Studs Lonigan (3 page)

In the United States, to put it bluntly, there was always someone the poorest, least successful European immigrant could feel superior to; even when white workers' wages were rock bottom, they enjoyed, in the words of African American theorist W. E. B. Du Bois, a “public and psychological wage”—racial superiority. Such benefits, as
Studs Lonigan
tells us, didn't arrive for Jews until the World War II era. Though it sickens him, Davey Cohen (with Paddy Lonigan, the only character other than Studs of whom the reader gets an extended inside view), an uneasy member of Studs's gang, must join in Jew-bashing as the price of admission. During a “gang shag,” the local teenage slut Iris lets all the boys have sex with her except Davey; whatever he does, he's still a Jew, ranked below any Irishman. The old association between the Irish and the Africans still occasionally surfaces. One of Studs's pals asks, “Where's . . . a difference?” between “the niggers” and the Irish? “You Irish . . . and the niggers can both look up to a snake,” another taunts. But the racial barriers hold. At the end of the book, Studs, seriously ill with a heart condition, is out looking for a job in the rain; he watches a perspiring coalblack negro mopping the floor “rhythmically” in a luncheonette, and wishes he could be “as naturally happy as all the shines were”—blacks, apparently,
like
menial labor. Then he catches himself. “Suppose he had been born a jigg. Christ! That was one thing to be thankful for!” At the bottom, Studs can still imagine a black face looking up.

The ideas of masculinity Studs picks up are equally limited, though he invests them with far more longing, effort, and detail. The book opens with Studs on the night of his graduation from grade school selfconsciously practicing his tough guy gestures and lingo before the bathroom mirror. “I'm kissin' the old dump goodbye tonight,” he says to himself as he twists his “frank and boyish face” into a sneer. He knows that the women in his life will publicly reprove his bad boy persona. When he tells his sister Frances to “go to hell,” the entire family jumps in to denounce him. Studs's slang is a vivid if stunted form of urban shorthand; his family tries to use a system of genteel ciphers. His mother and sisters, all three upwardly mobile in unattractive ways, call him “William”; the name “Studs” itself is a tacit declaration of war. They play censor; his performance defies their censorship. Neither can exist without the other.

Much of what matters most to Studs, the beauty of the park, the tenderness he sometimes feels for girls, and his own softer feelings, he labels “goofy” and refuses to talk about. He can't keep Lucy, the girl of his adolescent dreams, in part because, when a problem arises, he refuses to be the one to try to make it right, and she moves on. His masculine method of protecting his territory is a way of losing it. Studs isn't wrong, however, that femininity as it is practiced in his world is professional hypocrisy. His rival, the brutal Weary Reilly, publicly insists that the “niceness” girls are socialized into peddling—their continuous protestations of purity, their horror at masculine aggressiveness—is a pretense, and he brings to heel the best-bred, snootiest girl in their group.

Years later, however, when Weary takes a young girl to a party and assumes that her fear of sex is a façade, he makes a terrible mistake. Despite the fact that she automatically dances in a provocative way, Irene is a virgin, and terrified of violation. In trying to defend the calling-the-bluff routine which constitutes his only act of perception, Weary must rape, beat, and nearly kill her. Irene presses charges against him, sending him to jail for ten years. Girls do mouth platitudes even if they don't mean them; what Weary doesn't understand is that when they
do
mean what they say, they still have to use the same platitudes. They possess no socially-sanctioned language by which they can convey sincerity. At one point Studs and a friend discuss the reason that all girls, nice or otherwise, “wriggle when they walk”; they “had to,” the two young commentators conclude. In other words, no matter how they feel, girls should move dirty and talk clean. Helen Shires, the tomboy friend of Studs's youth with whom he feels uniquely at ease, who is openly disdainful of feminine coyness and circumlocution, has no other gender possibilities that the novel can keep in its sights. Studs and Helen drift apart; she moves away, and rumors circulate that she is a lesbian, in this world an untouchable.

Studs Lonigan
is a variant of the stream-of-consciousness novel which James Joyce and Virginia Woolf pioneered in the modernist era just preceding Farrell's own, but Farrell demystifies, Americanizes, and proletarianizes the form. Unlike Joyce or Woolf, Farrell did not believe that consciousness as most people experience it involves much free play or self-replenishment; it's not equivalent or superior to reality. Consciousness is not a delight, nor a refuge, for the large masses of people who have no real epistemological mastery over life at all. Studs's stream of consciousness serves instead as the anxious reflection of social programming and his inchoate desire to escape it.

Farrell never lets us lose touch with the longing for self-fulfillment which animates Studs; he needs to find and be himself, yet he possesses little more than a cross section of the mass mind to achieve that goal. Even when he is dying, his mind is filled with disjointed authoritarian images borrowed from his culture. The Pope demands, “Do you receive the sacraments regularly?” A satiric element enters his hallucinations. George Washington appears to shout, “Your country right or wrong, but your country, my boy, jazz her!” Studs, mute on his deathbed, is still conscious though his family doesn't know it, and he realizes, “What a joke it was!,” though the joke is surely more inclusive than he suspects

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 the society that formed him. Studs “made the wrong decisions,” Farrell remarked. He refuses to go to high school; he disregards his health; he never acquires the training that Danny apparently has which could make his skill at sports dependable and intelligent, much less a professional option. Save for one journey to Indiana for the funeral of a friend, Studs has never left his Chicago neighborhood.

All that's left to Studs is to try to find what kernels of life the clichérotted world into which he has been exhaustively initiated in one meaningless ritual after another actually contains. Like a plant left in near darkness that tries to move toward the light its every molecule tells it it was formed to receive, Studs at his nadir, when effort is in any conventional sense futile, grows; murder is sometimes more difficult than the murderer anticipates. In Studs's failure lies his only success. His fatal illness, his “enlarged heart,” a condition that serves to designate his spiritual as well as his physical state, contains his only chance at life.

Out of inertia, Studs works for his father as a housepainter, and though the work has on inherent appeal for him, he comes to take pride in the fact that he does it well, that he's a professional. As Paddy's real estate business collapses, Studs wants desperately to help him, but he has—another mistake—sunk his own savings in bad stocks, and is now helplessly watching them disappear. For the first time he realizes that his parents, despite their faults and falsifications, actually love each other, and this perception touches him. Studs himself is now involved with a twenty-five-year-old Irish Catholic woman named Catherine; she is the first important woman in his life since his infatuation with Lucy fifteen years earlier, and she loves him as Lucy never did. He joins the Catholic fraternity, the Order of Christopher, to which is father already belongs, in part because the Order offers life insurance to its members—he's been turned down elsewhere because of his heart condition; he takes it out in Catherine's name so that, whatever happens to him, she'll at least have $1,000. When they quarrel, Studs abandons his punitive masculine ethos, making the first move at reconciliation. In their first sexual encounter, Studs knows he has deflowered her crudely, insensitively. “I'm sorry,” he tells her. Farrell believed that Americans “can't do as much” with their emotions as Europeans can; it's crucial that Studs is experiencing “a whole new set of feelings.” “He was beginning to see some of the things that love was.”

In none of this are Studs's motives and feelings unmixed. His mother, jealous of the woman who is taking her son from her, tells him Catherine is “common” and Studs himself knows that she doesn't have the “class” that Lucy and his sisters possess. Catherine becomes pregnant and refuses to have an abortion. They get engaged, but, feeling “trapped like a rat in a cage,” Studs takes her to the beach hoping to make her exercise violently enough to induce a miscarriage. At Lake Michigan, he compares her pale, small, dumpy body unfavorably with the tanned beauties he can't help looking at. All along, he wants a woman as a kind of trophy advertising to other males his own prowess; he often sees Catherine as nothing but one specimen of a totalized category: “women” do this, “women” do that.

Farrell chronicles every shift and contradiction in Studs's motives—in this sense, and this sense only, is the novel unedited—but so does he. He never claims that he is activated by the high ideals to which all those around him constantly attribute their actions and sentiments, though he occasionally takes their protestations at face value. He can't tell himself, as a Bogart hero might, that life is like that, the human psyche works this way; he hasn't the requisite knowledge or the mastery. Instead, he lives as best he can with the mortifying disarray, as he sees it, of his impulses and responses—how can he be having dirty thoughts about a “pure” girl, or want to rid himself of the woman who has given him her most valuable asset, her virginity? He can't find the truths that might save him but he seldom lies to himself, and when he does, shame and embarrassment soon follow. As Robert Butler has remarked, Studs's death is tragic because he has at last something, something precious, to lose: a nascent integrity, even dignity.