abandoned" by his father. Their relationship, although not actively hostile, was never really cordial either.
As he grew up Jim, although not a "tough guy" in principle, could handle himself well in the neighborhood of Chicago's Southside, and he later said that Studs and his group, who were the tough guys, pretty much left him alone. In Studs Lonigan Jim wrote himself in as the "four-eyes" character Danny O'Neil (later the protagonist of five novels and a number of short stories). By the time he graduated from high school, Jim, like Danny, had picked up both an absolute fanaticism for the game of baseball, and the ambition to be a writer
For some reason a number of readers took Studs Lonigan to be about life in the Chicago slums or even about gangsters. Either characterization is way off the mark. Studs came from a quite ordinary and even prosperous family. His father, Paddy Lonigan, was a self-employed, successful building contractor and painter. Paddy had invested his profits in real estate, and as the book opened, he was the landlord for a number of apartment buildings. So far from being poor, Studs' family, if not actually rich, was in the upper income bracket. Studs at least had all the advantages Paddy never enjoyed, and Paddy continually and fatuously reminded Studs of that wonderful fact.
But by the end of the book, Studs had drunk and "jazzed" himself to death. While attending the 58th Street New Year's Reunion Party of 1929, he drunk himself into incoherence, got pounded insensible by a former neighborhood bully, and was dumped unconscious and with a broken nose into the street. Two years later, now with a bad heart (and having increasing and severe attacks of unstable angina), he invested his life savings into stock that quickly lost 80 % of its value and was trounced by his little brother during a trivial argument. Then after knocking up his girlfriend, he died of pneumonia after looking for a job in the rain.
Although today people read the book and want to grab Studs by the throat and shout, "For God's sake, Studs, get a life!", Jim said his intent had been to show the effects of what he called "spiritual" poverty. Others have pointed out Studs and his friends suffered from a "poverty of imagination". But John Chamberlain, the extremely long lived New York Times critic, pointed out exactly the opposite was the case. Studs was altogether too imaginative to function in the humdrum world working for a family business in South Chicago. Studs is about what happens to any organism that looses a functional relationship with its environment. Put someone with Studs' characteristics into another place of the same time - such as sending him to Ireland where he could have joined the early 20th Century struggle against the English - and he would have found some useful direction to his life. Ironically, on Armistice Day when Studs - fanatically proud of his Irish ancestry - heard a drunk slobber that Patrick Pearse was dead, he wondered who the hell that guy was (and we all know who Patrick Pearse was, don't we?).
Modern readers may see the characters and situations as stereotypes, but that reaction is like dismissing Hamlet as "just a bunch of famous quotations". Studs Lonigan is a gritty and realistic novel. The book accurately depicts the attitudes, speech, and thoughts of those who inhabited Studs' world. People really did think, talk, and act like that - and sad to say, many still do. Of course, today the more educated usually substitute other ethnic groups to be intolerant of and put their prejudice into a more socially acceptable disguise.
Although the individual volumes had received mixed reviews (those for Judgment Day were mostly laudatory), once the trilogy was issued in a single volume, Jim was hailed as one of America's greatest naturalistic writers. Then just three years later, in 1938, Random House publisher Bennett Cerf selected Studs Lonigan for inclusion in the Modern Library series. Studs Lonigan, like Huckleberry Finn, had passed from being a crudely written and filthy novel (according to some reviewers) to an American classic. So by the time he was 35, James T. Farrell was considered an author worthy to stand with the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and (of course) Mark Twain. Not bad.
Praise of Studs continued to grow. John Steinbeck, in the introduction to The Log from the Sea of Cortez (one of John's best books, by the way), lauded the authenticity of the book. Paperback editions began to appear as early as the 1940's, with those in the 1950's anachronistically depicting Studs on the covers as a duck-tailed, black jacketed James Dean type hoodlum. Still the books were popular, and Chicago commentator and writer Studs Terkel took his nickname from the novel's protagonist. Norman Mailer said reading Studs changed his life and convinced him to be a writer. Editions were issued in nearly every European language, and the books became million copy best sellers. In 1960, Studs was made into a movie featuring a young Jack Nicholson. Then shortly before he died in 1979, Jim hit the highest pinnacle possible for a man of American letters. Studs was made into a television mini-series.
Today Jim Farrell has all but vanished from the literary radar screen, and virtually no one remembers he even existed. Studs Lonigan was finally dropped from the Modern Library, and the centenary of Jim's birth (2004) brought barely a blip of a renewal despite the reissues of some of his other works plus a biography, ably written by Robert Landers. This - quote - "revival" - unquote - went entirely unnoticed by the American people, and today Jim continues to slumber peacefully in literary obscurity.
But worse was to come. In July 2008, National Public Radio broadcast a discussion of American literature. When one of the callers brought up Jim and his masterpiece, no one on the panel - which included professors of literature from major universities - had ever heard of James T. Farrell or Studs Lonigan.
Well, maybe even that's not the worst. When Young Lonigan was reissued in 2003 by Penguin Classics, the volume had an introduction by Ann Douglas, Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Ann knew Jim personally and used Studs in her course on early 20th Century America. But when a new printing came out a year later, who did the publisher ask to write the new forward?
Sylvester Stallone.
Yep. Sylvester Stallone.
If Jim were alive, he'd be rolling over in his grave.
References
An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, Robert Landers, Encounter Books (2004). Jim was in many ways the quintessential 20th Century Liberal. He started out with extremely leftist politics and slowly moved to the right until in the 1970's he was a supporter of Richard Nixon. It's amazing what a bit of money will do to people.
Jim found literary fame early as we said, but much of his day-to-day income was writing book reviews and criticism. In his last years, he became a sad, almost pathetic figure, living in Manhattan (which, rent controls and artist subsidized housing notwithstanding, shows he can't have been too poor), popping amphetamines so he could write from eight in the morning until midnight, cranking out manuscripts and stories no one would read, and lobbying for the Nobel Prize.
Alas, Jim never even won a Pulitzer. That said, the decreasing number of Studs fans will find Jim's biography fascinating, particularly regarding the real life models of Studs, his friends, and his family. Loretta Cunningham, the real life Studs' little sister and the model of Loretta Lonigan, was a major source.
For what its worth, Loretta thought the book distorted her brothers' personality. Again since Studs, the book, is fiction, that's very likely. An interesting aside is that William Lederer, Loretta's son, became a literary figure and playwright and later became friends with Jim. William was far enough removed from his uncle to be more objective, and as a writer himself he understood how an author uses real life models. He did tell Jim, though, that the rest of his family had been ticked.
Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell, Modern Library (1938), Introduction by John Chamberlain and new introduction by James T. Farrell. Ironically a book that was the subject of obscenity trials is now sometimes classified as "young adult" literature. However, with its accurate depiction of the brutal attitudes of Studs and his friends toward other ethnic groups, it is nothing of the kind. Also Studs is one of those great books - like Herodotus' Histories - you can literally pick up, open a page at random, and begin to read.
Chicago Stories, James T. Farrell, University of Illinois Press (1998). A reissue of some of Jim's earlier stories, this includes the short story, Studs. This is probably a factual account rather than fiction since in his correspondence, Jim used nearly identical wording when talking about a meeting with the real Studs Cunningham shortly before he died.
Fans of Studs may be cheered to learn there may, just may, be a James Farrell revival underway. Not only did the publisher have Rambo and Rocky Balboa write the introduction to the new edition of Young Lonigan (which actually might help sales), but signed Jim Farrell volumes now are going for thousands of dollars. A few years ago, you could barely give them away. In any case, at least Jim's books have some market value in the world of the artistic mercenary. Well, we shall see.