Author John O’Hara was once beaten up at a bar by two midgets after he shouted at one, “What the fuck are YOU looking at?”
O’Hara was a newspaperman, a journalist, a short story writer, and a bestselling novelist. He lived the first three-quarters of the 20th century, and nobody captured the essence of his times better than he did. As biographer Frank MacShane says, nobody sold more books while being as loathed by everyone as he was.
I was assigned Ten North Frederick, his mid-1950’s biggie, by Brenda Murphy (who was a great teacher) my freshman year at St. Lawrence. I thought I might want to major in English. O’Hara convinced me otherwise.
The novel is about an obscure small city lawyer who has spent his whole life feeling entitled to become president, or governor of Pennsylvania, or something big and important.
O’Hara spent his whole life feeling entitled to win the Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, despite coming from the real small city in Pennsylvania – Pottsville – that his fictional character knew as Gibbsville.
You get the drift.
And all of his novels have this same entitlement/bitter loss/”poor me” aura. Oh, he does it well. But it wears on readers.
He was middle-class or upper middle-class, a beloved son of an Irish surgeon, but he desperately wanted to be a WASP.
When his father died relatively young, with messed up finances, O’Hara was left with his dream of attending Yale or some other Ivy shattered. His whole life he had one half of his brain stuck in Irish workingman culture and the other half of his brain idealizing the lives of preppies and the “tasteful” upper classes.
The result was an alcoholic life of envy and hatred of both the poor and the wealthy. He could never be happy in either Pottsville or New York and Hollywood, where he toiled in the studios and had his own work turned into movies.
Skimming Frederick yesterday, it’s apparent that what sold O’Hara to the masses in the 20th century was sex. His editors regularly had to excise certain scenes, and on one occasion he had to flee New York State under cover of darkness to avoid being arrested and jailed on obscenity charges.
By today’s standards, his work is not only not obscene, it’s not even bad language. But, as the internet proves, people live for sex, and the pickings were slimmer in the 20th century, and you had to take what you could get.
His fans today are few. Critics who approve of him say that he shows a deep knowledge of social classes in America, and was a great sage of exactly what it felt to live in the 1920’s or ’50’s.
But MacShane’s biography, and newer ones that I’m starting, show a bitter man with one leg in Pottsville, one leg just outside of New Haven, with the right formula to titillate the housewives and commuters of suburbia. But that’s the wrong formula to interest scholars and readers today.
