Wild Irish Eyes

Growing up on Chicago’s South Side in 1920

James T. Farrell’s novel, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy, is, after nearly a century, still the best fiction about Chicago’s south side. The area is famous for hosting the Columbian Exposition of 1893, celebrating the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the new world (that won’t happen again), and, today, for being the home of the University of Chicago.

Dozens of novelists have written about the area, many focusing on its transition from a largely white population of immigrants, many of them Jewish, to the arrival of a large Black population in the 1960. Early signs of this transition are evident in Farrell’s work, which today has few if any champions.

One of Farrell’s admirers was another famous South Side Chicagoan, Studs Terkel. He was born Louis Terkel in 1912 (d. 2008) and ranks as one of America’s foremost oral historians. His vast output includes a Pulitzer Prize-winning book and many others, as well as articles, films, and interviews with some of the twentieth-century’s most celebrated figures, among them Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, Dorothy Parker, Aaron Copeland, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He had a program on Chicago’s classical music station, WMFT, for many years, and was an expert on jazz and blues. He also had a law degree from the University of Chicago, although he never practiced law (see Golus, in sources).

Louis was nicknamed Studs, after the hero of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy. His family moved from New York City to Chicago’s West Side when Terkel was eight years old. Farrell grew up among South-Side Irish (1904-1979), and that was the world of Studs Lonigan. Terkel’s parents were Russian Jewish immigrants and ran a boarding house in the area known as Bughouse Square, a bit north and west of downtown, the location of the famous Newberry Library. Terkel was not Irish and not south-side dweller. I think that he understood Farrell’s work as a kind of social history that Terkel wanted to create.

As Farrell presents them, Lonigan and his friends are hard-drinking street fighters with extreme sexual, racial, and ethnic prejudices. The only people who were considered to be truly “American” were other South-Side Irish. They saw themselves as royalty among the ordinary folks and as masters of the immigrants who came after them to South Michigan Avenue and 58^th Street, including a large population of Blacks.

Like many of his male peers, Studs is not a man of words but of looks. He sees more than he speaks. His verbal skills are limited. A moment halfway through the trilogy reveals how appearances create his thoughts. Studs, in his early twenties, is on a train, returning from the funeral of a friend who seems to have drunk himself to death. From his window seat, Studs observes people who watch the train passing by. He notices a boy who “gapes at the train.” The man in the train—and inside the system—looks at a boy outside it and thinks of the boy he himself once was.

Studs wonders if the boy and others outside the train can see him. He looks down on those outside the train as nobodies who are mired in poverty and ignorance. He believes that they admire him—literally, look up to him, and to the other passengers—and see them as well-off, as somebodies who will remain remote and unknown. Studs enjoys this feeling. “Being a mystery to others, when he knew himself so well, stuffed him with the feeling of being important” (p. 549).

Studs thrives on his imagined power over others. He awards himself a superiority that is not tested against any kind of evidence. He believes that he knows himself thoroughly, “so well,” but Studs is utterly without self-knowledge. We will see that he rarely learns from his experience. To do that, would have to admit to making mistakes and had the humility to correct them.

Farrell describes Studs as a man “stuffed . . . with the feeling of being important.” Stuffed describes a skin filled with something—a toy, for example, that is given shape by soft filling. The word is apt, for Studs Lonigan is a skin that is filled out by fluff, by fantasies that give him the shape of a man.

Studs’ illusory masculinity is sometimes obvious even to Studs himself, but this is an insight that he invariably disregards. A man who understands and accepts his lack substance can learn. He dismisses his awareness of his cowardly and bullying behavior and does not hold himself accountable. He cannot learn from his many failures because he refuses to admit that they result of his own decisions.

Terkel and many others greatly admired Farrell’s trilogy (if not Farrell’s other 39 books!) as a biting portrait of hardscrabble South Side Chicago. William McCann sums up this view nicely.

McCann sees Farrell as “a consummate realist in viewpoint and method,” a writer who “turned repeatedly in his fiction to the subject he knew best, the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Chicago's South Side.” He admires Farrell for portraying “people who were victims of injurious social circumstances and of their own spiritual and intellectual shortcomings” (qtd. from the Wiki entry on Farrell). He ranks Farrell with such better-know authors as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris, writers who are written about much more often than Farrell.

This assessment, however, omits what I see as the most revealing side of the Lonigan trilogy, which is not its sociology but its art. Another writer we should consider when we examine Farrell’s work is his contemporary William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner’s books about the American South are rooted in the language and micro-cultures of the poor and those who exploit them. To link Farrell’s work to Faulkner’s is to emphasize that the latter’s fame has endured while the former is forgotten. True enough. But the authors share modernist techniques.

Farrell was an admirer of Faulkner. He reviewed Light in August in 1932, the year that Studs Lonigan appeared. As is sometimes the case, the reviewer might be writing about his own work as well as about his subject’s. “It is his sheer ability to write powerfully that carries many readers through the consistently melodramatic and sensational parts that occur regularly in his writings,” Farrell wrote of Faulkner. We might say the same of Studs Lonigan, which is long on both sensationalism and melodrama. “William Faulkner's most apparent literary virtues are an impressive stylistic competence and a considerable virtuosity in construction and organization,” Farrell said. He himself was adept at organizing long works.

Faulkner often used experimental forms. As I Lay Dying (1930) is a marvelous example. The chapters are narrated by the neighbors and children of the woman who dies in the opening chapter. Her wish—her revenge for a disappointing life—is to be buried with her family in a distant cemetery. This forces them to take a long and dangerous journey with her dead body. Her name is Addie Bundren. I often thought, teaching the book, that Bundren and “burden” were not an accidental pair.

As I Lay Dying engages Faulkner’s interest in psychic phenomena and other paranormal phenomena, including survival after death (in the form of Addie’s consciousness) and the interaction of mind and matter. The characters seem unable to talk to each other about their conflicting feelings before or after their mother’s death. They are more conscious of what cannot be said than they are motivated to speak. Some of them are able to read the secret thoughts of others by looking into their eyes. One of many examples is Darl, who knows that his sister, Dewey Dell, is pregnant. She and Darl speak “without the words” in an imagined conversation about her and her lover, just as she and her lover, while picking cotton, agreed to have sex without saying a word (pp. 26-27).

A similar phenomenon is suggested in Studs Lonigan, which has experimental touches of its own. Studs has a girlfriend about whom he seems to be serious. When Catherine talks about marriage, Studs wonders if she wants him to propose. As is often the case with him—around his parents, for example—he can’t talk. Farrell writes that Studs “held his eyes on her, hoping that she would turn and see in his eyes all the things that he did not seem able to put into words.” Knowledge that can be seen in the eyes: a perfect Faulkner moment. It might well have found a place in As I Lay Dying.

Farrell’s trilogy has another modernist side, its disrupted narrative surface. This brings to mind the modernist classic of John Dos Passos, his U.S.A. trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, which appeared between 1930 and 1936 (Dos Passos lived 1896-1970). These books use headlines and news clippings to incorporate contemporary events and points of view into the narrative. These insertions create disruption even as they cement the historical context of the narrative. The storytelling is fragmented and yet cohesive narrative. Much is suggested, little spelled out.

Farrell uses the same device when Studs reads The Chicago Questioner and scans headlines that emphasize the dangers of “Reds” who battle cops and that refer to bankers who admire President Hoover (p. 632). The headlines align the Catholic Church with the government’s anti-Communism and convey Farrell’s cynicism about the financial establishment. This offers the author a chance to surface beliefs and assumptions that Studs holds but could never articulate.

Farrell’s experimental side is apparent in lesser form in the first pages of the book, when he uses small pictographs of round letter forms and straight or angular letter forms to illustrate the mysteries of the Palmer method of handwriting. The method was “supposed to make you less tired and made you more tired,” but Studs finds it messy and obscure (p. 6).

More complex is Farrell’s use of film. Studs and his friend Pat go to the movies. Farrell includes many titles from the newsreel shown before the feature (pp. 593-98). They focus on the depression, which is said to be over. Then comes the movie called “Doomed Victory.” Studs does not read the credits or the cast list. This makes it easier for him to erase the line between the film and his own life. Just as he prefers seeing to talking, he prefers looking to reading.

Just as he has previously imagined himself as the hero of dramatic events he hears about or reads about, Studs imagines himself as a character in the film (pp. 599-607). The film is about two boys who are trying to work their way into a gang. Studs tracks their path, which he sees as a model for his future. But he also notes that he would never have made the mistakes made by Gallagher, the doomed hero. Farrell cleverly mixes dialogue from the film with exchanges between Studs and Pat, one of Farrell’s ways of underscoring Studs’ confusion of reality and fantasy.

At the movies or on the street, Studs believes that he could out perform men considered to be at the top of their professions. Boxing is one of these. Boxing figures into the Lonigan books, just as it does in those of Dos Passos. The latter, critical of male bravado, scorns “heman twofisted broncobusting pokerplaying stockjuggling America” (p. 927). To boxing fans of the time, the words “heman twofisted broncobusting pokerplaying” point to the great boxer Jack Dempsey, the rough Western (“broncobusting”) hero whom America admired.

Dempsey is not mentioned in Farrell’s trilogy, but Studs and his friends know about Jack Sharkey (1902-94), who fought Dempsey in a famous battle July 21, 1927, before 80,000 fans at Yankee Stadium. Along with other great boxers, including Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, Farrell mentions Jess Willard (pp. 183, 658), seen in classic early boxing form here.

Farrell manages to twist wry humor out of an informal boxing match at home between Studs and his brother Martin, a fight complete with clinches and uppercuts. Their mother screams at them from the next room, and when Martin punches Studs and he falls, she too “dropped to the floor like a sack.” Their father stops the fight (pp. 656-57).

Studs Lonigan’s story is that of a man who is skilled at evading the truth and who believes that his hollow, inflated self is more than a match for the best men around him. There are very few put-up-or-shut-up moments in the trilogy to offset his illusions of power and excellence. One that stands out is a baseball game he happens upon (ch. 8, part II, pp. 709-13). As the players chose sides, they joke good-naturedly about their abilities. Standing nearby, Studs hopes they will call on him, and they do. He accepts, thinking that “he’d get by, even if he hadn’t played in years” (p. 711).

But it turns out that he can do nothing well. Facing the pitcher, “he lost confidence.” He swings late and sends a grounder to the pitcher. He does not even run to first. Then he abruptly quits the game. As he walks away, he wishes he had stayed, because if he had, he would have hit “his stride,” perhaps even hit a homer (p. 713). A better example of a character who did not learn from experience would be hard to find. He never admits that he has no stride to hit.

Lonigan’s sexual relationship are predictably disastrous. He repeatedly offends Catherine when he takes her out, failing to offer the elementary courtesies (taking her coat, helping her get seated) that she expects. She scolds him. “You men,” she storms, you think “that you are the only and the best possible thing that comes walking along. You and your conceit” (p. 726). She nails him as “mean and hateful,” and he longs “to haul off and smack her down” (p. 727). And again, as he walks away, he has regrets and realizes that his “victory” over her was not worth the cost. What was that cost? He believes that they had once come close to having sex and he is sorry to have lost that chance (p. 730). We can say that Studs strikes out again. This will change as the narrative nears its end.

Farrell portrays Lonigan as violent and grossly prejudiced, without a sympathetic side. For that reason, the name of Studs sits oddly with Studs Terkel and all he stood for. There is a chasm between Terkel’s reliably pro-Communist views and the rabid anti-Red views of Studs Lonigan and his cohorts, for example.

What Terkel and others value in Farrell’s trilogy is its realism, its success in capturing the world of South Side Chicago. The model for sociological fiction is, I believe, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the horrors of the meat-packing industry and led to regulation and inspection of the industry, unheard of at the time.

When he read Farrell’s work, was Terkel thinking that it too might lead to social reform? World War II would eventually remake the world of Studs Lonigan much more thoroughly than any reform movement could have done. Women worked. Blacks served. Social levels were thrown together out of necessity, not out of idealism.

Nobody chronicled these changes better than Terkel did in The Good War: An Oral History of World War II . This 1984 book is his oral history of the war, for which he was given the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the next year. The book is not a synthesis or an analysis but rather a series of interviews with those who experienced the various phases of the war.

This was history as Terkel saw it—as fragments that, without fitting neatly together, nonetheless created a picture, an impression, an idea. Farrell’s history of Studs Lonigan pursues some of these same goals in miniature. He determined to spell it all out, however, and not to let the parts speak for themselves. One impressive side to his art is his reliance on sources outside the main character’s own consciousness to tell the story of Studs.

Catherine’s angry denunciations of Studs tell us more about his crass sexism and brutality than his own thoughts do. In the end it is his family that speaks for Studs, each reacting to him and struggling to put his behavior into his or her own words.

The trilogy comes to a firm, if not tragic, conclusion. Farrell, I believe, would have done better to leave the fate of Studs unresolved. The whole of the trilogy is not greater than the sum of its parts. The work’s fragments and chapters don’t have to form a system—a single story—as Farrell, who was, at heart, really a traditional writer (compared, say, to Faulkner), seems to have believed. No reader could take a part of the Lonigan trilogy for the whole. But, before they are assembled into a system or a form that resolves their major conflicts, the parts tell the story. They are bits, pieces, and fragments of an urban world thatStuds can’t quite grasp.

March 2025