John O'Hara Remembered

 

Norman Mailer almost killed one of his wives. John O'Hara, when besotted by drink, was no gentleman. But in today's lit'ry circles, Mailer often gets a pass. O'Hara never does. Get to meet 'the Master of the Fancied Slight,' as O'Hara was known, in the following brilliant new dissection of the author's life by Charles F. McElwee III.  

 

Touchy, Touchy 

By Charles F. McElwee III

 

John O'Hara wanted acceptance, but acceptance required penance. The author's acerbic, self-destructive personality limited the accolades and tributes he demanded. O'Hara had too many enemies, and he added many in his exhausting life. An Olympian grudge holder, O'Hara routinely blacklisted friends for no particular reason.

 

He was a brawler, a boozer and a blowhard - the holy trinity of a jerk. Bars were O'Hara's boxing rings, and he slugged and rumbled at negligible or imagined provocations. He threw fists at a dwarf in New York's "21" Club, only to be knocked down by another dwarf who joined the fight. He even smacked a woman for a tardy lunch arrival. The high society O'Hara craved loathed him for his alcohol-soaked brutality. Everyone knew him as "a master of the fancied slight." 

 

No, It Wasn't Drinking

O'Hara's Social Disease

By Richard Carreno
The late Sheilah Graham, the Hollywood gossip columnist, is almost always linked to F. Scott Fitzgerald as his mistress for the last three and a half years of his besotted life before the author's death, in 1940, at 44. Of course, Graham helped create this hardly missing link by mining her relationship with Fitzgerald for all it was worth in a series of tell-all books that told all -- over and over again.

Despite that repetition, her reminisces are interesting, engaging, and rather frank. (Fitzgerald used to call her a 'cunt' and, when drunk, wouldn't be shy in telling utter strangers that she was a 'good lay').

Less known, at least to me, was how John O'Hara would keep popping in Fitzgerald's life in Hollywood as a personal guest in Encino, fellow party guest in Hollywood, or just as general New York-connected hanger-on.

But was the big, brash, bear-like O'Hara shy around Graham, a knock-out blond with a sharp tongue and even sharper eye for the rich and the powerful?

O'Hara was no Lothario. Graham, on the other hand, was known to have had her share of men. (Before Scott, she counted eight in all, according her tally reported in The Real F. Scott Fitzgerald: Thirty-Five Years Later, a memoir -- yes, another tell-all -- published in 1976. Let's assume we can multiply that by at least a factor of five).

Somehow, O'Hara got to drive Graham home after she had an interview with Errol Flynn.

Unlike many a squire with a similar opportunity, it seemed that O'Hara didn't want to weazle an invitation to go in and make out. In fact, he left the motor of his car running -- sure sign that he meant to make tracks.

Graham recalled that O'Hara was making it plain that he wasn't about to investigate whether she was a 'good lay' or not.

'Does he think I'm going to rape him or something?' she thought at the time. Ouch!

Besides, Graham reported, O'Hara was suffering from a 'social disease' at the time. How she knew that, she never said.

On CD

Frank MacShane, Another Loss Frank MacShane was one of a dozen O'Hara experts recorded in 1998 by WVIA-FM in its year-long retrospective on the Master. Published: November 17, 1999, The New York Times Frank MacShane, a literary biographer who specialized in applying the highest standards of criticism to popular novelists like Raymond Chandler and John O'Hara who had been ignored by other academic critics, died on Monday at a nursing home in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He was 72. Dr. MacShane, a former professor of writing at Columbia University, moved to Massachusetts seven years ago after the onset of Alzheimer's disease, said his son, Nicholas. As recently as the 1960's and 70's, despite occasional efforts by Edmund Wilson, W. H. Auden and others, academic literary critics largely dismissed Chandler as a mere mystery writer, O'Hara as an undisciplined hack and Ford Madox Ford as a purveyor of glossy junk, none of them worth the time of serious students of literature. Dr. MacShane's biography ''The Life of Raymond Chandler'' (1976), in which he identified Chandler as one of the originators of the hard-boiled detective story and compared him to Joyce, Tolstoy, Chaucer, Twain and Conrad, helped change all that. Reviewing the book on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, Leonard Michaels said that Chandler ''emerges from the book as a very powerful and psychologically interesting figure.'' Newsweek called the book ''an exemplary biography,'' and Richard R. Lingeman, in a review in The New York Times, said it was ''valuable and fascinating.'' John Simon, on the other hand, wrote in Book Week that the biography lacked ''critical acuity.'' The Chandler biography was followed by studies of O'Hara and James Jones. Previously, Dr. MacShane had written a biography of Ford Madox Ford. Discussing his career in 1981, Dr. MacShane told an interviewer for Columbia Library Columns that he had concentrated on the study of writers who had ''substantial followings and many enthusiastic champions'' but who were not ''automatically accepted into the highest literary rank.'' Dr. MacShane was also a dedicated teacher who focused his attention on nonfiction and translation. He taught at the Hotchkiss School, Vassar College, the University of California at Berkeley and Williams College before founding the graduate writing division in the School of the Arts at Columbia in 1967. From 1972 to 1973, Dr. MacShane served as dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia, but then he returned to teaching in the writing division. He was born on October 19, 1927, in Pittsburgh, the only son of a newspaperman who became publisher of The New York Journal-American, the Hearst flagship. He graduated from Harvard in 1949, and received a master's degree from Yale in 1951 and a doctorate from Oxford in 1955. In addition to his son, Nicholas, of Wellesley, Massachusetts, Dr. MacShane is survived by a sister, Jean Fraser-Harris of Bristol, England, and two grandchildren. The above article was written by William H. Honan.