O'Hara and Capote

Strange Bedfellows

By Charles McGrath

The New York Times | May 16, 2014

It would be hard to think of two writers less alike — stylistically and, for that matter, personally — than Truman Capote and John O’Hara, yet they shared many pre­occupations. Both were fascinated by society high and low, by how people climbed or toppled from one rank to the other, and by how sex and money underpinned the entire system. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote’s charming 1958 novella about a self-invented cafe society girl and the admiring writer who lives upstairs, is set during World War II. Most of the stories assembled in the recent Penguin anthology of O’Hara’s New York stories were written in either the ’30s or the ’60s, but some are set decades earlier. And yet in the newly released audio recordings of the two books, maybe even more than on the page, the versions of New York that are evoked seem virtually interchangeable: It’s a city of people on the make or else clinging to their former reputations, where everyone drinks too much, and where you can easily wake up in bed next to someone you barely remember meeting.

 

Listening to Capote and O’Hara back to back, in fact, you have to concentrate to keep the characters in one recording from wandering into your recollections of the other, and from picturing Capote’s Holly Golightly, for example — who once had a future in the movies and now pays the rent by accepting financial favors from men — showing up at “21” on the arm of one of O’Hara’s fast-talking Hollywood producers. And that young couple who make a living from hosting creepy sex parties — it may take a moment to recall that they turn up not at one of Golightly’s parties but in the deeply strange O’Hara story “A Phase of Life.”

 

O’Hara is now somewhat neglected and under­appreciated, and the print version of the New York anthology, edited by Steven Goldleaf, with a foreword by E. L. Doctorow, is part of a welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback. (I wrote the introduction to the new edition of O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in Samarra.”) But even readers familiar with O’Hara may be surprised by how many of these stories involve not his Park Avenue types but people in show business: agents, producers, writers, actors, many of them alcoholic has-beens. This is a world O’Hara knew well from his early days as a press agent, and like much of his best work, the stories have the tang of genuine observation and ­reporting.

 

So it’s not inappropriate that the audio version employs, instead of a single voice, a whole cast of people, and not just audiobook veterans, but real actors. Some are household names, like Gretchen Mol, Bobby Cannavale and Jon Hamm (doubly appropriate, since Don Draper is an O’Hara character if ever there was one), while others, like Jan Maxwell, Dallas Roberts and Dylan Baker, have solid Broadway or TV credentials. The drawback to this scheme is that some of the cast (Cannavale is probably the worst offender) are inclined not just to read the stories but to act them out, overdramatizing the dialogue and laying the accents on thick.

Unlike most story writers, who fret obsessively about what order the stories in a collection should follow, O’Hara thought that all of his stories were of equal value and so often presented them in his collections alphabetically by title. Goldleaf has adopted this practice, even though it means that contiguous stories are sometimes decades apart in setting (so that Lyndon Johnson, for instance, is president in one, and a while later Franklin Roosevelt is in the Oval Office) and in style. (The later stories are, in general, longer and more discursive than the earlier ones.) And this confusing arrangement is compounded in the audio version by the way the various narrators turn up unannounced. You have to consult the liner notes to know who’s reading what.

 

But part of what made O’Hara such a master of the short story was his ear, his way of capturing in print the sound of actual speech, and the best performances here catch his nuance and even add to it. Baker, for ­example, can do a perfect Brahmin accent, subtly underscoring the tension between the New York and Boston-born characters in O’Hara’s great novella-length story “We’re Friends Again.” In “The Assistant,” Mol delicately ­suggests the wistfulness and self-­deception of an over-the-hill actress. Listening to these stories, perhaps even more than reading them, you’re aware of how brilliantly O’Hara uses dialogue to convey exposition, and of how often his people, like Hemingway’s, leave unsaid what is really on their minds. In the gym or in the car, with your earbuds plugged in, you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on real lives.

 

In the case of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” though, you may find that there’s less dialogue than you remember. Capote’s novella, some of the best writing he ever did, has in many ways been hijacked by the 1961 movie version, in which Audrey Hepburn, so elegant and winning, is not really the character Capote imagined (he had in mind someone more like Marilyn Monroe), and the George Peppard character is a far cry from the book’s narrator, who is partly a version of Capote himself. The movie turns “Breakfast” into a heterosexual love story, which the book is only in a fablelike way, and ignores the degree to which it’s an authorial coming-of-age story, in which the main voice is the narrator’s own.

 

It’s tempting to imagine an audio version of “Breakfast” read by Toby Jones, who was so convincing as Capote in the movie “Infamous,” though it would probably get irritating pretty quickly. The audiobook features Michael C. Hall, probably best known for “Dexter” and “Six Feet Under,” and for the most part he delivers a straightforward, understated version of the text — a reading rather than a performance. This approach avoids all kinds of potential embarrassments (like Mickey Rooney’s cringeworthy attempt at a Japanese accent in the movie) but also adds an element of literalism to the story, ignoring that Holly is in large part a confection, and leaches away some of the romance. What you miss is the sense that “Breakfast” is the story of a writer in love with his own beginnings, or his reimagining of them.

 

O’Hara employs some writerly narrators as well, but they tend to be older and more cynical. They’ve seen so much that nothing surprises them anymore. And the one big difference between O’Hara’s New York and Capote’s is that Capote’s is still a place of hope and possibility. In O’Hara there is sometimes a lingering sense that the city’s best days, like those of the people who inhabit it, are already over, or that even if they’re not, only an out-of-towner would admit it.

THE NEW YORK STORIES

By John O’Hara

Various readers

Penguin Audio

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

By Truman Capote

Read by Michael C. Hall

Audible Studios

 

Correction: May 19, 2014
An earlier version of the bibliographical note with this review misidentified the producer of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It is Audible Studios, not Brilliance Audio.

Charles McGrath, a former editor of the Book Review, is a contributing writer for The Times.