A Novelist Begins
I
I BEGAN writing what has developed into the trilogy, Studs Lonigan, in June 1929. Judgment Day was finally completed at the end of January 1935. In June 1929, I was a young man who had burned other bridges behind me with the determination to write whether my efforts brought success or failure. I was then finishing what happened to be the last quarter in which I was a student at the University of Chicago.
Three times before, I had dropped out of classes because I was restless and dissatisfied. I resolved to devote my time to writing and to educating myself in my own haphazard manner. For a fourth and last time I had matriculated and I managed to finish out the quarter. Although I read continuously and rather broadly, I could not, after my sophomore year, maintain a steady interest in any of my courses except composition, where I could write as much as I pleased. I would cut other classes, day after day, finally dropping out, heedless of the loss of credit and the waste of money I had spent in tuition.
My mood or state of mind in those days was, I believe, one which most young writers will recognize. To be a young man with literary aspirations is not to be particularly happy. At first, the desire to write is more strong than is a clear perception of what one wants to write and how one will write it. There are surprising oscillations of mood. One moment the young writer is energetic and hopeful. The next, he is catapulted into a fit of despair with his faith in himself infirm, his self-confidence shattered and broken, his view of the future one in which he sees futile self-sacrifices ending only in dismal failure. There are times when he cannot look his friends in the eye. There are moments when he feels himself to be set against the opposition of the entire world. There are occasions when he turns a caustic wit, a brutal sarcasm, and a savage arrogance on others only because he is defending himself from himself.
Suddenly he will be devastated by an image of himself in which he sees a nobody who has had the temerity and egotism to want to call himself a writer. He measures himself, with his few unpublished manuscripts, against the accomplishments of great writers, and his ambition suddenly seems like insanity. Even though he is not particularly conscious of clothes, there are periods when he gazes upon his own shabbiness — his unshined shoes, his worn and unpressed suit, his frayed overcoat, his uncut hair—and sees this all as a badge of his own miserable mediocrity. A sense of failure dogs his steps. Living with himself becomes almost unendurable.
Writing is one of the cruelest of professions. The sense of possible failure in a literary career can torment one pitilessly. And failure in a literary career cannot be measured in dollars and cents. Poverty and the struggle for bread are not the only features of a literary career which can make it so cruel. There is the self-imposed loneliness. There is the endless struggle to perceive freshly and clearly, to realize and re-create a sense of life on paper. There is more than economic competition involved. The writer feels frequently that he is competing with time and with life itself. His hopes will sometimes ride high. His ambitions will soar until they have become so grandiose that they cannot be realized within the space of a single lifetime.
The world opens up before the young writer as a grand and glorious adventure in feeling and in understanding. Nothing human is unimportant to him. Everything that he sees is germane to his purpose. Every word that he hears uttered is of potential use to him. Every mood, every passing fancy, every trivial thought, can have its meaning and its place in the store of experience which he accumulates. The opportunities for assimilation are enormous, endless. And there is only one single short life of struggle in which to assimilate.
A melancholy sense of time becomes a torment. One’s whole spirit rebels against a truism which all men must realize because it applies to all men. One seethes in rebellion against the realization that the human being must accept limitations, that he can develop in one line of effort only at the cost of making many sacrifices in other lines. Time becomes for the writer the most precious good in all the world. And how often will he not feel that he is squandering this precious good? His life then seems like a sieve through which his days are filtering, leaving behind only a few, a very few, miserable grains of experience. If he is wasting time to-day, what assurance can he give himself that he will not be doing likewise to-morrow? He is struggling with himself to attain selfdiscipline. He weighs every failure in his struggle. He begins to find a sense of death — death before he has fulfilled any of his potentialities — like a dark shadow cast constantly close to his awareness.
Such were some of the components of my own state of mind when Studs Lonigan was begun.
II
In the spring of 1929, I took a course in advanced composition conducted by Professor James Weber Linn. And Professor Linn — with whom I was constantly at loggerheads concerning literary questions — was encouraging. His encouragement, as well as my arguments with him and with the majority of the class, assisted me in maintaining my own self-confidence. For his course I wrote thousands of words. I wrote stories, sketches, book reviews, essays, impressions, anecdotes. Most of these manuscripts related to death, disintegration, human indignity, poverty, drunkenness, ignorance, human cruelty. They attempted to describe dusty and deserted streets, street corners, miserable homes, poolrooms, brothels, dance halls, taxi dances, bohemian sections, express offices, gasoline filling stations, scenes laid in slum districts. The characters were boys, boys’ gangs, drunkards, Negroes, expressmen, homosexuals, immigrants and immigrant landlords, filling-station attendants, straw bosses, hitch-hikers, bums, bewildered parents. Most of the manuscripts were written with the ideal of objectivity in mind. I realized then that the writer should submit himself to an objective discipline. These early manuscripts of mine were written, in the main, out of such an intention.
One of the stories which I wrote for Professor Linn’s course was titled ‘Studs.’ It was originally published in This Quarter. ‘Studs’ is the story of a wake, written in the first person. The corpse is a lad from the Fifty-eighth Street neighborhood who died suddenly at the age of twenty-six. The story describes his background and his friends. They have come to the wake, and they sit in the rear of the apartment discussing the mysteries of death in banalities, nostalgically remembering the good old days, contentedly describing dull details of their current life. The author of the story sits there, half-heartedly trying to join in the conversation, recollecting the past vividly, remembering how these fellows who are now corpulent and sunk in the trivialities of day-to-day living were once adventurous boys.
Professor Linn read this story in class and praised it most enthusiastically. I had no genuine opinion concerning it. I had tried to write it as honestly, as clearly, and as well as I could. I did not know what I thought of it. The praise which the story received in class greatly encouraged me. I asked Professor Robert Morss Lovett to read it. He kindly consented, and after doing so he called me to his office and suggested that the story should be developed at greater length, and the milieu described in it put down in greater detail. I had already begun to think of doing this, and Professor Lovett’s advice clinched the matter for me.
In a sense, Professor Linn and Professor Lovett are the spiritual godfathers of Studs Lonigan.
When I began working on this material, I envisaged one long novel, ending in a scene similar to that described in the story, ‘Studs.’ I saw in the character of Studs Lonigan, who was growing in my mind, a number of tendencies at work in a section of American life which I happened to know because it had been part of my own education in living. I began to see Studs not only as a character in imaginative fiction but also as a social manifestation. In the early stages of writing this work, I analyzed my character as I considered him in his relations to his own world, his own milieu. I set as my aim that of unfolding the destiny of Studs Lonigan in his own words, his own actions, his own patterns of thought and feeling. I decided that my task was not to state formally what life meant to me, but to try to re-create a sense of what life meant to Studs Lonigan.
I worked on with this project, setting up as an ideal the strictest possible objectivity. As I wrote, the book enlarged and expanded. It grew into two novels, and finally into three. There were numberless changes and expansions of the original conception, alterations in emphasis, reconstructions of the structure of events, from the time that the project was first conceived until the last line was written. However, to go into this phase of the work would be dull, and it would sound too much like a pretentious effort to bring one’s laboratory out in public. All works of imaginative fiction go through such a process of change and expansion.
III
Studs Lonigan was conceived as a normal American boy of Irish Catholic extraction. The social milieu in which he lived and was educated was one of spiritual poverty. It was not, contrary to some misconceptions, a slum neighborhood. Had I written Studs Lonigan as a story of the slums, it would have been easy for the reader falsely to place the motivation and causation of the story directly in immediate economic roots. Such a placing of motivation would have obscured one of the most important meanings which I wanted to infuse into my story — my desire to reveal the concrete effects of spiritual poverty.
It is readily known that poverty and slums cause spiritual poverty in many lives. One of the important meanings which I perceived in this story was that here was a neighborhood several steps removed from the slums and dire economic want, and here was manifested a pervasive spiritual poverty.
The fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers of boys like Studs Lonigan came to America as to a new world. They came from the shores of that island whose history is one of the most bitter of all time. Most of them were poor immigrants. Some of them could not read or write. They belonged at the bottom of the American social and economic ladder. Many of them did menial work, and the lives which they led were hard. They struggled upward in American society just as have other immigrant groups and races before and after them.
Their lives constituted a process in which they were assimilated into the American petty bourgeoisie and the American labor aristocracy. Their lives were dedicated to work, to advancing themselves, to saving and thrift, to raising their families. They rose socially and economically. Ultimately many of them owned buildings and conducted their own small business enterprises. They became politicians, straw bosses, salesmen, boss craftsmen, and the like. And they became tired.
Their spiritual resources were meagre. They believed in the American myths of success and advancement. They believed in the teachings and dogma of their faith. They believed that with homilies, platitudes about faith and work, and little fables about good example they could educate their children. They believed that thus their children would start off in the race of life with greater advantages than they had had, and that their children would advance so much the farther, so many more rungs on the economic and social ladder.
The story of Studs Lonigan opens on the day that Woodrow Wilson is renominated to run for a second term as President of the United States. It closes in the depths of the Hoover era.
It was during the period of the Wilsonian Administration that this nation reached upward toward the zenith of its power and became, perhaps, the richest and the most powerful nation in all history. The story of Studs Lonigan was conceived as the story of the education of a normal American boy in this period. The important institutions in the education of Studs Lonigan are the home and the family, the church, the school, and the playground. These institutions break down, and do not serve their desired function. The streets become a potent educative factor in the boy’s life. In time, the poolroom becomes an important institution in his life. When Studs reaches his young-manhood, this nation is moving headlong into one of the most insane eras of our history — the Prohibition era.
A word here is necessary concerning the drinking of Studs and his companions. This drinking has a definite social character. When Studs and his companions drink, they do so as a gesture of defiance which is in the spirit of the times. Drinking in those days became a social ritual. Furthermore, when Studs and his companions began drinking, the worst liquor of the Prohibition era was being sold. Those were the days when the newspapers published daily death lists of the number of persons who had died from bootleg liquor and wood alcohol. That was the time when men and boys would take one or two drinks, pass out into unconsciousness, and come to their senses later to learn that they would never again have their eyesight.
All generations drink more or less in the period of young-manhood. But all generations do not drink the kind of bootleg liquor which Studs Lonigan and his companions drank. The health of Studs and many of his friends is impaired and permanently ruined in this story. That very loss of health has, it can be seen now, a social character.
Studs Lonigan is neither a tough nor a gangster. He is not really a hard guy. He is a normal young American of his time and his class. His values become the values of his world. He has as many good impulses as normal human beings have. In time, because of defeat, of frustration, of a total situation which is characterized by spiritual poverty, these good impulses go more and more into the stream of his revery. Here we find the source of Studs’s constant dream of himself.
His dream of himself changes in character as the story progresses. In the beginning, it is a vision of what he is going to be. He is a boy waiting at the threshold of life. His dream of himself is a romantic projection of his future, conceived in the terms and the values of his milieu. In time, this dream of himself turns backward. It is no longer a romantic projection of things to come. More and more it becomes a nostalgic image turned toward the past. Does this not happen in greater or lesser degree to all of us?
Shortly after I began working on Studs Lonigan, I happened to be reading John Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct, and I came upon the following sentence which I used as a frontispiece quotation in Young Lonigan: ‘The poignancy of situations which evoke reflection lies in the fact that we do not know the meaning of the tendencies that are pressing for action.’ This observation crystallized for me what I was seeking to do. This work grew out of a situation which evoked reflection. The situation revealed to me the final meaning of tendencies which had been pressing for action. And that final situation became death, turning poignancy into tragedy.
Studs Lonigan was conceived as the story of an American destiny in our time. It deals with the making and the education of an American boy. My attitude toward it and toward my character here is essentially a simple one. ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ . . . There, but for the grace of God, go many others.