There were two great fictional chroniclers of America during the 1930s –
John Steinbeck and John O’Hara.
Steinbeck got the awards and the sympathy of the critics. O’Hara got some minor awards. Both wrote novels and short stories into the
1960s.
I want to submit one small but vital fact in support of John
O’Hara as ultimately the better, or at least the more important, writer. By the 30s, most Americans were city
folk. Rural America was still there, it was
still important, but it was no longer the dominant arena of most American
lives. Americans had become city and
town dwellers for the most part. And
O’Hara wrote about that in detail and with photographic honesty. In the long run, by the middle of the
twenty-first century, after the oldest twentieth century critics are dead, that
skill and detail may be appreciated.
http://www.amazon.com/Appointment-Samarra-Butterfield-Hope-Heaven/dp/B000NY21BO/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1424665992&sr=1-7&keywords=john+o%27hara
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
[great overview of John O'Hara by a brilliant editor]:
An interim status report
John O'Hara is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature: he's never got
the proper respect and he spent much of his career complaining about it. At
best, he's been called a "first-rate second-rate writer" in a clever
phrase that seems to nail his literary reputation.
I'm here to try to change that.
For many critics, O'Hara is part of that twentieth-century, second-quarter,
generation of celebrated American authors—including
Ernest
Hemingway,
F. Scott
Fitzgerald,
John Steinbeck
and William Faulkner—but not in their top ranks. Some rate his short stories
among the best but disdain his novels, half-heartedly praising his first,
Appointment
in Samarra (1934), but seeing degeneration since that early promise.
His later long works, his most popular with the public, are dismissed as gaudy
bestsellers of upper-crust sex and glamour.
Even his prolific production of short stories, which appeared in magazines over
four decades (holding the unbeatable record for appearances in
The New
Yorker) and were gathered into collections every few years, has been held
against him. Especially in his latter career, it is charged, he was just
knocking them out. The stories lost focus, meandered and became irrelevant, it
is said
Part of the problem may be that O'Hara outlived and out-produced many of his
acclaimed contemporaries. In addition to his faltering fiction of the 1960s,
his letters and published commentary of that era showed him to be a
conservative crank, obsessed with seeking status in the establishment. His
major work then was still going over the times and subjects of his earlier
work.
He was also known in literary circles—among the fellow writers he praised
and idolized and in whose ranks he yearned to be accepted—as quite a piece of
work: a mean drunk and a petty, self-promoting sycophant. Even when he wrote a
fawning appreciation of Hemingway's otherwise panned novel,
Across the River
and Into the Trees, the master was offended at what he saw as O'Hara
patronizing him.
But surely it's now past the time when the name of John O'Hara should evoke
odious comparisons to his contemporaries. Or that mentions of his work should
stir discussion of his possible failings as a man. More than forty years after
his death, with several of his novels still in print and his best stories still
being anthologized, we may be compelled to raise him a notch or two in our
canon of great American literary figures.
In his early years, O'Hara was accepted as a leading chronicler of his
times. His first novels,
Appointment
in Samarra (1934) and
BUtterfield 8 (1935), and his first
stories, collected in
The
Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935) and
Files on Parade
(1939), were recognized as offering a command of the forms with a
conversational style and dispassionate voice that was equal to but distinct
from the work of his famous peers. Like Hemingway, he adopted journalistic
skills of clear-eyed reporting and clarity of style for fictional subjects and,
as with Fitzgerald, his subjects were often the social mores of his times. But
O'Hara never became the master of style like the former nor the lyrical poet of
prose like the latter.
Moreover, he seemed to deal with lighter-weight themes than the other greats
of his time. He focused ever more intently on the ironies of social life,
usually—but not always—of the affluent and artistic classes. Like Thackeray,
Dreiser and James before him, and Tom Wolfe after him, he examined minutely the
unwritten rules and byplay of status and sexual relationships in various levels
of society. But his unadorned, colloquial style may have undercut the
seriousness of his achievement, so he never received the same credit as those
others.
Appointment
in Samarra cleverly shows the intertwining of characters from all
strata of Gibbsville (stand-in for the real town of
Pottsville, Pennsylvania),
the analysis disguised in the ironical story of an affluent local Cadillac
dealer's self-destruction.
BUtterfield 8 delves into the relationship of
a proud, promiscuous, lower-class woman with an upper-class businessman.
Rescheduled appointments
His first major work to hit a critical and popular snag was
Hope of
Heaven (1938), taking place in
Hollywood
to which he was being drawn as a screenwriter. The novella was considered weak
and implausible. But today it reads as compressed writing of satirical verve,
akin to Nathanael West's similarly themed
The Day of the Locusts (1939),
albeit less apocalyptic.
But the stories kept coming and O'Hara bounced back in a big way with
another novella, cobbled together from a series of short stories taking the
form of letters from a self-aggrandizing jazz musician. Throughout his career,
O'Hara's worst critics have always given him credit as at least a masterful
dialogue writer, though often suggesting this is a minor achievement detracting
from his serious writing.
Pal Joey (1940) should have squelched that
notion. Written entirely in one voice narrating a series of letters, it is
usually overlooked as a work of literature, but it's a small gem of subtle,
disciplined writing, a lesson in how to have a character say more than he
thinks he is saying—in how to create a colourful milieu through a single prism.
O'Hara also adapted
Pal Joey for a stage musical, with Richard
Rodgers and Lorenz Hart providing the songs. It was a hit on Broadway with Gene
Kelly in the lead and has been continually revived ever since.
After these early artfully compressed works of near-perfect colloquial
writing, O'Hara's approach to his craft began to change. His next big work
was one of his longest and most controversial:
A Rage to Live (1949),
about business and personal affairs among the movers and shakers of another
Pennsylvania town. It scandalized
some critics with its frank (for that time) sexuality. Several found the story
superficial. The novel was criticized for its long-windedness and
rambling dialogue that sometimes takes up entire chapters.
It has to be admitted the writing in the 700-plus pages of
A Rage to Live
is somewhat looser than in O'Hara's earlier novels. At times the
characterizations become paper thin and the narrative can be disjointed. But a
canny reader can discover O'Hara expanding upon his past achievements, experimenting
with directions in which to take the modern novel. Most people's stories in
real life are not wrapped up in neat ironies, as presented in his early novels.
Most of our lives are not shaped by profound motivations. Our personal
narratives follow no dramatic arcs; they
are rambling and repetitive for
the most part, with abrupt breaks of deaths, illnesses, and infidelities. How
much of this could O'Hara get across with a minimum of obvious artifice? And
using just the language we all speak? And the surface minutiae of life we all
experience?
It's not all successful experimenting, but it is interesting if you look at
this as a watershed novel in O'Hara's career. And the story does stay with you,
as do one or two of the characters.
A Rage to Live was a huge success
with the public—his biggest to date.
His next few novels generally plough the same fields, though with decreasing
effect.
Ten North Frederick (1955) and
From
the Terrace (1958) are both sprawling, thick novels following the travails
of dysfunctional families. O'Hara kept going back to the time and place he was
determined to record for posterity in detail: the first half of the twentieth
century in
America.
About this time,
Hollywood,
which had earlier tried to use O'Hara as screenwriter, caught on to O'Hara's
books as material for potboiler movies. Between 1957 and 1965, a slew of uneven
cinematic adaptations came out. Frank Sinatra took the lead in a decent film of
the musical
Pal Joey, Gary Cooper starred in a diminished
Ten North
Frederick, Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward paired in a middling
From the
Terrace, and Suzanne Pleshette played the sexually savvy leading lady of a
forgettable
A Rage to Live. Even
BUtterfield 8 was adapted,
decades after its publication, as a trashy movie, with an updated story set in
1960, complete with a car chase and with Elizabeth Taylor as the call girl.
Other novels followed in the 1960s, though with decreasing critical and
commercial impact. Notable, though seldom mentioned now, is
The Big Laugh
(1962), called "the greatest
Hollywood
novel ever written" by O'Hara fan Fran Lebowitz. Its near-complete
reliance on dialogue to convey character makes it similar to a movie script,
though this (as usual with O'Hara) is generally cited as a criticism.
Another neglected late entry is
The Instrument (1966), a likewise
dialogue-ridden novel, with a terrifically crafted first chapter—harking back
to
Appointment in Samarra—that gives way to a thin, wandering story.
It's worth reading though to see the novelist not just still plying his trade
but still developing his art, coming up with new ways of using human
conversation in fiction.
So where does our re-assessment of John O'Hara's career take us? To raising
him at least a notch, from best of the second-raters to the second tier of
first-raters.
If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, let's give him time.
Keep reading him and you may be tempted—with me—to place his best work among
the very best of American writing in the mid-twentieth century. First-rate all
the way.
