Arts and Letters

John O’Hara and I made friends slightly while I had the honor to preside over the Institute, when he suddenly resigned from it. I wrote to him that, having begun my term of office by losing Ezra Pound, I wanted more than anything not to let him go. Could he explain the matter to me? Might I be able to remedy it or to make amends? He replied at some length, very much to the point, but didn't withdraw his resignation. He asked me not to file his letters with the run-of-the-mill Institute correspondence, to be read perhaps by fellow-members less sympathetic than I. To which I agreed, and I have not yet broken that promise. In 1964 the Academy conferred upon him its Award of Merit; upon which he came back into the Institute good-naturedly enough.

Even after his success was well established, he suffered intensely from competitiveness, that most manly and, as you might say, superstitious form of the sin of envy. He was one of two writers of my acquaintance who extremely aspired to be ranked with the world-wide and timeless masters of literature—the other was Somerset Maugham. I personally have always thought this an undignified and rather unwise consideration. But the heavy forms of literary art such as the novel, to say nothing of the swarming inspirations of the short story, may exhaust a man's sense of his own identity. If the company of the great in his own imagination bucks him up, why not? Let no creative man pride himself on his mere humility. Often it partakes of cowardice and laziness. We must desire results, not attitudes.

One important factor in O'Hara's mastery of the literary art was his inclination to live the life of subject matter for a number of years, and to the hilt; for example, heavy drinking and perhaps quarrelsomeness, and sweating things out in the vulgar marketplaces for a writer's work: Hollywood, Broadway, and so on. I don't suppose that the fair sex troubled him much. From the midpoint of his life on, good and beautiful women seem always to have felt protective toward him, and he was most apt to be influenced by them. Another important trait of his character in due course was his willingness and ability to switch from living for experience's sake to the life of writing itself, drudgery and production. His regimen in recent years has been described to me by a family connection of mine, one of his neighbors in Princeton; it was extraordinary! Regular and sober to an extreme degree then, with a minimum of sociability and a routine of exercise and sleep, he chose to work in the dead of night, undistracted, undisturbed except by the rising sun; and wrote then as well as ever, if not better than ever, until the sorrowful, untimely end.

Now, about his literary mentality and output as a whole, I can offer a few brief generalizations; not criticism. His powers of characterization were somewhat limitedly American. We (according to him) are a morally fragile type of humanity: fighters with glass chins, heroes who have heart attacks, all hubris-prone! But the way things turn out for his protagonists is far from the ancient tragic concept. For our time and our literature he, even more than Hemingway, created the anti-hero. From the word go, the O'Hara characters' weaknesses and ignobilities transpire, little by little, plain as day. None of their downfalls surprise us in the slightest. It is all harrowing rather than tragic. There isn't elevation enough or hopeful illusion enough for entire tragedy; but it is powerfully harrowing.

His themes, however, are important in America, to Americans. I can mention two or three. A sort of formula for suicide not due either to unbearable blows of fate or to definite mental illness, but to a lack of mental hygiene: believing in hopeless moral principles and doing things, day in and day out, year in and year out, that any fool would refrain from or cease before long. The vertical social mobility of those who only get a little way up the ladder, then find themselves stuck. Why? Because they have lower-middle-class traits ingrained and do not develop horizontal energy or peripheral vision.

O'Hara's sense of literary aesthetics, style, and form, was simple and sound. Having had from the start an ear for talk almost as keen as Hemingway's, his dialogue is a matter of mimicry rather than drama. Whether simple or not, his people talk a great deal without expressing themselves deeply, but their every word goes to prove that they have existed in reality, continue to exist in his framework of fiction.

I suppose that his chief formal problem was length; the ratio between breadth of theme, depth of emotion, and dimensions of the finished work. Sometimes his short stories seem too short; most of his later novels are (I think) too long. With the least overexpansion or heavy emphasis, the texture of both his morality and his prose as such thickens, his detail turns to convention or repetition. I once supposed that he had yielded perhaps unwittingly to the nineteenth-century tradition: giving his reader his money's worth for long winter evenings in the country—there still are hundreds of thousands of story-lovers who prefer reading to watching television—or that his clever publishers had beguiled him along this line. But surely not; the long-drawn-out fiction occurred in his prosperous, angrily independent post-maturity. He never really wanted anything so much as to be as great a narrative writer as he could be. And Appointment in Samarra and The Doctor's Son and Imagine Kissing Pete and other middle-sized works are perfect, in manner, message, pace, and proportion.