On June 13 I sat down
with John O’Hara Society member Steven Goldleaf to discuss his new collection
of John O’Hara’s New York stories. The
book is published by Penguin Classics and will be released on August 27,
2013. Below is the first part of our conversation. I’ll share additional responses in the
coming weeks.
Robert Knott
Robert Knott: How did
the book come about and why choose the New York Stories?
Steven Goldleaf: It was pretty unoriginal. Matt Bruccoli had come out with two
geographically organized collections of short stories. He had first done a collection called Gibbsville, PA, which was almost every
story that took place in Gibbsville. It
was 900-odd pages. It was a really thick
book. And then he came out with John O’Hara’s Hollywood, which was almost—if not quite—all the stories that took
place in Hollywood.
Then Bruccoli died and I didn’t want to let the New York
stories go unpublished, so I proposed the idea to Wylie O’Hara Doughty and she
was very enthusiastic. She put me in touch
with her agent, the agent for the O’Hara estate, and he didn’t take that long
to interest a publisher, which is Penguin.
Penguin did not want to do an inclusive collection, which is
a little different than the two earlier books.
From the very beginning they thought an inclusive collection would be
too long. So, I created a list of the
New York stories I thought were the essential ones, and we pared it down to the
number we are doing, which is over 30.
RK: How did you arrive
at the final selection of stories, from an editorial standpoint?
SG: The first thing I did, early on, when I had a list of 70
or 80 stories, I realized that about 30 of them were stories that didn’t
strictly speaking take place in New York City.
They took place in Westchester, Long Island, or New Jersey. The characters worked in New York City or
took a trip there, but they were stories that were essentially set in the
suburbs. I realized that that could be a
whole separate book. So, if I let
geography determine what stories could be included that made things a lot
easier.
One of the final stories, “Late, Late Show,” which I read
again after the stories had been set in type, I think is a story that actually
takes place in the suburbs. But, aside
from that, the stories are very specifically located in the City.
I still had too many stories, though. So, I decided one criterion was going to be
whether readers had seen these stories before, rather than including stories
that had been included in some earlier O’Hara collections. There were other stories that the publisher
wanted included, such as “At The Cothurnos Club,” which is from The Time Element. The editor at Penguin, a very smart, excellent
editor named John Siciliano felt very strongly that he wanted it included.
There was another story mentioned by E.L. Doctorow in his foreword
called “The Public Career of Mr. Seymour Harrisburg,” which John [Siciliano] thought
we should include because Doctorow had referenced it.
I do mention stories in my introduction that we did not ultimately
include. For example, in the excerpt already posted on the John O’Hara Society
blog I alluded to a story called “The Golden” that we did not include because
it is a suburban story. But I used it to
make a general point about O’Hara’s characters, of which it was a good
illustration. I ended up alluding to
several stories that were eliminated from the final table of contents.
RK: The Table of
Contents does heavily emphasize the later stories. Why?
SG: I don’t think the early stories are as interesting
literarily as they are historically.
They give you an idea about what got O’Hara interested in writing about
New York City, but the quality of the stories is less pronounced. Also, I don’t think the later stories have
received all that much attention. If
you look at the posthumous collections like The
Time Element and The Good Samaritan,
I’m not sure they sold as well or were as well received and I’m not sure
everyone has had an opportunity to read some of those stories. O’Hara was also not able to publish most of
his later stories in journals and many were only available in these
collections. If you didn’t see the
collections you didn’t get to read the stories.
RK: Were there any
stories you were sorry to leave out, due to space concerns?
SG: Sure. One of the stories that I was surprised
didn’t make it was a story called “Now We Know,” an interaction between a bus
driver and a woman he was flirting with in Queens. It is an early story and not very weighty or
significant, but it was one of the better early stories. I’m not even sure why it ended up being
excluded except that I had to keep drawing up lists of stories that we might be
able to dispense with and I was pretty much taken up on all of my offers. But I was surprised that I had even suggested
that it could be cut.
Watch this space next week for part two.
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