The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  trades upon the stupidity of mankind. First he whets our appetites & flatters our hopes, then he lets loose a civilization more horrible than we could have imagined, & then he says “you can’t do without me.” But he does nothing to rescue us.

  Michael Oakeshott may not have produced a systematic philosophy of the kind that supplies persuasive answers to life’s most pressing questions. As often as not, he chipped away at what he deemed the hollowness of many of those answers, showing, persuasively, how unpersuasive they really were. Along the way, he provided in his teaching and writing a model of a clear mind operating at the highest power. On one occasion, he called himself a mere “interested spectator,” on another, “a wanderer, that is, one with no destination, or only interim destinations.” His own life’s work, a brilliant ramble, resembled nothing so much as the glorious never-ending conversation he revered and to which he made so many notable, even unforgettable, contributions.

  John O’Hara

  (2016)

  John O’Hara was wont to complain publicly about the state of his reputation, thereby joining the majority of writers, most of whom keep this standard complaint to themselves. What, exactly, apart from being insufficiently grand to please him, was his reputation?

  I should say it was—and remains today—that of a writer a substantial notch below Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, about all of whom he spoke and wrote reverently. Five or so years younger than these three novelists, O’Hara labored in their long shadows. He had the additional problem of being thought stronger as a writer of short stories than of novels, though he wrote no fewer than 17 novels. He is credited as a master of dialogue, a practitioner if not the progenitor of the New Yorker story, a never-less-than-interesting commentator on American manners.

  To give some notion of his self-evaluation, O’Hara was disappointed that he never won the Nobel Prize. He planned to use part of the money to buy a Rolls-Royce. He bought the Rolls anyhow, but died, in 1970, at the age of 65, with a still unsettled reputation. Although many of the big critical guns of the time had fired off their opinions of his work, no true consensus emerged. Nor has it even now.

  In a review for the New York Times Book Review of O’Hara’s third collection of stories, Pipe Night (1945), Lionel Trilling wrote: “More than anyone else now writing, O’Hara understands the complex, contradictory, asymmetrical society in which we live.” He added,

  No other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.

  Trilling went on to place O’Hara in the distinguished line of American novelists that includes William Dean Howells and Edith Wharton.

  Irving Howe, in a 1966 Saturday Review, held that there was, finally, something thin and disappointing in the piling up of O’Hara’s social observations, remarking of his gift for dialogue that “were mimicry the soul of art, O’Hara would be our greatest master.” Contra Trilling, Howe held that O’Hara lacked the “deep personal culture” of Edith Wharton that allowed her “to bring to bear upon her material an enlarging standard of humane tradition and civilized reflection.” Alfred Kazin and Arthur Mizener wrote disparagingly about O’Hara; Guy Davenport and John Cheever praised him. If literary criticism were a prizefight, the decision on O’Hara would be a draw.

  John O’Hara was born in 1905 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, the seat of Schuylkill County, anthracite coal country, near Philadelphia, the son of a physician. Perhaps the most crucial fact about him is that he was Irish. Hard now to remember that the Irish in America were once a despised group: The term paddy wagon, used by policemen rounding up drunks and other rowdies and still in use today, gives a strong notion of the social standing of the Irish in the early decades of the 20th century. To rise out of the working class, and even the middle classes up into the upper reaches of American life, could be a bumpy run for the Irish, shanty or lace-curtain.

  Themselves victims of snobbery, the Irish, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O’Hara, and (somewhat lower down the social scale) James T. Farrell, became the great 20th-century chroniclers of American snobbery The goal for the wealthier and more ambitious Irish was to achieve the status of WASPs, with the Roman Catholic church added on. One thinks here of Joseph Kennedy, of his compound at Hyannis Port, his children at Harvard, pushing, pushing, pushing until one of his sons arrived at the best American address of all, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC.

  The barriers for the Irish were fewer in smaller towns like Pottsville. Dr. Patrick Henry O’Hara had a flourishing practice and his family lived on exclusive Mahantongo Street in Pottsville, renamed Lantenengo Street in many of his son’s stories and novels. Dr. O’Hara wanted his oldest son to succeed him in his medical practice, and when John chose not to do so, a chill, never to be entirely shaken off, arose between father and son. In a number of O’Hara stories, the O’Hara character, rechristened James Malloy, is in a never-fully-explained strained relationship with his physician-father.

  A wild kid, John O’Hara was smoking and already drinking in his early adolescence. He got tossed out of various prep and private schools for disorderly conduct. His great dream of going to Yale was shattered when his father, at the age of 57, died of Bright’s disease, leaving heavy debts in his wake. No Dink Stover, no boola-boola for O’Hara, who seems never quite to have got over missing out on Yale. A story—O’Hara tells it himself—has it that Hemingway, Vincent Sheean, and James Lardner pooled their money to go off to Spain but had an odd two francs left over, causing Hemingway to say: “Let’s take the bloody money and start a bloody fund to send John O’Hara to Yale.”

  Not getting to go to Yale may have been the best thing that ever happened to him. Had he done so, he might have lost that sense of outsider status that can be so important to a writer. Besides, colleges have never been in the least helpful to any serious writer.

  For a number of years, O’Hara wandered in the jungles of journalism. Between 1925 and 1932 he worked for various newspapers and magazines, ranging from the Pottsville Journal to Henry Luce’s Time. A drinking man, easily angered, he was fired from one publication after another for the usual sins: arguing, unexplained absences, unreliability generally.

  In 1928, he published his first piece in the three-year-old New Yorker, then edited by its founder Harold Ross. Over the years, as a freelancer, O’Hara would publish more than 400 stories and reportorial pieces in that magazine. He would have three marriages, put in a not-especially-successful stint as a Hollywood screenwriter, have a great financial success with Pal Joey (1940), the musical based on his stories and for which he wrote the book for its long-running stage performance. Other of his stories and novels Butterfield 8 (1935), Ten North Frederick (1955)—would also be made into movies. He had a good run, John O’Hara; but for a man of boundless literary ambition, a good run is nowhere near good enough.

  The epitaph on O’Hara’s gravestone reads:

  BETTER

  THAN ANYONE ELSE

  HE TOLD THE TRUTH

  ABOUT HIS TIME

  HE WAS

  A PROFESSIONAL

  HE WROTE

  HONESTLY AND WELL

  It’s important to point out that O’Hara composed that epitaph himself. What is its truth quotient? He was indubitably a professional; he did write honestly; he may he even have told the truth about his time better than anyone else. The question is: Does that truth matter, today, in our time?

  Although O’Hara wrote about bootleggers, faded movie stars, cab drivers, farmers, big shots, and others, his real subject was life lived at what H. L Mencken called “the country club stage of culture.” Many of his characters have the center of their social lives anchored in their country clubs. The country club of O’Hara’s day offered golf
, bridge, evenings of dinner and dancing and boozing. At Gibbsville’s Lantenengo Country Club, adultery was also on offer. So many of the stories in this new Library of America edition of John O’Hara’s stories, expertly and unobtrusively edited by Charles McGrath, have extramarital affairs at their center that the entire volume would not have been mistitled Adultery. But then, when one thinks about it, what drama does life at the country-club stage of culture—otherwise so boring—offer other than sleeping with one’s best friend’s husband or wife? While sex is at the heart of so many of O’Hara’s stories, in these stories, it must be said, he treats it in the best adult fashion, which is to say that he rarely descends to the naming of parts or describing these parts at play.

  In Appointment in Samarra (1934), O’Hara’s first novel, there is also the prospect of drunkenness and insulting people. Just such an act on the part of the novel’s main character, Julian English—who, in his drunkenness, throws his drink in the face of a rich country-club bore whose financial support he needs—propels the novel into motion. Julian runs the Cadillac agency in Gibbsville, a town of roughly 25,000, a mixture of English, Welsh, Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch that O’Hara named after Wolcott Gibbs, his friend at the New Yorker, and that appears in several of his stories. He is part of the town’s gratin, or top crust, but he has a drinking problem. He loves his wife, Caroline, but does not let this stand in the way, when drunk, of bonking in the backseat of his car, the mistress of Ed Chantey, the town’s bootlegger-gangster. Later in the novel he will get into a fight with two other members, also while boozed up, that will force him out of his club.

  As for Caroline English, in a characteristic passage, O’Hara fills us in on her by comparing her with her 10-years-younger cousin Constance:

  The cousins were pretty good types of their respective colleges: Caroline had gone to Bryn Mawr, Constance was at Smith—the plain girl who goes to Smith and competes with the smart Jewesses for Phi Beta Kappa, distinguished from the pretty girls who go to Smith and write to Yale. Caroline was the perfect small-town girl at Bryn Mawr; from private school in her home town, to a good prep school, to Bryn Mawr and the Bryn Mawr manner, which means quick maturity and an everlasting tendency to enthusiasms.

  All his days, John O’Hara would be preoccupied with status and its outward symbols. Colleges, fraternities, addresses, cars, Liberty scarves, Dunhill lighters, Herbert Johnson hats from Brooks Brothers—in O’Hara’s novels and stories, these are meant to place and lock in his characters’ social position. He prided himself on knowing how speech reflects social class and character. No woman who graduated from high school, he once claimed, would ever say “half a buck,” which sounds right to me. In Appointment in Samarra, a lower-class nightclub singer confuses the word “eunuch” with “unique” and a working-class boy mistakes the word “instigated” for “implicated.” He believed one could tell a lot about a person who calls the evening meal “dinner” and another who calls it “supper,” about someone who plays squash and someone who plays handball.

  The danger of such a delicate radar for status is that it can devolve into stereotypes, which in O’Hara’s fiction it sometimes does. In Appointment in Samarra he mentions “a handsome young Harvard Jew.” Later in the novel he has Julian think that “he did not like to see men driving hatless in closed cars; it was too much like the Jews in New York who ride in their town cars with the dome lights lit.” Believing that you are what you drive, O’Hara names enough different cars by make—Pierce-Arrows, Cunninghams, Franklins, Garfords, Duesenbergs, Packards, Mercers, Stutz Bearcats, et alia—to stock a large used-car lot. Membership in one or another college fraternity, in an O’Hara story, can pin a character down as firmly as an exotic butterfly on a lepidopterist’s velvet pad. “Probably out of spite,” O’Hara writes, “Julian did not accept the invitation to join Phi Delta Theta, his father’s fraternity, but had joined Delta Kappa Epsilon.” Dekes, Betas, Tau Beta Pis, Psi Upsilons, the Porcellian Club at Harvard, the Ivy Club at Princeton—all these have great significance in O’Hara stories. One such story, “Graven Image” (1943), is about a man who bears the lifelong scars of not being invited to join Porcellian.

  The narrative of Appointment in Samarra leaves enough loose threads for a man to hang himself. Toward the end of the novel, Julian English does not do this but, sensing his life shattered, a bottle of Scotch and a pack of cigarettes in hand, he goes out to his closed garage, sits in his car, locks the doors and windows, turns on the motor and lets his life leach away in suicide from the carbon dioxide. Julian English is not John O’Hara, yet one gets the feeling that, in him, O’Hara is describing a life of the kind he himself might have led had he not found salvation in writing.

  This Library of America edition contains 60 of John O’Hara’s short stories. They vary greatly in length and in quality. A number of them end disappointingly, but satisfactory endings are the great problem in short stories. So many writers of them know how to soar, but too few how to land the plane. None of these O’Hara stories is dull, none boring. One is improbable, “A Man to Be Trusted,” about a woman having a love affair with a 13-year-old boy. The three best stories in the collection are “Imagine Kissing Pete,” “Pat Collins,” and “Natica Jackson,” which also happen to be its three longest stories; another lengthy story, “Mrs. Stratton of Oak Knoll,” peters out sadly over its final 20 or so pages. O’Hara’s novels sometimes give one more than is required, his shorter stories less. The novella, that form of indeterminate length between the story and novel, shows him atop his game.

  Storytelling in itself, this volume leads one to think, may not have been O’Hara’s chief talent; portraiture and social observation are where his strengths lay. Often he will present a brilliant character but be unable to find a plot in which that character might play out his destiny. For good or ill, O’Hara was the least moral-minded of writers. On the one hand, the strong hand, he was not in the least tendentious, he set things down as he saw them; on the other, the shaky hand, moral questions, generally at the center of what gives fiction both its drama and its staying power, are often sorely missing from his work.

  One encounters in these stories some of the characters from Appointment in Samarra: Julian and Caroline English and Julian’s father Dr. English, Whit Hofman, Ed Chaney, and others put in cameo appearances. A character named James Malloy, a writer, narrates a number of these stories, rather like the usually unnamed narrator of Somerset Maugham stories but with less of a cosmopolitan tone than the more sophisticated Maugham commanded. O’Hara may have been the American Maugham, although Maugham was better able to shape a story than O’Hara and who was a more pure storyteller.

  Later in life, O’Hara became a great grump, bemoaning critics, literary coteries, the want of prizes and praise for his writing, leaving the New Yorker for 11 years owing to a deflationary review by Brendan Gill of his novel A Rage to Live (1949). He was a man who never forgot unfavorable reviews, even in the Trenton Sunday Advertiser.

  In earlier days, John O’Hara had been a patient listener and acute observer, which went to make him so impressive an impersonator in his fiction. “He do the police in different voices,” as T. S. Eliot had it in The Waste Land. O’Hara could do female nightclub singers, thugs, rich old women, savvy Hollywood agents, Pennsylvania Dutch. His skill at dialogue was such that he could float an entire story along its stream. So smoothly convincing is his dialogue that one feels a sense of low gotcha triumph catching him out in the rare miscue: The misuse of “put me on” in “The Assistant.” The error in “I Can’t Thank You Enough” of the character who says, “Hurry back, as they say down South,” when what they actually say is “Hurry on back.” The jarring “You make me sick” in “How Old, How Young.”

  What entices more than anything else in O’Hara’s stories is his knowingness. This comes through sometimes in subtle observation, sometimes in risky generalization. In “Pat Collins,” he remarks of a character named Dick Boylan, wh
o runs a speakeasy in Gibbsville, that “possibly as an Irishman, he was immune to what the non-Irish call Irish charm.” In “Natica Jackson,” he notes that “stingy women are apt to be insatiable in bed,” an observation as interesting as it is difficult to test. Of a character in “The Assistant,” he writes: “There was thought behind everything he had on, and behind the thought no taste.” Another character, this one in “Fatimas and Kisses,” has “the special look of dignity offended, the look of small people who do not feel entitled to anger.” A now-retired Hollywood female star in “The Sun Room,” thinking no doubt about Judy Garland, remarks, “If you want to be popular with the queers, you’d better have a weakness.” Rich stuff; this, and it abounds in O’Hara’s writing.

  For all its richness, for all John O’Hara’s skill as a mimic and sharpness as an observer of the life of his time, his writing fails the memory test. Having read 60 of his stories within the past month or so, I find that, with the exception of only three or four, I cannot recall anything of their content. Lucid, smart, never less than interesting, these stories nonetheless leave no strong impress because they are devoid of conflict, specifically moral conflict, of the struggle over difficult decisions that gives a larger meaning to literature and to life itself.

  John O’Hara was a good and honest writer, always worth reading, but owing to this marked absence in his work, a less-than-great one.