Reading Those Classics #5

Classic Short Stories. Before I went to work in Okinawa in 1986, I bought at used book stores all the John O’Hara fiction I could find. About a dozen novels and a half-dozen short story collections, on the strength of a recommendation by either Gore Vidal or Louis Auchincloss. I read them all in the next six years. I remember Appointment in Samarra (Caroline English), BUtterfield 8 (dirty secrets), Ten North Frederick (village bigwig flops on bigger stage) and From the Terrace (the narcotic chillin’ of flat, prosaic, knowing prose a la Maugham). Of the short stories, I remember only Natica Jackson; the four novellas in Sermons and Soda Water were good but I don’t recall why, except that I like novellas. Weird. So, 30 years down the pike, I thought I’d take another crack at the stories.

New York Stories – John O’Hara

The stories collected in this book are sharp and perceptive. A master of dialogue, O’Hara was a keen observer of people. His goal was to write stories that revealed character in different, interesting ways in order to document how Americans thought and acted in situations that urban adults typically face: career setbacks, love trouble, estrangement, failure, aging, loss, health scares, the frictions of social class, the hamster wheel of financial stability, etc.

He sketches scenes or set pieces in daily life with careful precision, grabbing the reader’s attention at the beginning, holding it fast in the middle and with genuine twists at the end, meeting but shaking up expectations of a writer’s tricks. O’Hara, with masterful control over words, will merely imply a change in mood or feeling, like Chekhov. Readers that like surprise endings will like O’Hara’s subtle revelations of character in unfamiliar situations.

O’Hara The Ordinary Guy didn’t much care about plumbing the abysses of existential issues and assumed his readers didn’t either so O’Hara The Professional Writer gave the readers what they expected of him as the successful author of Appointment in Samarra in 1934.

Readers want stories told with clarity, in readable prose, with entertaining insights into character. Like his readers that liked to think they had a real good bead on things, O’Hara knows full well how unfair Lady Luck is in the distribution of advantaged origins, money, property, opportunity, success, glory, etc. At the same time O’Hara also recognizes how rigidly we apply our allocation of brains and wiles in order to pump our status at work, in the neighborhood, among acquaintances. We are what we choose to become.

Some readers – like me – will read with an implicit smugness, assuming the characters, trapped in the aimless and directionless wandering of limitless rebirth and reincarnation, will reap what they sow given their never-ending foolishness, prejudice, cowardice, and pleasure-seeking. Me, I found reading too many of the stories with insufficient space between them made initial smugness give way to sadness with the human condition. Such moods descend in northern places in March, i.e. the punishment phase of winter.

Also, as the title implies, the setting is the same city. I think I would have liked as a break stories set in good old Pottsville and Hollywood and miscellaneous spots. Actually, I want to re-read Natica Jackson.

Other readers will be more capable and willing to empathize with those who have gone through an experience they've never had.  After all, the research says reading serious fiction may contribute to a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations.

With his Trollopian work habits, O’Hara wrote every single night from midnight to dawn, bent on a Nobel Prize and being counted in the number of respected writers like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. His wife chose as his epitaph a comment he made about himself, “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” Snicker, sigh, or snort at “better…” but read these stories without prejudice and consider the rest.