When politics and morality mixed in print - author John O'Hara

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 12, 1994 | by Rex Roberts

An artist is his own fault, John O'Hara said, and O'Hara delivered himself into literary oblivion. An arrogant and immodest man, he proclaimed himself the best writer of his time, and critics rightly rejected such self-aggrandizement. Anyway, his books didn't need their explications. While William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway were reinvent" the novel, O'Hara stuck to stolid realism and prided himself on his plain, metaphorless prose.

Then there was O'Hara's exasperating obsession with fraternities, honor societies and clubs. O'Hara's characters fretted constantly about the differences between a Pierce-Arrow and a Packard, and whether someone summered on the Cape or in Narragansett. They spent pages discussing whether "Phi Betes" were more likely to wear vests. O'Hara himself could not choose among details - at least not in his novels. If he staged a scene in a den, for example, we would learn that it had been referred to at one time as the back sitting room, "and which was so indicated on the signal box in the pantry, with the letters BSR."

As for his own character, O'Hara was a bit of a boor. He played the rogue, brawling and bragging about his sexual conquests, until he almost killed himself with drink. Then he adopted the pose of country squire, motoring from his home in Princeton, N.J., to his publisher in New York, who might arrange to have his Rolls-Royce blessed by the cardinal. During his later years, he sealed his literary fate by promoting himself for the Nobel Prize and embracing unfashionable, reactionary politics.

Nevertheless, O'Hara deserved a better fate, on the strength of his short stories alone - he published more fiction in the New Yorker than any other author. "In a just - and thus unrecognizable - world, John O'Hara would need no introduction," writes Fran Lebowitz in her introduction to a new edition of Appointment to Samarra (Modern Library, 290 pp), O'Hara's first and most famous book, published in 1934. "But despite the publication of 14 novels and 402 short stories he is almost entirely unknown to American readers under forty."

Even I, at 40 one of O'Hara's staunchest defenders, ignored him until circumstances forced us together - despite the fact that I was born and raised just outside of Pottsville, Pa., the city that would gain notoriety as Gibbsville in his fiction. What's more, my mother once dated O'Hara when she was in college. She remembered little about him - there is a photograph of them posing awkwardly at a county fair - except to say she thought he was stuck on himself. My mother was part Dutch, and as one of O'Hara's biographers once noted about his school days, "Some of the `Dutch' students [seemed] to have been annoyed by the confidence displayed by an Irish Catholic."

During my own college days as an English major at Penn State, O'Hara was not read, let alone discussed, in my literature classes. I was unaware that his study was reconstructed inside Pattee Library. While in graduate school at the University of Chicago, I noted that BUtterfield 8 made the reading list for a course titled "American Literature of the Thirties." I sometimes told my fellow scholars by way of introduction, "I'm from Pottsville, Pa., the Gibbsville of John O'Hara." They would stare back blankly.

In the late seventies, when federal and state governments were unusually liberal with money for local arts councils, several of us convened the John O'Hara Journal, a "little magazine" that published fiction, poetry and articles about O'Hara. I won't say we exploited O'Hara to pursue our own befuddled aspirations, but I will confess that at the time I still had read almost nothing he had written. What a revelation when finally, out of guilt, I cracked the spine of a dog-eared collection of his short stories.

O'Hara had phenomenal range as a writer, despite that he has been pegged a chonicler of the rich and oversexed. His ear for dialogue is legendary, and he evoked New York cabbies, Hollywood producers and cheap hoods like Pal Joey as easily as he did Park Avenue socialites. And he was more than a social realist. True, he produced a lot of satires and character sketches during the first half of his career, and his work during this period is colored by the cynic's interest in failure and frustration. Beginning in 1949 with A Rage to Live, however, he began writing more expansive narratives, and melancholic conceits such as love crept into his novels.

Indeed, one of these novels, Ten North Frederick may be the most underrated of our time. Winner of the 19S5 National Book Award, it takes as its subject the most powerful myth our culture has created, that anyone can grow up to be president: Joe Chapin, the novel's protagonist, is a naive idealist destroyed by politics, middle-class mores and a passionless marriage. Ten North Frederick captures the dreams and despair of an affluent society that guarantees everyone enough rope to hang himself. It may be the last novel to treat seriously the aspirations of an era Henry Luce proclaimed the American Century.