The Anti-Aesthetic Aesthetic of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan

 

     Admirers and critics alike must acknowledge that James Farrell’s Studs Lonigan preserves a glorious array of slang from the ‘twenties.  Studs and his young friends on Chicago’s South Side know every mean ethnic slur including some that were unfamiliar to me such as “schonicker” for Jew (though fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow uses it, too).  Their Irish parents may have contributed such Britishisms as “gaffer” and “shag,” while the Black population whose spread dislodged the Lonigans from the old neighborhood contributed “jazz” (in the sense of having sex) and “getting one’s ashes hauled.”  Everything good is “jake.”  Good things may also be “swell,” but this word often carries suggestions of snobbish arrogance.  “That’s a swell suit” means approval but a bit of surprise at the wearer’s implied social pretension.  In Studs’ world one can say “She’s a keen girl” and “keen” carries sexual associations absent from its use today (if, indeed, it is used today). 

     Of course, the elements of a story that are most up-to-date are those that first sound dated and soon require footnotes.  Yet to a twenty-first century reader, it is not the language alone that is out of fashion.  James Farrell himself and his monumental trilogy Studs Lonigan are to a certain extent passé.  With the privileging of the largely European avant-garde tradition and its American lineage descending from Gertrude Stein, with naturalism as a whole démodé, it is little wonder that few critics care to comment on the proletarian novels of the Depression era.  The left-wing views that motivated a legion of agitators among the authors of the ‘thirties are now more likely to be found among the obscure scholarly publications of university mandarins practicing New Historicism or Gender Studies.

     Yet at one time books like Studs Lonigan were not only popular but seemed to many the strongest representatives of American literature, with Studs prominent in most reckonings.  [1]  Readers today might have to think a minute to understand H. L. Mencken’s insistence, repeated at least from 1917 on, that Chicago was the most important city in American literature.  For him the most innovative and authentically American writing developed in the Midwest, the source he thought of “all literary movements that have youth in them, and a fresh point of view, and the authentic bounce and verve of the country and the true character and philosophy of its people.”  In part Mencken’s encomium derived from his conviction that in the West “originality still seems to be put above conformity.” [2]  

     Mencken was surely cocking his snoot at New York City, but the gesture carries a meaning beyond provocation.  If the United States is conceived as the place of liberation from moribund Europe ways, writers from the Midwest and West, further removed from the conservative values and decorum associated with the old wealth of the Northeast and the façade of gentility among the Southern plantation owners, might offer the greatest freedom of all.  Writers from states lying well west of the Hudson River such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Edward Dahlberg, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren challenged received ideas in wildly different ways.

     In this American context, influenced by the socially conscious naturalism of Zola, which itself developed from Flaubert and Balzac, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan opus, three novels amounting to nearly a thousand pages, seemed a ground-breaking and monumental achievement.  Farrell’s uncompromising treatment of poverty written on the cusp of the Depression was daring in its sexual content as well as its radical thematic premises. 

     Sex in Studs’ world was often rough and thoughtless.  His story includes descriptions of taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and gang-rape.  Well aware of the possibility of censorship, Farrell excised certain especially explicit episodes, yet Farrell and his publisher Vanguard remained anxious about the consequences of the content that remained [3].  The original introduction assured readers of the sociological value of the work but cautioned that “it is not for children or for the unsophisticated.”  Its unsparing realism and lack of “prudery” means the book might “shock the naïve adult who has lost touch with youth.” [4]  As a further cautionary move, the 1932 Vanguard dust jacket bore a special notice informing the public that the book was a “clinical document,” directed solely at “physicians, surgeons, psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, social workers, teachers and other persons having a professional interest in the psychology of adolescence.”  A later edition included a second and bolder introduction, stressing the story’s social implications, in particular the failure of the Catholic Church, as though some ground had been gained in writers’ ability to deal with sexuality [5].  Nonetheless, the book was still to encounter censorship [6].

     No one can doubt Farrell’s role in increasing the writer’s freedom in America.  Whereas Mark Twain had been torn between his rebellious Huck side and his conformist Tom Sawyer tendencies, the milieu of Farrell’s novels is wholly that of his lower middle-class characters, albeit from the point of view of Danny O’Neill, himself on the rise in education and status.  The inclusion of sexual incidents so significant in people’s lives yet long proscribed in fiction is surely salutary.  Furthermore, the open espousal of revolutionary economic views, in Farrell’s case Trotskyite, was novel in his youth, though for a time during the later ‘thirties it seemed as though a good portion of the American intelligentsia had become “fellow travelers.”  Farrell’s role in pushing back sexual and political boundaries is clear.  What has been debated from the start has been the aesthetic quality of his work, whether his fictions possess the style, the beauty to make great novels.   

    The verdict has often been far from flattering.  Most critics, even Farrell’s admirers, concede his weaknesses, prominent among them being a graceless style.  To Alfred Kazin he was the “the plainest” and “most ungainly” of writers; Irving Howe found his prose afflicted by “soggy repetitiveness;” and Mark Shorer observes that “in sheer clumsiness of style no living writer exceeds him.”  The point need not be belabored, since virtually all critics have concurred to one degree or another in defining these weaknesses [7].  Luna Wolf, who worked with Farrell for nine years as a secretary and editor said “He was an extremely creative writer, but he was not a great stylist.  That’s always a problem with his writing.  It’s a shame.  Because he could have been right up there.  It’s terrible that he had this flaw.  He was a writer who, in a way, couldn’t write” [8].

     Farrell was quite aware of modern developments in literature.  He did in fact live in Paris for a year during 1931 and 1932 while writing Studs Lonigan.  His use of popular songs, fragments, newspaper headlines and other materials recalls John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy.  Yet, when he attempted a more radical deviation from conventional narrative, as in Studs’ terminal delirium, most of his readers find he had little success.  (He later imagined he might write a Joycean book about O’Neill’s deathbed consciousness.)  While others, like Lola Ridge and Edward Dahlberg, managed to combine a proletarian perspective with innovative technique, Farrell was never at home with anything but straight story-telling.

     It is hardly a justification to claim that, since Farrell’s character were so often bored, asking each other what they should do, seeking intoxication, loveless sex, and risky or cruel pastimes just to get through the day, that readers should feel similar ennui.  The deadening repetition of the daily routine, relieved mostly by suffering, ought, of course, to be vividly portrayed, not reproduced in the reader.  This general truth is apparent in the vernacular, at first quite fascinating, but which becomes tiresome because it is always the same.  The frequent use of vulgarities flattens their impact until the transgressive words fade to having no specific meaning.  Their significance is only general, implying a low social status and a reactive worldview: rough, cynical, semi-anaesthetized, but the same in every utterance.  The worst consequence is that such language, even if it initially shocks, rapidly becomes tedious.

     Yet Studs does retain a readership if no high spot on Parnassus.  How can one account for Studs’ continuing appeal to many readers?  The wealth of local color – not only slang usage, but references to specific Chicago buildings, local politics, and the like – may underly some readers’ pleasure.  Others may applaud Farrell’s principled advocacy for socialism, consistent for a lifetime.  But the primary artistic appeal of Studs Lonigan is paradoxical: the work exemplifies an anti-aesthetic aesthetic.

     Such appreciation of art on anti-aesthetic (rather than non-aesthetic) grounds is not a new practice. The twentieth century produced a theory to explain the beauty of objects considered camp or kitsch, but these are not the only possible categories for ironic appreciation. Some years ago I saw an exhibit of tiny editions of poetry that celebrated poets in the ‘fifties and early ‘sixties produced to distribute to friends. Some were mimeographed, all were crude-looking, but this is the very quality that enhanced their meaning for me, indicating unmistakably that the authors were hip enough to cultivate their development with showy disregard for fame and the marketplace.  They intended their work to be defiantly unprofessional-looking.  At the time I myself was making visual poems using paste-on letters, always slightly out of place.  The lack of art school precision seemed just right for broadsides distributed on the street. 

     The shabbiness of the product can be an asset; it can be a seal of authenticity.  I am thinking of a wide variety of examples: Kenneth Anger films or the Cockettes, the off-key ebullience of a Mexican band in the zocalo, the plastic tableware of a marvelous hole-in-the-wall eatery, art brut, the lumpy forms of some Zen pottery, the slapdash simplicity of some graffiti-inspired painting, the creaky voice of an aged Appalachian singer, delivering a tune from a half a millennium ago.  In each case the imperfection seems not just appropriate, but expressively beautiful, however much in contrast to ordinary standards.

     There is a similar technical flouting of the usual rules of art in other writers of whom I am fond. Nelson Algren and then Willard Motley followed Farrell in chronicling Chicago. In Jack Kerouac (and Wolfe before him) the naive sexuality and loping, sometimes wandering, rhetorical periods convey passion and vulnerability. Though many pages of Henry Miller seem to have been hastily written, an intoxicating esprit pervades his narration and, even more, his essays.  His casualness is part of his style and this reader would not have it any other way. Norman Mailer could make stumbling both on the page and in person look like the poignant moves of a great if flawed hero.

     So, while I concur with Farrell’s critics in their negative judgements, I do not regret reading the three volumes of Studs’ life once more. I find in it not just life, but a kind of beauty common as dirt and perhaps sometimes as fruitful.

     At times Farrell can strike just the right note.   Fragments of "Just A Gigolo" are quoted a number of times.  This song was wildly popular, the first hit of Bing Crosby’s long career when it was issued in 1932. In its original form this was an Austrian cabaret song of a hussar fallen in the world to the status of gigolo.  In Crosby’s version the speaker is a WWI veteran in a Paris café who laments; 

 

When the end comes I know

They'll say just a gigolo

As life goes on without me

 

The tone of weary, lack-love suffering, of a life pushed by inescapable currents, directionless, can apply to a poor neighborhood of Chicago as well as to the capitals of Europe.  The confidence implied by the left-wing parade near the conclusion of Judgement Day cannot overcome the pathos of this fragment of song, or the suffering of the lives recorded in the fine detail of Farrell’s memory, not to mention lives not so very different, being lived today on a thousand urban streets, including those of Chicago’s great South Side. 

 

 

 

1.  Vestiges of this prestige persisted.  In 1999 the editors of the Modern Library included Studs Lonigan in their list of the hundred best novels of the century.

2.  The quotations are from the October 28, 1917 Chicago Sunday Tribune.  Mencken also wrote an essay for the London Nation (not to be confused with the American journal of the same name) of April 12, 1920 heralding Chicago as the “Literary Capital of the United States.”  Nelson Algren, a strong but late representative of gritty Chicago realism and left-wing sentiments, cited Mencken’s judgement approvingly in his Chicago: City on the Make.

 3.  One he turned into a short story titled “Boys and Girls” which is included in the Library of America edition of Studs Lonigan.

 4.  Frederic M. Thrasher, “Introduction,” Young Lonigan. Thrasher was a professor of education and author of a study of urban youth titled The Gang.

5.  This was written by University of Chicago English professor and radical activist Robert Morss Lovett.

6.  Studs Lonigan was seized by authorities as obscene in Canada in 1944 and in Philadelphia in 1948.  The latter case led to a significant decision by Judge Curtis Bok who decided in Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Gordon et al. that the works of Farrell, as well as those of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell which had been seized were nothing but “obvious efforts to show life as it is” and could not be suppressed.

7.  Kazin’s comments are in a largely sympathetic obituary in the New York Times, Sept. 16, 1979 titled “James T. Farrell, 1904‐79.”  For Irving Howe, see “Naturalism and Taste” in A Critic’s Notebook and for Shorer, “Technique as Discovery,” The Hudson Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring, 1948).

8.  Robert K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell.  Note the mildly apologetic tone of Landers’ title.  When Wolf left him in 1962 to work at McGraw-Hill, he angrily accused her: “All right!  Go ahead!  Leave the sinking ship!”

9.  The original song was "Schoner Gigolo," (1928), first sung in America by the French star Irene Bordoni.  The song has been recorded by a great many artists, including Louis Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, Thelonius Monk, and Louis Prima (for whom it was something of a hit in 1956).