Deconstructing John O’Hara

Ever since he burst onto the scene in 1934 at the age of 29 with his dazzling first novel, “Appointment in Samarra,” appreciating John O’Hara has been a complicated matter.

For one thing, he wrote so much in the 3 1/2 decades between his debut and his death in 1970 -- thousands of pages -- that it was difficult to separate the good work from the bad or indifferent. For another, there seemed to be two O’Haras in one career: the bestselling novelist who turned out sprawling (some said bloated) epics that spanned generations, and the short-story and novella writer of dream-sharp tales, as crisp yet as dense as a film shot by James Wong Howe. And then there was O’Hara himself: a combative man; a belligerent, violent drunk; a burner of bridges; his own worst enemy; a man who coveted honors and complained when he didn’t get them (and even when he did). Outliving his contemporaries, he outlived his own artistic context. In his final years, he was a political conservative in a time of protest, a relic of the raccoon-coat era in the age of Woodstock.

In “The Art of Burning Bridges,” Geoffrey Wolff, a novelist and author of the highly regarded biography “Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby” and the memoir “The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father,” has separated the various perceptions, beliefs, myths and lies surrounding O’Hara and put them together again in a cohesive account.

“My aim,” writes Wolff, “is ... to restore to John O’Hara’s complicated history those human and occupational particulars that make him a writer worthy of attention.” With its “human and occupational particulars,” Wolff’s biography sets for itself an O’Hara-esque goal, and Wolff, director of the graduate fiction program at UC Irvine, meets it with a brilliance worthy of its subject on the best day of his best year.

Wolff makes clear from the start that he can’t do everything. “The problem for a biographer with no direct experience of the young John O’Hara,” he writes, “is the necessity of leaving unexplained the major mystery of his personality; namely, why so many men and women found it pleasing to be in his company.” Partly, Wolff guesses, O’Hara’s regrettable behavior was characteristic of those hard-drinking times, a period when “falling down drunk was a cause of mirth, and a bad story told well on oneself was a reputation-enhancer.”

The sensitivity of O’Hara’s writing gives proof, Wolff argues, that there was more to like in the author than the “monster of solipsism” he often was: “He didn’t reproduce the cadences and underlying reality of spoken idiom without listening to voices other than his own; he couldn’t have so accurately drawn pictures of his times without staring out, at the integrities as well as the incongruities of his companions, as well as selfward. Without these nuances of motive and act, certified by the fact of his friends’ loyalty as well as by the specifics of work, it would be easy to write him off as a coarse bully and a social climber, a mean drunk and a brutal husband. And indeed, hanging judges among critics have for years dismissed him along with his work in just such terms.”

Wolff, of course, is no hanging judge but a passionate defense attorney. O’Hara couldn’t ask for a better champion. The brief for O’Hara begins with his childhood as the son of a stern and respected doctor whose stubbornness was bred into a talented boy unwilling or unable to toe the line Dad drew. With the skills of a novelist, Wolff brings to life the world of relative privilege that shaped and misshaped O’Hara.

Born in 1905 in the coal-mining city of Pottsville, Pa., O’Hara was “the altar-boy eldest son of one of the most esteemed families in a region stingy about bestowing its esteem.” O’Hara’s father was a personage in this region -- hence, so was his heir. “To be a doctor’s son,” Wolff writes, “was to expect a passerby to curtsy or tip the hat.” Before he was a teenager, O’Hara was accompanying his father on the doctor’s rounds: going into darkened rooms where ordinary children weren’t allowed, gazing without blinking on scenes of mortal sickness. “When he came back out into the light, he emerged as a writer.”

But his father wanted John to be a medical man, something the adolescent resisted. The strong-willed doctor, notes Wolff, “met in his son a match for stubborn pride, for prickly self-governance.” Rebellious John became “a teenage pain,” then a flamboyant screw-up.

On the eve of his graduation as valedictorian of Niagara Prep and the brink of probable entrance into Yale, O’Hara went with two classmates on a memorable drinking spree, from which the three were escorted back to school the next morning by police. The hung-over O’Hara awoke to learn he’d been stripped of his prep-school diploma, and his enraged father vowed: “I’ll be damned if I’ll send a drunk to Yale.”

Free of his family’s supervision, O’Hara made a rough-and-tumble odyssey to Prohibition-era Manhattan, where, without too much trouble and despite vast failings, he found good friends and fame.

There are marvelous set pieces: O’Hara’s relationships with the likes of Franklin P. Adams and Dorothy Parker; his vexed association with the New Yorker, the magazine that used so much of his work but never gave him the respect he craved; brilliant analyses of the art and craft of several O’Hara short stories, and judicious readings of the novels.

Los Angeles readers will find O’Hara’s story of particular interest. Though one thinks of him as an Easterner, he spent a fair amount of time in Hollywood, writing for the studios, drinking at Musso’s, hanging out with Robert Benchley and crew at the Garden of Allah. How nice to know that Ravenswood, the still-standing apartment-hotel on North Rossmore, was not only the longtime home of Mae West but also the onetime residence of her fellow Paramount employee O’Hara.

Throughout this masterful and intelligent biography, Wolff allows himself to be a presence in his own text: making personal asides, dispensing judgments, inserting witty footnotes and otherwise proving that a biographer is not some abstract and omniscient authority but a human being with a point of view. It’s bracing when he presents some chestnut about his subject, then cracks it to bits: “One of the many apocryphal tales of O’Hara’s first days at the Herald-Tribune has him showing up at the city desk for his first assignment wearing his coonskin coat. In April? I doubt it. O’Hara had many blind spots, but reading a culture’s manners and favored costumes was not among them.”

Or: “Wolcott Gibbs trots out a tale many times told about O’Hara.... The root version has O’Hara assigned by a magazine to fly over New York in an airplane. He does; it lands; he breaks a window in the cockpit; he is subdued by ‘authorities.’ ... The versions are there, in print, with citations available. But they’re baloney” -- not only, Wolff maintains, because of the variations in the story’s printed versions (one has O’Hara doing a piece on “the sight of Manhattan from aloft”; another insists he was assigned “to cover Amelia Earhart’s arrival at Newark”) but because Wolff, an experienced biographer, knows “in my bones that this story is false.”

Or when previous O’Hara biographer Frank MacShane reports as “settled fact that at the adjournment of a stormy visit to Random House ... O’Hara ‘hurled’ a glass paperweight at his editor before ‘storming out,’ ” Wolff declares himself “skeptical, not least because MacShane reports that this ‘cleared the air’ between the novelist and his publisher” -- an unlikely outcome to such a violent act.

No doubt about it: Wolff is on O’Hara’s side, sticking up for him when the evidence warrants, always giving him the benefit of the doubt. (“However hard on his friends ...,” Wolff insists, “he was harder on himself.”) So it’s a grand moment when the biographer, finally faced with yet another example of O’Hara’s willful boorishness, at long last blows his top.

It comes during an account of O’Hara’s cranky behavior toward Random House’s Bennett Cerf, that most civilized of publishers. “There really was no reason at all for the disagreeable and even threatening tone of your note of November 27th ... ,” wrote an exasperated Cerf to his recently signed author in the late 1940s. “From the first day we talked about your coming with us, everybody in this office has done everything in his power to make you happy. You, on the other hand, seem to take some kind of perverse delight in making us uncomfortable. Why?”

Wolff, as if spurred by Cerf, erupts: “John O’Hara did seem to take a delight in creating and nursing grudges. It can’t be ignored that ... he frequently behaved like a petulant bully.... [S]ometimes I just can’t like this man. I admire in his character that he was never disloyal, never shrewd in his own advancement, never two-faced. But whatever provocations can be debited to his enemies there is no excuse for his self-indulgent brutality, his sullen refusals to discuss with his antagonists the very grievances he brought to their uninvited attention.”

But that’s as hard as Wolff gets on his prickly, often unappealing subject. O’Hara was no monster, and when all’s said and done, it is his writing that matters most to us today. As a writer, if not as a person, he knew how to win favor: by addressing the most human of human concerns.

O’Hara, writes Wolff, “understood very well that if fiction is about any general impulse, it is about denial. Someone wants something that someone else ... will not give. Club membership, a kind word, love, a Nobel Prize, piles of money, the presidency, a clean bill of health, a nice review, a bicycle for Christmas, sexual intimacy, a starting position on the football team, an entry in Who’s Who or in the Social Register.... There are as many things to be denied as there are to be desired, and people to want and withhold them.”

O’Hara never wanted for stories. How well he wrote them was another matter. His short stories stayed crisp throughout his career. The novels were more problematic. Wolff is amusingly apt when he imagines the task of a critic assessing for the first time O’Hara’s 1949 novel “A Rage to Live.” “On one hand O’Hara resorted to interior monologues of stunning clumsiness. On a second hand his inflection was stunningly accurate (‘You like him best?’ a character asks Grace; ‘I like him the only,’ she answers). On a third he piles on senseless data. And on a fourth he nails the clothes and dressing-methods.... “ Such criticism, Wolff points out, needs the multi-limbed physique of a Vishnu.

Wolff concludes -- fairly, sensibly, obviously -- that O’Hara should be judged by his best, that (as Wolff quotes someone else about somebody else) the “only rocket launch that matters is the one that went highest; the highest stays up there forever.” O’Hara’s highest is still up on view, some of it in newly reissued trade paperbacks with introductions by enthusiasts whose eloquence is nearly a match for Wolff’s.

In her introduction to the 1935 novel “Butterfield 8,” Fran Lebowitz admires O’Hara’s “impeccable understanding of what brutal use can be made of impeccable behavior, of how closely the cut of a suit can approximate the cut of a knife.”

Louis Begley is similarly moved to write in his consideration of O’Hara’s short stories: “O’Hara wrote effortlessly. His style is efficient and spare.... He avoided equally the oversimplification of language that in Hemingway’s fiction sometimes lends itself to parody, and the flights into poetry in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction, although he admired deeply both writers....”

John Updike, looking once more at the book that started it all, “Appointment in Samarra,” makes the keen observation that “factuality was O’Hara’s gruff way of telling the world he loved it.”

Read these terrific books yourself -- again, or for the first time. Coin your own superlatives.

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‘My aim is ... to restore to John O’Hara’s complicated history those human and occupational particulars that make

him a writer worthy

of attention.’

-- Geoffrey Wolff

Author, “The Art of Burning Bridges:

A Life of John O’Hara”