THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

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The Irish-Catholic John O'Hara felt he looked in at the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment from the outside. In Butterfield 8, Jim Malloy (John O'Hara's alter ego, as aptly described by Steven Goldleaf), and Isabel Stannard, both from Gibbsville, are at a speakeasy in New York City in 1931. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

Jim: "People like you make me mad, I mean people like you, people whose families have money and send them to good schools and belong to country clubs and have good cars - the upper crust, the swells..."

Isabel: "I beg your pardon, but why are you talking about you people, you people, your kind of people, people like you. You belong to a country club, you went to good schools and your family at least had money -"

Jim: "I want to tell you something about myself that will help to explain a lot of things about me. You might as well hear it now. First of all, I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don't eat salad with a spoon and I probably could play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick...I'm pretty God damn American, and therefore my brothers and sisters are, and yet we're not American. We're Micks, we're non-assimilable, we Micks. We've been here, at least some of my family, since before the Revolution...I'm not a member of it (the upper crust), and now I never will be."