Books: Frustrated Pygmalion

THE LOCKWOOD CONCERN by John O’Hara. 407 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Since the deaths of Faulkner and Hemingway, John O’Hara is unquestionably the most famous of living American novelists. Yet he is notoriously discontented with this grudgingly conceded eminence; he is given to complaints that he never won the highbrow vote or the Nobel Prize. And critics who find his work unsatisfactory put him into a considerable swivet.

However, there is evidence that O’Hara shares the critics’ dissatisfaction with his creatures—a circumstance that may explain his touchiness. At all events, in his latest novel O’Hara may again be seen at work like a frustrated Pygmalion, infuriated because the being he has articulated with such skill and wired for authentic speech is somehow, after all, not quite human.

Living Blight. The humanoid he has made and destroyed is George Bingham Lockwood of Swedish Haven, Pa., St. Bartholomew’s (’91) and Princeton (’95), a not-quite gentleman whose masterly style of address covers and serves a cold-spirited egotism that blights every living thing within its reach. George Lockwood is first seen as he supervises the building of a manor house for himself outside the town where the murderous skulduggery of Grandfather Moses and the more genteel avarice of Father Abraham have made the Lockwoods one of the richest families in the area. But his chief ambition is to be the first Lockwood gentleman.

The house is no Xanadu; it is built in the seemly red brick style of the region, but there is something extravagantly not right about it. Imported craftsmen have constructed a spiral staircase behind a secret panel in the wainscoting, and an eight-foot brick wall topped by spikes encloses a 30-acre park.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, wrote Robert Frost, and in this novel that something is the Pennsylvania Dutch peasantry on the farm lands and the immigrant Irish and Polish serfs in the coal “patches” upriver. A farm boy, intent on exploring the grounds, dies impaled on the spiked wall, and George bugs out to New York, leaving his lawyer to slip $500 in hush money to the family. Why does a man like this want to be a gentleman? It seems that “becoming a gentleman” was an obsession that Father Abraham had developed and that he thought of as “the Lockwood concern”—concern being the Quaker word for a Friend’s special field of good works or vocation.

Wrong Defeat. There is, of course, a great deal more. Lockwood banishes his son for the unforgivable fault of getting kicked out of Princeton, his daughter gets entangled in an intricate sexual morass in London, he himself acquires one mistress too many (O’Hara tycoons always have several mistresses). His brother kills himself—and the mis tress. In the end there is no one left of the Lockwood concern but the principal person of this private religion. But the chief trouble with the Lockwood concern is that it has also be come the O’Hara obsession. And that may be what is responsible for the nagging feeling that there is something lacking in the latter-day O’Hara. Any realistic story of the era includes the assault of the upwardly mobile upon the established rich. But O’Hara’s as pirants never make it. Like Scott Fitzgerald before him, O’Hara feels that there is something implacably defeating about the always-have-been-rich.

But there isn’t. Lockwood has everything that riches can buy, but he still has the feeling that he is being denied something. It bothers him. It still bothers O’Hara—who has also made it. And that is just the trouble—both with Lockwood as a convincing character and O’Hara as a novelist. For it no longer bothers anybody else. The upwardly mobile do make it. The rich are no longer exclusive. O’Hara is fighting a battle against the Establishment that the Establishment itself has long since quit fighting.

If it is social history (which O’Hara insists he is writing), it seems no longer relevant. Reading O’Hara is beginning to take on something of the feeling of reading a Victorian novelist.