by Gore Vidal
Stylistically, Burroughs is—how shall I put it?—uneven. He has moments of ornate pomp, when the darkness is “Cimmerian”; of redundancy, “she was hideous and ugly”; of extraordinary dialogue: “Name of a name,” shrieked Rokoff. “Pig, but you shall die for this!” Or Lady Greystoke to Lord G.: “Duty is duty, my husband, and no amount of sophistries may change it. I would be a poor wife for an English lord were I to be responsible for his shirking a plain duty.” Or the grandchild: “Muvver,” he cried, “Dackie doe? Dackie doe?” “Let him come along,” urged Tarzan. “Dare!” exclaimed the boy, turning triumphantly upon the governess, “Dackie do doe yalk!” Burroughs’s use of coincidence is shameless even for a pulp writer. In one book he has three sets of characters shipwrecked at exactly the same point on the shore of Africa. Even Burroughs finds this a bit much. “Could it be possible [muses Tarzan] that fate had thrown him up at the very threshold of his own beloved jungle?” It was possible since anything can happen in a daydream.
Though Burroughs is innocent of literature and cannot reproduce human speech, he does have a gift very few writers of any kind possess: he can describe action vividly. I give away no trade secrets when I say that this is as difficult for a Tolstoi as it is for a Burroughs (even William). Because it is so hard, the craftier contemporary novelists usually prefer to tell their stories in the first person, which is simply writing dialogue. In character, as it were, the writer settles for an impression of what happened rather than creating the sense of the thing happening. In action Tarzan is excellent.
There is something basic in the appeal of the 1914 Tarzan which makes me think that he can still hold his own as a daydream figure, despite the sophisticated challenge of his two young competitors, James Bond and Mike Hammer. For most adults, Tarzan (and John Carter of Mars) can hardly compete with the conspicuous consumer consumption of James Bond or the sickly violence of Mike Hammer, but for children and adolescents the old appeal continues. All of us need the idea of a world alternative to this one. From Plato’s Republic to Opar to Bondland, at every level, the human imagination has tried to imagine something better for itself than the existing society. Man left Eden when he got up off all fours, endowing his descendants with nostalgia as well as chronic backache. In its naive way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man is able, as William Faulkner put it in his high Confederate style, to prevail as well as endure. The current fascination with LSD and nonaddictive drugs—not to mention alcohol—is all a result of a general sense of boredom. Since the individual’s desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society that every day grows more and more confining, the average man must take to daydreaming. James Bond, Mike Hammer, and Tarzan are all dream selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world that, more and more, diminishes the individual. Among adults, the current popularity of these lively fictions strikes me as a most significant and unbearably sad phenomenon.
Esquire, December 1963
JOHN O’HARA
In 1938, writing to a friend, George Santayana described his first (and presumably last) encounter with the writing of Somerset Maugham. “I could read these [stories], enticed by the familiarity he shows with Spain, and with Spanish Americans, in whose moral complexion I feel a certain interest; but on the whole I felt…wonder at anybody wishing to write such stories. They are not pleasing, they are not pertinent to one’s real interests, they are not true; they are simply graphic or plausible, like a bit of a dream that one might drop into in an afternoon nap. Why record it? I suppose it is to make money, because writing stories is a profession…” In just such a way, the Greek philosophers condemned the novels of the Milesian school. Unpleasing, impertinent, untruthful—what else can one say about these fictions except to speculate idly on why grown men see fit to write them. Money? There seems nothing more to be said.
Yet there is at least one good reason for a serious consideration of popular writing. “When you are criticizing the Philosophy of an epoch,” wrote Alfred Whitehead in Adventures Of Ideas, “do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary to defend. There will be some fundamental assumption which adherents of all the various systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose.” Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O’Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer, and useful to any examination of what we are.
Over the last three decades, Mr. O’Hara has published close to thirty volumes of stories, plays, essays and novels. Since 1955 he has had a remarkable burst of activity: twelve books. His most recent novel, Elizabeth Appleton, was written in 1960 but kept off the market until 1963 in order that five other books might be published. His latest collection of short stories, The Hat on the Bed, is currently a best seller and apparently gives pleasure to the public. In many ways, Mr. O’Hara’s writing is precisely the sort Santayana condemned: graphic and plausible, impertinent and untrue. But one must disagree with Santayana as to why this sort of work is done (an irrelevant speculation, in any case). Money is hardly the motive. No man who devotes a lifetime to writing can ever be entirely cynical, if only because no one could sustain for a lifetime the pose of being other than himself. Either the self changes or the writing changes. One cannot have it both ways. Mr. O’Hara uses himself quite as fully and obsessively as William Faulkner. The difference between them lies in capacity, and the specific use each makes of a common obsession to tell what it is like to be alive. But where Faulkner re-created his society through a gifted imagination, Mr. O’Hara merely reflects that society, making him, of the two, rather the more interesting for our immediate purpose, which is to examine through certain popular works the way we live now.
Mr. O’Hara’s work is in the naturalistic tradition. “I want to get it all down on paper while I can. The U. S. in this century, what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability with the sometimes special knowledge that I have.” He also wants “to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and to do it with complete honesty and variety.” In this, he echoes Sinclair Lewis, Emile Zola, and (rather dangerously) the brothers Goncourt.
The Hat on the Bed is a collection of twenty-four short stories. They are much like Mr. O’Hara’s other short stories, although admirers seem to prefer them to earlier collections. Right off, one is aware of a passionate interest in social distinctions. Invariably we are told not only what university a character attended but also what prep school. Clothes, houses, luggage (by Vuitton), prestigious restaurants are all carefully noted, as well as brand names. With the zest of an Internal Revenue man examining deductions for entertainment, the author investigates the subtle difference between the spending of old middle-class money and that of new middle-class money. Of course social distinctions have always been an important aspect of the traditional novel, but what disturbs one in reading Mr. O’Hara is that he does so little with these details once he has noted them. If a writer chooses to tell us that someone went to St. Paul’s and to Yale and played squash, then surely there is something about St. Paul’s and Yale and squash which would make him into a certain kind of person so that, given a few more details, the reader is then able to make up his mind as to just what that triad of experience means, and why it is different from Exeter-Harvard-lacrosse. But Mr. O’Hara is content merely to list schools and sports and the makes of cars and the labels on clothes. He fails to do his own job in his own terms, which is to show us why a character who went to Andover is not like one who went to Groton, and how the two schools, in some way, contributed to the
difference. It would seem that Mr. O’Hara is excited by fashionable schools in much the same way that Balzac was by money, and perhaps for the same reason, a cruel deprivation. Ernest Hemingway (whose malice was always profound) once announced that he intended to take up a collection to send John O’Hara through Yale. In his own defense, Mr. O’Hara has said that his generation did care passionately about colleges. Granting him this, one must then note that the children and grandchildren of his contemporaries do not care in the same way, a fact he seems unaware of.
The technique of the short stories does not vary much. The prose is plain and rather garrulous; the dialogue tends to run on, and he writes most of his stories and novels in dialogue because not only is that the easiest kind of writing to read but the easiest to do. In a short story like “The Mayor” one sees his technique at its barest. Two characters meet after three pages of setting up the scene (describing a hangout for the town’s politicians and setting up the personality of the mayor, who often drops in). Then two characters start to talk about a third character (the mayor) and his relationship with a fourth, and after some four pages of dialogue—and one small uninteresting revelation—the story is over. It has been, in Santayana’s image, a daydream. One has learned nothing, felt nothing. Why record it?
Another short story, “How Can I Tell You?” is purest reverie. Once upon a time there was a car salesman who by all worldly standards is a success; he even gets on well with his wife. All things conspire to make him happy. But he suffers from accidie. The story begins in medias res. He is making an important sale. The woman buying the car talks to him at great length about this and that. Nothing particularly relevant to the story is said. The dialogue wanders aimlessly in imitation of actual speech as it sounds to Mr. O’Hara’s ear, which is good but unselective, with a tendency to use arcane slang (“plenty of glue”) and phonetic spellings (“wuddia”). Yet despite this long conversation, the two characters remain vague and undefined. Incidentally, Mr. O’Hara almost never gives a physical description of his characters, a startling continence for a naturalistic writer, and more to be admired than not.
The woman departs. The salesman goes to a bar, where the bartender immediately senses that “You got sumpn eatin’ you, boy.” The salesman then goes home. He looks at his sleeping wife, who wakes up and wants to know if something is wrong. “How the hell can I tell you when I don’t know myself?” he says. She goes back to sleep. He takes down his gun. He seems about to kill himself when his wife joins him and says, “Don’t. Please?” and he says, “I won’t.” And there the story ends. What has gone wrong is that one could not care less about this Richard Cory (at least we were told that the original was full of light and that people envied him), because Mr. O’Hara’s creation has neither face nor history. What the author has shown us is not a character but an event, and though a certain kind of writing can be most successful dealing only with events, this particular story required character shown from the inside, not a situation described from the outside and through dialogue.
Elizabeth Appleton, O’Hara’s latest novel, takes place in a Pennsylvania university town. Will the dean, Elizabeth’s husband, be made president of the college? He is a popular choice, and in line for the post. Elizabeth has been a conscientious faculty wife, in spite of being “aristocratic” (her family used to go to Southampton in the summer). Elizabeth also has money, a fact which her patrician good taste insists she hide from her husband’s world. But hidden or not, for those who know true quality Elizabeth is the real thing. She even inspires the reverence of a former New York policeman who happens to be sitting next to her during a plane trip. There has been bad weather. Danger. Each is brave. The danger passes. Then they talk of…what else do Mr. O’Hara’s people talk of in a pinch? Schools. “You’re a New York girl, even if you did get on at Pittsburgh.” Elizabeth allows that this is so. Then with that uncanny shrewdness the lower orders often demonstrate when they are in the presence of their betters, the flatfoot asks, “Did you ever go to Miss Spence’s Finishing School? I used to help them cross the street when I was in that precinct.” No Franklin High School for him. “I went to Miss Chapin’s,” says Elizabeth quietly, as if declaring, very simply, that she is a Plantagenet. Needless to say, the fuzz knows all about Chapin, too. He is even more overcome when he learns her maiden name. He knows exactly who her father was. He even recalls her family house “on the north side of Fifty-Sixth between Madison and Park. Iron grillwork on the ground floor windows….Those were the good days, Mrs. Appleton, no matter what they say,” he declares in an ecstasy of social inferiority.
Like so many of O’Hara’s novels, the book seems improvised. The situation is a simple one. Appleton is expected to become Spring Valley’s next president. He wants the job, or nearly (readers of the late John P. Marquand will recognize with delight that hesitancy and melancholy which inevitably attend success in middle age. Is this all there is to it? Where are my dreams, my hopes, my love?). Elizabeth wants the promotion, partly for her husband’s sake, partly because she is guilty because she has had an affair. It is over now, of course. Her lover has taken to drink. But with the aid of flashbacks we can savor the quality of their passion, which turns out to have been mostly talk. Sometimes they talked about schools, sometimes about games; occasionally they discussed the guilt each feels toward her husband, and the possibility of their own marriage one day. But aside from talk nothing happens. In fact, there is almost no action in Mr. O’Hara’s recent work. Everything of consequence takes place offstage, to be reported later in conversation—perhaps his only resemblance to classical literature.
To be effective, naturalistic detail must be not only accurate but relevant. Each small fact must be fitted to the overall pattern as tightly as mosaic. This is a tiresomely obvious thing to say, but repetition does not seem to spoil the novelty of it as criticism. Unfortunately Mr. O’Hara does not relate things one to the other, he simply puts down the names of schools, resorts, restaurants, hotels for the simple pleasure of recording them (and perhaps, magically, possessing them in the act of naming). If he can come up with the name of an actual entertainer who performed in a real club of a known city in a particular year, he seems to feel that his work as recorder has been justified. This love of minutiae for their own sake can be as fatal to the serious novelist as it is necessary to the success of the popular writer…which brings us to the audience and its unconscious presuppositions.
Right off, one is struck by the collective narcissism of those whose tastes create the best-seller lists. Until our day, popular writers wrote of kings and queens, of exotic countries and extreme situations, of worlds totally unlike the common experience. No longer. Today’s reader wants to look at himself, to find out who he is, with an occasional glimpse of his next-door neighbor. This self-absorption is also reflected in the ubiquitous national polls which fascinate newspaper readers and in those magazine articles that address themselves with such success to the second person singular. Certainly, fiction is, to a point, an extension of actual life, an alternative world in which a reader may find out things he did not know before and live in imagination a life he may not live in fact. But I suggest that never before has the alternative world been so close to the actual one as it is today in the novels of John O’Hara and his fellow commercialites. Journalism and popular fiction have merged, and the graphic and the plausible have become an end in themselves. The contemporary public plainly prefers mirrors to windows.
The second unconscious presupposition Mr. O’Hara reveals is the matter of boredom. Most of the people he describes are bored to death with their lives and one another. Yet they never question this boredom, nor does their author show any great awareness of it. He just puts it all down. Like his peers, he reflects the taedium vitae without seeming to notice it. Yet it lurks continually beneath the surface, much the way a fear of syphilis haunted popular writing in the nineteenth century. One can read O’Hara by the yard without encountering a single character
capable of taking pleasure in anything. His creatures are joyless. Neither art nor mind ever impinges on their garrulous self-absorption. If they read books, the books are by writers like Mr. O’Hara, locked with them in a terrible self-regard. Strangely enough, they show little true curiosity about other people, which is odd since the convention of each story is almost always someone telling someone else about so-and-so. They want to hear gossip but only in a desultory, time-passing way.