Books: Pyramid for a Cold Fish

FROM THE TERRACE (897 pp.)—John O’Hara—Random House ($6.95).

John O’Hara is perhaps the U.S.’s chief social embalmer of manners and morals among the moneyed. His latest novel is a massive pyramid of prose raised over the mummified form of a minor Pharoah of finance named Alfred Eaton. As if by ancient Egyptian custom, Eaton’s living tomb is stocked with the appurtenances of his caste and class: tennis rackets, the entrance requirements for Princeton in 1915, a Marmon runabout, a roster of exclusive clubs, a Navy lieutenant’s stripes, partnership in a Wall Street banking house, two wives, two mistresses. It is part of Alfred Eaton’s tragedy that he cannot unravel these possessions in time to find himself. It is part of Author O’Hara’s semifailure in his most ambitiously conceived novel that the embalmers art which he brings to this saga often gives Alfred Eaton only a bloodless reality, a kind of rouge to live.

Whatever its disabilities, From the Terrace arrives on a literary scene so bleak and hackneyed that the book outruns most of the competition even while standing still. The novel it most strongly resembles is last season’s front-running By Love Possessed, though O’Hara’s workmanlike sentences bear no resemblance to Cozzens’ involuted maze. Like Cozzens, O’Hara tries to strike a balance sheet on a man’s life at the mid-century mark. With Cozzens, O’Hara seems to agree that the assets and liabilities all but cancel out, leaving a chilling desolation of spirit in which futility is challenged only by fatalism. Of Alfred Eaton, as of Cozzens’ Arthur Winner, it can be said that he achieves a kind of strength through joylessness except that with O’Hara’s Eaton the licked wounds never quite heal.

The Jinx. Joylessness begins at home for Alfred Eaton in the turn-of-the-century Pennsylvania town of Port Johnson. Alfred’s brother is the apple of Papa Samuel Eaton’s eye, and poor Alfred is the apple core. When the brother dies at 14, Alfred is cut off without a pennyworth of love by the steelmaster millionaire father. With old-fashioned pre-Freudian directness. Author O’Hara allows this rebuff to clue the pattern of Alfred Eaton’s life. From then on, he is destined to confer his love rather than give it, to make contact with people rather than make friends. His outwardly charming, cold-fish personality seems to carry a jinx. Before he is 20, he is partially responsible for the deaths of his childhood sweetheart and of his first mistress. At home he can do nothing to stave off his mother’s crack-up as she drowns in alcohol.

College (Princeton) releases Alfred from family pathos and small-town parochialism. O’Hara, a noncollege man who lives in Princeton, lavishes a special nostalgia on the college scene where an Ivy Leaguer becomes a species of feudal knight surrounded by noncollege varlets.

Worst-Kept Secret. Back home after World War I, Alfred tackles a career and marriage. He and his best big-rich college pal begin manufacturing airplanes, and Alfred woos and wins a Wilmington, Del. socialite named Mary St. John, who subconsciously loves Alfred’s trust fund about as much as she does Alfred. Eaton shortly abandons the sky for “The Street” (Wall) and later bars Mary from his bed but not board after she has an affair with an ambisextrous psychoanalyst. Alfred in turn is smitten with a nacreous 22-year-old named Natalie, and thus begins a 16-year-old triangle that develops many more than three angles. The secrets of the bedroom have always been the worst-kept secrets in O’Hara’s novels, and the pages of Terrace are crammed with knowing sinnuendo. But O’Hara seems to make a more serious effort in this novel than he did in either A Rage to Live or Ten North Frederick to subordinate sex to plot rather than plot to sex.

Toward novel’s end, when Alfred Eaton’s life should be reaching its climax, it comes apart. The surface events are relatively predictable—divorce, remarriage, dismissal by his Wall Street firm, a heart attack. But it becomes clear that for the most part these events are not accidents, that they are not even results of Alfred Eaton’s education, past, or environment, but that they are fated by a small, icy crack in his being. The reader is forced to look backward over the story and to revise—what seemed love is suddenly revealed as the very inability to love, what seemed a wise or manly action toward a friend is seen as the fatal inability really to be close to anyone. Eaton achieves futility and failure in his middle years as others by hard work and determination achieve success. In a memorable finale, Alfred Eaton, the poor little rich boy of 50, is pictured killing time at the fashionable New York clubs, compulsively seeking out the company of older men, and slowly but surely earning the contempt of his second wife.

Space, Time & Snobbery. From the Terrace has all the O’Hara virtues and all the defects of those virtues. His ear for dialogue has never been truer, but when page after page of unselective trivia has been set down, the reader finds himself aching for an earplug. O’Hara continues to describe the nuances of social habit with rare authority in a society in which social flux continuously alters the symbols of prestige. But the snobbism of the right prep school, the right club, the right street in the right exurb becomes so intrusive that Terrace often reads like a gigantic menu.

Author O’Hara, who wrote this novel in a two-year, eight-hour-a-day stint, prides himself on always delivering his manuscript to his publisher on the promised date, but it is increasingly clear that this external discipline has been paid for with the loss of inner form and tension. Diffuse, repetitious, overly detailed, Terrace suffers badly from the fallacy that to fill space is to conquer time. When Appointment in Samarra appeared almost a quarter-century ago, it was apparent that Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald had a challenger. From the Terrace is probably the best novel O’Hara has written since Samarra; but he is still the challenger.