O'HARA, John (Henry)

Nationality: American. Born: Pottsville, Pennsylvania, 31 January 1905. Education: Fordham Preparatory School; Keystone State Normal School; Niagara Preparatory School, Niagara Falls, New York, 1923-24. Family: Married 1) Helen Petit in 1931 (divorced 1933); 2) Belle Mulford Wylie in 1937 (died 1954), one daughter; 3) Katharine Barns Bryan in 1955. Career: Reporter, Pottsville Journal, 1924-26, and Tamaqua Courier, Pennsylvania, 1927; reporter, New York Herald-Tribune, and Time magazine, New York, 1928; rewrite man, New York Daily Mirror, radio columnist (as Franey Delaney), New York Morning Telegraph, and managing editor, Bulletin Index magazine, Pittsburgh, 1928-33; full-time writer from 1933; film writer, for Paramount and other studios, from 1934; columnist ("Entertainment Week"), Newsweek, New York, 1940-42; Pacific war correspondent, Liberty magazine, New York, 1944; columnist ("Sweet and Sour"), Trenton Sunday Times-Adviser, New Jersey, 1953-54; lived in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1954; columnist ("Appointment with O'Hara"), Collier's, New York, 1954-56, ("My Turn"), Newsday, Long Island, New York, 1964-65, and ("The Whistle Stop"), Holiday, New York, 1966-67. Awards: New York Drama Critics Circle award, 1952; Donaldson award, for play, 1952; National Book award, 1956; American Academy award of merit medal, 1964. Member: American Academy, 1957. Died: 11 April 1970.

Publications

Collections

Collected Stories, edited by Frank MacShane. 1985.

O'Hara: Gibbsville, Pa.: The Classic Stories, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1992.

The Novellas of John O'Hara. 1995.

Short Stories

The Doctor's Son and Other Stories. 1935.

Files on Parade. 1939.

Pal Joey. 1940.

Pipe Night. 1945.

Here's O'Hara (omnibus). 1946.

Hellbox. 1947.

All the Girls He Wanted. 1949.

The Great Short Stories of O'Hara. 1956.

Selected Short Stories. 1956.

A Family Party (novella). 1956.

Sermons and Soda Water (includes The Girl on the Baggage Truck, Imagine Kissing Pete, We're Friends Again). 3 vols., 1960.

Assembly. 1961. The Cape Cod Lighter. 1962.

49 Stories. 1963.

The Hat on the Bed. 1963.

The Horse Knows the Way. 1964.

Waiting for Winter. 1966.

And Other Stories. 1968.

The O'Hara Generation. 1969.

The Time Element and Other Stories, edited by Albert Erskine. 1972.

Good Samaritan and Other Stories, edited by Albert Erskine. 1974.

Novels

Appointment in Samarra. 1934.

Butterfield 8. 1935.

Hope of Heaven. 1938.

A Rage to Live. 1949.

The Farmers Hotel. 1951.

Ten North Frederick. 1955.

From the Terrace. 1958.

Ourselves to Know. 1960.

The Big Laugh. 1962.

Elizabeth Appleton. 1963.

The Lockwood Concern. 1965.

The Instrument. 1967.

Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian's Story. 1969.

The Ewings. 1972.

The Second Ewings. 1977.

Plays

Pal Joey (libretto), music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by LorenzHart, from the stories by O'Hara (produced 1940). 1952.

Five Plays (includes The Farmers Hotel, The Searching Sun, The Champagne Pool, Veronique, The Way It Was). 1961.

Two by O'Hara (includes The Man Who Could Not Lose and Far from Heaven). 1979.

Screenplays:

I Was an Adventuress, with Karl Tunberg and DonEttlinger, 1940; He Married His Wife, with others, 1940; Moontide, 1942; On Our Merry Way (episode), 1948; The Best Things in Life Are Free, with William Bowers and Phoebe Ephron, 1956.

Other

Sweet and Sour (essays). 1954.

My Turn (newspaper columns). 1966.

A Cub Tells His Story. 1974.

An Artist Is His Own Fault: O'Hara On Writers and Writings, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1977.

Selected Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. 1978.

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Bibliography:

O'Hara: A Checklist, 1972, and O'Hara: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1978, both by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

Critical Studies:

The Fiction of O'Hara by Russell E. Carson, 1961; O'Hara by Sheldon Norman Grebstein, 1966; O'Hara by Charles C. Walcutt, 1969; O'Hara: A Biography by Finis Farr, 1973; The O'Hara Concern: A Biography by Matthew J. Bruccoli, 1975; The Life of O'Hara by Frank MacShane, 1980; O'Hara by Robert Emmet Long, 1983; Critical Essays on John O'Hara edited by Philip B. Eppard, 1994.

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Trained as a journalist and proud of his craft, John O'Hara wrote unadorned short stories that could have passed as reportage. His first collection, The Doctor's Son and Other Stories, contained at least one piece of nonfiction, "Of Thee I Sing, Baby," originally published as a 1932 New Yorker profile. O'Hara's very earliest published stories took the form of seemingly improvised speeches to a paint-manufacturing company and a ladies' social club. His deadly accurate ear for the American vernacular got him labeled a mere stenographer, but O'Hara's naturalistic dialogue strove for more than accuracy. It revealed traits his speakers felt they were cleverly concealing. O'Hara did use reportorial techniques, but he used them to create art.

Naturalistic speech—a technique popularized in the 1920s by O'Hara's satiric models Ring Lardner, Dorothy Parker, and Sinclair Lewis—gradually faded from his repertoire. Although the device recurred in "Walter T. Carriman," "Mrs. Whitmen," and the "Pal Joey" series (all stories published by 1945) and even in the novella A Family Party, O'Hara's next story collections, Files on Parade, Pipe Night, and Hellbox, sympathized with their subjects rather than satirizing them. The lonely schoolboy in "Do You Like It Here?" wrongly accused of theft, the workingman in "Bread Alone" whose quiet son secretly gives him a present, and the doctor who wastes his life waiting to make "The Decision" are presented critically but compassionately.

Many of O'Hara's best short stories take place in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a thinly disguised version of O'Hara's hometown of Pottsville; throughout his career O'Hara told many of these Gibbsville stories through a thinly disguised version of himself named James Malloy. In these stories O'Hara helped invent his own sub-genre, the prototypical New Yorker magazine story—full of contemporary dialogue, focused on everyday events, indeterminate in its resolution, and sometimes maddeningly elliptical. "I write little pieces for the New Yorker, " O'Hara jokingly wrote in 1936, "some of them so vague that when I send them away I almost include a plea to the editors that if they can understand them, please to let me in on the secret." Actually, O'Hara's short fiction was lucid enough by current standards, but 1930s' readers of popular fiction were accustomed to stories with explicit endings. O'Hara often ended his stories on a flat or jarring non sequitur. "Trouble in 1949," about a man who spends a nerve-racking afternoon with his now-married girlfriend of a decade ago, ends with him wondering about their relationship in another ten years.

Although "1949" in that title meant only some distant future time, the year 1949 did turn out to be full of trouble for O'Hara. The New Yorker, which had published some 200 O'Hara pieces by then, was the market he geared his stories for, making them, as he put it, "simply not saleable anywhere else." So when the New Yorker reviewed his 1949 novel A Rage to Live harshly, he felt he could no longer contribute to it, which effectively ended his short story writing for the next eleven years.

But after a decade spent mostly writing long novels, O'Hara published a long Jim Malloy story in the New Yorker, later collected with two other linked Malloy stories in Sermons and Sodawater, and he entered his golden decade of short story writing. In the 1960s he published six collections of short stories—several thousand printed pages, almost every one of which was at a remarkable level of quality.

His focus shifted slightly in that final productive decade. His Malloy stories no longer concerned events in Malloy's life, as they had in "Transaction," "Miss W.," and other early Malloy stories. Starting with Sermons and Sodawater, the stories took the form of memoirs about Malloy's old friends taking ill or dying. A particularly mournful collection is The Cape Cod Lighter, many of whose stories are set 30 or 40 years earlier but are framed in the present. A man is persuaded by his wife and daughter to attend an old friend's funeral in "Appearances"; his vague antipathy towards the old friend, O'Hara slowly reveals, is founded more solidly than he knows. "The Lesson" is taught by a divorced father who travels to his hometown, also for a funeral, as he justifies his life to his estranged adult daughter. "Your Fah Neefah Neeface" is an especially sad tale about a woman outliving her high-spirited brother; a middle-aged Malloy narrates it, piecing together the brother's life, the woman's, and the lives of several witnesses to their youthful gaiety. "Exterior: With Figure" in the next year's collection, The Hat on the Bed, is another story about a family that has died out since Malloy knew them 50 years earlier. Whether narrated by Malloy or not, these stories keep the past alive by remembering it vividly in the present. "Pat Collins," "The Professors," "The Nothing Machine," and others have at their centers a long-ago event that continues troubling the protagonists in their old age.

O'Hara arranged these short story collections alphabetically, as if in contempt of the notion that any ordering might improve the stories themselves—or detract from them. He knew how good they were, and his prefaces conveyed his satisfaction with his reputation as a master of short fiction. Ever the consummate professional, O'Hara had kept his pre-1960s short stories tightly focused and consistent in length. Now his prestige allowed him the liberties of widening the narrative scope and expanding the length of some stories: 50 printed pages was not at all unusual, and one Malloy-told monster, "A Few Trips and Some Poetry," ran 122 pages. He was writing more than he could place in magazines and no longer needed to write for a market.

Some of these lengthy stories were as artful as any he ever wrote. Waiting for Winter, his 1966 collection, included several long stories never published in magazines. "Natica Jackson" and "James Francis and the Star" are two long looks at Hollywood scandals. Natica Jackson, a movie star, has a love affair resulting in the violent deaths of two children, and James Francis Hatter is a successful scriptwriter whose life is changed when he must shoot and kill a burglar. O'Hara's Hollywood stories not only show insight into the behavior of stars but also characterize various hangers-on and people outside the movie industry who happen to get involved with movie people. O'Hara, who had worked for years as a Hollywood script doctor, intuited the sociology of show business. In "The Friends of Miss Julia" a studio executive's lonely mother-in-law strikes up a friendship with a woman she meets at her hairdresser's. Very little happens in that story—the mother-in-law decides to leave Hollywood—but plot rarely dominates an O'Hara short story. The plot of another show business story, "John Barton Rosedale, Actor's Actor," is also slight—the title character insults a theatrical manager and costs himself a part—but that story, like "Miss Julia," is about the hierarchies and the pettiness of the entertainment world. O'Hara is concerned with relationships, not events, because events are capable of being simplified. People, no matter how simple, are always intricate.

Another show business story, "The Portly Gentleman," introduces a self-absorbed actor whose proposal of marriage gets turned down; the kicker comes when the woman's personal reasons summon up his genuine concern. Several late stories ("Andrea," "A Few Trips and Some Poetry," "The Gunboat and Madge," "The Flatted Saxophone") concern mature people's tender feelings towards each other, entire generations after their initial passions for (and against) each other have passed. Other late stories end with characters improbably finding a kinship with strangers. "Mrs. Stratton of Oak Knoll" ends when the dignified matron of the title places on her breast the hand of a man who has befriended her and asks him, "Why does this endure?" The wise friend's answer: "Something must." O'Hara's short stories certainly will.

—Steven Goldleaf

See the essay on "Fatimas and Kisses."