Somewhere I picked
up the Modern Library edition of Studs
Lonigan when I was a kid, and read it two or three times before my
twenty-first birthday, and never again. Once Nabokov had showed me how
beautiful prose and the architecture of fiction can be, Farrell’s clunky sentences
and stridency became largely unreadable. What kept me reading at first was the
raw, unformed power of Farrell’s working-class characters and settings. His
people reminded me of my mother’s Irish-American family. Her brothers, from the
generation after Studs, were house painters, and had taken their first steps
into the middle class after service in World War II.
As an experiment
I picked up Farrell’s Omnibus of Short
Stories (Vanguard Press, 1956). The epigraph is unexpected: “Not knowing when the dawn will come / I open every door.” At random I turned to “Street
Scene,” originally published in To Whom
It May Concern (1944), which begins: “‘Say, do I belong to the human race?’
the old man asked himself aloud as he stood at the corner of Ninth Street and
Michigan.” Not a promising start. The reader already sniffs portentousness, a
grasping after Bigger Things. Here is the next paragraph:
“It was an
Indian summer afternoon. Across the street, in Grant Park, there was a
playograph recording of the World Series baseball game between the St. Louis
Cardinals and the New York Yankees. The old man wore shapeless clothes; his
shirt was gray with dirt, and the toes stuck out of his army boots. He shuffled
along and stopped in front of the gold and bronze entrance to the Nation Oil
Building.”
The hackneyed
language and bargain-basement symbolism make it tough going, though it was
interesting to learn about the playograph. Inevitably, a crowd gathers. An
audience, really. The old man is putting on a show. He pantomimes undressing,
putting on pajamas and lying down in bed. “Street Scene” starts sounding theatrical. The reader has seen such people
on the street, afflicted, reading from a covert script. The crowd speculates:
Is he “full of canned heat”? “Coked up
with wood alcohol”? A cop shows up, and the old man “meets his gaze with
innocent eyes.” He explains to the cop that “maybe I’d just like to lay down
and die.” One sense this isn’t the first time he has staged this stunt. A
police sergeant shows up and asks, “What’s the matter with you? You can’t die
there,” and the old man replies, “Jesus Christ, can’t a man die in peace, even
in a free country?”
That’s as
close as Farrell gets to comedy. Played differently, the scene might have had a
Beckett-like humor about. But another two and a half pages follow, more of the
same – much dialogue, a little scene-setting narration. “`I’ll be dead soon,’
he soliloquized,” Farrell writes, again emphasizing the theatricality – not because
he is writing meta-fiction, but because mentally ill people often imagine
themselves performing on a stage. A patrol wagon takes the old man away. He’ll
get “thirty days in Bridewell,” the cop explains to someone in the crowd, “but
it won’t do no good. Them bums is jus [sic]
bums.” Here’s the concluding paragraph:
“The cop
strolled back along Michigan Boulevard. There was a cheer from the crowd by the
playograph, and it broke up. The Yankees had won the world series from the
Cardinals in four straight games.”
A Leftist cliché:
once the show, the “street scene,” is over, the unfeeling mob turns its
attention to the other spectacle. Farrell writes sentimental propaganda, though
I enjoyed reading “Street Scenes” and several other stories that display occasional
hints of tough-guy charm. Call it a wallow in nostalgia. The title of Farrell’s
story reminded me of an identically titled poem by David Ferry, one that I wrote about more than nine years ago. One of the lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XV
quoted by Ferry seems appropriate:
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