Robert Knott: Are there any
other projects relating to O’Hara that you are currently working on or that you would
like to in the future?
Steven Goldleaf: The most interesting and exciting for me is a novel I’m
now writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s death in which John O’Hara is a
character. I’m having a lot of fun with
it because I’m able to show John O’Hara behaving very badly. The story is set in the spring of 1940. Fitzgerald died in the winter of 1940. In most of O’Hara’s appearances in the book
he appears somewhat drunk and disorderly as this was during the period when O’Hara
was doing a lot of drinking and fighting.
He was married to Belle Wylie, but was still a pretty untamed character
in a lot of ways. It’s just before his
big break, which was basically the musical adaptation of Pal Joey, which made him
wealthy and famous in a way he hadn’t been before. So I’m enjoying writing about the young John
O’Hara, whose talent is known to everybody in Hollywood, but whose personal
behavior is somewhat repellent.
It’s funny because I admire this man inordinately and I have
a lot of respect for his judgment and literary ability, but I can see that
during certain insecure periods of his life—when he was drinking or fighting
with anyone who gave him a hard time—he was a hard man to get along with. That’s what I’m trying to describe in a
couple of chapters of this novel.
The suburban stories is another project, as I mentioned
before, and a collection of the miscellaneous or Midwestern stories that might
attract a trade publisher if there is sufficient interest in the New York Stories. Then there are O’Hara books that are more
suitable for university presses like the uncollected John O’Hara stories. There are a good number of those and they
should see print at some point. They
haven’t been collected or reprinted since they were originally published, many
in the 1920s. I think this would be of
interest to John O’Hara’s fans, if only to show what he was interested in early
in his career. There are a few later unpublished
stories as well.
RK: What do think are
O’Hara’s greatest attributes as a writer and why hasn’t he maintained favor, as
many of his contemporaries have?
SG: In some ways he
was his own worst enemy. Lots of people
have noted that he insisted his stories not be anthologized. Obviously there have been exceptions. I couldn’t have read “Graven Image” in high
school if it hadn’t been included in whatever anthology we were reading, but he
was certainly reluctant to have these anthologized. I don’t even know what was going on. Maybe he didn’t want to be lumped in with
other writers he thought were inferior to him or maybe he didn’t think the
money he was offered for anthologizing was sufficient. Whatever the reason, an entire generation of
high school and college students never saw his work—and his work is very accessible! So in that sense you could attribute his lack
of renown to his own bad decisions.
Others have come up with theories having to do with his
so-called repellent personality that I don’t agree with at all. He made so many enemies and was so nasty that
people would go out of their way not to do him any favors. I don’t think this carries much weight as he
was not the only fiction writer who had trouble getting along with people and
others have maintained their reputations despite a lack of personal charm. To some degree O’Hara did have a personal
charm, particularly in his later years.
It seems strange that 40 years after his death people would still be
carrying a grudge against him and using it as a reason not to include him in
their collections.
It’s hard to say what accounts for his lack of popularity,
particularly because he is such an accessible writer. One thing he never did was write in an
experimental way that would please the literary intelligentsia. There were things he did that were
innovative, but not really with the fictional form. A lot of it had to do with what O’Hara
considered to be a story and I think a lot of his stories were very influential
on later so-called “New Yorker
writers” because of O’Hara’s elliptical endings. The stories actually got less elliptical as
he went on and he provided people with more closure and thematic
“sense-making,” but his refusal to moralize in his early stories really became
very fashionable and was absorbed by other writers to the extent that a lot of
short stories now don’t seem to want to take a moral position. They’ll tell you what happens on such and
such a day but not what it all means, and I think this is attributable, in
part, to John O’Hara’s innovative techniques.
But I think the stylistic changes that have happened in
fiction over the last 50 years are fashionable in a way his isn’t. I think his writing is a little too explicit,
a little bit too “comprehensible” to compete with the latest generation or two
of fiction writers.
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