by Geoffrey Wolff
Peacock-pride in bloodline is commonly the enemy of honest reporting, but John O'Hara was nothing if not true to the paradoxes of character, so that he reported of the Major that "ethics never bothered him much." He was hardworking, with an eye for the main chance. He launched himself with no bankroll, only a few horses: thus a livery business. Horses could pull hearses: thus an under-taking establishment, the quick and the dead pulling happily in tandem. By dint of horses he was also in the house-moving business and part owner of the circus to which he had leased three hundred head. He built the Shenandoah Opera House, later renamed the O'Hara Theater, and associated with the actors and singers and musicians he booked to per-form there. He was chief burgess of Shenandoah before it became, in his grandson's estimate, "a third-class city." Writing his brother in 1963, John O'Hara precisely calibrated that on the Schuylkill County ladder their paternal grandparents "were the top people of Shenandoah, which is top of nothing much, but top."' Michael's son Patrick was born the day after Christmas, 1867, and grew up working in his father's lively, getting an education in the sweaty verities of violent acts and language, and sealing his passion for horses. Ambitious for his family of six children, the Major sent young Patrick to the Roman Catholic Niagara University, whence he entered the Univer-sity of Pennsylvania medical school, graduating in 1892, at twenty-four. His brothers Michael and James also studied medicine at Penn, but fail-ing to get degrees they became partners in an undertaking firm. "There was always money around," John O'Hara recollected, "and there were always fights about money." After feuding with his brothers—"all lar-ceny," his son concluded: "I always suspected Jim had a bit of necrophilia in him, and I certainly suspect him of not leaving any wedding rings in the caskets"—Patrick O'Hara practiced briefly in New Orleans; when his father died in 1893, he accepted a Republican patronage appoint-ment as surgeon to the Schuylkill County Alms House and superinten-dent of the Hospital for the Insane in Schuylkill Haven, six miles to the south of Pottsville. Many years later one of his sons recollected for a 'newspaper reporter that Patrick O'Hara despised saxophone music "because it reminded him of the wailing of the mad women after the asylum's lights were doused for the night."
Harold Ross groused to O'Hara "I trust you with nouns but not adjectives"
No episodes in O'Hara's personal history are as ugly as his explosive indulgences of ferocity against men, women, and—on that one ghastly occasion at "21"— midgets. In this notorious incident, O'Hara insulted—or decided he had been insulted by—a gruff Lilliputian, and threw a punch. The bantam's buddy, returning from the men's room, joined the fray, and between them the peewees won on points, giving the heavyweight a unanimous-decision whipping. Let's call getting beaten up in bars a lifestyle choice; hammering women and knocking them down at parties and in bookstores is some-thing else altogether, and it was something O'Hara did in his drinking days. In self-vindication he later explained, helpfully, that "although I may often have felt like belting a woman, I have never actually taken a poke at one except in anger." Stories circulated that he had shoved Pet, pushed her out of a moving taxicab, slapped her. These scenes are difficult to picture. Of course everyone knows by now that no awful act is inconceivable in privacy, and that an ashamed, drunk, and truculent hus-
band was brutal to his wife is within the range of experience. But it is dif-ficult to picture these scenes being acted out in public places. Any writer—and for sure any drinking writer—is familiar with the outra-geous. Bar fights, fuck-yous, drinks thrown in a perceived jerk's face: it happens, but in my experience seldom, and I don't think of myself as cloistered. There is no tolerance these days for wild pain-in-the-ass drunkenness among even the baddest boys and girls. Furniture breakers and shouters get the gate as soon as they stumble across a line not that distant from civility. Now is now and then was then. James Thurber's second wife summarized O'Hara as "a cruel and neglectful son of a bitch," and on drunken fury and viciousness has to count as a connoisseur. Her own husband was repellent. Gentle E. B. White was his closest friend, and White "spent a lot of evenings with him but I didn't enjoy them. Jim had it in for women and he was obnoxious about it. He would lash out at the nearest woman, and one night the nearest woman was my wife, Katharine. I wanted to hit him, but I couldn't hit a one-eyed man."' Wolcott Gibbs, another friend, swore that Thurber was "the nicest guy in the world" until five in the afternoon. After his third drink, he'd begin to brood, and squint his half-good eye, and mutter imprecations, and soon enough he was maligning the speakeasy patrons with filthy language and hurling glass-ware. In a notorious incident at Tony's, Thurber pitched a glass of whiskey at Lillian Hellman, an event she described in "Julia." Dashiell Hammett, also drunk, shoved him against a wall, so Thurber pitched another whiskey (so quickly refilled?) at him, hitting a waiter, cousin to Tony, who called the police, "an extreme action for a speakeasy proprietor," as Burton Bernstein appropriately observes, adding in a footnote the kind of ad hominem aside that threatens to make the writing of biography pleasurable: "There is something about Lillian Hellman that makes men, and some women, want to throw whiskey at her. Thurber simply and inexcusably did what everybody else thought better of doing." Back then, otherwise smart men and women subjected themselves to the torments of keeping company with morose, bellicose, incomprehensible, drooling drunks, and these otherwise astute men and women came back for more, and even invited such sots as Thurber and O'Hara to par-ties that began more than three drinks into the cocktail hour.
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Dorothy Parker pointed him toward a possible epigraph, in W. Somerset Maugham's play God-awfully entitled Sheppy. The passage tells of the encounter in the Baghdad marketplace between a merchant's servant and the female Death. The servant, jostled by Death and startled by a shock of recognition on her face, flees, riding his master's horse north to the putative safety of Samarra. What a coincidence! Death had been surprised to see that very servant in Baghdad, "for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra." O'Hara, studying the passage, said, "There's my title." Dorothy Parker, according to him, said "Oh, I don't think so, Mr. O'Hara."' Alfred Harcourt—suggesting, with an unpersuasive quorum of Har-court, Brace, editors, that he call his first novel Swell Guy—abhorred the title. So did Sinclair Lewis, who called it "atrocious philosophy, and—since it is both meaningless and difficult to remember—shock-ingly bad box office."101 Apart from the difficulty of remembering whether Samarra has two ins or two rs, I think it's a fine title, tantalizing and appropriately deterministic, which is, I suspect, what Lewis found so "atrocious." "I bulled it through," O'Hara later boasted in an author's preface to the Modern Library edition of the novel. It was thereafter a mark of his nerve, if not of his judgment, that he looked only to himself for literary counsel, just as his successful auction of the novel to three publishers caused him to overvalue his cunning as a literary agent. Appointment in Samarra comes out the gate with speed and authority.
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At the height of his powers, his interest in exploring female characters was fearless and persuasive. Fitzgerald's women were aspects of Zelda, made memorale by a rhetorical virtuosity masking opacity of motive.
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To be serious was to be engaged with the historical rather than transitory consequences of capitalism, and social Darwinism was too busy in its cruel communal labors to be reproached for clubhouse post-ings and exclusions. America's official readers were suspicious of the novel of manners even before Henry James's time, and during Edith Wharton's, and F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and J. P. Marquand's. They are sus-picious of it now, assuming that "manners" refer to social climbing and that climbing is a fit action only for mountaineers, that slights are life-changing only if suffered by those of a minority religion or with off-white skin pigmentation. Novelists of manners—faced with this humanly com-prehensible hostility to the pain of palefaced, educated, fully employed, or trust-funded characters—must be resigned to critical indifference. Oddly enough, this critical unfriendliness has often been the hand-maiden of popular success: Wharton, Fitzgerald (while the Jazz Age was still on), O'Hara, Marquand, Auchincloss. O'Hara understood American critics' ("professional pipe-smokers," he called them) reflexive hostility "It is a dangerous thing to bother about the rich," he wrote in an introduction to The Portable F Scott Fitzgerald. "A writer who does it in this country—at least during and since the times when barbers and bootblacks were piling up fabulous fortunes of from five to forty thousand dollars—will find himself regarded a toy." (The ridicule of teensy sums—"five to forty thousand dollars"—was not designed to ingratiate.)116 Even at their most catholic, serious American critics find it difficult to take seriously coded behavior, systems of civility and discrimination, "the rich" and their damned man-ners and mannerisms. Charles Child Walcutt, writing one of the first extended appreciations of O'Hara's fiction, concluded in 1969 that he was a grand and gifted writer of short stories and a mediocre novelist. "The weakness of O'Hara's novels is related to the excellence of his short stories: America lacks the manners to sustain what Aristotle called a 'sig-nificant action of some magnitude.' "117 It isn't, of course, that "America lacks the manners," but that our manners are so fluid. For a reader to feel deeply a character's resistance to the oppression of an arbitrary sys-tem, it is necessary for the reader to believe a system in place and to comprehend its quiddities. The devil is in the quiddities: a short story may extrapolate—as "How Can I Tell You?" surely does—from a sequence of comprehensible acts of battery on a character, in this case the cul-de-sac of serial belittlings; there is neither need nor leisure in so
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few pages to invoke or create the Great Chain of Being that is a system of manners. In Appointment in Samarra, O'Hara relied on his readers to understand at once the consequences of Julian English's recklessness at a moment in American history particularly intolerant of gratuitous ges-tures. He threw his drink in the face of a man who had money just when he was going to need some himself, because it was understood that the drivers of Gibbsville were going to do without Cadillacs. Much later, dis-cussing a possible film adaptation of his first novel, O'Hara insisted that it be set during the Depression, and in particular in 193o. He reminded the producer David Brown that "in 193o there was not yet an FDR to revive hope. . . • In [Westbrook] Pegler's great phrase, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense was at an end, but the only hope people had was that the Era was not over; the hope was not for a bright future; the hope was for the resumption of the immediate past."' Julian English's situation within a small city's depressed situation is coherent. To kill himself by Cadillac is congruous. Walcutt is on to some-thing in his suggestion that such tragic inevitability is missing from O'Hara's episodic later novels—A Rage to Live, say, or From the Terrace. In these discursive wanderings, he sets himself the task of inventing not only the social obstacles that his characters batter against, but also the foundation, furnishings, and filigree of a society zigzagging across great fields of time; these family sagas depend for narrative coherence on the constants of money and privilege. As many readers have noticed, O'Hara did not—in his novels, at least—take a position on "the rich." He was neither a bomb-thrower nor the moneybags' running dog. He meant to describe rather than to deride, decry, or cry up. He surely believed, with Fitzgerald, that the rich are different from you and me (or "from you and I," in one of the favored extended-pinky solecisms O'Hara bestowed upon the children of the rich). Clive James has tellingly written in the New Yorker that for bright children who, like George Orwell and O'Hara after his father's death, grow up in the "impoverished upper class," poverty is "a potent incubator" of lively perception as to how hierarchy works. "Either they acquire an acute hunger to climb back up the system—often taking the backstairs route through the arts . . . or they go the other way, seeking an exit from the whole fandango and wishing it to damnation." O'Hara climbed, but on the way up he licked no heels. Norman Podhoretz concludes that "despite his meticulous care in describing the way they live and think- he draws no conclusions from class. Which is to say he is not a snob" Of course he was a snob, always within a self-described meritocracy- but Podhoretz explores an abundant vein in his next conclusion, "The rich appear to him most representative of the human condition-because their lives are clearly and fully implicated in the life of society."
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