JOHN O'HARA'S PROTECTORATE
The world O'Hara summoned is extraordinarily foreign to modern readers. A few families control the economic, political, social, and cultural life of their localities. Their sons may attend nearby prep schools and colleges, or they may go off to, say, Lawrenceville and Princeton, but most return to run the real-estate concerns, banks, law firms, factories, and mills that are at the center of the economy and from which their families derive power and prestige. (Even time in this era was locally determined; a crazy-quilt pattern of miniature time zones was changed to a uniform system only when the budding national market required it.) The true subject of O'Hara's chronicle is this provincial ruling class while it was being gradually supplanted by the "national class," as the historian Robert Wiebe has more precisely called the establishment. By the 1930s the local elite had lost so much ground that in Appointment in Samarra the aptly named Julian English's rash compulsion to put the Irish arriviste Harry Reilly in his place leads to English's demise rather than reinforcing his position in society. And significantly, in O'Hara's later novels provincial nabobs fail pathetically when they seek to make their mark in the emerging world of national politics and business. Pottsville's economy today, with its prominent prison and several nursing and retirement homes, is emblematic of this shift in power. Old class antagonisms have mostly dissipated, according to Mimi O'Hara, John O'Hara's niece, who still lives in Pottsville. But so has the vitality of the city, as O'Hara anticipated. In "The Man on the Tractor," a Gibbsville story unusual in being set in the early sixties, long after the period that normally commanded O'Hara's attention, one of his characters comments to another: 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. Not slummy but certainly seedy, Pottsville is old without being "preserved." Although local boosters express hopes of transforming the city into a charming mecca for antiques hounds, this is almost impossible to imagine. The city that once burgeoned with four furriers, five department stores, seven jewelry shops, nine shoe stores, eleven furniture stores, thirty-seven clothing shops, three movie palaces, twenty lunchrooms and restaurants, and nine hotels (and also a red-light district that drew high rollers from New York and Philadelphia) is now neither thriving nor quite dead. Many of the storefronts are empty, and the agencies and enterprises housed by the others -- an office-supply store, a center for maternal and family health services, a rape crisis center, a temp agency, a luncheonette -- are hardly the sort to attract the strollers who used to crowd Pottsville on Friday and Saturday nights. A sign in the window of the Army recruitment center announces that it has moved to the mall. "People even buy their Halloween candy in Reading," one resident, who remembers Pottsville's heyday, says. After a stint as the Moose Lodge, one downtown nineteenth-century mansion is now derelict, and another, Cloud Home, a little farther up the mountain, is a home for "at risk" boys. Pottsville's grand Necho Allen Hotel (O'Hara's John Gibb Hotel) houses a senior citizens' residence. "'Gibbsville' doesn't exist anymore," Paul Connors, an O'Hara family friend who has lived in Pottsville most of his life, told us. |
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