Talking of books
Scarlet O'Hara
Benny Green
Ever since I first read Appointment in Samarra in my teens, I have had the feeling that I would have detested John O'Hara. It is perhaps an unwise course to deduce the author from the behaviour of his characters, but as the author deduces his characters from the behaviour of himself, perhaps not as unwise as all that. I never felt entirely at ease in O'Hara's world because inside it there were too many occasions when self-expression was equated with getting too drunk to stand, when manhood meant punching somebody on the nose, when morality was insisting that the whole world stinks. All of these propositions have some validity, but as they are no more than half-truths and O'Hara seemed uninterested in or unaware of the other half, he seemed to me to be one of those difficult cases for the literary conscience, readable but intolerable.
My worst suspicions have all been confirmed by Finis Farr's biography, O'Hara (W. H. Allen £3.50), a book which I must say has plugged many a yawning gap in my knowledge of modern American literature. If O'Hara's beginnings are as obscure to his many thousands of British readers as they were to me, then Farr's book will prove fascinating. He has researched painstakingly, followed his hero in and out of every speakeasy in the history of New York, read widely, by which I mean he has read O'Hara, and marshalled his facts with considerable intelligence.
Now to get down to cases. Mr Farr is very good on the Life, not so good on the Works, and might have been better advised not to theorise on the aesthetics of the case. For instance, he says that his man was a genius because he created a world of his own, but as that achievement also stands to the credit of W. W. Jacobs, Barbara Cartland, Warwick Deeping, Dornford Yates, Hugh Walpole, C. S. Forester and who knows how many others, I doubt the validity of the argument. Farr also has the odd idea that all people of high talent are liberals, and in quoting a witness of O'Hara's behaviour, "He may be a successful and talented writer but he is at heart a cheap bastard", makes the extraordinarily naive claim that "the weight of O'Hara's talent made such severe judgments inevitable after displays of impatience or fretfulness that would be overlooked or forgotten in less interesting men", which is a piece of advocacy whose intellectual brilliance is matched only by its blinding imbecility.
Mr Farr also feels bound not to say that O'Hara published much too much, especially some of those awful short stories and the reams of monthly magazine hackerv which would have been far better left to some poor fish who really needed the money, and quotes without any evident ironic intent the bonechilling Elks-and-Buffaloes sermonising solemnity of the last two sentences of The Lockwood Concern, surely the most banal conclusion ever reached by any considerable author of the last fifty years. I discover too that O'Hara was drunk and disorderly at least as many times as there are pages in his complete works, that he was a braggart who, like his biographer, confused success with sales, that he was ready to barter his dignity in exchange for a crumb from the President's table, that he attached importance to literary awards, and that he felt Who's Who mattered. All in all, a pretty sort of specimen.
And yet the admiration I felt for O'Hara before reading the book is still there, only more so now that I have read it, and for the most obvious of reasons. For all that he wrote some very bad prose, for all that he had an inflated opinion of himself, for all that his intellectual powers were so feeble that he could announce his discovery to the world that George F. Kaufman was superior to Bernard Shaw, in spite of all this sort of loudmouthed nonsense, O'Hara was a professional down to his bootlaces. If his style was often irritating, at least he worked hard enough to have a style. If his habit of often leaving the dialogue of his characters unattributed could confuse the reader to the point of distraction, at least that dialogue when you unravelled it, sounded like three-dimensional people talking. And after all, at his best O'Hara was compulsive reading. The two O'Hara books I will always think of with special affection are Pal Joey (the book, not the musical, which is a
different work entirely which happens to hoe the same title) because of its understanding of the social dilemma of the jazz musician, and a trio of novellas called Sermons and Soda Water, for the purely subjective reason that in 1966, while struggling to compose a first novel, I happened to come across that book, read it in a day, and was so enlightened by the procedure O'Hara had used that I stopPed struggling and finished my own book in matter of weeks. I am not comparing the results with Sermons and Soda Water, onlY saying that John O'Hara was one of those professionals who could show a lazy man the way.
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