Despite declining to buy rights to his first novel in 1934, Paramount recognized O'Hara's gift, and aspiring to make use of it offered him a ten-week contract as a writer of what was termed—by grocery clerk bookkeeping—"additional dialogue," at two hundred and fifty a week, with an option to renew for another ten weeks. It's one of the more affecting credulities of moviemakers that they continue—in a triumph of hope over experience—to confuse the art of dialogue on the page with the art of dialogue on the screen. In a story or novel, voice must enact the most explicit of actions; a prose character's speech and language of meditation is that character's performance, the principal display of motive, sense, and judgment. On the screen, a character's words serve best to punctuate acts, or lie at cross-purposes to those acts. The screen-plays of America's best literary writers make a dreary filmography: Fitzgerald bombed, as did Dorothy Parker; Faulkner was bombed during most of his serial visitations, though he managed to come up with a nice credit on To Have and Have Not. In the human comedy, Hollywood is top banana, whether the subject is boastful ignorance, mad vanity, vulgar gimme, automotive or architectural novelty, eccentricity of wardrobe, or unfelt sentiment. When I was a greenhorn novelist, beckoned from New York to that palmy colony by first-class air tickets for a first chance to be professionally lied to, a more experienced writer friend took me to an instructional lunch, as if to a briefing at the Explorers Club. My friend assured me that if I refrain6d from scribbling sums on the backs of hotel envelopes in the expectation that I'd soon be able to afford an imported roadster, and if I understood that any woman asking in a friendly way whether I hailed from out of town was a hooker, and if I NEVER returned ANY phone call from ANYONE in the movie business more than once, I'd limp home with my skin and some of my self-respect. He sagely explained that it was best not to debate whether it were a pardonable sin to sell one's soul, at least until someone offered to buy it (with a cashier's check), and that should I be so lucky as to sell mine, for God's sake get a hefty chunk on the front end. I got no hefty chunk but I enjoyed a limo trip from LAX to the Beverly Hills Hotel and heard swell reviews of my book by people who hadn't read it. What a visitor makes of such circumstances pretty much sets in stone whether he'll read the pretty blandishments of Hollywood as the talent-thieving seductions of the whore of Babylon or as the razz-ma-tazz of a pretty cheerleader. Here John O'Hara had his head on straight. For one thing he was cocky, which sold a whole lot better out west than hangdog. He arrived late to work his first day on the job, and Matthew J. Bruccoli reports that he explained in extenuation, "You should have seen her." For another thing, he desired a car, and Hollywood had an abundant inventory and was a capital place for a writer to carry away money enough to buy a fine ride. A feature writer for the Los Angeles Times recently remarked that "for almost a century, writers have been coming to Southern Cali-fornia for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks."' The more sardonic writers didn't announce themselves to be bank robbers, but thought of themselves as hookers. From the prominence of Stockholm, after bagging his Nobel, Faulkner explained to an interviewer who'd asked how he bore his two-year sentence at Warner Brothers: "I just kept telling myself, 'They're gonna pay me Saturday, they're gonna pay me Saturday.'
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O"Hara was protected from self-ruin by his wife Belle's "modest competence".
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If the violent striking back here has been commensurate with its provocation, this is not invariably the case in O'Hara's work. As Louis Auchincloss has written in Reflections of a Jacobite: la the strange, angry world that he describes, the characters behave with a uniform violence, speak with a uniform crudeness. . . . The most casual meeting between a major and minor character will result in an ugly flare-up or a sexual connection, or both. It is impossible for an O'Hara hero to order a meal in a restaurant or to take a taxi ride without having a brusque interchange with the waiter or driver."' Auchincloss is address-ing the novels rather than the styries, and he has somewhat over-sharpened his point, but motiveless truculence is often a feature of O'Hara's unsuccessful characterizations. Resentment is animating, but only when the acuity of the hurt—as opposed to a reader's personal judg-ment of the stakes—can be felt through the writer's sentences. "Surely," Auchincloss writes, "there is a difference between the feelings of the man who has not been asked to dinner and those of the man who has been thrown down the front stairs." O'Hara, who wrote both crudely and subtly about both, might not agree. Hurt—unlike the narrative that attempts to convey it—is not subject to an exegesis, but it is reasonable to argue that injury suffered from an abuse of power has a better chance of exciting pity and terror than the delayed petulance of an individual scorned.
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In a 1942 Newsweek column, O'Hara chose to memorialize what was to be one of the more inglorious anecdotes attached like a limpet to his history. As he reported the story, the war correspondents Vincent Sheean and James Lardner, together with Ernest Hemingway, were off together at the Spanish Civil War when they found themselves with some unexpected dividend of spare cash from a royalty or expense-account payment and wondered aloud how best to spend it, and Hemingway had said of this lagniappe, "Let's take the bloody money and start a bloody fund to send John O'Hara to Yale," about which remark O'Hara remarked, "It's a mean little story, but it shows what my friends think of me." In his biography of O'Hara, Matthew J. Bruccoli quotes a letter to him from Sheean that ameliorates the disdain a bit by subtracting "bloody," and goes on to explain that he excised Hemingway's snub from his own book to avoid one of O'Hara's "savage rages." And still later Don Schanche, the Esquire interviewer-of O'Hara, told Bruccoli that O'Hara said of the sally that "it was the first time I knew Heming-way had any real envy of me."' It remains a puzzle why O'Hara retailed the story to his Newsweek readers, unless being known to know Hemingway was more pleasurable than the great man's opinion of him was painful.
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Lionel Trilling's passion for the novel burned with an almost sacred heat: he believed it to be civilisation's most refined expression of intellectual elevation and moral complexity. But the novelist who had his considered esteem was not an American realist- Dreiser and Steinbeck aroused his disdain- but Henry James. And O'Hara would not have seemed his inevitable choice for an heir to the Master's lacework of inferences and contingencies.
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But of course he knew just what he was doing; he was sometimes given envelopes to pass along. "It was only a venial political sin to pocket some of that money on its way from the committee to the ward leader: but when Mike was given $400 to deliver to a ward captain, the ward captain received $400, not $375. There would have been no comment and no disillusion-ment if Mike had paid himself a $25 delivery fee, but he early showed that he was not a $z5 man. The $25 men are indispensable, but they invariably remain $25 men" (O'Hara, Ten North Frederick [New York: Random House, 19551, pp. 207, 208).
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that there was no shadow over his patriotism or manliness."' What seems remarkable here—as elsewhere in O'Hara's many linkings of col-legiate social disappointment and existential disgrace—is the want of irony. It is a mystery how loyally, with what blind faith, this shrewd skep-tic accepted the conventional mandarin wisdoms. How could O'Hara have failed to hold to the fire the feet of a character who confuses mem-bership in Skull and Bones with service at Verdun? In Chapin's Yale junior class, forty-five students were chosen for the brotherhoods of three tombs: Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head, and Skull and Bones.* While a socially aspirant fellow, feeling his shoulder go untouched on Tap Day, might say to himself that this was how it would feel to hear a doctor diag-nose a malign tumor, how could a grown man have allowed himself to believe that a character hearing a cancer diagnosis would imagine as an equivalent curse how it would feel to go untapped by Wolf's Head? Such an unreliable table of equivalence is fatal to a novel of manners, whose narrator must demonstrate reliable judgment in order to seem a wise judge of his characters' misjudgment of weights and measures. It's fathomable to be a snob or to be easily impressed by surfaces when one is young. Some lucky kids seem to be born "attractive" or "original" or both, with a strong chin or bushy eyebrows, with shrewd fashion sense or fearlessly open eyes or even with a coherent set of val-ues. Sometimes this apparent grace is merely an accident of physiog-nomy, and in rare instances—from genes or by training—a kid can have from childhood the whole package: brains and courage and kindness. But most of us have to learn a day at a time—many days, a long time—what matters, what's decent or mean, what's authentic or bogus. After a while—after, say, a couple hundred short stories, half a dozen novels, and a half century of living—it becomes a vice to refuse to learn.
*Yale's version of discrimination—O'Hara's favorite—differed from Princeton's and Harvard's. Princeton's better eating clubs of the time (Ivy, Cottage, and Colonial) selected members according to unscientific principles of "attractiveness," a function of boyish decorum and understated haber-might welcome a hdashery. Ivy ockey player from a Montana high school as well as one from St. Paul's, if the high-schooler had the right haircut, so that in the annual club photo a stranger couldn't tell the young gents apart. As Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. has elsewhere explained, Harvard's better final clubs (Porcellian, and A.D.) insisted on "belongingness," a function of family name and schooling (Groton, St. Mark's, even Milton). Yale's secret societies selected gifted strivers according to their titled distinctions, so Tap Day was a contest between curricula vitae: captains of major teams (inclu-sive of hockey, squash, and rowing) were surely in the running, as was the editor of the Yale Daily News (unless he was or appeared "unattractive"), or a straight-arrow fundraiser.
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When a novel breaks down in so many ways—fails in voice, pacing, proportion, energy of character, psychological credibility, and moral vision—it usually, as a literary work, fails utterly.* Yet, O'Hara consid-ered From the Terrace his masterpiece, and there are passages in it so grand that for pages at a time it is possible to share his delusion. On hier-archies and the manifestations of deference he is observant and subtle. As a boy of eleven Alfred "had already noticed that some of the fathers and mothers of his friends would contradict themselves if they expressed views that conflicted with those of his own parents. ("Such a lovely day!" "A little too warm for my taste." "Well, yes, it is rather close.")' In turn, Mary's mother, Mrs. St. John, regarded from Wilmington the Eatons of Fort Johnson, or Port Johnson, whatever that little mill town was named: "They're nothing and nobody. The mother is a drunkard and other things beside, the father is a nouveau-riche war profiteer."' The novel also offers several brief, almost impressionistically com-pressed descriptions of the consolations of long marriage, of adjustment and resignation. The sexual accommodations of Mrs. Budd to her hus-band have been quoted above; the settled affection between the daugh-ter of James D. MacHardie (senior partner of Alfred Eaton's investment bank) and her husband, Creighton Duffy, is described with swift and sure daring: "She laughed a lot and smiled more. She was a jovial woman, and the quality had been brought out by Duffy in their perfect marriage. The MacHardie money had got her nothing but duty dances as a debutante, but Creighton Duffy wooed her with second helpings of ice cream and cake, and she had won him by devouring them. She became a Catholic (as she would have become a Mohammedan) because he asked her to. . . . They had each other, and it became increasingly unimportant that no one else wanted either one of them."' This is a glimpse of the complex portraiture mostly missing from the tomes, the delicate willingness of O'Hara to seem surprised by his char-acters, a simulation of surprise credible only after a novelist's empathetic study of his inventions' quiddities. Creighton Duffy is Alfred Eaton's nemesis, a petulant and jealous man who brings Alfred low. He, too,
*These novels never failed commercially: From the Terrace sold out its first and only hardcover printing of one hundred thousand copies, and by 1966, Matthew J. Bruccoli reports, Bantam had sold two and a half million copies in paperback, together with thirteen million copies of O'Hara's other books.
exhibits sexual habits of potential interest to Havelock Ellis, but this time O'Hara pulls back from the perverse in refusal to reduce and judge, as he does so often elsewhere. He must, bless his soul, love Duffy's coarse character, despite himself: "The slaps and ticklings that stimulated them in their lovemaking had never gone past the danger point, and when lovemaking had exhausted them they slept like enormous, untroubled infants until time for their next feeding." Writing about the sexual impulses and excesses of the characters of Butterfield 8 and Ourselves to Know, Arthur Mizener rightly reproaches O'Hara for his inclination always toward the extreme: "a tabloid newspa-per's alternately sentimental and sensational view of life, a view that characteristically takes extreme forms of behavior—especially of sexual behavior—and unusual circumstances as typical."' A reader's confi-dence in O'Hara's judgment of individuals is frequently shaken; as Mizener notes, "everything conceivable happens occasionally," but to represent molestation and sexual violence and eccentricity of taste as being inevitable—as if, behind closed doors, all is abuse and seduction—is "the basic stuff of sexual fantasy, of pornography." Although Mizener might have meant his dismay to have a moral component, my interest is in the awful toll that O'Hara's indulgence of "unusual circumstance as typical" exacted on his novels. Aristotle makes sense, I believe, in his credo on this matter, that in make-believe a plausible impossibility is to be preferred over an implausible possibility. O'Hara owes no apology for his management of crowds, in contrast to individuals.
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Even recently—perhaps especially recently—McPhee was rueful as well as amused at his presumption in cadging from a celebrated pro-fessional a free piece, but that's what he got. The story, "The Favor," concerns an accident following a game at the Yale Bowl; encouraged by the writer's courtesy, McPhee said he'd like to change the venue to Prince-ton's Palmer Stadium, and telephoned O'Hara to ask whether this tri-fling change would be acceptable. "No," was the answer. O'Hara got for his generosity a Revere silver bowl, inscribed With thanks for The Favor. McPhee delivered this gift to 2o College Road West, and O'Hara, clearly touched, asked whether McPhee might like to join him in a drink. "I was only what? Twenty-one. I said sure I would." O'Hara led his guest out to a terrace—the terrace, the one from which the big novel came*—excused himself, then returned with "an old-fashioned glass big enough to hold a softball. This was a bucket of booze."
The O'Haras were invited during their first year or so in Princeton to more dinner parties than they welcomed, and these often went badly. At J. Robert Oppenheimer's house O'Hara quarreled, about educational theory, with the nephew of Thorstein Veblen "who wrote," as O'Hara remembered later, "an overestimated book called The Theory of the Leisure Class."At another Princeton dinner party, Matthew J. Bruccoli
(On the other hand, McPhee has conceded that other terraces have been hallowed or blamed for From the Terrace: "Wherever there's a terrace, he wrote his novel on it." )
reports that the wife of the New York Times bigwig Arthur Krock declared to O'Hara that A Rage to Live was a "fraud."' To such belliger-ence he would respond without forbearance, drinking till he was drunk, then glaring or snorting or turning his back—which often seemed to have a lurid target pinned to it. Soon he had a reputation for difficulty, though—as ever—not without exception. At a dinner at his house he had seated on his right a friend's new wife, a woman from the South who'd been warned to agree with whatever her host opined. Nervous, she drank too much, then opined her own self. "Mr. O'Hara, I have to tell you, your books are just trash. Whenever someone sends me one, I toss it right into the fireplace." A long silence commenced as guests stared at their salad. O'Hara made a noise, then a choking sound. He was laugh-ing. "He knew a pugnacious drunk when he met one," in the recollection of Kate Bramwell.
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