How Important Is O'Hara?

John O'Hara is generally considered a fine stylist. He is easy to read, unusually observant, and apparently easy to understand. The setting and dialogue of O'Hara's stories are so familiar to contemporary Americans that reading his work seems at first glance to require no more imagination than watching a situation comedy on television, or a Doris Day movie.

But O'Hara's work is far more profound than its trappings would suggest. Although he has occasionally been dismissed simply as the ranking historian of American manners, the Amy Vanderbilt of the Gibbsonville set, John O'Hara is one of America's important writers. For he is one of her most incisive and bitter social critics.

The short stories collected in The Cape Cod Lighter demonstrate O'Hara's perception of the hypocracies and paradoxes of our civilization. In the land of the free, the individual is trapped. Each story broadens our understanding of our lives by reminding us of the myriad restrictive pressures which confine us: sex, society, manners, ambition, obligation, capitalism, habit.

Almost every story repeats the theme of the trapped American. The first story is appropriately entitled "Appearances". On the surface it describes the quarrel of a New York suburban couple over whether to attend a funeral. Using numerous arguments of social obligation the woman persuades her husband to abandon his weekly golf game and attend a funeral, for appearances. The confining pressures of habit--and resignation to it--are made vivid. "I took for granted that you'd be going to the funeral. I just took it for granted," Mrs. Ambrie explains. Her husband accepts this, saying "I suppose the same way people took for granted that Jack Hill (the deceased) was a friend of mine." But O'Hara leaves it to the couple's daughter, who had had an affair with the deceased, to utter the most depressing line of all: "Maybe now I can marry Joe and settle down in (suburban) Greenport and be what I always wanted to be."

Excerpted, O'Hara dialogue seems melodramatic, but in his stories it reads smoothly. Over the years O'Hara's ear for dialogue has become something of a legend, as critics never tire of reminding us. Yet he did not come by this talent easily: he worked at it as a young journalist. Fox example, in 1929 he got a New Yorker assignment to report the meetings of the Orange County Afternoon Delphian Society. As Walcott Gibbs reflected in 1938, after a while the stories became almost impossible to read, "the sensation was uncomfortably like being trapped among the ladies while they talked."

A good ear is only one of several talents which critics generally concede to O'Hara. Another is a good eye. Lionel Trilling has pointed out that "he knows, and persuades us to believe, that life's deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn."

O'Hara's fiction does not glorify American life, it satirizes it. The accuracy with which he describes our way of life in The Cape Cod Lighter is matched by the poignancy with which he mocks it. In "The Bucket of Blood" Jay Detweiler runs a small bar, and has an affair with a local prostitute. Finally he ends the romance when she wants to hustle in his joint, even if it means marrying him. "He was sorry to break off with Jenny, and amidst his regret was deep appreciation of the compliment to himself and to her business in her willingness to marry him. It was easy to find a woman who would marry a man with a successful business, but Jenny had been willing to be a partner. It was a high compliment indeed and it made little difference whether it flattered his business or himself, since one was the same as the other. He wondered how many Detweilers in the town had had this satisfaction." Thus O'Hara mocks the conventional terms of marriage, and the perverted ethics of commercial society.

"Your Fah Nefah Ne-face" is every bit as distorted, and openly comical, as its title. Johnnie and Sallie Collins, a brother and sister, play outrageous tricks on a world with a rigid sense of propriety. They exploit sentimentality by feigning an accidental meeting under the clock at the Biltmore, pretending to be long-lost siblings, leaving onlookers with a happy tale they will tell and retell. They mock tradition and rumor by registering as newlyweds in a motel, and asking for separate rooms because she is shy. But finally it is society that has the last laugh. Several years after Johnnie dies, Sallie learns that people had (falsely) accused them of incest. Even Sallie Collins can't laugh off that one. "Aren't people darling? Aren't they lovely?" she asks. "They's managed to ruin all the fun Johnnie and I had together all those years. Just think, I was married twice and had two children before I began to grow up." It took public humiliation to destroy Sally's innocence.

Cynical as he is, O'Hara believes in some kind of salvation. His solution, like his criticism, is neither new nor profound, but it is handled with extra-ordinary skill. For O'Hara, salvation comes through brotherhood, through man's deep love of man. Where people's hearts and lives connect, there is freedom and meaning.

"Pat Collins", the best story in The Cape Cod Lighter, carries this message of brotherhood. Through his friendship with the eminently successful Whit Hofman, Pat Collins builds up a good business. But there is a hitch: Pat's wife loves Whit and seduces him. When their affair ends, Mrs. Collins confesses to her husband, and his world collapses. Not sin, but Pat's loss of his friend brings failure. He loses all faith in himself. As his world crumbles, Pat spends his evenings at a speakeasy where he befriends a lonely elderly millionaire who has spent 35 years writing a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The two become friends. Pat regains dignity, confidence, and the desire to succeed. Then, unsolicited, the Hawthorne scholar gives Pat $10,000 to start his life anew.

Of course not even this moral is devoid of satire. O'Hara seems to say make good friends and make sure they're rich. O'Hara continues to explore the ramifications of friendship in "The First Day," and in "A Short Walk from the Station." In these stories attempts at friendship are rebuffed. He stresses love in "Jurge Dulrumple," where the love of two women for each other precludes their loving George Dalrymple. The frequency with which man's search for spiritual love fails provokes O'Hara's constant, and notorious, descriptions of promiscuity in modern America. Men must seek sexual love in the absence of any other.

The question is whether Americans will read O'Hara for gossip and sex or for his social criticism. Almost certainly they will stick to the familiar American pattern and relax with his books while snuggled in suburban armchairs. For O'Hara's descriptions are so real, his eye and ear so keen, that we can accept the stories at face value and place The Cape Cod Lighter on the coffee table next to The Saturday Evening Post. To recognize the bite and satire on every page would be to challenge the foundations of our entire way of life