In the six years between 1928 and 1934, the young O’Hara hustled a living by writing what the market demanded, and he was busily acquainting himself with the widest variety imaginable of New Yorkers with interesting stories to tell. What he learned was that people are rarely what they seem, and that they often turned expectations on their heads to anyone willing to listen and to relate their stories to the public. He became a skilled listener, and a sensitive renderer of New Yorkers’ voices—of what they had to say, what they were omitting, and how they expressed themselves. As he grew more settled as a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright (the turning point of his career was the success of the musical Pal Joey in 1940), he widened his social circle but retained the lesson he had learned as a young journalist: Every simple surface truth has a complicated and very rarely wholesome past, a principle he applied to the bankers, CEOs, and Broadway stars as well as to the bartenders, car-washers, and waitresses he continued to write about. His stories warn readers not to understand his characters too quickly—their motives will always be mixed, their emotions always mutable, their voices always revealing.
In a few of his early stories, O’Hara characterized people through techniques such as dialect, which is perhaps less amusing and less lucid today than it was in the 1930s. (One of these, “I Never Seen Anything Like It,” omitted here, is narrated in wall-to-wall Brooklynese, and today practically requires a translator.) He gradually abandoned such glitzy quirks in favor of more subtle ways of developing character, and of playing with readers’ expectations. With so varied a city as his subject, he worked at elevating his characters above clichés and stereotypes, and challenging his readers to abandon any easy assumptions they might have held based on superficial signifiers of social class.
In selecting the stories for this volume, I have been struck by the number of high-quality New York stories that take the form of dialogues between married couples. O’Hara’s curiosity, always keen, was piqued particularly by the mystery of what went on between couples behind closed doors, especially bedroom doors. He was criticized for this by a generation of critics, but his curiosity ranged wider, and his prurient interests are so mild by current standards that it is the critics whose comments seem badly dated, not O’Hara’s work, which seems insightful, psychologically and thematically. In a letter to a couple O’Hara knew well, written as they were divorcing, he observed, “No outsider knows what is between a husband and a wife,” concluding that he pretended to know least of all: “But I know nothing. I know nothing.” In his fiction, however, O’Hara explored what he guessed, what he believed, what seemed possible, what private actions might be deduced from public ones.
In this volume, such stories include “Late, Late Show” and “The Private People,” both exploring complicated marital relationships using very different techniques. The scope of “Late, Late Show” is very narrow; the story takes the form of a single conversation between husband and wife as they watch a late-night movie on TV. Issues from their past emerge over the course of the conversation, which closes with the husband cutting it off as he realizes how near they are drawing to a topic he has long ago sworn secrecy on, even from his wife, who seems to accept this limit to their intimacy. In “The Private People,” O’Hara makes his reader into a fly on the wall of another New York couple’s apartment, though the scope of this story is much wider, stretching literally from coast to coast and taking in months and years of the couple’s evolving relationship. The husband is a successful and famous actor who retires at an early age on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his wife, who is far less happy than he is with the relocation—so unhappy that she takes to heavy drinking, then decides to separate from her husband and move back to Hollywood, where she continues making an alcoholic spectacle of herself. Her estranged husband flies out to California, where he rescues her from the clutches of the quack running a pernicious rest-home/detox-center, and they repair their broken marriage, settling once again in Manhattan with vastly reduced expectations of happiness. In the story’s final lines, O’Hara writes that the wife requires a night light in order to sleep, but reassures his reader, “Oh, it is not a very bright light,” a typically elliptical ending.
O’Hara’s endings increasingly intrigue and sometimes puzzle readers, often seeming to confirm the story’s theme, and at other times introducing a twist in the final moments that changes that theme, as in the show-business story “The Portly Gentleman.” The titular character, a somewhat crude entertainer, finds his career suddenly thriving, then finds himself escorting a socially refined woman, to whom he proposes marriage. Though his outlandish proposal is rebuffed, the two characters seem to reach an empathetic understanding at the story’s conclusion. One of O’Hara’s gifts, which shines more or less directly in different stories, is to make plausible the improbable connections and sympathies between his characters.
O’Hara makes equally plausible the ways in which relationships suddenly deteriorate. “The Portly Gentleman” and “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor,” a pair of New York stories that combine show-business and marital relationships, turn with startling ferocity when everyday conversations between the title characters and, respectively, an agent and a producer turn suddenly ugly. O’Hara’s gradual introduction of tension into the quotidian conversations prepares the reader for the ugliness even as it shocks the reader when the volcanic action erupts. O’Hara teaches us to pay attention to the most casual exchanges between his characters, who are often perilously close to professing deep affection for each other or to voicing their fiercest animosity. The most succinct example of this sudden switching of moods might be in the suburban story “The Golden,” not included here. O’Hara describes two dogs playing for a long time, until the observing protagonist “saw that they had reached the nipping stage. Then one dog’s fang touched another dog’s nerve, and in an instant both animals were making the horrible gurgling sound that meant a fight.” With O’Hara, this process between people is more nuanced but no less shocking in its suddenness.
The longer stories, which are generally the later stories (the date of first publication appears in parentheses at the end of each story), frequently take a reminiscent tone, and delve further back into the earlier years of the characters’ lives. This is particularly so with the novella included here, “We’re Friends Again,” which traces the course of the marriage of Charles Ellis and Nancy Preswell through the perspective of Ellis’s closest friend, O’Hara’s alter-ego narrator, James Malloy. As the title indicates, their friendship goes through peaks of affection and valleys of deep animosity. Like many of O’Hara’s later stories, “We’re Friends Again” is longer not only because it contains more narrative material, but also because O’Hara’s 1960s style became increasingly discursive. The novella opens with a mini-essay on the subject of men’s clubs, particularly on a summer’s weekend evening, and in the course of telling the story, Malloy holds forth on several subjects that do not advance the plot very much but that add to an understanding of his character. Malloy pauses in his narration to pass judgment on clubs, Lord Byron’s character, loneliness, the cachet of extra-long telephone extensions, the difference between New York society and Boston society, and several other topics. He also pins the story’s plot upon an appreciation, doubtless hazy to today’s readers, of 1930s politics, particularly the positive and negative nuances of the patrician class’s response to the byzantine policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt over the course of the decade. Similarly knotty are the love lives of O’Hara’s characters: Malloy is involved with an actress (named, presciently, Julianna Moore), who is engaged to a stage designer, and his friend Charley is seeing a married woman whose husband gets killed in the course of the story, while Charley is also secretly in love with a cousin of his, married to a multimillionaire, who eventually marries a WAVE ensign, while the multimillionaire’s ex-wife is carrying on an affair with a Boston socialite, whom Malloy meets by chance in a theater and ends up working with on an espio
nage unit during World War II. The multiplicity of characters is sufficient for a much longer work than a novella, but “We’re Friends Again” succeeds despite the crowded cast in two ways: The passages of reminiscence are among O’Hara’s finest, philosophizing on subjects O’Hara cares deeply about, and Malloy’s career as a writer is examined at length here, providing a window on O’Hara as a writer. One fictional story is discussed extensively, as Malloy explains and listens to a reader’s interpretation of his work, and also discusses his work habits: Like O’Hara’s, his workday typically ended at dawn and, also like O’Hara’s, Malloy’s stories often begin when he overhears casual conversations between strangers. Malloy is among O’Hara’s most hard-boiled narrators. In the novel Hope of Heaven (1939), for example, Malloy is a hard-hearted Hollywood scriptwriter, caught up in a tale of theft, false identity, and finally gunplay—it’s easy to understand how Edmund Wilson included O’Hara in his 1941 review of hard-boiled writers, “The Boys in the Back Room.” But in “We’re Friends Again,” Malloy’s sentimental side prevails: When his friend accuses him of being “the lonesomest son-of-a-bitch I know,” Malloy’s response is not to laugh, or to grunt in agreement, or to take a swing at his accuser, but to break down in tears: “I bowed my head and wept. ‘You shouldn’t have said that,’ I said. ‘I wish you’d go.’”
The three-novella collection that “We’re Friends Again” first appeared in, Sermons and Sodawater—a title taken from Byron’s poem Don Juan—marked a crucial point in O’Hara’s short fiction. The tone in “We’re Friends Again” is distinctly more bookish and reflective—O’Hara quotes not only Byron but also Shakespeare, Milton, and Walter Scott—and reintroduces his recurring narrator, James Malloy, whose voice here is both reminiscent and moralizing, neither of which typified O’Hara’s short fiction before 1960. From then on, when O’Hara wished to reminisce or moralize, he would do so in Malloy’s voice; when he preferred his reader to infer the moral of his story, he would do so without Malloy. In the 1950s, when O’Hara eschewed the short story entirely, he was busy thinking about different ways to structure stories, and about how to employ the full array of techniques at his disposal, so that when he started up again with Sermons and Sodawater, he was prepared to begin the most productive and varied short-story writing of his career.
Which is not to diminish his pre-1960 stories, only to note that in complexity and craft they were comparatively hit-or-miss. “Bread Alone,” to take one example from the 1930s, is one of his hits: As in so many of his finest stories during the Depression, such as “Pleasure” and “Sportmanship,” O’Hara empathized with the working poor but never patronized their struggles. In “Bread Alone” he introduces a black workingman (an extremely rare protagonist for a white middle-class writer from the political center) with a practical dilemma: He wants to hide from his wife the fact that he wagered some money in an office pool, but he won a pair of baseball tickets, and he would like to take his young son, from whom he feels disconnected, to the ballgame. As the story develops, O’Hara’s reader sympathizes with this character, coming to understand the delicate problems faced by black people in a white society and, in the story’s final epiphany, the rich feelings between the two estranged males. In the tight constraints of a very short story, O’Hara both moves and educates his white audience to appreciate a side of American society that few of them would have had any prior access to.
The earlier, shorter stories usually lack the sweeping scope of his later stories, but nearly all O’Hara’s stories share an elliptical quality that is one of their trademarks, eventually becoming an identifying trait of the prototypical New Yorker story, which O’Hara is largely responsible for inventing. The majority of the stories collected here were originally published in The New Yorker, whose legendary founding editor, Harold Ross, supposedly declared he would never purchase another O’Hara story he couldn’t understand. But Ross was also aware that decoding the subtle events in an O’Hara story and deciding on their significance was a great pleasure for O’Hara’s fans, so he and his successors continued purchasing them.
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There is a quirk of arrangement in this volume that is worth discussing briefly: In his final five collections, from 1962 to 1969, O’Hara presented the stories as they are presented here, in alphabetical order by title, as if to suggest that the quality of the stories could be neither improved nor diminished by any artful arrangement. (The order in which stories in a collection are presented is typically discussed by authors and editors at astonishing length and with surprising passion, such as you might expect among the floral arrangers at a royal wedding, but O’Hara was foreclosing that discussion entirely, by authorial fiat: “This is it,” he was saying in effect. “The stories themselves can choose their own order.”) He was inordinately proud of the quality of his work, and I believe this alphabetical arrangement was one of the ways he expressed his pride in the consistently high level of his writing. At the same time, he tempered his pride with a reluctance to overexplain, or even to explain: He never, as far I can tell, discussed with anyone his thinking behind arranging his stories alphabetically. It wasn’t until I read his third or fourth collection of alphabetically arranged stories that I even became aware of what O’Hara was doing, and what he might have been trying to communicate by it.
O’Hara’s assertion of the absolute equality of all his stories, if that is what he was asserting, is one I’d quibble with—he wrote many masterpieces in the genre, but there are a few New York stories that continue to puzzle me: “The Sun-Dodgers” and “The Brain” and “A Phase of Life” are even more elusive than O’Hara’s typically elusive gems. “The Sun-Dodgers” devotes a paragraph to a minor character who, the narrator promises, will reappear at a crucial point later in the story, “when he is needed.” But the minor character becomes instead a noncharacter—he does not reappear. The problem in “The Brain” seems even less like an authorial oversight, because O’Hara tells the story of the titular “Brain,” a New York businessman who is asked to resign, and O’Hara tells it twice. On the first go-around, his titular character is interrupted by a troubleshooter reporting directly to their boss, who, after being admitted by the Brain’s secretary, a Miss Hathaway, discusses the possible reassignment of the Brain to Montana, finally telling him that he has the same chance of being fired as anyone in the company except their boss. O’Hara then switches to a more removed narrator who tells a similar story, except in the second version the troubleshooter is not admitted by the secretary, whose name is now Miss Hawthorne, and the state in question is not Montana but Colorado, and the “Brain” is unambiguously instructed to clear his desk out immediately. Since O’Hara could not possibly have gotten so many small details wrong, the likeliest explanation is that he was conveying something about how different versions of an event can change the event’s essence, but if so, this is one of the few times O’Hara’s point in telling a story gets muffled in the telling. “A Phase of Life” is clearer, though still a little hazier than usual: a relatively early story, it may typify O’Hara’s early elliptical stories. Some unsavory characters get together for an evening of sex for pay, though the precise nature of the sex, and the pay, and the characters for that matter, never becomes explicit. This may be another of those stories that, as O’Hara said of his New Yorker stories in a 1936 letter, “I almost include a plea to the editors that if they can understand them, please to let me in on the secret.”
In his best stories, O’Hara is a master of pacing and of action, of knowing when to paint a scene in fine detail and when to summarize. There is a moment in “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor” that is amazing in its understated pace: The title character, having made an ego-satisfying but self-destructive career decision, reviews his suits hanging in his closet, and considers the hanging and rehanging of them—a duller subject can hardly be imagined. But in writing lively sentences on such a dull subject, O’Hara is not only showcasing his virtuosity but also susp
ending his narrative to build anticipation for the blowout marital fight that results from his character’s cogitation. When that quarrel comes, his reader has been both entertained and prepared for it, though without knowing fully why and how. O’Hara excelled in the dual roles of entertainer and educator: He enlightened readers seeking amusement, and he amused readers seeking enlightenment, and at times he did so, as his tombstone claims, better than any other writer of the mid-twentieth century.
STEVEN GOLDLEAF
Suggestions for Further Reading
There hasn’t been much scholarship on John O’Hara, for largely incomprehensible reasons other than personal antipathy or a prejudice against clear English prose that doesn’t require much parsing, but there has been some, starting with the most inclusive and judicious biography, Matthew J. Bruccoli’s The O’Hara Concern (New York: Random House, 1975). Bruccoli also compiled a detailed bibliography of O’Hara’s publications, John O’Hara: A Checklist (New York: Random House, 1972), which contains a speech O’Hara gave late in his career. Of the other biographies, Finis Farr’s O’Hara (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973) has the dubious advantage of being the first written, as well as the only one written by an acquaintance of O’Hara’s. Frank MacShane’s The Life of John O’Hara (New York: Dutton, 1980) is perfectly serviceable if slightly less inclusive than Bruccoli’s. Geoffrey Wolff’s The Art of Burning Bridges (New York: Knopf, 2003) is not quite a biography of O’Hara, and not completely satisfactory as an extended literary essay or as an autobiographical essay, either. It is a strange book.