48
PARTISAN REVIEW
ho-od of Studs lAnigan.
He has done more than write the biography of
one inarticulate boy living his futile life; he has chronicled the Chicago
South side in the decade following immediately upon the war, vividly re-
creating the life of a city within a city, reporting the dialectic of life and
death in the Catholic migration and the Negro influx.
No writer I know of has succeeded in revealing as much of the
child mind as Farrell has done. He possesses a rare and profound insight
into the adolescent mind and he has given us valuable clinical material
on the city boy. More, he has written the case history of an entire sec-
tion within a city; it is significant that the introduction to his first book,
Young Lonigan,
was written by a sociologist who appreciated his author-
itative record of interstitial
neighborhoods.
It is significant because
Farrell has not really written a novel; his method has been cumulative
rather than qualitative.
He has produced a profound and moving
diary.
The writer himself was not purposive; he did not seek an
answer to the burning questions of life.
Farrell has only taken the
first stei) in the crisis, he has been impressed by the degradation and
fut;lity of life today.
But he has not been aware of a pattern in people
and in society that would lend direction to his book.
The children Farrell is dealing with come from righteous middle
class homes. He has not motivated or traced the transformation of- these
children into pool reom habitues, hoodlums and incipient gangsters. There
is a fault he shares in common with Edward Dahlberg.
Both authors
reduce their characters to the lowest common denominator; because they
are dealing with an inarticulate character they divest him of all clements
of consciousness-often to their own embarrassment.
The reader may
recall that in
Young Lonigan,
after the gang-shagging of Iris we were
asked' to accept in one blow that Davey Cohen beside being a hard-
boiled young hooligan, also was a sensitive, introspective child who read
many books.
In
Young Manhood
we are informed in one short
paragraph that Danny O'Neill resents the life he is leading, that he plans
to become a writer and create a book that will repudiate it. This resent-
ment and consciousness is as much a part of the life Farrell is recording
as the unleavened world of the toughs.
Had he integrated both these
elements he would have found the three dimensional pattern of this life,
he could have emphasized the consoling answer that Danny O'Neill was
discovering-the Soviet way.
Instead the author has imposed himself
upon his milieu and constricted it.
These limitations, we must remember, are the limitations of growth.
The Young M anlzood of Stu-ds Lonigan
is a deeper and surer book than
Farrell's earlier work.
He has shown an increasing mastery of his craft.
Today Farrell is one of the most sensitive recorders of the American
language, in his book he has captured the vigor and richness of the Amer-
ican
argot.
As he leaves the naturalist tradition and moulds his work
with a sense of direction and purposiveness he will fulfill the major
promise he now shows.
