JOHN O’HARA: The Rage Is Stilled

THE big manor house at Princeton lies at the end of a long, tree-shaded gravel drive, secluded from the noise and bustle of the public road. It is much like the homes of the wealthy, whose manners and mores John O’Hara chronicled over the past four decades with a keen ear and a sharp eye. There last week, O’Hara died of a heart attack at the age of 65. He was indisputably one of the major figures of 20th century American literature, but just as indisputably, he was an author who never quite fulfilled the promise of his talent.

Since 1934, when his first book, Appointment in Samarra, was published O’Hara had been astonishingly productive. At his death, he had written twelve novels, between 300 and 400 short stories and a large assortment of essays, novellas and plays; he had recently completed a new novel, The Ewings, scheduled for publication next February and was 70 pages into a sequel as well. His tough, spare prose, crackling dialogue and gift for creating mood and atmosphere won him a worldwide audience (his works have been translated into at least 19 languages, including Dutch and Vietnamese). He was, almost certainly, several times a millionaire—and he was not at all ashamed of his wealth. “I am a very lucky man,” he once said, “but, by God, I earned it.”

He did. In the earning, friend and foe alike learned to fear his prickly wit and often combative manner. In 1956, when his novel Ten North Frederick won a National Book Award, some critics attacked O’Hara for overemphasizing sex. Now, 14 years later, what once seemed daring seems decidedly tame.

Other critics scoffed at his almost obsessive preoccupation with the rich, disregarding the brilliant portraits of the poor and classless that stud his novels. “I want to get it all down on paper while I can,” O’Hara once wrote. “The United States in this century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt and to do it with complete honesty and variety.”

Telling the Truth. He never got it all down, of course, but he went a long way toward capturing on paper those eternal preoccupations of mankind: loving, living and dying. Once, asked how he would sum himself up, O’Hara replied: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the 20th century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.”

O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pa., five years after the century began, the son of a prosperous doctor. His childhood was comfortable. He seemed destined for Yale and a happily-ever-after life, but just before he was to go to New Haven his father died and there was no money for college. O’Hara went on to a spectacularly varied assortment of jobs—freight clerk, steel-mill worker, soda jerk, gas-meter reader and deckhand—before turning to writing.

In the late ’20s he came to New York and worked on the Herald Tribune, the Mirror and TIME. He developed a reputation as a prodigious drinker—he quit altogether in 1953 after suffering a massive internal hemorrhage—with a concomitant talent for being fired. But by 1929 the first of his short stories started appearing in The New Yorker. Four years later, his literary reputation solidly established, he set to work on Samarra. Between August and November he rattled out 25,000 words, then ran out of money. He promptly sent copies of the early chapters to three publishers, asking for an advance. Harcourt, Brace responded with $500 and a $50-a-week allowance.

Never a Pet. Appointment in Samarra, recounting the last days of Julian English, a doomed young member of the upper middle class, was a great success. O’Hara’s career was truly launched. Novels like Butterfield 8, A Rage to Live and From the Terrace flowed from his restless typewriter. In 1940 he wrote the libretto for Pal Joey, an instant Broadway sensation. Though he got the National Book Award, he never won either the Pulitzer or the Nobel Prize, to his unconcealed annoyance. “It used to hurt, never winning an award, but I’ve never been the pet of intellectuals,” he said. His small Pennsylvania towns, like Gibbsville of Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, were microcosms of American society, observed with scrupulous attention to detail—down to the width of the lapel on a man’s suit. Gibbsville, in fact, closely resembles Pottsville, his old home town.

One of the Best. O’Hara had little patience with writers of the ’60s; he was of an earlier era, a contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. “I’ve never been able to read Norman Mailer,” he complained in 1967. “Mailer is a dirty Saroyan.” Bernard Malamud and William Styron received the same short shrift. Most young writers, however, confess to at least a degree of admiration for O’Hara. “He has more genius than talent,” John Updike wrote in 1966. “Very little censoring went on in his head, but his best stories have the flowing ease and surprisingness of poems.”

In recent years, however, younger critics hit O’Hara hard, charging that his preoccupation with the upper middle class made him no longer relevant. That sort of criticism stirred O’Hara. Asked about his increasingly conservative views, he told a friend not long ago: “If I were 21 years old, I would probably be a good deal more concerned about race and poverty and other problems than I am, because if I were 21, I would be more alive to what’s going on. But when you’ve only got a certain number of years to live, you can’t concern yourself with all the problems of the world.” His world began and ended with Gibbsville and, in the cacophonous, violence-studded global village of today, that sometimes seems a narrow world indeed. Yet many of its problems will be shared as long as the species endures. John O’Hara illuminated those problems with a professional’s skill and honesty.