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Change of Identity

Judgment Day by James T. Farrell. The Vanguard Press

The New Republic, June 1935, 171–172

Could one possibly read James T. Farrell’s impressive Lonigan trilogy without feeling an irresistible desire to sermonize? Farrell always gives us the feeling that what he says is authentic. Hence his story of a young Chicago Irishman, bred in a typically modern-Catholic orientation, forms a ghastly attack upon the educational influences, both formal and informal, to which his representative hero is subjected. When reading his three vigorous volumes, the last of which has been published recently, one can well understand why conscientious persons raised in a thoroughgoing religion may as adults be able to tolerate nothing short of absolute atheism, manifesting an almost ferocious hatred of the God-concept, and categorically shutting off all visions of damnation by violently insisting upon the mortality of the soul.

I admit that I have considerable sympathy with religious lore (as preserved in the formulations of the Church’s philosophers, psychologists and mystics, and as manifested in a vast structure of myth and symbolism that seemed miraculous in its ability to take care of basic human difficulties). I believe the visions that give purpose and unity to historic movements are in essence religious. And I am convinced that, however secular the terminology guiding our subsequent social directions may set out to be, it will not succeed in handling the essential problems of human relationship unless it finds ways of paralleling, in its own terms, the mental patterns formed in the past by religious imagery. In this work of secular transformation, I think, the “illumination” will come primarily from our poets.

To read Farrell’s startling trilogy, however, is to feel how complete the transformation must be. At least as regards the class that provides all the important characters of his trilogy (the “low Irish” of a metropolis), Farrell repeatedly shows us, with a feverish insistence that makes the heart sink, how completely unfit the precepts of the Church are for coping with the principal morbidities of today. Primitive Catholicism may have been strongly collectivistic; and medieval Catholicism, for all its tolerance of serfdom, may have been pitted against the cults of nationalism, individualism and business; but what Farrell pictures today is a slovenly manipulation of superstition and prejudices that directly or indirectly stimulates jingoism, race hatred, sexual orgy, alcoholism, cruelty and uncritical acceptance of a drastically ailing economic structure. In this respect, the picture he draws is not new. Farrell’s claim to distinction is the purely esthetic one of having given form to his own particular range of experience. But in the course of thus putting things together, he shows most poignantly, at times even terrifyingly, how the religious emphases, at least as manipulated by average priests under capitalist conditions, make spontaneously for moral disorganization through their very vocabulary of virtue. As we read we see the full irony of the situation he portrays: the fact that those who are pushed down by a defective economic system are held down by the very structure of meanings to which they turn for guidance and solace.

A morality is an equipment for living. At its best, it is a felicitously adjusted set of values which, by inducing people to despise real social dangers and to desire real social goods, promotes the maximum of cooperative conduct in the group as a whole. Yet Farrell shows us a dangerous misalliance of religious and late-capitalist values that—by combining the informal instruction of the pool room and the “can house” with dismal political thinking of the ward-heeler variety and a moral training that mainly lays the basis for pruriency—contrives in the end to promote an incongruous moral clutter (a clutter that contributes most to “cooperation” by stifling and misdirecting criticism of the current commercial framework).

Other writers may appear and give us other versions. (For, as conditions continue to tighten, we may well discern the same “class lines” forming within a religious orientation as outside it.) I am simply discussing now the convincing version provided us by Farrell. In his tough, fluent lingo, he gives us three novels that bear devastating evidence, on every page, of the drastically anti-social amalgam we get when run-down capitalism and religious conformism are put together—the first creating the need of accurate economic appraisals, and the second obscuring the need by a continual thundering against symptoms while causes go unquestioned.

The most interesting paradox in Farrell’s trilogy to me is the extreme moralism that figures in his characters’ decay. Their brutality and carousing are done with the most exacting sense of propriety; one can feel their scrupulous straining to “belong,” in accordance with a woefully muddled system of values that (a) does not properly name the evils of their economic structure, (b) does not properly name their own individual quandaries with respect to the situation in general, and (c) attempts to make up for its inaccuracy by an elaborate tissue of promises, indulgences, and condemnations thoroughly irrelevant. In this sense, we may feel his characters’ decay, not as weakness, but as a sensitive recording of the colossal moral burdens being placed upon them. Their corruption, their loss of social purpose, their confused devotion to a gang morality—all this may be considered as the crude first draft of a judgment which, if properly revised, can become correct and wholesome.

Reading the three volumes of Farrell’s trilogy in succession, I noted certain shifts in treatment that I considered significant. In the first, Young Lonigan, which begins with Studs’s graduation from St. Patrick’s grammar school at the age of fifteen, we have by far the closest interweaving of Studs’s character with the events about him. He is almost wholly a part of his environment—with but a slight sense of separation, best observable in the occasional feeling on the boy’s part that there is a door in his mind, and the vision of his deliberately closing this door at times when he wishes to shut away untoward thoughts. In The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan there enters a stronger sense of dissociation; inserted between the main chapters of the plot, there are brief interludes in italics, totally different in style (ceremonious, novelistic interpretations that suggest the “layer” method of Dos Passos).

In Judgment Day the element of dissociation is advanced far beyond a dualism in treatment. The mark of it is strongly upon Studs Lonigan himself. Though Studs does not die until the end of volume three, an integral part of him died after his besotted collapse at the end of volume two. Judgment Day opens by stressing his fear of death (a theme that had been present in the two preceding books, but now becomes major). Though still a young man, he is obsessed with the thought of his physical deterioration, and given to morose comparisons with what he had been or might have been. And for all his paucity of vocabulary, he has become somewhat the observer (much of the plot being a succession of typical city scenes, with Studs simply transferred from one to the next). Studs walks beneath a shadow (a state which has, for its one good side, a much more humane attitude towards his parents).

Returning now to my opening remarks: I believe that, however radically we transform the dogmas of religion, its essence must remain. And that even in a man like Farrell, whose ferocity against the Church has been turned into these energetic books, we may expect to see the religious processes perpetuated. Thus, his Lonigan trilogy might be called an initiation service—the dropping of one personality and the assuming of another in its place. And as Studs dies, leaving an unmarried woman pregnant with his child, while the radicals demonstrate in the streets, we can discern the tenor of this magic rite whereby a change of role is heralded in the symbolism of a novelist’s plot.