Here is part two of my interview with John O'Hara Society member Steven Goldleaf, editor of the upcoming volume of O'Hara's New York Stories.
Robert Knott: What were some of
the challenges the editing process entailed?
Steven Goldleaf: During the editing I realized that I was having
arguments with John O’Hara. I could
sense his presence when I would decide, for example, to make something uniform
throughout the stories. Some of these
were very small things, like the spelling of “grey”—with an “e” or an “a.” He had it both ways. I thought it would be nice to have it
consistent, but I imagined O’Hara’s objection: “No, that has to be spelled in
the British way because….”
I’m not crazy enough to literally have this argument with a
dead person, but in my head I thought: “Yes, sir, but for consistency….” And sometimes they were rather substantial
issues. You think of editing as being
rather easy, just select some stories, put them in order and publish them, but
there were some issues that were tricky.
Did I mention the story “Sportsmanship?”
“Sportsmanship” is a wonderful early story that is a kind of
morality tale about a guy who steals money from the owner of a pool hall and
tries to get back in his good graces. I
love the story. It’s one of my favorite
early stories and it’s included here because it clearly takes place in the
Bronx. But in the course of reviewing it
for this collection, I noticed there was a typo in the story. In fact, there was a typo in the title of the
story. The story is actually called—and
I checked the New Yorker publication
and the first book collection and the later book collections—“Sportmanship” with
no middle “s.” I thought, “That’s a
funny typographical error” and I looked in the story itself and found the
character says, in dialogue, “sportsmanship.”
I thought, “Ok, let me look this up,” and I looked it up in
various dictionaries and it was virtually non-existent. There were no dialectical uses of it, no
examples of it in literature. I thought
it was flatly a typographical error, but the story has been reprinted with that
error in the title and in the story itself time and time again. This was a particularly interesting argument
I was having with the dead O’Hara, saying, “We really should fix this one” and
he saying: “No, leave it as it is. That was how I approved it for printing in
the New Yorker and in the first
collection.” I think I went back and
forth on this several times. There’s a
good argument to be made either way, but ultimately I think I ended up titling
the story “Sportmanship,” even though I don’t think that was actually the title
of the story or that O’Hara was making any particular point. I think it was simply an error. But it appears as “Sportmanship” in every
form John O’Hara ever got to approve.
It’s only been transformed into “Sportsmanship” by other editors. I’m not even sure they made the change
consciously. They just saw it misspelled
and unthinkingly corrected it.
If anyone thinks that “Sportmanship” was a deliberate misspelling
on O’Hara’s part I’d be interested to hear about it. I’ve discussed sports with thousands of New
Yorkers, but I’ve never heard any of them pronounce that word without all three
“s”es in it.
There was another early story called “Good-by, Herman,”
which O’Hara sometimes spelled without an “e” at the end, but is sometimes
printed with an “e.” Inside the story he
references a character who is a non-native speaker of English, a
German-speaker, whose name is spelled different ways throughout the story. It’s hard to tell if this is something O’Hara
did deliberately to show the difficulty different American characters had
pronouncing the name or if it’s simply an error. You could also make all kind of character
assumptions based on how an individual character chose to pronounce the name
and you’d feel pretty stupid if you found out that was just O’Hara’s goof.
In the end, I just tried to do whatever I thought O’Hara
would have wanted me to do, after he and I were done arguing about it.
RK: Do you have a
particular favorite story in the book?
I do. If O’Hara were
to be represented by only one story, I would probably pick the only story (I believe)
that he ever wrote about a black man.
It’s a beautiful story called “Bread Alone.” It comes very close to being overly
sentimental, but it humanizes this African-American protagonist in a way that
very few white middle class authors were capable of doing in the late
1930s. For this reason I think it’s of
great historical significance that a white author took such trouble to
understand what black people went through and presented it in a way that
allowed the reader to empathize with the characters. So, that’s my favorite in a lot of very real
senses.
I’ll also say that a story I’m very much drawn to—and again,
it’s because of place—is “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor.” It takes place in a building that is still
standing. It’s also a building that John
O’Hara lived in for a period in the 1930s.
It’s actually a city block between 23rd and 24th
streets and 9th and 10th avenues; a series of linked
buildings called London Terrace. The
story is an unusually good character study of a—how should I put
it—monomaniac. This actor who is the
protagonist of the story is well portrayed as being extremely talented and
extremely prideful. It’s a wonderful
study! If I had to get this collection
down to only a dozen stories this one would certainly be among that
number. It’s a very strong piece.
RK: Is there anything
you hope the book reveals about O’Hara to readers new to his work? To readers familiar with his work?
SG: The main trait that O’Hara’s stories have in common is
their emphatic theme of compassion.
O’Hara is often seen as a kind of hard-boiled writer gifted at depicting
circumstances and brand names and outward appearances, but I think that’s all
wrong. I think what he was most gifted
at was studying people who he felt were not that easily understood. He would go to some trouble to understand
what motivated them, what made them behave in the—often odd—ways that they did
and then write a story that made the reader say, “I understand why that
character did what he did.” Some of the
most amazing things he’s done are stories about very unsympathetic characters,
sometimes murderers or other criminals and, while you don’t want to go out and
commit a murder yourself, you do understand what’s going on in a criminal’s
head. I can see how this character got
to the point that this seemed like a good option.
One example of this is John O’Hara on lesbianism. In his later years he seemed virtually
obsessed with lesbians and how they lived their lives and how they behaved and
what they ate for lunch and so on. But I
remain convinced that his main motivation for exploring this was that he was a
heterosexual man and didn’t really understand what they were doing or how they
lived or why someone would be homosexual.
Rather than say, “Well, I don’t understand that and to hell with it,” he
would write obsessively stories about people who behaved in ways that seemed
odd or strange to him, in such a way that he would understand the people
finally, and O’Hara’s reader would get
to understand what was going on inside that person’s mind.
His last story was entitled, “We’ll Have Fun” and it was
about this very unlikely pairing of a wealthy, young upper-class lesbian who finds herself in
proximity to an unemployed, elderly Irish stable hand—and they forge a
friendship. I think this was O’Hara’s
way of saying it is very difficult to predict what people will do when confronted
with a type of person they don’t know very well. In this case there was a very positive
outcome: two unlikely people getting
together and forming a relationship.
