Everybody hated John O’Hara. But he made a good living at it.
I just finished Geoffrey Wolff’s biography of author John O’Hara, and I know less about O’Hara than I did when I started it. Like the previous bio I read, anything about him sucks your brains out your ears and you know less about him than when you or I read him in college.
Perverse and prolific, O’Hara built, not unlike P.G. Wodehouse did in his many Blandings Castle novels, a cottage industry writing in the same damned fictional world, set in his native Pottsville, PA, thinly disguised as “Gibbsville.”
Looking back at him a half century since his death, you have to wonder why anybody cared.
He was concerned about sex in his small town, and about social class distinctions in small cities, and preppie sports, and Brooks Brothers shirts, and his Rolls Royce, and booze, and Yale, and booze, and booze.
Reading O’Hara today, or reading anything about him, is like opening a crypt and sleeping with your late uncle.
I have no idea what this biographer, Geoffrey Wolff, was trying to do, although he says he was trying to find out the “why” of why John O’Hara was such a perversely tortured creature. But, as he admits at the end , he did no better than others who tried to answer “why”.
So O’Hara is forever an enigma. He’s good for studying an era. It’s hard to believe, but he wrote the books and treatments of early and mid Hollywood blockbusters (and some stinkers).
Let’s let Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward take us out. It seems so long ago.
Because it was.