For Studs will be miserable in Heaven, more miserable than he was on those Sunday nights when he would hang around the old poolroom at Fifty-eight and the elevated station, waiting for something to happen. He will find the land of perpetual happiness and goodness dull and boresome, and he’ll be resentful. There will be nothing to do in Heaven but to wait in timeless eternity. There will be no can houses, speakeasies, whores (unless they are reformed) and gambling joints; and neither will there be a shortage of plasterers. He will loaf up and down gold-paved streets where there is not even the suggestion of a poolroom, thinking of Paulie Haggerty, Sport Murphy, Arnold Sheehan and Hink Weber, who are possibly in Hell together because there was no priest around to play a dirty trick on them.

For Studs will be miserable in Heaven – STUDS by James Farrell, the short story that created the character Click To Tweet

As James Farrell himself explains in a brief introduction to this story, this is the first idea that sparkled his most famous work, the Stud Lonigan Trilogy. Here, he says, was the idea of the whole series, with the ending that he initially planned to use as it stands here.

I haven’t read the trilogy, because I honestly find the idea a bit depressing, but this story was surprisingly nice. It’s the story of a wake, but there is humour in it. There’s a spark of rebelliousness that is kind of unusual in Farrell, a mix of defiance and defeat. I really liked it.

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