Concerning John O'Hara

The epilogue to that mammoth Labor Day post (and whoever has read it, I thank you humbly and sincerely...I spent six hours in my room writing it on Labor Day, so it means a lot that you stuck through it) will be forthcoming, and from then on my outside-of-class faculties will be devoted to Anthony Trollope. I wonder if I can get a clock put on hear ticking down to April 24, 2015, the Trollope Bicentennial, at which point I want to have the first draft (at least) of a book or dissertation ready to go. As the Grand Victorian would have said, "Excelsior!"

But today, in response to one last bit of pleasure reading, much needed after some very stressful doings so far this week, I want to talk about a great American author...and hopefully clue in my new MAPH friends studying literature and such if they haven't fully experienced him yet.

That bit of pleasure reading was Geoffrey Woolf's The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara (2003).

I first heard of O'Hara in passing in my movie history books...Elizabeth Taylor won her first Oscar for the somewhat atrocious film version of BUtterfield 8...but my real experience was in the fall and winter of '05. Having perused the Modern Library's Top 100 list, I noticed him at #22 with a book called Appointment in Samarra. And when I should have been editing my Film II project, my head was focused elsewhere on the self-destruction of Julian English.

The personal pleasure of Appointment in Samarra came in how O'Hara created the same effects as in The Great Gatsby (my all-time favorite novel, if you didn't know already) using a completely different technique. Both stories are about a well-to-do man, one firmly in the Twenties at their most Roaring, the other lucky enough to be financially secure in 1930 as the Depression sweeps in, who (SPOILER ALERT) suffer and ultimately die due to their inner impulses, Jay Gatsby from his hopeless love, Julian English from his breaking society's codes. The difference is that Fitzgerald (whom O'Hara idolized) focused his story on seven people and conveyed their ambiguous pyschic states with poetic language and an intricate approach to time and structure which gives the story and its themes an enduring timelessness...the fact that it is set in the early twenties doesn't seem to matter. Fitzgerald's intense emotional explorations of Gatsby's idealism, Daisy's thoughtlessness, Tom's brutality, Nick's striving for the truth, are all traits we see in others today, we see in ourselves today. Thus the novel lasts, and always will last. But while Fitzgerald used the gentle strokes of Pisarro, O'Hara went for the intense realism of Canalletto crossed with the Dutch Masters. Appointment is firmly rooted in its time and place, with an entire world of characters who would, in Trollopian manner, reoccur through another thirty-five years of fiction, each one described with details piling up on details of food, drink, clothing, transportation, American society in general. Julian and Caroline English's tragedy is a particular tragedy which could only have happened in a particular town, O'Hara's personal fiefdom of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania (really Pottsville), but O'Hara's straightforward writing and lavishing of characteristics, mannerisms, and top-flight dialogue on every person and place and object puts a reader so firmly into the world that we are unable to leave it so easily...we feel Julian and Caroline's pain and heartbreak and loss as intensely as we would feel our own decline in life. And like any great novelist, O'Hara still works in a universal theme: a lifelong preoccupation with the manners and attitudes of any society where privilege exists, and how these societies destroy people either through crushing their aspirations or corroding them from within.

O'Hara was a man of aspirations, a man stifled by his hometown (which Woolf aptly describes as a pretentious city whose reason for being--the power of coal--was swiftly passing it by even during O'Hara's youth) and rankled by his inability to attend Yale, let alone any college. So much of his life was spent chasing his dreams and lashing out at those he thought would obstruct him. He verbally quarreled with almsot everyone he ever met (especially at The New Yorker, which published 250 of his works), drank as if he had two hollow legs, held fast to prejudices, picked fights with anybody (including women and midgets), and was a shameless self-promoter who lobbied for the Nobel Prize and honorary degrees. Even fulfilling his aspirations (the musical Pal Joey, based on his stories, set him up for life) didn't help, for following his Broadway triumph he devoted himself to writing more novels, all of them bestsellers, most of them terrible.

I should know, because I read the (amazingly) National Book Award-winning Ten North Frederick and his other heavyweights during my last year of college and first year in Los Angeles...for they have one intoxicating power beyond their near-pointless, careworn themes and disturbing obsession with every form of sex possible. If only through his social documentation, O'Hara firmly situates his readers in his world, conuring up details and thought processes until you can't tell where reality ends and O'Hara begins. I should knowm, for during that time I made my first and only attempt to write a novel. My goal was to combine the social chronicling of Trollope, the exciting plotting of Agatha Christie, and, yes, the romanticism of Fitzgerald. 594 pages and one "The End" later, I ended up with a John O'Hara novel, an episodic, meandering tome with annoying characters who barely learned anything and cheap shock value. I tossed it before I left L.A.

And yet, O'Hara MATTERS, because if he was only a one-great-shot as a novelist, he was arguably the GREATEST American short story writer ever, and only a few figures in world literature, the peerless Borges above all, top him. Reading O'Hara's short stories, some packed into a few spirit-taxing pages ("How Can I Tell You?," "The Cellar Domain"), others more extended but, unlike the novels, knowing just what to tell and where to stop, is to be dropped into explorations of humanity few writers are capable of. O'Hara put his details and ear for dialogue to their best work, capturing every nuance of a person's choices and desires, leading up to one moment where an action occurs, sometimes only a misspoken sentence, which from that tiny instant onward alters the protagonist's life forever. O'Hara in the short stories is less meandering than Fitzgerald, more fully-formed than Hemingway, more accessible than O'Connor, and more intelligible than while keeping the unskimping power of Salinger. Only Raymond Carver, whom Woolf acknowledges as a great follower, can match O'Hara for the devastating power of little things. But O'Hara...forgive me...uses language even better than Carver. Any serious student of American Literature, I feel, must read Appointment, but also cannot overlook "The Doctor's Son," "Imagine Kissing Pete," "Andrea," and others.

Reading Woolf's biography was a joy for me, not only because he writes in a fluid style peppered with asides and commentary on the elusive art of life-writing itself, but also because he firmly captures the arc of O'Hara's life. Like so many of my heroes, I discovered, O'Hara was a man transformed by love: his adoring second wife Belle, his gentle third wife whom he married after Belle dies of a heart condition, and his daughter Wiley, his only child. In his devotion to them O'hara quit drinking, settled in Princeton, and, if never mellowing, at least being more and more a great American man of letters. Whatever bridges he burned, he left an enduring, towering mounment in this country's literary pantheon.