Channeling O'Hara

Steinbeck-O'Hara Redux

James MacDonald, in Essex, England, digs deeper into the Steinbeck-O'Hara connection:
The Steinbeck-O'Hara connection is intriguing for the reasons you suggest.

But then the pre-war John O'Hara was pretty much a New Dealer. In 1964, anyway, he wrote James Gould Cozzens that he and Steinbeck had been friends since 1936, when he was seriously considering adapting In Dubious Battle for the stage. Steinbeck wrote to O'Hara in 1951 in defence of The Farmers Hotel (which had been given a critical roasting); then, in 1957, Steinbeck was one of O'Hara's principal sponsors for his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

O'Hara's telegram to Steinbeck after Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize was: "Congratulations. You were my second choice." And O'Hara drove to Sag Harbour, on Long Island, New York, to read to Steinbeck after eye surgery. Steinbeck's widow attended O'Hara's funeral, and there is a well-known photo of O'Hara and Steinbeck at Quogue, though Steinbeck's appearance looks decidedly more plebeian than O'Hara's.

What impresses me most about the friendship, such as it was apparently, is how candid they must have been about each other's work. O'Hara was very critical of the supposed verisimilitude of East of Eden, for example, I've long wondered how they could have sustained friendly visits with that level of disagreement between them. It certainly speaks well of Steinbeck's temperament.

Matthew Bruccoli says that O'Hara tended to look on his contemporaries as members of a club, and this is how he viewed John Steinbeck, whatever he may have thought of his individual novels. It is always gratifying to me how much fellow novelists respected O'Hara.

I share your misgivings about the Library of America's continuing disregard of O'Hara. I am a LOA customer and have written them about O'Hara. They've included far inferior authors, God knows.

Steinbeck

The 'Other' O'Hara

By Richard Carreno

I remember, long ago, how the late journalist George Frazier once explained how his son, George Frazier IV, received the moniker 'IV'. It was because of John Steinbeck, he said. Steinbeck, Frazier told the group I was in, landed on the 'IV' for his son John Steinbeck IV (1946-1991) on a whim. There had been no 'Jr,' or 'III,' beforehand, you see. "If it was good enough for Steinbeck, it was good enough for me,' Frazier said. Actually, that was same line of reasoning I employed when I named my youngest son, Hunter, 'Hunter Carreno IV.' But, as they say, I digress.

What got me thinking about John O'Hara was, in fact, Steinbeck. This, thanks to a recent article about the author in The New York Review of Books by Robert Gottlieb, a former -- and the brilliant editor, I should add -- of The New Yorker.

First, I didn't know that O'Hara and Steinbeck were friends, that is, New York-based friends. I always reckoned that their backgrounds and visions were quite different, divisively different -- Steinbeck, the populist; O'Hara, the elitist. It's more complicated than that, of course. But you get the idea Still.... Both authors became more politically conservative as they aged. They were both gung-ho supporters of the Vietnam War. Both of Steinbeck's sons were volunteers in the war. I believe O'Hara's step-son was also a volunteer. (Me,I was a draft-dodger. Actually, not exactly. I received a 4-F, and if you don't know what that is, you're younger than 50 and you don't believe in a Fairy God Mother).

Gottlieb, writing in the Review's 17 April edition, says Steinbeck's 'life in the big city was populated by well-known New Yorkers-about-town: Abe Burrows, John O'Hara, Fred Allen, the Benchleys, Burgess Meredith, the Frank Loessers. When Joshua Logan invited him to a party for Princess Margaret, he told Elaine [Steinbeck's third wife], "That's not the way I live." But it was the way he lived.'

Gottlieb continued, East of Eden was 'also a new kind of novel for Steinbeck -- a novel of moral crisis, told entirely in the first person, very much in the spirit if not the tone of East Coast novelists like his friend John O'Hara...' Who knew?

Just by changing 'Pottsville' for 'Monterey' and 'O'Hara' for 'Steinbeck,' Gottlieb's take on Steinbeck could be a stand-in for O'Hara: '...[W]ho in America considers him seriously today, apart from a handful of of Steinbeck academics and some local enthusiasts in Monterey?'

There's a big legacy difference, however. Gottlieb notes the 'force-feeding' of Steinbeck on 'hundreds of thousands of school kids' and, more recently, the author's recent 'official canonization by the Library of America....' (Gottlieb's essay on Steinbeck was occasioned by a new Steinbeck edition by The Library of America).

As for O'Hara, nowhere to be found -- much. Certainly, not in schools. Thanks to the O'Hara Estate, I'm told, his works have not been permitted to seep their way into school-oriented anthologies, the source of 'literary' teaching nowadays. Likewise, no Library of America editions of O'Hara's oeuvre.

Another check? At my Barnes & Noble in Rittenhouse Square (in Philadelphia, no less!), three O'Hara books on the shelf. More than dozen by Steinbeck. Enough said.

New Member Request

New Member Seeks Dialog

From Robert Knott in Jersey City, New Jersey:

I am an O'Hara fan from New York City, now living in Jersey City, New Jersey. I am delighted there is a John O'Hara Society and an on-line forum of other devotees.

I became interested in O'Hara through my more general curiosity as to why so many once-popular and/or noted authors fade into the literary background. I might have explored this question further had I pursued an academic career. As it is, I did manage, with the assistance of a very indulgent professor, to devote a good portion of my senior year at Kenyon College to an independent study of O'Hara's work, tearing through one book after another, taking two field trips to Pottsville, and developing a genuine enthusiasm along the way.

I am always interested in hearing from other JOH enthusiasts and in learning their impressions of the man and his work.

Manners

O'Hara as Outsider

From a 'profile' of the author Louis Auchincloss by Larissa MacFarquhar in the 25 February 2008 New Yorker:

Society 'outsiders were missing something important. (Thus the difference, for instance, between an outsider novelist of manners like John O'Hara and an insider novelist of manners like John Marquand: where O'Hara looked at society and saw smugness and hypocrisy, Marquand saw the bewilderment of the sheltered and quixotic adherence to duty and self-limitation, no matter how absurd.'

O'Hara's Ranking

The New Yorker's Top 7

In a new column on New Yorker fiction, past and present, writer and editor Benjamin Chambers reports:

A couple of weeks ago, I rashly declared that John Updike had to be the record-holder when it came to publishing the most short stories in The New Yorker.

Should've known better than to venture so boldly into speculation: as it happens, The New Yorker's librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, covered this for Emdashes a while back in "Ask the Librarians," and it turns out that James Thurber and S.J. Perelman are the neck-and-neck front-runners by far. Despite his prodigious output, Updike isn't even in the top three—he comes in sixth.
Here's the librarians' list. Each author is followed by the number of short stories he published in The New Yorker during his career (or to date):

1. James Thurber 273
2. S.J. Perelman 272
3. John O'Hara 227
4. Frank Sullivan 192
5. E.B. White 183
6. John Updike168

Submitted by Richard Rabicoff

Not Mere Sex....

James MacDonald writes that O'Hara describes 'love,' 'not mere sex

Both in his own voice and through Gerald Higgins (Ourselves to Know), JOH confessed to being in love with Fitzgerald's Rosalind Connage.

That made me feel better about being in love with Kate Drummand (Ten North Frederick) and Norma Budd (From the Terrace). They are, admittedly, among O'Hara's most attractive characters, intended to provide their respective counterparts with sentimental education.

They also add weight to my belief that O'Hara, more accurately, writes about love, not mere sex. His sexual passages are almost cursory, The consequences, covering the balance of many a novel and at the heart of most of the stories, constitute a career-long examination of men's and women's commitment to one another.

Yes, of course, O'Hara's work is concerned with manners and morals, the social history of the United States of his time and ken. But relations between men and women, as he acknowledged, is the most compelling theme, and in this respect he bears serious comparison with D.H. Lawrence.

Both writers share an intensity of focus and a detailed analysis of inter-personal commitment. In BUtterfield 8, for example, the relationship given greatest attention is between Eddie Brunner and Gloria Wandrous, not Gloria's numerous affairs, including the fatal one with Weston Liggett.

Kate and Norma (to bring this back) are crucial to their counterparts' development, and the scenes in which they figure are sustained conversations about commitment, not repeatedly detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse. For O'Hara, as for Lawrence, sex is an important component of love. But it is clear that the emphasis is on love, however elusive it may be, finally, in much of his work.

The greatest slur anyone can make against O'Hara is to say that his writing is cheap, sex obsessed. It simply does not stand up, either under detailed critical scrutiny or an attentive perusal of any single work.

(James MacDonald is a member of the John O'Hara Society).