tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-158373932024-03-15T21:10:10.241-04:00THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETYTHE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY celebrates the life and works of John O'Hara, Pennsylvania's pre-eminent contemporary author and America's greatest short-story writer. The JOHS studies, publishes, and diffuses works by and about the author. Membership is free. For details, contact the JOHS's Corresponding Secretary, Richard Carreño, via Philabooks@yahoo.com. © MMXXIV John O'Hara Society.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger559125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-4213378412196132172024-03-12T15:04:00.000-04:002024-03-12T15:04:30.593-04:00Writer Search<p><b><span style="font-family: courier; font-size: x-large;">PUBLISHER REQUEST</span></b></p><p> <span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;">Hello,</span></p><div class="I_ZkbNhI D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; display: table; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; outline: none !important; width: 792px;"><div class="msg-body P_wpofO mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; outline: none !important; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 2px 0px 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word;"><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="outline: none !important; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"><div style="outline: none !important;"><div id="yiv8825831829" style="outline: none !important;"><div style="outline: none !important;"><div class="yiv8825831829WordSection1" style="outline: none !important;"><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;"> </span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-family: sans-serif; outline: none !important;">My company is preparing an entry on John O’Hara for </span><i style="outline: none !important;"><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; outline: none !important;">Literature Criticism</span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-family: sans-serif; outline: none !important;">, a reference series published by Gale-Cengage. We rely on scholars to shape these entries, and we have had a difficult time finding a scholar to advise us on this entry. I wonder if anyone at the Society might be interested?</span><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; outline: none !important;"><br style="outline: none !important;" /><br style="outline: none !important;" /><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; outline: none !important;">The scholar would be credited as an academic advisor to the volume and we offer a small honorarium. I’d be happy to explain more about the job and send sample entries should anyone come to mind.</span><br style="outline: none !important;" /><br style="outline: none !important;" /><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; outline: none !important;">I look forward to your response.</span><br style="outline: none !important;" /><br style="outline: none !important;" /><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; outline: none !important;">Best regards,</span></span><span style="color: black; outline: none !important;"></span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: black; font-family: sans-serif; outline: none !important;">Hollis</span><span style="color: black; outline: none !important;"></span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;"> </span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;"> </span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><b style="outline: none !important;"><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;">Hollis Beach</span></b></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;">Senior Editor</span><span style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;"></span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;">Layman Poupard</span></p><p class="yiv8825831829MsoNormal" style="font-family: Aptos, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in; outline: none !important;"><span style="color: black; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; outline: none !important;">843.568.6437<b style="outline: none !important;"></b></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="outline: none !important; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"></div></div><div class="H_7jIs D_F ab_C Q_69H5 E_36RhU" data-test-id="toolbar-hover-area" style="align-items: center; background-color: white; color: #1d2228; display: flex; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; height: 64px; margin-left: -8px; margin-right: -20px; outline: none !important;"><div class="D_F W_6D6F r_BN gl_C" data-test-id="card-toolbar" style="cursor: default; display: flex; justify-content: center; outline: none !important; width: 820px;"></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-29609697762405346752023-03-25T15:32:00.000-04:002023-03-25T15:32:06.005-04:00ANOTHER LOOK<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Hail O'Hara—Again!</span></b></p><p> <b><span style="font-size: medium;">By Samuel Goldman</span></b></p><p><b><i><span style="font-size: medium;">J<span style="font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif;">ohn O’Hara’s novels and stories are one of those fashions, like wing collars or Bermuda shorts, that never quite come around again. Prominent between roughly World War II and the Great Society, O’Hara’s enormous output of fiction, which literary critics never really liked, almost immediately sank into obscurity. Every few decades, one of O’Hara’s admirers, usually a literary miner of the same sociological vein, tries to revive the writer’s reputation with biographies, glossy new editions, or appreciative essays. None of these efforts has succeeded. O’Hara’s name usually draws a blank among even well-read people younger than 60 or so.</span></span></i></b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The obstacle probably isn’t the material<i> per se. </i>Though he enjoyed his biggest sales in the Eisenhower era, much of O’Hara’s work is set in the 1920s. Associations with the Lost Generation, Prohibition, and the New York nightclub scene have done little to undermine, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s status. And while O’Hara never reaches Fitzgerald’s heights of lyricism, his characters, their actions, and their speech are more plausible than the laconic caricatures and contrived plots of Ernest Hemingway’s mid-career.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><b><br /></b><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>O’Hara is relentlessly specific about details of dress and slang in a way his more famous contemporaries were not, but it’s no harder to understand what O’Hara means by a “cake-eater” suit and what that signifies about the characters who wear them than it is to appreciate the significance of Gatsby’s cascade of beautifully colored shirts. If anything, the obscurity of the references should make them less obtrusive now than they were to readers with their own memories of those times. Because the social and economic implications are clear from the context, we don’t need to worry about the specific difference in price between Cadillac, Packard, and Pierce-Arrow automobiles.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Nor is the problem necessarily style. In a 2000 article for <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Atlantic</i>, journalist Benjamin Schwarz argued that O’Hara’s greatness had been obscured by the then-current preference for minimalism. For audiences accustomed to the kind of compressed, exquisitely wrought structure that’s sometimes treated as the essence of literary craft, O’Hara’s sprawling novels might be an unfamiliar, and unwelcome, experience. O’Hara’s earliest books, especially his 1934 debut, <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Appointment in Samarra</i>, include experiments with stream-of-consciousness and other classic modernist techniques. Yet the most obvious influences on O’Hara’s postwar efforts include Booth Tarkington and perhaps Sinclair Lewis, who also offered panoramas of provincial American life. Though they’re sometimes classed together as fellow realists, O’Hara was never so gritty, as we’d say now, as Theodore Dreiser. This was not a problem for a contemporary public that loved big narrative fiction, including the works of the even-less-appreciated James Gould Cozzens. But it’s no recipe for twenty-first-century popularity.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Yet it’s possible to appreciate an author without admiring everything he wrote. Thomas Hardy, with whom O’Hara is occasionally compared, went to his grave believing that he’d be remembered as a poet, but it’s the prose work he regarded as secondary that sustains his reputation today. And while O’Hara’s novels became increasingly conventional as he grew older, his short stories grew, if anything, more challenging and elliptical. If not minimalist in the Raymond Carver sense, many of O’Hara’s stories are extremely compressed, sometimes consisting of a single conversation presented almost entirely as dialogue. The 1960 story “It’s Mental Work,” for example, is composed of nothing more than a chat between two bartenders closing up for the night.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Reliance on dialogue over description is easy to dismiss as a trick of the stage and screen (genres in which O’Hara dabbled). Used carefully, though, the technique is effective in revealing more than the characters actually say, or even than they know. Though more expansive in both style and length, “We’re Friends Again” revolves around the mutual incomprehension of two old friends who actually don’t understand each other. In fact, O’Hara’s approach doesn’t work especially well on film. Despite his success in print, feature films based on O’Hara’s work were artistic, if not commercial, failures. It didn’t help that O’Hara was unlucky in the casting of the productions he inspired. The 1960 production of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Butterfield 8</i>, O’Hara’s 1935 novel, features a lead performance by Laurence Harvey, an actor so wooden that it’s been quipped that his only convincing role was as the titular brainwashed puppet in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The Manchurian Candidate</i>.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The revelations that emerge from O’Hara’s work aren’t so old-fashioned as readers might expect, either. Though he drifted to the political right in the postwar years, O’Hara is nonjudgmental in his presentation of sex, alcoholism, and the petty and not-so-petty lies that pervade real life. The plot of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Butterfield 8</i>, set in New York café society during Prohibition,<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </i>includes hardly less partying than the latest HBO miniseries. “The General,” published in 1966, culminates in the revelation that the story’s military officer, a pillar of his small-town community, is, with the acceptance—if not encouragement—of his wife, a habitual cross-dresser. O’Hara presents this as an unusual but essentially trivial quirk of an otherwise successful marriage. His lack of prudery even extended to language. O’Hara is credited as the first writer to use the phrase “fuck up” in print.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"></p><figure class="m_article-picture m_article-picture__ noalign" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 15px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><img alt="A poster for the 1960 film version of “Butterfield 8,” O’Hara’s 1935 novel set in New York café society during Prohibition, with a plot that includes as much partying as the latest HBO miniseries (MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ART/GETTY IMAGES)" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="1" src="https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/cj/files/poster-for-1960-film-version-of-Butterfield-8.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: none; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 645px;" title="A poster for the 1960 film version of “Butterfield 8,” O’Hara’s 1935 novel set in New York café society during Prohibition, with a plot that includes as much partying as the latest HBO miniseries (MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ART/GETTY IMAGES)" /></b><figcaption style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>A poster for the 1960 film version of “Butterfield 8,” O’Hara’s 1935 novel set in New York café society during Prohibition, with a plot that includes as much partying as the latest HBO miniseries (MOVIE POSTER IMAGE ART/GETTY IMAGES)</b></figcaption></figure><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>It’s true that O’Hara wrote a lot—maybe more than was good for him. This was partly to earn money, but mostly because he believed that writing was what a writer should do. The result, though, is that it can be hard to know where to look for the good stuff, especially after reading <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Appointment in Samarra</i>. Onetime popularity has advantages: it’s not hard to find many O’Hara titles on the shelves of used bookstores and, of course, the Internet. But some of O’Hara’s best work is not in print, and it helps to have an idea about which of the many titles are worth acquiring and which can be skipped.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The main reason for O’Hara’s continued neglect is neither stylistic, nor moral, nor practical. It’s that his principal subject is so absent from American life today that it seems to belong not just to another century but to another planet. John O’Hara was at his best as a literary sociologist of the kind of industrial city that has almost vanished from the American landscape. He was drawn to the big ponds of Broadway and Hollywood, and he swam in them with success, but he found his place in American letters as the Balzac of a fishbowl.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="cap" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.75em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: -2px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 1px 2px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>O</b></span><b>’Hara’s fishbowl is called Gibbsville, and it is a lightly fictionalized version of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. As he explains in a famous passage of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Appointment in Samarra</i>, “Gibbsville people, when they went away, always had trouble explaining where they lived. They would say: ‘I live in the coal regions,’ and people would say, ‘Oh yes, near Pittsburgh.’ Then Gibbsvillians would have to go into detail.” In fact, Gibbsville (like Pottsville) is in the eastern third of the state, north of Reading but west of Allentown. As O’Hara goes on to explain, it is the heart of the region devoted to mining anthracite, the hard coal that was a popular fuel for running railroads and heating homes and buildings until the mid-twentieth century.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Coal is the source of Gibbsville’s (temporary) prosperity, the axis around which its social structure revolves, and ultimately the cause of its decline. Coal is the reason that a region inhabited by perhaps 50,000 people (the population of Pottsville proper peaked around 20,000 soon after World War I) could boast the regional gentry, rising middle class, active local press, variety of immigrants, and local mafia that O’Hara depicted in such lavish detail. As social critics note, the magnificent illusion that O’Hara pulls off in the novels and stories that bring Gibbsville to life is to make you think that a place so complicated must also be big. But it’s a trick: as with a model train set, the smallness highlights subtle differences that would get lost at a larger scale.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"></p><figure class="m_article-picture m_article-picture__ noalign" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 15px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><img alt="O’Hara’s fishbowl: a rendering of his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, which he fictionalized as Gibbsville (THE TICHNOR BROTHERS COLLECTION/ BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY)" class="media-element file-default" data-delta="2" src="https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/cj/files/rendering-of-OHara-hometown-Pottstown-Pennsylvania.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: none; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; height: 408px; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; width: 645px;" title="O’Hara’s fishbowl: a rendering of his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, which he fictionalized as Gibbsville (THE TICHNOR BROTHERS COLLECTION/ BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY)" /></b><figcaption style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 0.8em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.857em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>O’Hara’s fishbowl: a rendering of his hometown of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, which he fictionalized as Gibbsville (THE TICHNOR BROTHERS COLLECTION/ BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY)</b></figcaption></figure><p></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>O’Hara’s readers aren’t the only ones perplexed by the deceiving character of Gibbsville. His characters also struggle to place their little world in the large one that surrounds it. For some, Gibbsville is, if not a metropolis, then a big-enough city. In O’Hara’s short story “The Mayor,” Lester Flickinger begins life as a Pennsylvania Dutch farm boy, speaking a German dialect that has now almost entirely vanished. Eventually, Flickinger rises to become a real-estate investor and mayor. His greatest ambition—and greatest pleasure—is making use of an official car with an attached siren, a miniaturized version of the motorcades that transport greater officials.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Other characters chafe against Gibbsville’s restrictions but cannot escape. O’Hara’s most fully realized creation, the subject of the 1955 novel <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ten North Frederick </i>(portrayed by a miscast Gary Cooper in the film version), is Joe Chapin, a rich lawyer and the acknowledged head of Gibbsville aristocracy. Unlike Flickinger, Chapin dreams of reaching yet higher status outside Gibbsville’s orbit, perhaps as a senator or even, absurdly, president. The comedy of Chapin’s aspirations is that he can’t quite fathom why his ascent to national prominence shouldn’t come as easily as his leading role in Gibbsville. He knows Gibbsville is just a small city, of course. But why would its political and social mechanisms work in a fundamentally different manner from those of the wider world?</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Some of O’Hara’s people even make it out of Gibbsville—more or less. His alter ego, Jimmy Malloy, who appears in many of the novels and stories, manages to turn jobs in local journalism into a position at a New York paper, which leads, as it did for O’Hara, to fame and fortune as a writer of novels, plays, and films. Yet even Malloy is unwilling or unable to cut ties entirely. In “Imagine Kissing Pete,” one of O’Hara’s late and longest Gibbsville stories, Malloy returns home to discover the different trajectory of early friends, who have moved downward in roughly opposite proportion to his ascent. For Malloy, Gibbsville is a point of departure that continues to orient him in his journey. For his old acquaintance Pete McCrea and his wife, Bobbie Hammersmith, it’s more like a black hole. Yet somehow, they reach equilibrium, rejoicing together in the graduation from Princeton of Pete and Bobbie’s son.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Some of these stories are conveyed in a kind of linear narration that seems staid today. But the real action—the influence of Gibbsville’s social structure on individual choices and the closed circuit of locations and institutions that brings them together—is shown indirectly, with different stories and reappearing characters revealing different sides of the same events. The whole picture emerges only gradually and somewhat dimly, without the benefit of the omniscient narrator who dominates nineteenth-century social novels. Though he dealt with a very different place and milieu, O’Hara’s approach—in the stories, if not the novels—has surprising similarities to the method of Anthony Powell. Powell was a more profound psychologist and a more self-conscious stylist, but he, too, relied on dialogue, reminiscence, and partial observation to develop a whole world. The haute<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> </i>bohemia of interwar London was a long way from Pennsylvania. But it’s not fundamentally a much bigger stage than Gibbsville.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>For all his personal crankiness, which generated a whole genre of anecdotes, O’Hara is also more humane than Powell. It’s remarkable that the thousands of words he devoted to Gibbsville not only fail to depict any outstanding heroes but also lack recognizable villains. There is no counterpart here to Powell’s unforgettably loathsome Widmerpool. O’Hara’s people hurt one another due to ignorance (maybe willful), selfishness, and sometimes sheer despair. But there’s little malice to be found, except perhaps in patrician marriages enforced by unquestioned social expectations. Unusually for a twentieth-century writer, O’Hara consistently presents the nuclear family as a stable and rewarding arrangement. Even when it comes to sex, members of the stolid middle class like the Flieglers of <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Appointment at Samarra </i>turn out to be more satisfied than the rich party animals with whom their lives overlap.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="cap" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.75em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: -2px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 1px 2px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>I</b></span><b>f they’re no longer so prominent, the yearnings and limitations of extra-metropolitan life remain familiar themes in American culture. But the peculiarities of big-little Gibbsville make it unfamiliar in ways that the archetypal small town is not.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The most obvious difference is the clearly delineated economic structure. Everyone knows not only who’s got money but when, where, and how they got it. The big fortunes come from coal or other heavy industries. But the professions, real estate, and financial speculation all produce their own share of wealth. Like few fiction writers today, O’Hara sees business as a fit subject for literature. The result is a precisely graded hierarchy, reflected in interactions as subtle as the varied receptions characters receive at local banks.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Yet the most important divisions in Gibbsville don’t rest on money alone. Like the rest of the country in the 1920s and 1930s, the anthracite region is informally ruled by an Anglo-Protestant elite that is rapidly, if unwittingly, approaching its eclipse. The best thing is to be an Episcopalian or a Presbyterian with New England origins. The next best is to have antecedents among the assimilated German-Americans—<i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">not </i>the rural Pennsylvania Dutch—of the colonial era. This fine distinction is illustrated by differences of pronunciation. The inhabitants of Lantenengo Street, Gibbsville’s tiny Park Avenue, pronounce the name Laubach, which belongs to one recurring character, “Law-back.” Their déclassé neighbors use the Germanic pronunciation “Lau-bock.” Irish Catholics, like O’Hara and his stand-in Malloy, are placed somewhere in the middle. Jews, Italians, and central European “hunkies” are outsiders, though they can win conditional acceptance with sufficient wealth and cultural assimilation.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Even more than economic hierarchy, these ethnic and religious distinctions obsessed O’Hara. His disappointment that he couldn’t go to Yale because of his physician father’s untimely death was legendary. The combination of resentment and fascination led him to accumulate a supply of collegiate lore that astonished contemporaries who had actually attended the Ivy League. In <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Butterfield 8</i>, Malloy laments that “I wear Brooks [Brothers] clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I could probably play five-goal polo in two years, but I am still a Mick.” In Gibbsville, and not only in Gibbsville, the descendants of immigrants and members of religious minorities were not considered fully American, in ways that have become hard to fathom today.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Yet O’Hara was not a society novelist in the manner of his middlebrow contemporary J. P. Marquand, who covered similar territory in <i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Point of No Return</i> (1949), perhaps the best of his New England novels. For one thing, O’Hara ranges much more widely through the social structure. Rich and poor, Protestants and Catholics, Yale men and immigrants who barely speak English coexist in Gibbsville, and O’Hara frames stories around all their perspectives. In a recent essay, novelist Walter Kirn dismissed O’Hara as yet another chronicler of “the grasping, striving, forward-thinking, white American commuting class.” That isn’t just wrong about O’Hara’s affluent characters, who may have belonged to the provincial gentry or the New York upper crust, but certainly never commuted; it also ignores the saloonkeepers, farm boys, bootleggers, and party girls who appear in his world and make up some of its narrators and central figures.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>O’Hara also avoids the nostalgia for decayed glory that pervades Marquand, who burnished the myth of the Boston Brahmins even as he satirized them. His settings just aren’t glamorous enough: as a well-born acquaintance remarks of Joe Chapin while he’s at Yale, “what has he got to be snobbish about? He’s from Pennsylvania.” Gibbsville isn’t a bad place, though it doesn’t work out for some of O’Hara’s characters, and it eventually enters inexorable decline. But it’s far from a paradise lost. As in his depictions of sex, money, and family, O’Hara avoids moralism. Gibbsville was what it was, for better and worse. That lesson, which also applies to people, could describe O’Hara’s entire perspective.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span class="cap" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: left; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.75em; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: -2px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 1px 2px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>I</b></span><b>t’s impossible to avoid speaking of Gibbsville in the past tense, and not only because O’Hara died in 1970. Bringing events up to about the Kennedy administration in his fiction, he could not help noticing how the country had changed, pushing Gibbsville to the margins. In his 2000 appreciation, Schwarz notes a passage that captures the shift. In the story “Man on the Tractor,” one character observes: “There’s no money here, George. Not the way we knew it. . . . A few of our old friends have made some money in the stock market, but that’s not here. That’s New York and Philadelphia and representing industries as far away as California.” With the decline of coal and emergence of fully nationalized (and increasingly internationalized) markets, Gibbsville slips from the provinces to being a backwater.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>This transformation helps explain the sociological contrast between O’Hara’s Gibbsville and John Updike’s “Brewer,” a fictionalized version of nearby Reading, Pennsylvania. As depicted in the Rabbit Angstrom series that Updike, another O’Hara admirer, published between 1960 and 2001, an increasingly postindustrial Pennsylvania is slowly merged into generic suburbia. This is not yet the “left behind” narrative that dominates more recent explorations of the region. To the contrary, Rabbit and his family and immediate associates are comfortable in material terms. But the region loses the cultural and economic distinctiveness that make Gibbsville so interesting to visit. Brewer could be just about anywhere.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Pottsville itself remains on the map, of course. And it retains some continuities with its glory days and their literary representation, including overwhelming support for the Republican Party. In popular memory, places like Gibbsville were bastions of the New Deal coalition. In fact, their relatively small industries, protected by tariffs and oriented toward regional customers, encouraged support for pro-business Republicans, even among workers. It’s fun to imagine what O’Hara, who began his career as a passionate admirer of FDR and ended it as a Goldwater conservative, would have said about Donald Trump. He probably would have liked him, partly because of his mounting contempt for a cultural establishment that had never granted him the recognition he thought he deserved (including the Nobel Prize). But he also would have noted, with approval, that Trump speaks one of those unaffected American idioms that O’Hara captured more accurately than almost any writer of his generation (or ours).</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>Still, even the most enthusiastic local booster would likely admit that much of the life has gone out of the place. Even if Pottsville does not suffer outright poverty, the carefully graded residential sections, clubs, hotels, and even barbershops that made it a fully articulated social structure have disappeared. In place of the minute gradations that once separated Pennsylvania from Massachusetts, Gibbsville from Brewer, exclusive Lantenengo Street from fading Frederick Street, we face a starker divide between the few prosperous metro areas that attract rich, talented, or ambitious people and the fading hinterlands that repel them.</b></p><p style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 20px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b>The sociological, economic, and electoral implications of this change remain central to debates about America’s future. The work of John O’Hara is a reminder of the cultural damage that they have wrought, as well. For O’Hara, the American provinces and the people who live there are not objects of pity, bewilderment, or caricature. Even if Gibbsville belongs to the past, this basic humanity deserves recognition, and even imitation, today. The self-composed epitaph inscribed on O’Hara’s gravestone in Princeton reads: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” At the time, this description was mocked as yet another delusion of grandeur from a small-town boy who believed, like Joe Chapin, that he deserved a place in the big leagues. One day, a generation not yet born may recognize, beneath the characteristic exaggeration, a glimmer of truth.</b></p><p class="byline" style="border-bottom-color: initial; border-bottom-style: initial; border-image: initial; border-left-color: initial; border-left-style: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(0, 175, 207); border-top-style: solid; border-width: 1px 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: 1.125em; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0px 20px; padding: 20px 0px 30px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b><a href="https://www.city-journal.org/contributor/samuel-goldman_2078" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #00afcf; font-family: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Samuel Goldman</a> is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University.</b></i></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-11171624991711550892023-01-14T13:04:00.002-05:002023-01-14T13:04:47.124-05:00Request from John Murphy<p> <a data-test-id="sender-logo" style="color: #1d2228; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><img class="e_e5X" height="40" src="https://data.mail.yahoo.com/xobni/v4/endpoints/smtp:jcmurphy1@comcast.net/photo?spsize=80X80&fallback_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fdh%2Fap%2Fsocial%2Fprofile%2Fprofile_a64.png&alphatar_photo=true&appId=YMailNorrin&format=image" style="border-radius: 50%;" width="40" /></a></p><div style="color: #1d2228; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><header aria-label="Message" class="r_BN D_F W_6D6F p_R P_Zjgzuf ir_0" style="cursor: default; display: flex; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px 16px; position: relative; width: 811px;"><div class="D_F ac_FT ab_CI en_0" style="align-items: flex-start; align-self: stretch; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0;"><button aria-label="This message is read" aria-pressed="false" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-read" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Mark as unread" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_ZpQYvz cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><circle cx="10" cy="10" r="4"></circle></svg></span></button></div><div class="o_h D_F em_0 E_fq7 ek_BB" data-test-id="address-info" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 8px; overflow: hidden;"><div class="D_F en_0" style="display: flex; flex-shrink: 0;"><span class="u_b en_0 c1AVi73_6FsP c1AVi7H_6LEV C4_Z29WjXl" data-test-id="message-from" style="flex-shrink: 0; font-weight: 700;"><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;">John Murphy<span class="u_N C_Z1VRqsb c1AVi73_6FsP c1AVi7H_6LEV" style="color: #828a93; font-weight: 400;"> <jcmurphy1@comcast.net></span></span></span></div><div class="d_6FIA i_6FIA c1AVi7H_6LEV c1AVi73_6FsP D_F eo_HB" style="display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; line-height: 18px; min-height: 18px;"><span class="u_b E_eo6 C_Z1TsNbA" style="color: #979ea8; font-weight: 700; margin-right: 4px;">To:</span><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span class="C4_Z29WjXl" data-test-id="message-to" title="philabooks@yahoo.com">philabooks@yahoo.com</span></span></div></div><span class="em_N en_N" style="flex-grow: 1; flex-shrink: 1;"></span><div class="en_0 s_6Fd5 H_6Fd5 M_3gJOe cdPFi_Z281SGl O_cMr O4_cMu" style="fill: rgb(29, 34, 40); flex-shrink: 0; height: 16px; margin: 0px 8px; min-width: 16px; opacity: 0.5;"><button class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-printer" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Print" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><g><path d="M13.8 13.5H6.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h7.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15.5 3.2c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7H5.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v3.3h11V3.2z"></path><path d="M17.3 8H2.7c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v6.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4.3-.7.7-.7h10.6c.4 0 .7.3.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.6.7h.7c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7V8.7c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15 11c-.6 0-1-.4-1-1s.4-1 1-1 1 .4 1 1-.4 1-1 1z"></path></g></svg></span></button></div><div class="D_F en_0 M_3gJOe A_6Eb4 c1AVi73_6EWk C_Z1VRqsb" data-test-id="message-date" style="color: #828a93; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 8px;">Fri, 13 Jan at 18:50</div><div class="D_F ab_CI en_0 H_6Fd5 W_6Fd5 lv_1IWXzk h_Z13pql2 h4_2d9T5e" style="align-items: flex-start; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; height: 16px; transform: scale(1); transition: transform 0.1s linear 0s; width: 16px;"><button aria-label="This message is not starred" aria-pressed="false" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-star" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Star" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 16px;"><svg class="D_X W_6Fd5 H_6Fd5 cdPFi_Z1WBuqm cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><path d="M9.242 1.762a.83.83 0 01.766-.512c.336 0 .637.2.77.508l2.179 5.183 5.402.176c.739.024 1.082.93.547 1.442l-4.133 3.984 1.11 5.105c.168.961-.649 1.235-1.051 1.043l-4.82-2.683-4.89 2.683c-.411.196-1.216-.093-1.052-1.043l1.18-5.105-4.156-3.984C.559 8.047.902 7.14 1.64 7.117l5.425-.176zm.77 2.472L8.187 8.582l-4.503.148 3.402 3.258-.98 4.254 3.91-2.148 3.855 2.148-.922-4.258 3.383-3.254-4.496-.152zm0 0"></path></svg></span></button></div></header></div><div data-test-id="message-body-container" style="color: #1d2228; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><div class="I_ZkbNhI D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="background-color: white; display: table; width: 811px;"><div class="X_6MGW" style="padding-left: 24px;"></div><div class="msg-body P_wpofO mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 2px 0px 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word;"><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"><div dir="ltr">I appreciate very much your efforts on be half of John O’Hara whom I admire greatly.<br /></div><div dir="ltr">I am trying to locate the story he wrote which was set on a trans Atlantic passage. Do you recall the title and in which collection it may be found.<br /></div><div dir="ltr">Thank you.<br /></div><div dir="ltr">Jcm<br /></div><div dir="ltr">443-956-8711<br /></div><div dir="ltr">410-625-4828</div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-27250390509825512112022-02-06T15:04:00.007-05:002022-02-06T15:04:55.753-05:00Wright On!<p><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"> <span style="font-family: Allerta;">Carol Ritter Wright</span></span></b></p><div><header aria-label="Message" class="r_BN D_F W_6D6F p_R P_Zjgzuf ir_0" style="cursor: default; display: flex; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px 16px; position: relative; width: 1013px;"><div class="o_h D_F em_0 E_fq7 ek_BB" data-test-id="address-info" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 8px; overflow: hidden;"><div class="D_F en_0" style="display: flex; flex-shrink: 0;"><span class="u_b en_0 C4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="message-from" style="flex-shrink: 0; font-weight: 700;"><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span class="u_N C_Z1VRpVF" style="color: #828c93; font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"> <ritterwrightc@gmail.com></span></span></span></span></div><div class="d_6FIA i_6FIA D_F eo_HB" style="display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; line-height: 18px; min-height: 18px;"><span class="u_b E_eo6 C_Z1TsNWR" style="color: #979ba7; font-weight: 700; margin-right: 4px;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">To:</span></span><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span class="C4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="message-to" title="oharasociety-mail@yahoo.com"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">oharasociety-mail@yahoo.com</span></span></span></div></div><span class="em_N en_N" style="flex-grow: 1; flex-shrink: 1;"></span><div class="en_0 s_6Fd5 H_6Fd5 M_3gJOe cdPFi_Z281SGl O_cMr O4_cMu" style="fill: rgb(29, 34, 40); flex-shrink: 0; height: 16px; margin: 0px 8px; min-width: 16px; opacity: 0.5;"><button class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-printer" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Print" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><g></g></svg><span style="font-family: Allerta;"><path d="M13.8 13.5H6.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h7.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15.5 3.2c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7H5.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v3.3h11V3.2z"></path><path d="M17.3 8H2.7c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v6.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4.3-.7.7-.7h10.6c.4 0 .7.3.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.6.7h.7c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7V8.7c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15 11c-.6 0-1-.4-1-1s.4-1 1-1 1 .4 1 1-.4 1-1 1z"></path></span></span></button></div><div class="D_F en_0 M_3gJOe A_6Eb4 C_Z1VRpVF" data-test-id="message-date" style="color: #828c93; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">Mon, 31 Jan at 12:39</span></div><div class="D_F ab_CI Y_68F4 en_0 cdPFi_ZpQYvz H_6MGW W_6MGW lv_1IWXzk h_Z13pql2 h4_2d9T5e" style="align-items: flex-start; display: flex; fill: rgb(224, 228, 233); flex-shrink: 0; height: 24px; margin-top: -4px; transform: scale(1); transition: transform 0.1s linear 0s; width: 24px;"><button aria-label="This message is not starred" aria-pressed="false" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-star" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Star" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 24px;"><svg class="D_X W_6MGW H_6MGW cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"></svg><span style="font-family: Allerta;"><path d="M15.718 8.35a.501.501 0 00-.47-.35h-3.656l-1.13-3.475a.494.494 0 00-.94 0L8.393 8H4.736a.501.501 0 00-.29.902l2.958 2.152-1.13 3.482a.495.495 0 00.76.553l2.958-2.152 2.958 2.152a.493.493 0 00.76-.553l-1.13-3.482 2.959-2.152a.495.495 0 00.18-.553z"></path></span></span></button></div></header></div><div data-test-id="message-body-container"><div class="I_52qC D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; display: table; font-size: 13px; width: 1013px;"><div class="X_6MGW" style="padding-left: 24px;"></div><div class="msg-body P_wpofO mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="line-height: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 2px 0px 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word;"><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">Add my name, please, to the list - however short it may be, alas - of individuals who always remember our man John O’Hara on his January 31 birthday.<br /></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"> I think it’s time to reread another one of his books. I do that rather often. Being confined so much for the past couple of years as disease raged around us, I think many of us have relished the written word and enjoyed the treasures we find in our libraries.<br /></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"> So let’s all think kindly of John O’Hara today and thank ourselves silently - or at the top of our lungs, if we choose - for having discovered and cherished his works.<br /></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">Carol Ritter Wright<br /></span></div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">from a still-snowy suburb of Rochester NY</span></div></div></div><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"></div></div><div class="H_7jIs D_F ab_C Q_69H5 E_36RhU" data-test-id="toolbar-hover-area" style="align-items: center; background-color: white; color: #1d2228; display: flex; font-family: YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; height: 64px; margin-left: -8px; margin-right: -20px;"><div class="D_F W_6D6F r_BN gl_C" data-test-id="card-toolbar" style="cursor: default; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 1041px;"></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-26922821270116330392021-10-07T11:02:00.003-04:002021-11-02T11:44:10.901-04:00BOOKS FOR SALE<p> <span face="YahooSans, "Helvetica Neue", "Segoe UI", Helvetica, Arial, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif" style="color: #1d2228; font-family: Allerta; font-size: 13px; font-weight: 700;">Frank Van Eck</span></p><header aria-label="Message" class="r_BN D_F W_6D6F p_R P_Zjgzuf ir_0" style="color: #1d2228; cursor: default; display: flex; font-size: 13px; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px 16px; position: relative; width: 996px;"><div class="o_h D_F em_0 E_fq7 ek_BB" data-test-id="address-info" style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 8px; overflow: hidden;"><div class="D_F en_0" style="display: flex; flex-shrink: 0;"><span class="u_b en_0 C4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="message-from" style="flex-shrink: 0; font-weight: 700;"><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span class="u_N C_Z1VRpVF" style="color: #828c93; font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"> <frank.vaneck@vaneckverlag.li></span></span></span></span></div><div class="d_6FIA i_6FIA D_F eo_HB" style="display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap; line-height: 18px; min-height: 18px;"><span class="u_b E_eo6 C_Z1TsNWR" style="color: #979ba7; font-weight: 700; margin-right: 4px;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">To:</span></span><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span class="C4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="message-to" title="philabooks@yahoo.com"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">philabooks@yahoo.com</span></span></span></div></div><span class="em_N en_N" style="flex-grow: 1; flex-shrink: 1;"></span><div class="en_0 s_6Fd5 H_6Fd5 M_3gJOe cdPFi_Z281SGl O_cMr O4_cMu" style="fill: rgb(29, 34, 40); flex-shrink: 0; height: 16px; margin: 0px 8px; min-width: 16px; opacity: 0.5;"><button class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-printer" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Print" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; font-family: Allerta; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><g><path d="M13.8 13.5H6.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h7.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15.5 3.2c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7H5.2c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v3.3h11V3.2z"></path><path d="M17.3 8H2.7c-.4 0-.7.3-.7.7v6.6c0 .4.3.7.7.7h.6c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7v-2.6c0-.4.3-.7.7-.7h10.6c.4 0 .7.3.7.7v2.6c0 .4.3.7.6.7h.7c.4 0 .7-.3.7-.7V8.7c0-.4-.3-.7-.7-.7zM15 11c-.6 0-1-.4-1-1s.4-1 1-1 1 .4 1 1-.4 1-1 1z"></path></g></svg></span></button></div><div class="D_F en_0 M_3gJOe A_6Eb4 C_Z1VRpVF" data-test-id="message-date" style="color: #828c93; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px 8px;"><span style="font-family: Allerta;">Thu, 7 Oct at 10:46</span></div><div class="D_F ab_CI Y_68F4 en_0 cdPFi_ZpQYvz H_6MGW W_6MGW lv_1IWXzk h_Z13pql2 h4_2d9T5e" style="align-items: flex-start; display: flex; fill: rgb(224, 228, 233); flex-shrink: 0; height: 24px; margin-top: -4px; transform: scale(1); transition: transform 0.1s linear 0s; width: 24px;"><button aria-label="This message is not starred" aria-pressed="false" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2hYGcu A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-star" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; appearance: none; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; font-size: 13px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Star" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 24px;"><svg class="D_X W_6MGW H_6MGW cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"><path d="M15.718 8.35a.501.501 0 00-.47-.35h-3.656l-1.13-3.475a.494.494 0 00-.94 0L8.393 8H4.736a.501.501 0 00-.29.902l2.958 2.152-1.13 3.482a.495.495 0 00.76.553l2.958-2.152 2.958 2.152a.493.493 0 00.76-.553l-1.13-3.482 2.959-2.152a.495.495 0 00.18-.553z"></path></span></svg></span></button></div></header><div data-test-id="message-body-container" style="color: #1d2228; font-size: 13px;"><div class="I_52qC D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="background-color: white; display: table; width: 996px;"><div class="X_6MGW" style="padding-left: 24px;"></div><div class="msg-body P_wpofO mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="line-height: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 2px 0px 0px; position: relative; word-break: break-word;"><div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;"><div id="yiv2208850101"><div class="yiv2208850101WordSection1"><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Dear Sir, or Madam,</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">We possess a collection of 1<sup>st</sup> edition John O’Hara books.</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Would you be interested in purchasing them? </span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">We could send you a listing with bibliographical details.</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Looking forward to the pleasure of hearing from you,</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Yours sincerely,</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Frank P. van Eck</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">********************</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">VAN </span><span style="font-size: 16pt;">E</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">CK </span><span style="font-size: 16pt;">V</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;">ERLAG</span></span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">Haldenweg 8</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">FL-9495 Triesen</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;">00423-392 30 00</span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="mailto:info@vaneckverlag.li" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" style="color: blue;" target="_blank" ymailto="mailto:info@vaneckverlag.li">info@vaneckverlag.li</a></span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.vaneckverlag.li/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" style="color: blue;" target="_blank">www.vaneckverlag.li</a></span></p><p class="yiv2208850101MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Allerta; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-66020981259380379442021-08-23T21:11:00.000-04:002021-08-23T21:11:12.644-04:00O'HARA WALKING TOUR<p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: trebuchet;">The Schuylkill County Historical Society will present a John O’Hara walking tour on Saturday, Sept. 18. </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zrDcsbfjfQE/YSRG-JdL8zI/AAAAAAAAS68/_K3CQ-rNtXcT9chEP7o_JUkqk83Dwlg1QCLcBGAsYHQ/s225/SchHistoricalSociety.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zrDcsbfjfQE/YSRG-JdL8zI/AAAAAAAAS68/_K3CQ-rNtXcT9chEP7o_JUkqk83Dwlg1QCLcBGAsYHQ/w200-h200/SchHistoricalSociety.jpg" width="200" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: trebuchet;">Participants will meet at the O’Hara statue on Centre Street between Howard Avenue and Mahantongo Street. Fees are $10 for Society members and $15 for the general public. </span></p><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px;" />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-85385950346675000902021-08-13T15:49:00.000-04:002021-08-13T15:49:33.894-04:00GENERATION GAP?<p><span style="font-size: large;"><b>UVA Professor's Students Disagree with </b></span></p><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>His Analysis of a John O'Hara Short Story. </b></span><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><span style="font-size: large;"><b>Are They Right? Or, He?</b></span><div><b><br /></b></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><b>Professor Matthew Davis Explains:</b></i></span></div><div><br /></div><div>What does it mean when three hundred bright college students disagree with your interpretation of a story? Or rather, what does it mean when you teach a story to three hundred students over the course of sixteen semesters and those students come up with all sorts of interesting ideas about the story, but not a single one of them comes up with the set of ideas that seems most plausible to you? </div><div><br /></div><div>Those are questions I’ve been asking myself recently -- because these things have happened to me. In English classes at the University of Virginia, I often teach a short story by John O’Hara called “Straight Pool,” and, over the years, my students have floated a wide range of interesting ideas about this story, but none of them have interpreted the story in quite the way I interpret it. </div><div><br /></div><div> “Straight Pool” is a four-page story that I usually teach as an example of a dramatic monologue. It was originally published in The New Yorker in December of 1933 and has been reprinted in a few anthologies over the years, including Points of View, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny. </div><div><br /></div><div> In the story we overhear a man speaking to a buddy while the two of them are shooting pool in a pool hall. The narrator sometimes discusses the action on the billiards table, but mostly he talks about his wife, Mae, who has been having crying spells and acting erratically recently. He is completely puzzled by his wife’s crying spells. He doesn’t understand why they occur. He doesn’t understand why they begin or why they end. Sometimes Mae cries. Sometimes she stops crying and just stares at him -- and he can’t understand why. Recently Mae has stopped cooking breakfast and doing the dishes, and she’s taken to getting drunk at night. The narrator says that he took Mae to a doctor, but the doctor found nothing physically wrong with her. </div><div><br /></div><div>He tries to stay with her and comfort her, but he can only stand so much of the crying and odd behavior, and eventually, when he can’t stand it anymore, he evacuates to the pool hall, where he delivers his monologue. There’s one more thing about the husband’s monologue that seems like it might be important to mention: the husband tells his buddy – whose name is Jack McMorrow -- that Mae spends a lot of time talking about . . . Jack McMorrow.</div><div><br /></div><div>It seems Mae has been telling her husband not to go to the pool hall. She says she doesn’t want him to go there and talk to Jack McMorrow about her. The husband says he won’t. She says she doesn’t believe him. She thinks he will go to the pool hall and talk to McMorrow. And in fact he does end up going to the pool hall and talking to McMorrow, so it seems she was right to worry about that. McMorrow and the narrator continue to play pool for awhile while the narrator goes on venting about his wife and her crying spells and the staring and the boozing. </div><div><br /></div><div>At the end of the story, the narrator tells McMorrow that he and Mae have just had a big fight: Yesterday she didn't get up for breakfast, and last night when I came home from work she wouldn't say a word. And then tonight when I came home, the same story over again. Cockeyed [drunk] again. "What's the idea?" I said, and we had it out hot and heavy, but she didn't want me to leave, so I said I'd leave all right, and she was lucky if I came back. I got the hell out of the house as sore as a boil. I guess I oughtn't to be talking about her like this, especially to you, because you're the one she thinks is always talking about her, but I have to talk to somebody. I think I'll go to Brooklyn and get drunk. How about it? . . . What's the matter? You quitting? ... Oh! If I'd of known you had a date, we could of made it twenty-five points. You're ahead anyhow, and I don't feel like shooting much. Guess I'll go to Brooklyn. My brother just got a gallon of apple .... And that his how the story ends – mid sentence. </div><div><br /></div><div>When I teach “Straight Pool,” I always begin by asking my students what they think might be wrong with Mae. Responses vary, but I usually don’t have to call on more than four students before someone says, “I think Mae is having an affair with Jack McMorrow.” Usually several other students immediately chime in to agree with this idea. However, there is always a second group of students who are skeptical or unconvinced by this theory. This is almost always the first major interpretative disagreement about the story that surfaces, and I like to diagram the disagreement on the chalkboard as a fork in a road, where each fork indicates a possible “path of interpretation.” </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>Since forking paths are hard to draw in an essay, I will present questions in boxes, with answers below. </div><div><br /></div><div>Q1: Is Mae cheating with Jack? Yes/probably (60-80%) No/not sure (20-40%) I would estimate that about 60 to 80% of my students say they think that Mae is probably cheating on her husband with Jack McMorrow. </div><div><br /></div><div>The others – 20 to 40% – say they are not convinced that she is. I give these percentages as ranges because the numbers vary from one semester to the next but also because students sometimes change their minds during class discussion. Every year there are some students who initially take the “no/not sure” position but eventually switch to the “yes/probably” position. </div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes there are students who switch in the opposite direction, too. When I ask the suspicious students what makes them think Mae is cheating on the narrator, their responses are usually based more on “gut” feeling than on textual evidence. One student told me, “I just have a feeling.” Another told me that his “spidey sense” told him there was cheating going on. I tell them that their responses interest me and I take them seriously. After all, they are young people who spend a lot of time negotiating the complicated world of dating, in which cheating does occur, so they are likely to have better cheating-detection equipment than an old, married guy like me. On the other hand, I also tell them that they won’t get far as essay-writers if all they have to share with their readers is what their “spidey sense” is telling them.</div><div><br /></div><div>That’s not the sort of evidence we English teachers are looking for! Some suspicious readers point to Jack McMorrow’s saying he has “a date” at the end of the story as a detail that makes them suspicious. They think that date might be an assignation with Mae. Others say, “it could be anyone!” Some say that the fact that Mae talks about Jack McMorrow quite a bit is evidence that she is having an affair with him, but other students say it’s not: “If she’s really cheating with Jack McMorrow, why does she talk about him so much? Wouldn’t she want to conceal his name? Isn’t that Cheating 101?” Some of the suspicious readers suggest that Mae must know it is unwise to talk about Jack but she simply can’t help herself. </div><div><br /></div><div>I call this the “girl can’t help it” school of interpretation. Eventually, we transition to a discussion of why Mae might be crying. This is where I usually begin to encounter a wider variety of interpretations, which I will attempt to summarize below.</div><div><br /></div><div> Q1: Is Mae cheating with Jack? Q2: Why does Mae cry? Yes/probably (60-80%) A. She cries because she is genuinely upset about the situation (80-90%) B. She cries strategically to achieve a goal (10-20%) No/not sure (20-40%) C. She cries for medical reasons (2%) D. She cries for some psychological reason unrelated to cheating, e.g. marital unhappiness (94%) E. She cries because Jack McMorrow sexually assaulted her (4%) </div><div><br /></div><div> I have printed question 2 next to question 1 in the table above because it is clear that these two questions are connected in certain ways. Students who think Mae is cheating with Jack McMorrow tend to account for her crying in different ways than students who doubt that she is cheating. Among students who suspect that Mae is cheating, 80-90% conclude that she is cheating but is genuinely upset about what she has done. This interpretative path – which can be summarized, Yes, A – turns out to be the most popular interpretation in virtually every class I teach. </div><div><br /></div><div>Often it is the majority position. Although it is popular with all students, it seems to be especially popular with female students. Many of the young ladies I teach seem to feel that men cheat and don’t even feel bad about it whereas women cheat but at least have the decency to feel guilty about it. Among students who suspect that Mae is cheating, there are almost always a few who are skeptical about the view I have just outlined and take a darker, less charitable view of Mae. </div><div><br /></div><div>These readers suspect Mae not only of cheating but also of crying strategically. They think she is crying to achieve a particular objective. When asked what that objective might be, many say that they think Mae is trying to cry the narrator out of the house so she can get rid of him and have a chance to rendez-vous with Jack. </div><div><br /></div><div>These readers make up the hard core of the suspicious group; I call them super-suspicious readers. Over the years, I would say that perhaps two-thirds of the super-suspicious readers have been males. “Why does Mae cry?” turns out to be a difficult question for readers who don’t think Mae is cheating, and many readers in this camp cheerfully admit they don’t know why she is crying. Some suggest psychological reasons. Maybe she’s depressed. Or maybe she’s preoccupied with something unrelated to Jack McMorrow. Maybe she’s unhappy in her marriage but not actually cheating. </div><div><br /></div><div>A few think there must be some physical problem, even though the doctor couldn’t find one. In recent years, some students have begun to suggest that perhaps Mae did have intimate contact with Jack McMorrow, but perhaps it was not voluntary sex. Perhaps she was sexually assaulted by Jack McMorrow at some point in the past. Proponents of this view say that it provides an answer to the question of why Mae talks so much about McMorrow. She wouldn’t do that, they say, if she were having a voluntary affair with him. In that case, she would try to conceal his name. Frequently mentioning his name but urging her husband not to talk with him would make more sense if Mae is ashamed and does not want her husband to find out about the assault – or if she just doesn’t want him to have anything to do with a man who assaulted her. This theory is put forward mostly by young women and has become more popular in recent years. However, it remains very much a minority opinion. There is another school of interpretation that I need to mention, and that is what I call the “genius husband” interpretation. </div><div><br /></div><div>This can be illustrated by placing another question in a box and then appending the different answers students give. Q1: Is Mae cheating with Jack? Q3: Does the husband know Mae is cheating? Yes/probably (60-80%) Yes. (2%) No. (98%) No/not sure (20-40%) (Not applicable) Among those who think Mae is cheating, the overwhelming majority of readers – I would estimate 98% -- believe that the narrator does not know what is going on. They think that this is part of what the story is about: it is ironic that the narrator who tells the story doesn’t understand the real cause of the behavior he is describing, whereas savvy, clued-in, suspicious readers of the story do. </div><div><br /></div><div>According to this line of thinking, the husband-narrator is “a dupe,” “a dope,” a “shmo.” He is “clueless,” “completely in the dark.” But he is also a victim. “Poor guy,” one of my students said, “Here he is trying to be extra nice to Mae and staying home with her and spending ‘quality time’ with her, and she is out fooling around on him. I feel sorry for him!” Such sympathetic sentiments are voiced much more often by men than by women. Most readers – male and female alike -- think that the narrator does not understand what is actually going on. However, not everyone agrees. </div><div><br /></div><div>A few readers think that Mae is cheating and the narrator actually has figured out what she and Jack are up to and is in the process of confirming his theory. These readers believe the narrator is deliberately pretending to be clueless and then promising to go to Brooklyn, to see if he can lure Jack McMorrow to his house and catch him in bed with Mae. “It’s all a trap, you see!” </div><div><br /></div><div>This theory has relatively few advocates. They are mostly men, and, for whatever reason, they tend to be men who are very proud of themselves for having come up with this theory. They tend to think that this theory clears up all of the difficulties in the story. According to their interpretation, the narrator is not a clueless dupe; he’s a genius who’s fishing for a cheater – and is about to catch one. There’s one last question I need to set out here. It’s another question on which I find that most students agree, and yet there are still two schools of thought. Q4: Does Mae want her husband to speak with Jack McMorrow? Yes. (< 1%) No. (> 99%) Interestingly, I find myself in the tiny sliver of readers who say “yes.” Actually, it’s worse than that: I am the sliver. That is, I am the only person who says yes, Mae wants her husband to speak with Jack McMorrow. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of the 300 people in my classes who have discussed this story over the years, I seem to be the only one who thinks that Mae actually wants her husband to speak with Jack McMorrow. I grant that this is a surprising opinion to hold -- because Mae spends a fair amount of time telling her husband, “Don’t you go to that pool hall and talk to Jack McMorrow!” I can account for my peculiar views on this point, but I prefer to do so by circling back and revisiting the four questions set out above. II The first question, as you may recall, was “Is Mae cheating with Jack?” On this question, I agree with the majority of my students. I think Mae is cheating on her husband with Jack McMorrow. </div><div><br /></div><div>I thought this might be the case the very first time I read the story, but I did not initially have much of an evidentiary basis for my view. I have developed one over time, though. Oddly enough, I convinced myself that there is probably hanky-panky going on when I sat down and reconstructed the pool game that is unfolding in the background while the narrator talks about Mae. </div><div><br /></div><div>The narrator and Jack McMorrow agree to play straight pool -- a variety of billiards for two players, in which there are fourteen balls to be sunk in each frame, and each ball is worth a point – and they agree to play until one player reaches 50 points. But the narrator has not been playing much pool recently -- he’s been spending a lot of time at home with Mae – so Jack agrees to spot him ten points. That is the initial agreement, or contract, and what is important to notice is that Jack McMorrow initially agrees to a nice long evening of straight pool. Of course, it’s impossible to say how long the game will last. That will depend on how well the two men play, and how evenly matched they are. </div><div><br /></div><div>If the players are poor shooters or having an off night, it could take a long time for either player to get to 50 points. But even if both players are playing well, it could take quite a while. Suppose the two of them are very evenly matched; in that case they could conceivably play until the score is 49-49 and until the deciding ball falls, tipping the match to 50-49. That would mean 89 balls sunk in all. (It’s 89, rather than 99, because we have to subtract the ten points that Jack spotted the narrator.) In order to reach that point, the two men would have to complete six whole racks of straight pool and then set out a seventh. (89 balls divided by 14 balls per frame of straight pool = 6.36 racks.) </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course, if the competition is more lopsided, they might end up playing less pool. If Jack McMorrow were to make every shot and run the table, he could reach fifty points in four frames (14 + 14 + 14 + 8); and if the narrator were to make all of his shots and run the table, he could get to 50 points in three frames (10 point spot + 14 balls + 14 balls + 12 balls). But these extremely lopsided scenarios are extremely unlikely. It is more likely that the two men will need to play at least five racks of fourteen balls – and possibly six or seven. What does all of this have to do with the question of whether Jack and Mae are cheating? I’ll get to that soon; I promise! </div><div><br /></div><div> I’ve said a little about how much pool the two men might have played if they had played on to the agreed-upon stopping point. But, of course, they don’t do that. I therefore need to change direction and look at how much pool the two of them actually play before they quit for the night. This can be puzzled out from details in the story. It is clear that Jack and the narrator play one complete frame of straight pool, which Jack wins, ten balls to four: “That makes it ten to four this frame,” the narrator says (p. 33). To calculate the running score, however, we need to factor in the ten balls Jack spotted the narrator; so, the running score at the end of the first frame must be Jack: 10, Narrator: 14. The two men then call for the rack boy or rack girl, whose name is “Snowball,” to re-rack the balls in preparation for their second rack of straight pool: “Hey, Snowball, rack ‘em up” (p. 33). </div><div><br /></div><div>The second rack of balls is set out on the table and the players begin to sink balls, but they do not finish off the rack. The narrator begins this rack by going on his “high run,” sinking three balls in a row (p. 33); so he must have at least 17 points in total. But then Jack sinks several balls and we are told that he is ahead when they decide to quit (p. 35). If Jack is ahead, he must have at least 18 points, to the narrator’s 17. The score could be 18-17, 19-17, or 20-17. It is probably not 21-17 or 22-17, though, because the narrator never calls for Snowball to re-rack the balls, as he would presumably do if all 14 balls in the second frame had been sunk. What happens at this point is that the narrator mentions that he might go to Brooklyn later and get drunk, and then Jack announces that he’s quitting. I think I'll go to Brooklyn and get drunk. How about it? . . . What's the matter? You quitting? ... Oh! If I'd of known you had a date, we could of made it twenty-five points. You're ahead anyhow . . . It’s suspicious that Jack mentions a date, as my students point out, but what makes it more suspicious is the timing. Jack does not reveal that he has a date at the beginning of the night; he does not mention this until after the narrator says he is thinking he will go to Brooklyn for a few hours. </div><div><br /></div><div>That raises the possibility that Jack doesn’t actually decide that he has a date until the husband mentions his plan to go to Brooklyn. And what makes the whole situation even more suspicious is that this “date” seems to represent a revision of Jack’s original plan for the evening. Earlier in the evening, Jack indicated that he was willing to play four, five, six, or even seven frames of straight pool with the narrator. He evidently made no mention of a date at that point. </div><div><br /></div><div>By agreeing to play so much pool, he seemed to be implicitly indicating that he did not have anything else he wanted or needed to do. However, once the narrator declares his intention to go to Brooklyn for several hours, Jack suddenly decides to quit playing pool -- before he and the narrator have even finished the second frame! It’s this sudden revision of plans, more than anything, that makes me think Jack is up to something. At the beginning of the story, he seems to tacitly declare that he has nothing in particular to do all night; he is perfectly willing to play pool till the wee hours. However, as soon as he learns that the narrator will be away from home for a few hours, he thinks of something he would rather do than shoot pool all night. To make a long story short, a close look at the initial “contract” for the pool game and the hasty termination of the game have led me to conclude the suspicious readers are probably right. Mae and Jack are probably having an affair. The second interpretative question introduced above was “Why does Mae cry?” </div><div><br /></div><div>On this question I side with super-suspicious readers who think that Mae is crying strategically. This is a problematic claim, I grant you, because usually when people cry they do so because they are genuinely upset. There’s not a lot of pretend-crying in the world, and it’s a difficult thing to do persuasively. Therefore, our initial presumption should be that a person is crying because he or she is genuinely upset. </div><div><br /></div><div>That assumption is going to be correct most of the time. In Mae’s case, however, there are some details that make me think we need to reconsider this initial presumption. In his monologue, the husband describes a curious pattern of crying and stopping and staring: You know I'm not a hard guy to get along with. At least I don't think I am, but Mae gets these crying spells, and honest to God, I can't stay in the house another minute. And then if I say I'm going out, even if it's only for a pack of cigarettes, why, she suddenly all of a sudden stops crying and sits there looking at me, not saying a word, and it's worse than her crying. I don't know what makes her do that. (32) What’s odd here is that Mae seems to be able to stop crying on a dime. Most genuinely hysterical people can’t do that. </div><div><br /></div><div>That should make us suspicious; it should make us wonder if she is turning the waterworks on and off, like a fountain, in order to attain some objective. It is important to note that the narrator is not describing something that happened once and once only. He is using the habitual present tense to describe an ongoing pattern of behavior: “Mae gets these crying spells . . . . and then if I say I'm going out . . . she . . . stops crying and sits there looking at me.” It’s also important to note that all of these instances the narrator is summarizing seem to end with Mae staring at the narrator. It’s risky to interpret what that staring might mean; it could mean a lot of things. However, what I think it means in this case is, roughly, “You said you were going to leave: why are you still here?” Staring often has the effect of making people feel uncomfortable, and it looks to me like Mae is trying to make her husband feel uncomfortable about sticking around. </div><div><br /></div><div>In short, I agree with the suspicious readers who believe that Mae is trying to cry her husband out of the house. It looks like she may have begun with a simple cry-him-out strategy and then moved on to a more complicated cry-and-stare strategy. She cries until he declares his intention to leave; then she switches from crying to staring. Unfortunately for Mae, these tactics do not have the intended effect. Her husband responds to her crying and staring by spending more time with her and not wanting to leave her alone: “honest, I'm afraid to leave her alone. When she gets in one of these spells, she's liable to do anything, so I very seldom leave” (p. 32). </div><div><br /></div><div>This is ironic for us, as readers, but it must be very annoying for Mae. As time goes by, she seems to try out other strategies for driving her husband out of the house. She stops fixing breakfast, stops doing the dishes (p. 33), and starts getting “cockeyed drunk with a bottle of gin” (p. 34). All of these actions can be viewed as genuine, spontaneous symptoms of distress, but all of them can also be viewed as motivated actions: if I can’t cry him out, maybe I can piss him off by neglecting my household duties or getting blotto. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am inclined to interpret them as motivated actions. In my interpretation, Mae has been cheating with Jack McMorrow and is eager to do so again. However, in order to do that, she has to get her husband to leave her alone. That is prerequisite for cheating, after all: you can’t do it until your spouse leaves your side. She tries to cry her husband out of the house, and when that fails she omits her household duties and starts getting drunk. This last strategy is ultimately successful. The narrator gets to the point where he can’t stand being home anymore and heads out for the pool hall. In short, there seems to a method in Mae’s madness. The third interpretative question was “Does the husband know that Mae is cheating?” I believe he does not. I agree with the students who argue that the story is meant to be ironic. </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s ironic because the narrator doesn’t understand the true significance of the tale he is telling, and it’s ironic because he responds to the situation (her infidelity and the resulting behaviors) be trying to be more and more attentive to her, which is exactly the opposite of what she wants. As a married man, I find this to be a rather painful sort of irony, but it is irony nonetheless. Now this brings us back to question 4: Does Mae want her husband to speak with Jack McMorrow? </div><div><br /></div><div> This is where I disagree with . . . everybody. I think Mae probably does want her husband to go to the pool hall and talk with Jack, even though she says pretty much the exact opposite. I reason thusly: Mae is apparently cheating on her husband with Jack, and she seems to be adopting various manipulative strategies to try to get her husband out of the house. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now, with those two ideas in mind, let’s look what happens in the story (or what I think happens). After Mae gets soused for the second night in a row, the husband bails out and goes the pool hall. He meets up with Jack and they agree to play straight pool -- first man to fifty wins. While they are shooting pool, the husband tells Jack all about his miseries at home and Mae’s odd behavior. Jack learns that Mae is at home and thinking about him. The husband then mentions that he might go to Brooklyn and get drunk later. Would Jack like to join him? No, Jack would not. Jack has a different activity in mind for his evening. He declares that he has a date -- and (I hypothesize) he goes off to meet Mae shortly after the action of the story ends. </div><div><br /></div><div> Now what could be better from Mae’s point of view? Things turn out perfectly for her – and perhaps she wanted them to turn out that way all along. Perhaps she hoped that her husband would become annoyed and go to the pool hall and talk with Jack. That would at least get him out of the house; and if he happened to talk about her with his buddy (as men often do), that would let Jack know how Mae feels; and if he happened to talk about his plans for the evening, that would let Jack know that he has a window of opportunity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Good, better, best! Now, if this line of interpretation is correct, it means that Mae is not just a cheater. She is a sort of superstar of cheating. Indeed, she has pulled off an astonishing coup: she has managed to send a message to her lover using her husband. She has sent Jack McMorrow a husband-gram, and Jack McMorrow has received the message. As for the husband, he has delivered the message, but he doesn’t even realize he has done so! Surely that is one of the great achievements in the history of infidelity! </div><div><br /></div><div>I would rank it right up there with the achievements of “handy” Nicholas in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. One does not wish to encourage such behavior, but one has to admire the intelligence employed, even if for ignoble ends. </div><div><br /></div><div>I should also note that this interpretation makes an ironic story even more ironic because the difference between what the narrator understands and what we think is really happening grows even larger. As we have seen, the interpretation I have been sketching can be encapsulated as a set of answers to the four questions set out above: Yes, B, No, Yes. This set of answers puts me in partial agreement with many of my students but it puts me in total agreement with none of them. Sixty to eighty percent of my students agree with me that, yes, Mae is probably cheating on her husband. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am suspicious along with those students. In addition, Perhaps 6% of my students agree with me that Mae is not only cheating and but also crying strategically to get her husband out of the house (2.B). I am super-suspicious of Mae, along with those readers. But nobody (so far!) agrees with my idea that Mae actually wants her husband to go to the pool hall and speak with Jack McMorrow (4.D). I have this super-duper-suspicious interpretation all to myself. When three hundred bright people disagree with you and zero agree, it’s usually time to rethink your position. Perhaps I should, but I’m not convinced that my interpretation is wrong. </div><div><br /></div><div>In fact, my way of reading the story seems to me to fit in pretty well with what I know about John O’Hara’s modus operandi as a writer: Although I am not an expert on his work, I have read enough of it to know that marital infidelity is a subject he returned to again and again – and also that he likes situational irony.1 </div><div><br /></div><div>I also feel that my interpretation accounts for the details in the story better than any of the alternative views. At this point I would revisit some of those alternative views and indicate briefly why I find them less persuasive. </div><div><br /></div><div> The majority view (Yes, A, No, No). Adherents of this view think that Mae is cheating and her husband doesn’t know, but she herself feels awful about it, and that’s why she cries. I call this “the cheater with a heart of gold” theory, just to agitate the students who adopt it. Unfortunately, given the patterns of crying, stopping on a dime, and staring that we have observed, I think it is much more likely that Mae is a cheater with a mind of gold. (About her heart, perhaps the less said the better.) </div><div><br /></div><div>As far as Mae is concerned, I am reminded of the old legal principle: falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus. It looks like Mae is false in one way (In her motivated crying); so we have good reason for suspecting she may be false in other ways as well. </div><div><br /></div><div> The “no cheating view” -- No, C/D, not applicable, not applicable. Adherents believe that Mae is not cheating on her husband and must therefore be crying for some other reason, either psychological or physical. I have had some delightful, pure-hearted students who adopt this position. These students seem not to want to think badly of Mae -- or anyone else. That is a generous and humane response, but it ignores the evidence about Jack and Mae rehearsed above and leaves these students with no very good explanation of what the story is about. Why might O’Hara have thought this story was worth telling? What might he be trying to do? What might be the point of the story? Students who follow this interpretive path have difficulty answering these basic questions. For them the story is just a slice of life – and a mysterious one. </div><div><br /></div><div> The sexual assault hypothesis -- No, E, No, No. Adherents maintain that Mae has had intimate contact with Jack McMorrow but against her will. I think this is a very clever theory, and some of my students have shown me in papers that it really does account for a lot of details in the story. However, there are some things it does not account for very well, and the most important of these is the husband’s trip to Waterbury. This is an episode in the story that I have not had occasion to mention previously. At one point during Mae’s days of crying and staring, the narrator has to go to Waterbury, CT, for a family funeral. He invites Mae to accompany him but she declines. Surely her decision to stay at home is more consistent with her wanting to be left alone (possibly for cheating) than with her wanting to stay with her husband at all times in order to be protected from Jack McMorrow. </div><div><br /></div><div>Why would Mae stay at home by herself, in the territory of predatory Jack McMorrow, if she could go to Waterbury and be safe with her husband? What I suspect is happening with this school of interpretation is that current issues, including the exposure of predatory males like Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein and the proliferation of #me too stories in the press, have encouraged readers (and particularly female readers) to find something in the story that probably was no part of O’Hara’s intention back in the 1930s. </div><div><br /></div><div>As readers, we do this all the time: we find contemporary significance in older stories, and it’s a good thing we do. But the significance of a story for a particular reader is not the same thing as authorial meaning, and that’s something I am interested in this case: authorial meaning. </div><div><br /></div><div> The “genius husband” interpretation -- Yes, B, Yes, (unclear) Adherents believe that the husband/narrator is not a dupe (as many readers think) but a savvy detective, who, in true Sherlock Holmes fashion, has solved the case and is now springing a trap to catch Jack McMorrow and his wife in the act. Again, it’s a very clever theory, and I’ve had students write excellent works of “companion fiction” describing what they think goes down back at the narrator’s house later in the night. (Things get broken!) I’m not sure I have an argument that refutes this interpretation absolutely, but I nevertheless feel that my theory is more plausible overall. One thing that troubles me about this theory is that it leaves us with a completely irony-free story. According to this line of thought, the whole monologue is a set speech – a fiction within the fiction -- that has been worked up by the husband for the express purpose of trapping Jack McMorrow. The husband dangles the speech in front of McMorrow like a fisherman dropping a lure in the water. And Jack seems to take the bait. Mission accomplished! </div><div><br /></div><div>High five! There is absolutely no irony in this reading, but that’s a problem for me – because I feel like there’s a lot of irony in the story. Now you may be wondering what students have had to say about my own theory over the years. The truth is, they haven’t said very much – because they haven’t really had the time it would require. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time listening to student theories and reviewing evidence relating to questions 1 and 2, and sometimes also question 3, but I’ve only occasionally had enough class time to fight my way through to question 4; and, on those few occasions when I have been able to address that question, I have found that my theory is met with uniform incredulity. The students are unpersuaded and mostly sit in puzzled silence. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps it’s too much to take in all at once, especially at the end of class; or perhaps the students just don’t want to offend their professor; or perhaps my theory really is bonkers. At any rate, the students tilt their heads in puzzlement and seem glad when the period ends, allowing them to scamper off to Microeconomics class. Their reaction doesn’t really surprise me. After all, Mae says several times that she does not want her husband to go to the pool hall and talk with Jack McMorrow, and usually people say what they mean. It takes a pretty complicated theory to explain why Mae might not be saying what she really means, and I have never had enough time to set out my theory in great detail. (At least not until now!) It could be that my theory is just not plausible, and that’s why none of my students go for it. </div><div><br /></div><div>But I think there may be another reason why students don’t ever seem to come up with this theory on their own and tend to be very skeptical when I present it in the last few minutes of class. I believe I am having trouble selling my theory partly because I am teaching the cellphone generation. My students have grown up with cell phones. They have grown up with direct messaging, Snapchat, Instagram, and probably a half dozen other platforms for instantaneous communication that I am not even aware of. If a young lady wants to send a message to a man she’s interested in, she needs only two thumbs, his “digits,” and five seconds of typing time. </div><div><br /></div><div>What could be easier? The sexual revolution allows such directness, and cell phones make it practicable, almost effortless. From my discussions with students, I know that texting is in fact the usual method for arranging hook-ups and communicating with a “side guy” or “side chick.” It is an ideal medium for regular communication without detection. In short, the cell phone is the cheater’s best friend. But here’s the thing: Mae didn’t have a cell phone. In fact, in the 1920s and 30s only a small portion of Americans even had private land lines. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>I remember talking to my mother, who grew up in the 1940s. Her family was fairly well off, and they had a telephone in the house, but the line was a “shared line.” This meant that when they picked up the phone, they sometimes heard a dial tone but they sometimes heard other people talking on the shared line. At that point they were supposed to hang up; however, being human beings, they sometimes stayed on the line to try to figure out what the neighbors might be taking about. </div><div><br /></div><div>They had different ideas about appropriate female conduct in those days, too. It was unusual for a married women to go out at night without her husband. Some husbands would not have allowed this; many wives would not have been comfortable doing it. They knew if they did such a thing, eyebrows would be raised. This old way of thinking about gender roles is not quite dead, even today. </div><div><br /></div><div>Some older couples I know still operate on the old expectations; they are not comfortable going anywhere in the evening without their spouse. The story was written the early 1930s, and I think it is likely that Mae is dealing with some of these old-fashioned societal expectations and also with some old-fashioned communication problems. Her husband doesn’t want to leave her in her distress (or seeming distress) – because that’s not what good husbands do. She can’t just run down to the pool hall to see Jack – because that’s not what good wives do. She certainly can’t text Jack McMorrow, and she may not be able to telephone him either. </div><div><br /></div><div>If she doesn’t have a phone, or Jack doesn’t have a phone, or if her husband is with her all through the evening, how on earth will she be able to communicate with the fellow she fancies? Mae could have a serious communication problem – but it’s not a problem that the Instagram youth of 2021 are equipped to understand. Communication is so easy for them that they struggle to understand how difficult it could be in earlier eras. To understand “Straight Pool,” we may need to think ourselves back into the 1930’s. How can Mae, languishing in the cellphone-less 1930s, establish contact with Jack? How can she get a message to him? Well, I think the story shows us. In fact, it shows not just how she might do it, but how she actually does it. Clever lass: she sends her boyfriend a husband-gram. At least that’s my theory. </div><div><br /></div><div>But none of my students agree with me, so maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree. What do you think, reader? </div><div><br /></div><div> Works Cited </div><div><br /></div><div> O’Hara. John. “Straight Pool.”<i> Points of View,</i> ed. James Moffett and Kenneth R. McElhaney. Revised edition. New York: Mentor, 1995. Stambovsky, Phillip. “John O’Hara.” <i>The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story.</i> Ed. Blanche Gelfant. 420-422. </div><div><br /></div><div> 1 In his entry on O’Hara in The Columbia Companion to the 20th Century American Short Story, Phillip Stambovsky notes that O’Hara was fond of “narrative irony” and liked to write about “ungoverned passions,” “adultery,” “sexual betrayal,” “cruelty,” “the breakdown of human relationships” and “suffering . . . of the innocent.” That could be a summary of the themes in “Straight Pool” as I read i</div></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-34316558970357713912021-05-03T19:22:00.005-04:002021-05-03T19:22:53.513-04:00SET 'EM UP, JOE<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9xKCUO_HcZ0/YJCFatsdinI/AAAAAAAARVA/t1t6ZluwBx4Rcix4F-qEVn0jzK8UqonNQCLcBGAsYHQ/s469/Image-1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="336" data-original-width="469" height="458" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9xKCUO_HcZ0/YJCFatsdinI/AAAAAAAARVA/t1t6ZluwBx4Rcix4F-qEVn0jzK8UqonNQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h458/Image-1.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-72500614240381915492021-03-28T15:03:00.000-04:002021-03-28T15:03:04.087-04:00HEMINGWAY ON PBS. DOES O'HARA GET A MENTION?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8fPV1Jm2pGg/YGDSOHhDIvI/AAAAAAAAQvY/MYF3LcvrOLMlPExWHgktVH9CFEGbFv2ZACLcBGAsYHQ/s640/IMG_0022.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="295" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8fPV1Jm2pGg/YGDSOHhDIvI/AAAAAAAAQvY/MYF3LcvrOLMlPExWHgktVH9CFEGbFv2ZACLcBGAsYHQ/w296-h640/IMG_0022.PNG" width="296" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-45174363484469400982020-09-19T13:33:00.001-04:002020-09-19T14:07:26.647-04:00O'HARA, FRAZIER, AND THE SLOW DEATH OF 'DUENDE'<p><b> THANKS FOR CONTENT FORWARDED BY MARK PLOTCZYK</b><br /><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1T5Bg9hRHXU/X2Y-5kO6IpI/AAAAAAAAP3g/uPp-YZCg7MQAzgw3dSR41aIQubcW7eEAgCLcBGAsYHQ/w300-h400/IMG_3216%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="300" /><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="359" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DW4qET2xA4I/X2Y-1wil_OI/AAAAAAAAP3c/AUQULuFA-V4pLLaxNLQ5CX8bbmyfBP8AQCLcBGAsYHQ/w225-h400/IMG_2322.PNG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="225" /> </p><p><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>George Frazier, left, and John O'Hara</b></span></p><p><b style="font-size: x-large;">Garcia Lorca Conceived it, John O'Hara Wore it, George Frazier Popularized it, Brooks Brothers Once Embodied it</b></p><p><b>By Samuel Goldman</b></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bdrop-cap" style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1.1; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px 0.2em 0px 0px;">G</span>eorge Frazier had a story about the first time he met John O’Hara. The journalist and clotheshorse Frazier was introduced to the novelist O’Hara while hanging out at a Greenwich Village jazz club. The famously cranky O’Hara looked Frazier up and down before inviting him to have a drink. “You’re welcome at my table,” he announced. “You’re wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt.”</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Frazier was known for popularizing the idea of <em>duende</em>. A Spanish folk term for a sort of goblin, <em>duende</em> came during the twentieth century to designate “style that’s truly alive”—a quality essential to those icons of Spanish culture, the poet, the flamenco singer, and the bullfighter. Frazier extended the concept to the exemplars of midcentury America. Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, and Miles Davis had <em>duende</em>. So did the Brooks Brothers shirt that they, like Frazier, habitually wore.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">As with any object that possesses <em>duende</em>, it is hard to articulate what is so special about that shirt. It has several distinctive features, but the magic lies almost entirely in the collar. Known as “button-down” to unreflective dressers and a “polo collar” to the enthusiast, the Brooks design involves points that are 3<span style="font-size: 13.5px; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;">3/</span><span style="font-size: 13.5px; line-height: 0; position: relative; vertical-align: baseline;">8</span> inches long and fasten just over three inches apart—almost but not quite half the distance between the top two buttons along the central placket.<span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Through a further alchemy that no one has ever fully explained, this pattern produces a bell-shaped “roll” that flows gently away from the neck before the collar reconnects with the collarbone. Because no man’s neck has exactly the same dimensions as another’s, and no two men knot their ties in just the same way, the exact shape of the roll is unique to each wearer. Even when paired with the soberest of suits, the effect is singular and relaxed without being at all affected or vulgar. As O’Hara saw it, a man who wears a shirt like that is likely to possess the same qualities in other areas.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Yet it is not clear that this man exists anymore, at least in sufficient numbers to sustain the store that once dressed him. In July, Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection and announced it would close its three remaining U.S. factories. For those inclined to seek parallels, the fate of Brooks seems uncomfortably similar to the condition of the country as a whole: mismanaged, overextended, and at risk of evisceration by speculators who care little for its storied history.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">It has become fashionable for apparel brands to emphasize their “heritage,” but Brooks really has one. Founded in Manhattan in 1818, it claims to have provided garments to forty-one of our forty-five chief magistrates. On the night he was assassinated, Lincoln was wearing a Brooks coat with “One Country, One Destiny” embroidered on the lining. Theodore Roosevelt ordered his dress uniforms for the Spanish-American War from Brooks’s then-thriving military tailoring operation.</p><div class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bpaywall yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bjs-paywall-before-article yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bbefore-article" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px auto; text-align: center; width: 570.03px;"><div class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bpaywall-header" style="color: #606162; font-size: 20px; letter-spacing: 2px; text-transform: uppercase;"><br /></div><div class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bpaywall-info" style="float: left; width: 570.03px;"><a class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791blink-read-without-limits" href="https://ssl.drgnetwork.com/ecom/FST/app/live/subscriptions?org=FST&publ=FT&key_code=ESPFA&type=S&gift_key=EZAFT2G" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990100; display: block; margin: 0px auto; width: 370.506px;" target="_blank"></a></div></div><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">More significant than its association with statesmen is Brooks Brothers’s central role in nearly every innovation in American menswear before the Second World War. In 1849, Brooks introduced the ready-to-wear suit, accelerating the transformation of clothing from an artisanal into an industrial product.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">In addition to lowering prices, mass production of clothes encouraged an important aesthetic shift. Prior to the nineteenth century, European men’s clothing had been as intricately constructed, and as rich in color and texture, as women’s. By the dawn of the Victorian Age, menswear had settled on the basic elements of coat, trouser, and shirt in a palette of matte blues, grays, browns, black, and white. These relatively simple, interchangeable items were easier to make and sell on a large scale than their predecessors. Notwithstanding the continuing objections of aesthetic radicals, men’s style has never reversed what psychologist John Flügel called its “Great Renunciation.”</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Brooks continued to provide custom apparel and military garb into the twentieth century, but the No. 1 Sack Suit, introduced in 1901, would become its signature item. A soft, tubular design that fit most men without extensive alterations, the sack suit was a happy compromise between formality and comfort. Quickly replacing the frock coat as standard businesswear, the sack suit was recognized as symbolic of the American way of life, just as closely tailored evening clothes epitomized the English gentleman.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">The same inclination toward practicality informed the company’s other novelties. Brooks specialized in adapting for general use items that the rule-bound British wore only for sports. In this way, such enduring staples as the reverse stripe or “repp” tie, Harris tweed, the camel hair overcoat, and the Shetland sweater entered the American sartorial lexicon. So did that magical shirt, which family scion John E. Brooks claimed was inspired by English polo players’ habit of using pins to hold down their collar points.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">By the early twentieth century, such attire was recognized as the uniform of the American upper class. In <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/This-Side-Paradise-Standard-Classics/dp/1500982318?tag=firstthings20-20" rel="nofollow" style="color: #990100;" target="_blank">This Side of Paradise</a></em>, Amory Blaine’s mother insists that he be supplied with a wardrobe of Brooks suits before setting off for Princeton. John O’Hara, an Irish Catholic who wished desperately that he had attended an Ivy League college, made a point of dressing as if he had. His alter ego in <em>BUtterfield 8</em>, the journalist Jimmy Malloy, laments: “I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I could probably play five-goal polo in two years, but I am still a Mick.”</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bdrop-cap" style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1.1; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px 0.2em 0px 0px;">C</span>ontrol of the company remained within the Brooks family until 1946, when it was sold to the Washington, D.C.–based department store chain Garfinckel’s. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was as part of this Jewish-American retail empire that Brooks Brothers enjoyed its widest appreciation. Adopted by athletes, actors, and musicians of non-patrician background, Brooks became a symbol of democratic prosperity. Shopping at Brooks wasn’t like going to a Savile Row tailor, with his subtly impertinent questioning about whether you dressed on the right or the left. If you had the dough you could walk out of the Madison Avenue flagship looking like the chairman of the board and with your dignity intact.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Not that the chairman of the board was wearing Brooks anymore. After the Second World War (when it promoted resource-saving economies, such as the two-piece suit and the flat-front trouser), Brooks ceased to be top of the line. The brand still benefitted from its association with statesmen, magnates, and celebrities. But its core customer was upper-middle class, upper-middle management, and, as the years wore on, upper-middle-aged. You might enter Brooks hoping to spy Cary Grant, or a Kennedy browsing ties. But for the most part the store was, as the<em> New York Times</em> recently put it, “a pit stop for commuters hopping the train from Grand Central to family life in the suburbs.”</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Mary McCarthy had already used the brand to signify affluence without taste or purpose in her 1942 story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” The eponymous character is a sybarite and cad from Cleveland, of all unprepossessing places. In 1948, Brooks adapted McCarthy’s title for use in its own advertising. (Perhaps the copywriters hadn’t read the original.) In 1964, John Cheever appeared on the cover of <em>Time</em> magazine in what cognoscenti will immediately recognize as one of those legendary shirts. Was the poet laureate of suburban despair upholding the myth or, like McCarthy, mocking it? His quizzical expression makes it impossible to be sure. In the decades after World War II, Americans had come increasingly to regard the bourgeois wardrobe Brooks pioneered as the uniform of soulless conformity.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Of course, the decline of Brooks may be as much a business story as a cultural one. As the company changed hands—from Garfinckel’s to retail conglomerate Allied Stories in 1981, from Allied to British chain Marks & Spencer in 1988, and from M&S to the Retail Brand Alliance in 2001—it expanded from fewer than a dozen stores, all in major U.S. cities, to nearly five hundred locations around the world. Those leases, many in premium locations, were neither cheap nor easy to escape when market conditions changed. So, Brooks was pushed against the wall when the COVID-19 pandemic closed down shopping districts, annihilated demand for new clothing, and stopped flows of free-spending tourists.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Long before the pandemic, Brooks had struggled to adapt to changing tastes. An early embrace of business casual helped the company while competitors succumbed. But shifting its emphasis from suits to sweaters and chinos came at a price. Profit margins are smaller on knits and machine-washable garments than on tailored clothing. In order to make up lost revenue, Brooks had to sell ever larger volumes and find ways to reduce costs.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">The result was a destructive cycle of discounting and quality reduction that undermined the brand without helping its bottom line. Whereas their fathers and grandfathers were proud to buy and wear Brooks, younger men knew the brand as little more than a source for serviceable basics. It didn’t help that Brooks redesigned the famous shirt in the mid-1990s, adding a collar lining that inhibited its elegant roll and alienated loyal customers. A reintroduced version of the classic shirt eschewed the lining, but still was somehow off. In 2015, <em>New Yorker </em>contributor Fran Leibowitz lamented that “I used to buy all my shirts at Brooks, but that was completely ruined.”</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">To recover its cachet, Brooks pursued aesthetic possibilities that cohered poorly with its British-inspired but unmistakably American history. The house look became rather Continental, with suppressed waists and low-rise trousers replacing the classic generous cut. The company also pursued partnerships with fashionable designers such as Thom Browne. The results included some thoughtfully updated classics. But they also included bizarre items like shorts suits and kilts, which must have puzzled most of the customers who chanced to behold them.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">The cantankerous community of online traditional clothing enthusiasts tends to blame such missteps on Claudio Del Vecchio, the Italian billionaire whose company acquired Brooks in 2001 and who is accused of disregarding the company’s importance and influence. But it may be that Del Vecchio simply loved Brooks not wisely but too well—that he did everything imaginable to keep it afloat, without understanding how such desperate measures made it ever less worth saving.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><span class="yiv6023302541ydp4d75791bdrop-cap" style="display: block; float: left; font-size: 4em; line-height: 1.1; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding: 0px 0.2em 0px 0px;">B</span>ankruptcy is not liquidation, and there is every reason to think Brooks will survive in some form. In the worst case, the shops will be closed entirely. Brooks would then live on as a label with no physical existence, producing piles of shoddy goods for sale by other retailers.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">A better case would be retrenchment to core locations and products. Along with successful counterparts abroad, about fifty stores in the U.S. generate the vast majority of the company’s revenue. With trimmed product lines and a renewed commitment to quality, these stores could meet whatever demand survives our present house arrest for reasonably tasteful, reasonably comfortable clothing suitable for meetings, weddings, funerals, and similar occasions.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">But the magnetic power Brooks once enjoyed has long since been forfeited to rivals. These newer brands are able to conjure up Brooks’s old romance with America, unburdened by the sociological baggage.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">The most successful is Ralph Lauren, who worked for Brooks as a salesman in the early 1960s and was later threatened with legal action for appropriating the name “polo” for his own fantasia of Ivy League, classic Hollywood, and the Old West. Competitor J. Press, originally based in New Haven, survives under Japanese ownership, selling the sack suits and heavy tweeds that have vanished from Brooks showrooms. Collegiate stalwart The Andover Shop in Massachusetts and traditionalist O’Connell’s in upstate New York attract pilgrimages from enthusiasts. Specialists Mercer & Sons and Michael Spencer provide facsimiles of the famous Brooks shirts, and Ralph Lauren disciple Sid Mashburn has established a small chain that combines some of the early Brooks flair for mixing formal and casual with a flamboyant, Southern sensibility. Antiquarians Wooden Sleepers and Crowley Vintage unearth troves of “golden age” Brooks material for collectors.</p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;">Through these and other establishments, the Brooks <em>duende</em> continues to burn somewhere in the deeper recesses of the American imagination. Brooks Brothers is dead. Long live Brooks. </p><p style="background-color: white; color: #1d2228; font-family: "lucida console", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin: 0px 0px 1.5em;"><em>Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of political science at the George Washington University and literary editor of </em>Modern Age.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-47048089957761200782020-06-26T17:37:00.000-04:002020-06-26T17:37:24.920-04:00HELP! I SEEK RIGHTS FOR O'HARA
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: small;">Hello,
friends of John O’Hara! This is Matthew Wilder. I’m a filmmaker
in Los Angeles. In recent moments I wrote and directed the movie
REGARDING THE CASE OF JOAN OF ARC, a kind of riff on Bresson’s
TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC set in a dystopian-ly alt-right near-future; I
wrote Paul Schrader’s DOG EAT DOG and executive produced Tim
Hunter’s LOOKING GLASS, both starring Nicolas Cage. I am writing
you good folks in order to inquire as to the whereabouts of the John
O’Hara estate. My colleague, the filmmaker Robert Schwentke, and I
are trying to locate the film rights to some O’Hara works. Any info
you can give us that’ll point us in the direction of the estate’s
reps would be dearly appreciated. Thanks!</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Palatino, serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: small;">Please
contact me at </span><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/null"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: small;">myiphoneiskillingme@gmail.com</span></a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: small;">
with any info</span>.</span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-23549725432807753152020-04-22T16:57:00.002-04:002020-04-22T16:57:48.146-04:00SEE OUR FACEBOOK PAGE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SBHFeoqWuOg/XqCu2hAdgCI/AAAAAAAAPj8/P_j7MMrMJY48smeL2Ha8_5SEltaxVDPbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/untitled.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="190" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SBHFeoqWuOg/XqCu2hAdgCI/AAAAAAAAPj8/P_j7MMrMJY48smeL2Ha8_5SEltaxVDPbgCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/untitled.png" width="457" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-65443506308734288092020-04-17T14:40:00.003-04:002020-04-17T14:40:35.304-04:00SHE WANTS A TOTE BAG<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">Why not a tote bag, instead of a t-shirt?</span></strong></span><br />
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> A fabric tote bag would be so useful for hauling everything from books to groceries. I’d gladly pay a pretty sum for a good quality fabric bag bearing a logo of some sort referring to our man John O’Hara. In fact, I’d probably buy two. Like pretty much everybody else, I already have a lifetime (and then some) supply of t-shirts; but tote bags that I can use and reuse and toss into a load of laundry are really a necessity in my household.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> Let me know if this idea appeals to you and/or anybody else.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"> Cheers from a chilly suburb of Rochester NY.</span></div>
<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><strong><em>Carol Ritter Wright</em></strong></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-60031468024740334622019-12-02T00:23:00.001-05:002019-12-02T00:23:52.038-05:00JOHN O'HARA SHORT STORY CONTEST<div style="text-align: left;">
Ages 5-10: Design a bookmark about something in your community. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />Ages 10-14: When John O’Hara wrote novels and short stories that used Schuylkill County as the location, he often changed the names of businesses and places in a way that you knew what he was writing about. For example, Schuylkill Haven became Swedish Haven, Tamaqua became Taqua, and Pottsville became Gibbsville. Write a short story (up to 1000 words) about your community that uses the same approach. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />Ages 15 and up: Write a one-shot (up to 2000 words) based on John O’Hara’s stories. Examples are prequels, sequels, alternate universe, or “what if this character had done that” explorations. </div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Entries are due at the Pottsville Free Public Library by December 14th. <br />For more details, visit the Pottsville Free Public Library Facebook event page. <br />Announcement of winners will be Friday, January 31st when the Pottsville Free Public Library celebrates John O’Hara’s 115th birthday.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-43540768574254492492019-10-30T10:22:00.000-04:002019-10-30T10:22:21.674-04:00O'Hara Celebration in Pottsville<header aria-label="Message" class="r_BN D_F W_6D6F p_R P_Zjgzuf ir_0" style="cursor: default; display: flex; outline: 0px; padding: 8px 0px 16px; position: relative; width: 885.03px;"><div class="o_h D_F em_0 E_fq7 ek_BB" data-test-id="address-info" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-flex: 0; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 8px; overflow: hidden;">
<div class="D_F en_0" style="display: flex; flex-shrink: 0;">
<span class="u_b en_0 C4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="message-from" style="flex-shrink: 0; font-weight: 700;"><span class="D_F rtlI_dz_sSg" data-test-id="email-pill" style="direction: ltr; display: flex;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div class="D_F en_0 M_3gJOe A_6Eb4 C_Z1VRpVF" data-test-id="message-date" style="display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; margin: 0px 8px;">
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #dddddd;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">By Beck<b>i White/Pottsville</b></span></span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #dddddd;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span></span></span><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #dddddd;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><br /></b></span></span></span></div>
<div class="D_F ab_CI Y_68F4 en_0 cdPFi_ZpQYvz H_6MGW W_6MGW lv_1IWXzk h_Z13pql2 h4_2d9T5e" style="-webkit-box-align: start; align-items: flex-start; display: flex; fill: rgb(224, 228, 233); flex-shrink: 0; height: 24px; margin-top: -4px; transform: scale(1); transition: transform 0.1s linear 0s, -webkit-transform 0.1s linear 0s; width: 24px;">
<button aria-label="This message is not starred" aria-pressed="false" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2uhb3X A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T ir3_1JO2M7 P_0" data-test-id="icon-btn-star" style="-webkit-appearance: none; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Star" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="-webkit-box-align: center; -webkit-box-pack: center; align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 23.9881px;"><svg class="D_X W_6MGW H_6MGW cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"></svg><span style="font-size: small;"><path d="M15.718 8.35c-.066-.205-.256-.35-.47-.35h-3.656l-1.13-3.475c-.066-.203-.256-.34-.47-.34s-.403.137-.47.34L8.393 8H4.736c-.214 0-.403.145-.47.35-.066.203.007.426.18.552l2.958 2.152-1.13 3.482c-.066.204.006.427.18.553.173.125.407.125.58 0l2.958-2.153 2.958 2.152c.087.062.19.094.29.094s.205-.032.29-.095c.174-.127.247-.35.18-.554l-1.13-3.482 2.96-2.152c.172-.126.244-.35.178-.553z"></path></span></span></button></div>
</header><div data-test-id="message-body-container">
<div class="I_52qC D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="background-color: white; display: table; width: 884.762px;">
<div class="X_6MGW" style="padding-left: 24px;">
</div>
<div class="msg-body P_wpofO iy_A mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="line-height: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow-x: auto; padding: 2px 0px 0px; word-break: break-word;">
<div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;">
<div id="yiv8339296473">
<div style="direction: ltr;">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">To make sure everyone is in agreement with the list of events planned for this celebration, this is what I have. Please let me know what I'm missing or if I have something incorrect. We will be working from this list to create the table tent cards. This list was also posted in the Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/2621340801231392/ if you haven't joined yet).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Bookmark and short story contest will be announced in early November, with deadline for entries Dec. 14th. The library is working with Abby Weaver to set up the scav<span class="yiv8339296473text_exposed_show">enger hunt, which will probably be launched at Winterfest, 3 weeks before the John O'Hara events.</span></span><br />
<span class="yiv8339296473text_exposed_show"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<div class="yiv8339296473text_exposed_show">
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Wed., 1/29, 6:30 pm - Schuylkill County Historical Society will present "Pioneer Hepcat" dramatic reading and discussion of reality in John O'Hara's works. $5 members/$10 nonmembers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Thu., 1/30, 6 pm - Pottsville Free Public Library Page Turners will discuss "Appointment in Samarra". General public invited. (We will also list other discussion groups happening elsewhere in the county but I don't have all that information in front of me.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Fri., 1/31, 1-4 pm - Pottsville Free Public Library will host a birthday party for John O'Hara, and announce the bookmark/short story contest winners. School students and general public invited.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sat., 2/1, 10 am-12 pm - Schuylkill County Visitors Bureau and Schuylkill County Historical Society will run a John O'Hara trolley tour, starting from the old Union Station. Ticket prices to be announced.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sat., 2/1, 2-5 pm - Majestic Theater will host speaker Cynthia Lucia and the film "Pal Joey", followed by a moderated discussion. General public invited.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sat., 2/1, 6 pm - Pottsville Free Public Library will host a cabaret celebration of John O'Hara and music from the time period. Hors d'oeuvres and drinks will be served. Ticket prices to be announced.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Thanks,</span><div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Becki White, MLS</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Head Reference Librarian</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Pottsville Free Public Library</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">215 W Market St</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Pottsville, PA 17901-4304</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">ph: 570-622-8880 ext 11</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">fx: 570-622-2157</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">bwhite@pottsvillelibrary.org</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">www.pottsvillelibrary.org</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">www.facebook.com/PottsvilleFreePublicLibrary/</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="H_7jIs D_F ab_C Q_69H5 E_36RhU" data-test-id="toolbar-hover-area" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; height: 64px; margin-left: -8px; margin-right: -20px;">
<div class="D_F W_6D6F r_BN gl_C" data-test-id="card-toolbar" style="-webkit-box-pack: center; cursor: default; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 913.021px;">
<span class="em_N en_N" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; background-color: white; color: #1d2228; flex-grow: 1; flex-shrink: 1;"></span><div class="D_F ab_C en_0 b_Z14vXdP e_3mS2U I_52qC P_Z1otBpf" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; background-color: white; border-radius: 100px; border: 1px solid rgb(224, 228, 233); color: #1d2228; display: flex; flex-shrink: 0; padding: 5px 4px;">
<ul class="hd_n P_0 H_6D6F M_0 ir3_0 iy_h D_F ab_C" data-test-id="navigable-list" role="menubar" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; height: 20px; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; padding: 0px;" tabindex="0">
<li class="G_e p_R" role="menuitem" style="position: relative; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><span class="r_P D_F M_1Eu5U7 cdPFi_Z1RVMOO cdPFi4_Z2aVTcY rtlR_h_2gl0WC" style="cursor: pointer; display: flex; fill: rgba(39, 41, 43, 0.8); margin: 0px 10px;"><button aria-label="Reply" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2uhb3X A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T ir3_1JO2M7 P_0" data-test-id="card-toolbar-button-reply" style="-webkit-appearance: none; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Reply" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="-webkit-box-align: center; -webkit-box-pack: center; align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"></svg><span style="font-size: small;"><path d="M8.71 15.946c.503.432 1.28.075 1.28-.587v-2.622c5.05 0 6.858 3.584 7.02 4.204.352.797 1.535.594 1.48-.262-.42-6.662-3.91-10.728-8.5-10.728V3.534c0-.662-.775-1.02-1.277-.588l-6.95 6.02c-.364.312-.36.875.01 1.18l6.938 5.8z"></path></span></span></button></span></li>
<li class="G_e p_R" role="menuitem" style="position: relative; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><span class="r_P D_F M_1Eu5U7 cdPFi_Z1RVMOO cdPFi4_Z2aVTcY rtlR_h_2gl0WC" style="cursor: pointer; display: flex; fill: rgba(39, 41, 43, 0.8); margin: 0px 10px;"><button aria-label="Reply all" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2uhb3X A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T ir3_1JO2M7 P_0" data-test-id="card-toolbar-button-reply-all" style="-webkit-appearance: none; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Reply all" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="-webkit-box-align: center; -webkit-box-pack: center; align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"></svg><span style="font-size: small;"><path d="M2.044 9.406l5.86-5.045c.324-.32.324-.838 0-1.16-.326-.32-.854-.32-1.18 0L.245 8.78c-.325.32-.325.84 0 1.16l6.507 6.42c.326.32.854.32 1.18 0 .325-.32.325-.84 0-1.16L2.043 9.407zM12.725 6.617V3.89c0-1.06-1.123-1.108-1.576-.694L4.804 9.14c-.348.32-.345.83.014 1.145l6.388 6.1c.63.525 1.526.162 1.526-.562l-.01-2.85c3.417 0 5.686 3.154 5.708 3.2.22.314.47.432.704.432.463 0 .864-.463.864-.772 0-7.27-4.44-9.216-7.275-9.216z"></path></span></span></button></span></li>
<li class="G_e p_R" role="menuitem" style="position: relative; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><span class="r_P D_F M_1Eu5U7 cdPFi_Z1RVMOO cdPFi4_Z2aVTcY rtlR_h_2gl0WC" style="cursor: pointer; display: flex; fill: rgba(39, 41, 43, 0.8); margin: 0px 10px;"><button aria-label="Forward" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2uhb3X A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T ir3_1JO2M7 P_0" data-test-id="card-toolbar-button-forward" style="-webkit-appearance: none; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="Forward" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="-webkit-box-align: center; -webkit-box-pack: center; align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"></svg><span style="font-size: small;"><path d="M10.442 16.956c-.515.385-1.238.01-1.238-.62V14h-6.94c-.427 0-.764-.372-.764-.8V7.794c0-.427.337-.793.764-.793h6.94V4.695c0-.705.767-.97 1.238-.62l7.74 5.81c.363.272.456.894 0 1.237l-7.74 5.834z"></path></span></span></button></span></li>
<li class="G_e p_R" role="menuitem" style="position: relative; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><span class="r_P D_F M_oRiNT" style="cursor: pointer; display: flex; margin: 0px 10px 0px 8px;"><div class="D_F cdPFi_Z1RVMOO cdPFi4_Z2aVTcY" data-test-id="popover-container" style="display: flex; fill: rgba(39, 41, 43, 0.8);">
<button aria-label="More" class="c27KHO0_n b_0 M_0 i_0 I_T y_Z2uhb3X A_6EqO r_P C_q cvhIH6_T ir3_1JO2M7 P_0" data-test-id="more-card-trigger" style="-webkit-appearance: none; -webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; border-color: initial; border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; cursor: pointer; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" tabindex="-1" title="More" type="button"><span class="D_F ab_C gl_C W_6D6F" style="-webkit-box-align: center; -webkit-box-pack: center; align-items: center; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 20px;"><svg class="D_X W_6LEV H_6LEV cdPFi_q cZW7ROP_n en_0 cvhIH6_T" viewbox="0 0 20 20"><g></g></svg><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><circle cx="3" cy="10" r="2"></circle><circle cx="10" cy="10" r="2"></circle><circle cx="17" cy="10" r="2"></circle></span></span></button></div>
</span></li>
</ul>
<span class="em_N en_N" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; flex-grow: 1; flex-shrink: 1;"></span><hr class="M_0 P_0 cn_0" style="border-width: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" />
<br /></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-14694664901027469722019-09-20T11:51:00.000-04:002019-09-20T11:51:01.028-04:00New Pic? Details....<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mZLffpvRCKc/XYT1B_k3o8I/AAAAAAAAOdo/nj8U84VGavMkSKueL0lkyXN5L0g6QIkqgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/thumbnail1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="359" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mZLffpvRCKc/XYT1B_k3o8I/AAAAAAAAOdo/nj8U84VGavMkSKueL0lkyXN5L0g6QIkqgCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/thumbnail1.png" width="358" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-19755370427918036612019-08-23T12:00:00.001-04:002019-08-23T12:01:26.670-04:00Now.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/---_UttWkAR8/XWANcuvrSjI/AAAAAAAAOb8/E97e0xe_53McXSD-PJqy5mR6YDqPMGlYwCLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail110.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="640" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/---_UttWkAR8/XWANcuvrSjI/AAAAAAAAOb8/E97e0xe_53McXSD-PJqy5mR6YDqPMGlYwCLcBGAs/s400/thumbnail110.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wad9QrH-kH8/XWANcjnwDPI/AAAAAAAAOcA/jTvQtgbxZS4HMhPUPTEgE35on29zn1JJgCLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail112.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Wad9QrH-kH8/XWANcjnwDPI/AAAAAAAAOcA/jTvQtgbxZS4HMhPUPTEgE35on29zn1JJgCLcBGAs/s400/thumbnail112.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SOKdG4zcEdE/XWANc2CyKgI/AAAAAAAAOcE/WexHM9oDJ-wvyO_CCx63zstfd5gFh08dACLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail113.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="480" data-original-width="640" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SOKdG4zcEdE/XWANc2CyKgI/AAAAAAAAOcE/WexHM9oDJ-wvyO_CCx63zstfd5gFh08dACLcBGAs/s640/thumbnail113.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-42816236495993360232019-08-23T11:58:00.003-04:002019-08-23T11:58:47.885-04:00O'Hara<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bbnuXaVsbC0/XWANGLE3EwI/AAAAAAAAOb0/AO_8UyYXcaQ9yhq0-5UvlXhALEX9L7PIgCLcBGAs/s1600/4966_1113565612159_781857_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="453" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bbnuXaVsbC0/XWANGLE3EwI/AAAAAAAAOb0/AO_8UyYXcaQ9yhq0-5UvlXhALEX9L7PIgCLcBGAs/s400/4966_1113565612159_781857_n.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-61191617990464994282019-08-23T11:36:00.001-04:002019-08-23T11:36:07.293-04:00Fitzgerald<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PBIUnjFMwRQ/XWAHu23Fq4I/AAAAAAAAObo/ljgjifmbzlkPJ0JSvyD1IzBSd83CJ7oBACLcBGAs/s1600/IMG_0621%2B-%2BCopy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PBIUnjFMwRQ/XWAHu23Fq4I/AAAAAAAAObo/ljgjifmbzlkPJ0JSvyD1IzBSd83CJ7oBACLcBGAs/s400/IMG_0621%2B-%2BCopy.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-10359758030943700822019-08-17T15:11:00.001-04:002019-08-17T15:12:17.687-04:00O'Hara Birthday Celebration in Pottsville<div data-reactroot="" id="mail-app-container" style="height: 628.571px;">
<div class="pointer-mode H_6D6F" style="height: 628.571px;">
<div class="D_F ek_BB H_6D6F aw_2941hk ba_10I1Qt az_oOItw ay_Z1nkUQx I_kt4zd" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; background-image: var(--bg-repeat-img); background-position: var(--bg-repeat-img-position); background-repeat: var(--bg-repeat); background-size: var(--bg-repeat-img-size); display: flex; flex-direction: column; height: 628.571px;">
<div class="D_F ek_BB H_6D6F cZ1RN91d_n s_1HCsWR aw_Z22yhkg I_kt4zd az_DW ba_Z2gmOa3 ay_Z1cYiMT c2hBT4u_Zm6i39 cZTwBjO_Zdogtk" data-test-id="mail-app" id="app" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; background-image: var(--bg-img); background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: var(--bg-size); display: flex; flex-direction: column; height: 628.571px; min-width: 1024px; user-select: none;" tabindex="-1">
<div class="I_sgPuT D_F em_N o_h W_6D6F H_6D6F" data-test-id="content-area" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3); display: flex; flex-grow: 1; height: 544.583px; overflow: hidden; width: 1300px;">
<div class="D_F em_N o_h s_1HCsWR" data-test-id="content-below-tabs" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; display: flex; flex-grow: 1; min-width: 1024px; overflow: hidden;">
<div class="D_F em_N ej_eUh o_h" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; display: flex; flex-basis: 86%; flex-grow: 1; overflow: hidden;">
<div class="em_N gl_C I_52qC j_ZlOSbd o_h p_R D_F s_e5X x_Z14vXdP" data-test-id="mail-app-component" data-yaft-module="norrin_main" id="mail-app-component" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; -webkit-box-pack: center; background-color: white; border-right: 1px solid rgb(224, 228, 233); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3) 0px 0px 3px; display: flex; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center; min-width: 50%; overflow: hidden; position: relative;">
<div class="D_F ek_BB p_a Z_0 L_0 R_0 T_0 B_0 cZ1RN91d_GG I_ZnwrMC" data-test-id="message-group-view" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; background-color: #f4f4f7; bottom: 0px; display: flex; flex-direction: column; left: 0px; position: absolute; right: 0px; top: 0px; user-select: text; z-index: 0;">
<div aria-label="Message view" class="iz_A I_52qC em_0 Z_0" data-test-id="message-group-view-scroller" role="main" style="-webkit-box-flex: 0; background-color: white; flex-grow: 0; overflow-y: auto; z-index: 0;">
<div aria-label="Keyboard navigation group. Use arrow keys to navigate, or tab to the next group." data-test-id="focus-group">
<ul class="hd_n M_0 X_0" data-test-id="cards" style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px; padding-left: 0px;">
<li class="m_Z12nDQf D_F ek_BB ir_0" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(241, 241, 245); display: flex; flex-direction: column; outline: 0px;"><br /></li>
<li class="m_Z12nDQf D_F ek_BB ir_0" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(241, 241, 245); display: flex; flex-direction: column; outline: 0px;"><br /></li>
<li class="m_Z12nDQf D_F ek_BB ir_0" style="-webkit-box-direction: normal; -webkit-box-orient: vertical; border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(241, 241, 245); display: flex; flex-direction: column; outline: 0px;"><div class="p_R b_2w4l8N I_52qC em_N X_fq7 N_6LEV ir3_Z1tiXR3 it3_689y j_ZlOSbd message-view" data-iskeynav="true" data-test-expanded="true" data-test-id="message-view" style="-webkit-box-flex: 1; border: 1px solid rgb(151, 155, 167); box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3) 0px 0px 3px; flex-grow: 1; outline-offset: -2px; outline-width: 2px !important; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 20px; position: relative;" tabindex="40">
<div data-test-id="message-body-container">
<div class="I_52qC D_FY W_6D6F" data-test-id="message-view-body" style="display: table; width: 1024.76px;">
<div class="msg-body P_wpofO iy_A mq_AS" data-test-id="message-view-body-content" style="line-height: normal; overflow-wrap: break-word; overflow-x: auto; padding: 2px 0px 0px; word-break: break-word;">
<div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;">
<div class="">
<div class="qtd-body" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0px; padding: 8px;">
<div class="yiv0046918441yqt8662631533" id="yiv0046918441yqt79992">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><b>You're Invited! </b></span><br />
<blockquote class="yiv0046918441" style="color: #1d2228; margin: 0px; padding: 8px;" type="cite">
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<div class="yiv0046918441" style="direction: ltr;">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Dear Colleagues,</span></span><br />
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<div class="yiv0046918441" style="direction: ltr;">
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">January 31, 2020 marks the 115th anniversary of John O’Hara’s birth. The Pottsville Free Public Library is planning to honor this anniversary with a week long celebration.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We invite you to join us at the Pottsville Library on Thursday, August 15 2019 at 2 PM to discuss how we as a city can celebrate O’Hara’s legacy in our community. For example, the library’s book discussion group, the Page Turners, will read one of his novels and discuss it at their January 23rd meeting; this session would be open to anyone in the county to take part. It could even be a city-wide “One City One Book” discussion. A birthday party will be held at the library on Friday, January 31st, complete with birthday cake.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">What other events would you like to see happen that week?</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Please let us know if you will be able to join us in our planning session on August 15th. If there is someone you think would be interested in joining us to plan the event, please forward this to them or bring them with you.<span class="yiv0046918441Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We will be throwing a party in January, but it will be a lot more fun if you are celebrating with us!</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
</div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sincerely,</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jean Towle, MLS</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Executive Library Director</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">and</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Becki White, MLS</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441MsoNormal">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="line-height: 18.5467px;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Reference Librarian</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 12pt;">
<br class="yiv0046918441" clear="none" />
<div class="yiv0046918441" style="font-size: 13px;">
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">Becki White, MLS</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">Head Reference Librarian</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">Pottsville Free Public Library</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">215 W Market St</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">Pottsville, PA 17901-4304</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">ph: 570-622-8880 ext 11</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;">fx: 570-622-2157</span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;"><a class="yiv0046918441" href="mailto:bwhite@pottsvillelibrary.org" rel="nofollow" shape="rect" style="color: #196ad4;" target="_blank" ymailto="mailto:bwhite@pottsvillelibrary.org">bwhite@pottsvillelibrary.org</a></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;"><a class="yiv0046918441" href="http://www.pottsvillelibrary.org/" rel="nofollow" shape="rect" style="color: #196ad4;" target="_blank">www.pottsvillelibrary.org</a></span></div>
<div class="yiv0046918441">
<span class="yiv0046918441" style="font-family: "tahoma"; font-size: x-small;"><a class="yiv0046918441" href="http://www.facebook.com/PottsvilleFreePublicLibrary/" rel="nofollow" shape="rect" style="color: #196ad4;" target="_blank">www.facebook.com/PottsvilleFreePublicLibrary/</a></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="jb_0 X_6MGW N_6Fd5" style="padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 24px; padding-right: 16px;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="H_7jIs D_F ab_C Q_69H5 E_36RhU" data-test-id="toolbar-hover-area" style="-webkit-box-align: center; align-items: center; display: flex; height: 64px; margin-left: -8px; margin-right: -20px;">
<div class="D_F W_6D6F r_BN gl_C" data-test-id="card-toolbar" style="-webkit-box-pack: center; cursor: default; display: flex; justify-content: center; width: 1053.02px;">
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-38736626405260154022019-07-25T18:20:00.000-04:002019-07-25T18:20:03.461-04:00JOHN O'HARA STUDY, PETEE LIBRARY, PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY<div class="separator" style="border-image: none; clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ERZKTvRIKb8/XToqG2Y6-QI/AAAAAAAAOaE/hbsGElrqMAcHP5ONX14q0CuDGPQK4NKUACLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ERZKTvRIKb8/XToqG2Y6-QI/AAAAAAAAOaE/hbsGElrqMAcHP5ONX14q0CuDGPQK4NKUACLcBGAs/s640/thumbnail23.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="border-image: none; clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HzTNmouG01Y/XToqG6NSTEI/AAAAAAAAOaI/baYehhLXNBI9w5QMDenk6VU8rmfMdFURgCLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail24.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HzTNmouG01Y/XToqG6NSTEI/AAAAAAAAOaI/baYehhLXNBI9w5QMDenk6VU8rmfMdFURgCLcBGAs/s640/thumbnail24.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="border-image: none;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="border-image: none; clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PnGlc47ljPA/XToqGljQGBI/AAAAAAAAOaA/Ih378YkY3PYw8iVoAO989WiHCucm6Px7wCLcBGAs/s1600/thumbnail25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="640" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-PnGlc47ljPA/XToqGljQGBI/AAAAAAAAOaA/Ih378YkY3PYw8iVoAO989WiHCucm6Px7wCLcBGAs/s640/thumbnail25.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-82432502642003027602019-07-16T13:01:00.000-04:002019-07-16T13:06:03.987-04:00Pottsville to Fête 115th Year of O'Hara's Birth<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><strong>CALLING ALL O'HARA FANS</strong></span></span><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;">Dear Colleagues,</span> </span><br />
<div style="color: black; font-size: 16px;">
<div>
<div style="color: black; direction: ltr; font-size: 12pt;">
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">January 31, 2020 marks the 115th anniversary of John O’Hara’s birth. The Pottsville Free Public Library is planning to honor this anniversary with a week long celebration.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We invite you to join us at the Pottsville Library on Thursday, August 15 2019 at 2 PM to discuss how we as a city can celebrate O’Hara’s legacy in our community. For example, the library’s book discussion group, the Page Turners, will read one of his novels and discuss it at their January 23rd meeting; this session would be open to anyone in the county to take part. It could even be a city-wide “One City One Book” discussion. A birthday party will be held at the library on Friday, January 31st, complete with birthday cake.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">What other events would you like to see happen that week?</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Please let us know if you will be able to join us in our planning session on August 15th. If there is someone you think would be interested in joining us to plan the event, please forward this to them or bring them with you. </span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><br /><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We will be throwing a party in January, but it will be a lot more fun if you are celebrating with us!</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Sincerely,</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Jean Towle, MLS</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Executive Library Director</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">and</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Becki White, MLS</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv6949293752MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Reference Librarian</span></span></div>
<div>
<br />
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Becki White, MLS</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Head Reference Librarian</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Pottsville Free Public Library</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">215 W Market St</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Pottsville, PA 17901-4304</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">ph: 570-622-8880 ext 11</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">fx: 570-622-2157</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">bwhite@pottsvillelibrary.org</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 13px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">www.pottsvillelibrary.org</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">www.facebook.com/PottsvilleFreePublicLibrary</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-10927082291728788552019-04-16T12:00:00.000-04:002019-04-16T12:00:03.968-04:00Admission to the "Club"THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY<br />
<br />
On November 21, 1959, publication of "That First Husband." <em>The Saturday Evening Post. The Time Element & Other Stories</em>. This was the last story John O'Hara wrote before rejoining <em>The New Yorker</em> with the publication in September 1960 of "Imagine Kissing Pete," which in my opinion is far superior to this story." <em>Ourselves to Know </em>was published in between these two stories on February 27, 1960. <br />
<br />
"Dutch" Otterbein and his wife Emily return to Dutch's college and have an ugly confrontation with Emily's first husband at Dutch's old club, The Orchard. What interested meesting was the description of the Club and its admission requirements:<br />
<br />
"A member of The Orchard considers himself a member from the time he first shakes hands to the moment when there is no longer life in his fingers. And, incidentally, we have no secret grip. We have a necktie, a hatband, and a watch charm, but our ritual is Robert's Rules of Order, and we have no connection with the Greek-letter fraternity whose members founded The Orchard. Our principal secret is that of any club - the discussions and the vote that decide who shall be invited to join. It is interesting to note that in almost every year of our existence the college as a whole has been able to guess accurately the names of the ten of fifteen men who will be invited. We have standards, and they are known: a good family background, a good prep school, a clear complexion, acceptable behavior when drunk, a responsible attitude toward the educational purpose of the college, and the subtlest one of all - a belief that a man who is being considered for an invitation will not, in college or later life, trade on his membership in The Orchard. We have made many mistakes. We have missed out on men who turned out well; we have taken in men who turned out badly. But one of the reasons why I always try to get to the club before the game is that the mistakes who persist in showing up are so much in the minority. The good men predominate, as I suppose they do in other clubs, and our standards are upheld in the superior court of adult life."robert salibahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18285734073087414832noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-29404060461510064672019-04-16T11:57:00.001-04:002019-04-16T11:57:22.784-04:00NEW O'HARA SHORT STORY EDITION<div dir="ltr" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1555429195395_2134">
<a href="https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/summer/feature/john-o’hara-wrote-about-the-things-rich-people-do-why-isn’t-he-still-famous" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1555429195395_2133" target="_blank">https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2016/summer/feature/john-o’hara-wrote-about-the-things-rich-people-do-why-isn’t-he-still-famous</a></div>
<div class="base-card-clear">
</div>
<div class="base-card-footer" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1555429195395_2256">
<div class="card-footer">
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15837393.post-15088207041752306572018-07-26T01:05:00.000-04:002018-07-26T01:07:10.977-04:00O'HARA AND HEMINGWAY<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE103" style="line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE104" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">JOHN O’HARA’S ‘HOW CAN I TELL YOU?’: AN ALLEGORY OF HEMINGWAY’S SUICIDE</span></b></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE105" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.26; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 8pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">By Steven Goldleaf</span></b></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE106" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.26; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE107" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On July 3</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE108" style="display: inline; line-height: 0; vertical-align: super; white-space: pre-wrap; zoom: 0.75;">rd</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE109" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 1961, as news of Ernest Hemingway’s death began to circulate, John O’Hara had been sitting in the TV room of his summer cottage at Quogue on the south shore of Long Island with his daughter Wylie, who had just turned 16. Suddenly, O’Hara bolted for his bedroom to retrieve a framed photo, taken some thirty years earlier, of the two successful and prosperous young authors flanking the owner of Manhattan’s Stork Club. Tears streamed down O’Hara’s cheeks. Showing the photograph to his teenaged daughter, he told her, “I understand it so well.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE110" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.26; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE111" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“It,” of course, was Hemingway’s suicide, and O’Hara never shared his understanding with anyone outside of that Quogue cottage. Inside the beachfront cottage</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE112" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE113" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that day, Wylie didn’t press her father for further details of his understanding, so the remark remains to this day tantalizing. “I understand it so well.” On numerous occasions over the past few decades, I’ve spoken with his daughter, who last month turned 73, and Wylie O’Hara Holahan Doughty, as charming and forthcoming as a literary executor is allowed to be, regrets that those bare details are all that she remembers from that day in 1961. </span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE114" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.26; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE115" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hemingway’s suicide was generally not very well understood, or even accurately described, in the days and years after July of 1961. Observers, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE116" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">even after learning details showing that his death was no gun-cleaning accident, as his widow claimed at the time, and even after reading what reporters and biographers and critical analysts had to say in making sense of it, were mostly puzzled by it, rather than immediately understanding and accepting of Hemingway’s</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE117" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> decision to end his life. To a degree, “it” still seems inexplicable, the willful death of someone who had been lionized as “the </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE118" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">most important…</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE119" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> author </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE120" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">since the death of William Shakespeare” some three and half centuries earlier, so O’Hara’s immediate claim of thorough understanding sticks out as highly unusual. Despite all of the analysis and knowledge that has emerged since 1961 from psychologists’ and literary critics’ studies of suicide, and of the self-destruction of authors and artists and creators of all stripes, from Sylvia Plath to Robin Williams to Anthony Bourdain, we still lack </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE121" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a single clue</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE122" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as to what was on the mind of John O’Hara that overcast July afternoon.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE123" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.26; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE124" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Or do we? I believe that O’Hara, who never </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE125" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">commented on or</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE126" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> explicated his </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE127" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cryptic</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE128" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE129" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">remark about Hemingway’s death, has nonetheless left us with that single clue in his work, a short story that allegorizes Hemingway’s suicide. Being a work of art, it doesn’t attemp</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE130" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">t to address that issue directly or explicitly, and indeed O’Hara’s short stories are very rarely explicit or directly expository. This one is elliptical, perhaps even by O’Hara’s standards, but</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE131" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> there is evidence that the Hemingway connection is there, and that evidence is what I’d like to present to you today.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE132" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE133" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The textual basis </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE134" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">for interpreting this story as allegorical of Hemingway’s death is simple enough. O’Hara wrote it in the second half of 1961, or early the next year, and it appeared in </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE135" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The New Yorker</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE136" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of December 1, 1962. It is a very short story of only 2,000 words, so short that I could probably just read it verbatim to you this morning, which might be the most persuasive display of O’Hara’s design. I will recommend that you do have a look at it—if you don’t have access to the </span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">NYer online, it also appeared in O’Hara’s 1963 collection of stories entitled </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE137" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Hat on the Bed</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE138" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE139" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE140" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">More of a character sketch than a short story</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE142" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, as many of O’Hara’s fictions are, the plot is easily summarized: a successful car salesman stops in a bar on his way home from</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE143" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a very productive day’s work and finds that alcohol does nothing to relieve his melancholy mood. When he leaves the bar, after engaging the bartender in a </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE144" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">discursive </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE145" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conversation, he goes home where he pointedly </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE146" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">conceals from </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE147" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">his wife the good news about his day on the sales floor. The couple goes to bed, but in the middle of the night, the salesman gets up and retrieves his shotgun from its case.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE148" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE149" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">There are several poignant details I’d like to highlight for you in this story, but the line to which O’Hara draws the most obvious attention is the line of dialogue he uses for the story’s title: “How Can I Tell You?” which is the salesman’s response to his wife’s inquiry about what’s troubling him. “How Can I Tell You?”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE150" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE151" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The implication, of course, is that the protagonist of the story </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE152" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">himself</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE153" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> doesn’t know what is troubling him, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE154" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">so</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE155" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE156" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he has no way to convey even to the most caring and concerned of sympathetic listeners the causes of his mysterious and all-enveloping despair. </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE157" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">O’Hara’s stories bear an elliptical quality, this one more than most, because inarticulateness,</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE158" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the inability to express in words his most profound doubts and fears is the ultimate cause of the salesman’s paralyzing despair.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE159" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE160" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">O’Hara’s choice of a small-town New Jersey Ford Motor Company salesman might seem a peculiar choice to allegorize a world-famous author, but O’Hara makes that peculiarity the main subject of conversation between his salesman and the bartender he speaks to. He orders straight bourbon, pointedly refusing any particular brand, and he ignores the glass of soda the bartender serves him on the side. “He waited for some pleasant effect,” O’Hara writes, “and when none came, he finished the drink in a gulp.” He then orders a second shot of whiskey, and that one too has no pleasing effect. The bartender chatters on blithely, about brands and blends and types of whiskey, ending his discourse with an observation that he read in some magazine: “You know, in this business,” he tells the stone-cold sober salesman, “we get these magazines, I guess you have them in the car business. Trade publications, they’re known as.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE161" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE162" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The salesman’s response is “Even the undertakers.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE163" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE164" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The bartender says, “Huh?” and the salesman elaborates, “The undertakers have trade publications.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE165" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE166" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“They do, ah? Well, wuddia know, I guess every business has them,” says the bartender.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE167" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE168" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">“Every business is the same,” the salesman says, “when you come down to it.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE169" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE170" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The bartender then amiably asks what’s the connection between selling cars and selling liquor, aside from both having an ultimate goal of making money, and the salesman says “What you just said. We’re all in it for the money. You. Me. Undertakers.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE171" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE172" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Soon after this exchange, the bartender decides that he can’t charge a patron money when he’s getting no benefit from his product, and the salesman heads on home.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE173" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE174" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The point of the exchange is the pointlessness of individual professions and interests and </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">occupations. Everyone, including undertakers, salesmen, bartenders, editors of trade publications, and authors, are all engaged in earning their livings, and there is no pleasure to be taken, drunk or sober, in the things any of us does </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE176" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">to make </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE177" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">a living, no matter how gifted any of us may be at our profession. Being especially skilled at one’s profession, in fact, as the introductory scene reveals the salesman to be, and as the bartender shows himself to be in the next scene, and as Ernest Hemingway had spent his entire career establishing himself as, is useless to anyone deriving no joy from his giftedness.</span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE178" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE179" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">O’Hara named his bartender, by the way, “Ernie”—a detail I’ll leave to you for evaluation.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE180" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE181" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">O’Hara takes considerable care, in the first scene, to establish that this salesman is not simply having </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE182" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">one</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE183" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> good day on the showroom floor, but has for many years been by far the most accomplished salesman at the dealership. Moreover, he has a family that cares for him, his children, his wife, his sister and his mother all respect him and admire him and depend on him. But he leaves his wife sleeping in their bed, and O’Hara writes, “Nevertheless, he went to the hall closet and got out his 20 gauge and broke it and inserted a shell.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE184" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE185" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In other words, O’Hara has gone out of his way to establish that the despair this car salesman feels but cannot articulate has nothing to do with any rational concerns this man might have. When I referred to Hemingway earlier as “the </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE186" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">most important</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE187" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">…</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE188" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> author since the death of William Shakespeare,” I was quoting from a front-page Sunday </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE189" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New York Times</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE190" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> review of “Across</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE191" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the River and Into the Trees” </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE192" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">written by John O’Hara</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE193" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. It was a </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE194" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">positive</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE195" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE196" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">review, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE197" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE198" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">some </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE199" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">felt was </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE200" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“a fawning appreciation </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE201" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">of </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE202" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">[</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE203" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">an</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE204" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">]</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE205" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> otherwise panned novel,” even suggesting that Hemingway was “offended at what he saw as O'Hara patronizing him.” </span><a href="http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/OHara.html" id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE206" rel="nofollow" style="color: #196ad4;" target="_blank"><span class="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cqowt-stl-Hyperlink" id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE207" style="background-color: yellow; color: #0563c1; display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/OHara.html</span></a><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE208" style="background-color: yellow; display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE209" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE210" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> But O’Hara devoted little space in his review to the novel itself, which he did not heap elaborate praise upon; rather, much of his review was devoted to Hemingway’s lifelong body of work and to Hemingway’s methods of writing, and to Hemingway’s life, all of which O’Hara did shower with slavering praise. Along the way, O’Hara took some potshots at academic analysts of contemporary fiction, to whom both men shared a visceral aversion, and </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE211" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE212" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">t </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE213" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">journalistic critics, particularly those at the </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE214" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">New Yorker</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE215" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE216" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE217" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> O’Hara had in the past year broken with, heatedly and violently and publicly, and which coincidentally had just published four months earlier L</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE218" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">illian Ross’s profile of Hemingway that pointedly addressed the subject of his excessive drinking. “[F]or Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody's drinking is one for the go-climb-a- lamppost department...”, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE219" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">O’Hara wrote somewhat irrelevantly in his review of </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE220" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Across the River…</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE221" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, “With the long piece on Hemingway, the magazine achieved a new low,” thus settling a score for Hemingway as he also attacked his own newest enemy. To Hemingway, this</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE222" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> spirited defense of his drinking habits may have seemed gratuitous and self-serving for O’Hara, who was still widely known for his own excessive fondness of spirits. Much of this review, ostensibly about Hemingway’s novel, redounded on O’Hara, which Hemingway may well have resented. O’Hara concluded by noting that “</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE223" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What matters is that Ernest Hemingway has brought out a new book</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE224" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,” neatly sidestepping the quality of Hemingway’s new book.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE225" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE226" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There were certain biographical parallels between the two writers’ careers, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE227" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which O’Hara may well have been drawing attention to in his remarks about Hemingway’s life</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE228" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: Hemingway’s father </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE229" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">had been a physician, Hemingway did not attend college, Hemingway had worked as a reporter, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Hemingway published a book every other year on average and stood accused by some critics for excessive prolificacy and was mocked by others for his excessively mannered plainness of style, all of which apply perfectly to O’Hara as well</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE231" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The title piece of O’Hara’s first collection of stories, in fact, was “The </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE232" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Doctor’s Son,” about a teenaged boy accompanying his father on a gruesome series of house calls, ending with a traumatic and </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE233" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">shocking</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE234" style="display: inline; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> death—the resemblance to Hemingway’s autobiographical “Indian Camp” is closer in technique and subject matter than this summary might indicate.</span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE235" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE236" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The competitive relationship between the two writers had for decades been troubled. For both men, relationships with all other writers fell into two categories, “troubled” and “very troubled,” each viewing contemporary writers of fiction primarily as rivals but also as among the very few qualified to hold an opinion on </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE237" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">each other’s</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE238" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> work. Between O’Hara’s rhapsodic 1950 review of “Across the River…” and Hemingway’s death eleven years later, two major changes in Hemingway’s stature as a writer occurred, and these two major changes were in contradictory directions: the world outside of Hemingway’s head had elevated him to literary pre-eminence, marked by but not limited to the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE239" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Old Man and the Sea</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE240" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> or the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, while the world inside that globe had disparaged Hemingway’s own opinion of his ability to write, often his utter inability to write at all. In other words, by 1960 there was the largest possible gulf between the world’s appraisal of Hemingway’s talents and his own appraisal of those talents, and that gulf had become utterly intolerable to him. </span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE241" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE242" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In that same decade, O’Hara had also undergone some major changes, all stemming from his giving up alcohol use after the sudden death of his wife, Belle, in 1954. Unwilling to raise his young daughter Wylie as a single parent with a life-threatening drinking problem, O’Hara stopped drinking entirely in 1954, and for the final decade of his life, produced more fiction, including “How Can I </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE243" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">T</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE244" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ell You?” than in any previous decade. This change gave him a unique perspective on the hardships and obstacles that writers must face: i</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE245" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">n</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE246" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> 1967 O’Hara discussed the distractions that kept writers from realizing their truest goals as “anything from booze to women to greed to too much praise,” four distractions he and Hemingway were mightily tempted by. That final distraction, “too much praise,” is perhaps the oddest, since both writers, perhaps all writers, but certainly Hemingway and O’Hara, saw writing as a competitive art, one in which they were in constant struggle, competing fiercely with past masters and present rivals. What O’Hara understood about Hemingway was his fear of getting praise for </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE247" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">work </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE248" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE249" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">that, deep inside himself, he knew he no longer could produce by own high standards.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE250" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE251" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">O’Hara understood Hemingway as few others could claim to, but he also understood the act of suicide, not least because </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE252" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">he</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE253" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> had suffered from life-long depression, and suicidal ideations, himself. O’Hara’s suicidal ideations were fiercest in the early 1940s, almost immediately following his greatest success as an author and as a playwright. The hit musical </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE254" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Pal Joey</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE255" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, based on O’Hara’s short stories and the dialogue he wrote for the stage show, provided the revenue stream and the renown that made him, for the first time</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE256" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a wealthy celebrity. But soon after this life-changing success, O’Hara wrote to a friend in 1944 that he was so “sick of myself that it’s a good thing I don’t use a straight razor. Or live in a tall building.” O’Hara suffered from self-loathing periodically, and had written about suicide, and its causes and murky origins and etiologies, throughout his </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE257" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">entire</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE258" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> career. </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE259" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His first novel, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE260" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Appointment in Samarra</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE262" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in 1934 </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE263" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">described </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE264" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE265" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">n outwardly</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE266" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> prosperous, healthy, happily married young American businessman who</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE267" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, at </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE268" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the </span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">novel’s climax</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE269" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, shockingly</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE270" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> decides to </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE271" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">kill himself.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE272" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE273" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the things that contributed to the novel’s notoriety was the deliberately unresolved question of why, exactly, Julian English takes his own life. This theme was repeated in other O’Hara novels about suicides, and numerous short stories, including “H</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE274" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ow Can I T</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE275" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ell You?” The protagonist of O’Hara’s next novel, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE276" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Butterfield 8</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE277" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, ends her life, and the novel, by committing suicide, as do characters throughout O’Hara’s work. </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE278" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Other characters merely contemplate killing themselves for reasons that they cannot make clear to anyone.</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE279" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The feeling they have, that their lives have reached a terminal point despite all outward appearances, is what compe</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE280" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ls their behavior, not the judg</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE281" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ment of observers.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE282" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE283" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">His fascination with the subject of suicide predates O’Hara’s career as a writer. In a letter written in 1928, introducing himself </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE284" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">to Katherine Angell, a fiction editor at the New Yorker, O’Hara concluded by writing “Other dope on myself are: My father was a doctor, I am just 24 years old, and my favorite word (not that you…asked me) is inevitable.”</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE285" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE286" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That final word</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE287" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">,</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE288" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> “inevitable,” appears as the final word of ano</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE289" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ther letter O’Hara wrote some 38</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE290" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> years later, at the age of 60, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE291" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">explicating its appeal to him. It was in a brief letter of condolence O’Hara wrote to his friend, Kate Bramwell, whose son Jerry had just committed suicide. It is dated 3 January 1966, and since it is brief, I’ll read it to you in full:</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE292" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE293" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Dear Kate, </span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE294" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE295" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">If trouble could get used to trouble, you would be used to it by now, but it doesn’t work out that way. How do your friends lessen your sorrows? They don’t, except by wishing they could.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE296" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE297" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Many years ago I made a study of suicide for my first novel, and I have never stopped studying it. Of one thing I am convinced: from Julian English to Jim Forrestal</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE298" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE299" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">from Louie Macy Gates to young Jerry Bramwell, no one who committed suicide could have done anything else. There is an inevitability to it that has a logic of its own, so powerful as to prevail over self-preservation, therefore more powerful than the most fundamental of our instincts.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE300" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE301" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">We are sorry for the sadness to you and Jerry and the girls, but who can argue with the power of the inevitable?</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE302" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE303" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Affectionately,</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE304" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; margin-left: 43.2pt; margin-right: 50.4pt; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE305" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">John</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE306" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE307" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I didn’t identify “Louie Macy Gates” for you, mainly because no such person ever existed—the compiler of O’Hara’s </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE308" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Selected Letters</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE309" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, Matthew Bruccoli, apparently mistranscribed the name O’Hara wrote, which was “Louise Macy Gates,” the widow of former FDR advisor Harry Hopkins and a suicide in 1963. </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE310" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Forrestal was the former U.S. Secretary of Defense. </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE311" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These were all, in other words, socially prominent, successful, famous, well-off, charismatic figures who had </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE312" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">nonetheless opted to kill themselves—or as O’Hara saw it, who had no option </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE314" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">other</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE315" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> than suicide. The final word of his letter to Mrs. Bramwell, again, was “inevitable.” A word that was not only of consoling value to Jerry Bramwell’s mother, but which also speaks to O’Hara’s understanding of </span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontentsContainer" style="background-color: white; font-size: 16px; padding-left: 72pt; padding-right: 72pt;">
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3ccontents">
<div style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">the reasoning process in the mind of a suicide that, to others, seems inexplicable or even perverse, varyi</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE316" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ng from anything like “reason,”</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE317" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> especially in those who </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE318" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">outwardly </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE319" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have every reason to live.</span></span></div>
<div id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE320" style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 1.2; list-style-type: none; padding: 5pt 0px;">
<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE321" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I don’t think O’Hara meant “Inevitability” to be synonymous with “Fate,” although it might seem so. The title of his novel </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE322" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE323" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ppointment </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE324" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">i</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE325" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">n </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE326" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">S</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE327" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;">amarra</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE328" style="display: inline; text-decoration-line: underline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE329" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">refers to a legend passed on by Somerset Maugham in which a merchant spots across the marketplace</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE330" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE331" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the figure of Death, who waves at him. Frightened, the merchant flees to the distant city of Samarra. When Death is asked why he waved at the merchant, he explains “I was startled to see him here today. I have an appointment with him tomorrow in Samarra.” In avoiding a misstep, a faux pas, O’Hara’s suicidal characters make a fatal step—in other words they may think, and it may appear, that in committing suicide they are saving themselves from pain, or from humiliation, or in Hemingway’s case, from arrest by the FBI or </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE332" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the IRS</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE333" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or some other fabulous </span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE334" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;">horror</span><span id="ydp7b59e3d3yiv1772143286ydp60b86c3cE335" style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that will destroy them. If they believe these fates to be actual inevitable disasters looming over them, despite what a rational observer might make of their situations, then it makes all the sense in the world for them to flee right into the arms of Death.</span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="display: inline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0