Strange Bedfellows
By Charles McGrath
The New York Times | May 16, 2014
It would be hard to think of two writers less alike — stylistically and, for that matter, personally — than Truman Capote and John O’Hara, yet they shared many preoccupations. Both were fascinated by society high and low, by how people climbed or toppled from one rank to the other, and by how sex and money underpinned the entire system. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote’s charming 1958 novella about a self-invented cafe society girl and the admiring writer who lives upstairs, is set during World War II. Most of the stories assembled in the recent Penguin anthology of O’Hara’s New York stories were written in either the ’30s or the ’60s, but some are set decades earlier. And yet in the newly released audio recordings of the two books, maybe even more than on the page, the versions of New York that are evoked seem virtually interchangeable: It’s a city of people on the make or else clinging to their former reputations, where everyone drinks too much, and where you can easily wake up in bed next to someone you barely remember meeting.
Listening to Capote and O’Hara back to back, in fact, you have to concentrate to keep the characters in one recording from wandering into your recollections of the other, and from picturing Capote’s Holly Golightly, for example — who once had a future in the movies and now pays the rent by accepting financial favors from men — showing up at “21” on the arm of one of O’Hara’s fast-talking Hollywood producers. And that young couple who make a living from hosting creepy sex parties — it may take a moment to recall that they turn up not at one of Golightly’s parties but in the deeply strange O’Hara story “A Phase of Life.”
O’Hara is now somewhat neglected and underappreciated, and the print version of the New York anthology, edited by Steven Goldleaf, with a foreword by E. L. Doctorow, is part of a welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback. (I wrote the introduction to the new edition of O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in Samarra.”) But even readers familiar with O’Hara may be surprised by how many of these stories involve not his Park Avenue types but people in show business: agents, producers, writers, actors, many of them alcoholic has-beens. This is a world O’Hara knew well from his early days as a press agent, and like much of his best work, the stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting.
