Robert Knott Interviews Steven Goldleaf
On June 13 John O’Hara Society
member Steven Goldleaf discussed his new collection of John
O’Hara’s New York
Stories. The book is published by Penguin Classics
and will be released on August 27, 2013. Below is the first
part of our conversation. Additional responses in the coming
weeks. – Robert Knott
Steven Goldleaf: It was pretty
unoriginal. Matt Bruccoli had come out with two geographically
organized collections of short stories. He had first done a
collection called Gibbsville, PA, which was almost every
story that took place in Gibbsville. It was 900-odd pages.
It was a really thick book. And then he came out with John
O’Hara’s Hollywood, which was almost — if not quite
— all the stories that took place in Hollywood. Then
Bruccoli died and I didn’t want to let the New York stories go
unpublished, so I proposed the idea to Wylie O’Hara Doughty and
she was very enthusiastic. She put me in touch with her agent,
the agent for the O’Hara estate, and he didn’t take that long to
interest a publisher, which is Penguin. Penguin did not want to do
an inclusive collection, which is a little different than the two
earlier books. From the very beginning they thought an
inclusive collection would be too long. So, I created a list
of the New York stories I thought were the essential ones, and we
pared it down to the number we are doing, which is over thirty.
RK: How did you arrive at the final selection of stories, from an editorial standpoint?
SG: The first thing I did, early on, when I had a list of vseventy or eighty stories, I realized that about thirty of them were stories that didn’t strictly speaking take place in New York City. They took place in Westchester, Long Island, or New Jersey. The characters worked in New York City or took a trip there, but they were stories that were essentially set in the suburbs. I realized that that could be a whole separate book. So, if I let geography determine what stories could be included that made things a lot easier. One of the final stories, “Late, Late Show,” which I read again after the stories had been set in type, I think is a story that actually takes place in the suburbs. But, aside from that, the stories are very specifically located in the City. I still had too many stories, though. So, I decided one criterion was going to be whether readers had seen these stories before, rather than including stories that had been included in some earlier O’Hara collections. There were other stories that the publisher wanted included, such as “At The Cothurnos Club,” which is from The Time Element. The editor at Penguin, a very smart, excellent editor named John Siciliano felt very strongly that he wanted it included.
There was another story mentioned by E.L. Doctorow in his foreword called “The Public Career of Mr. Seymour Harrisburg,” which John [Siciliano] thought we should include because Doctorow had referenced it. I do mention stories in my introduction that we did not ultimately include. For example, in the excerpt already posted on the John O’Hara Society blog [www.OHaraSociety.blogspot.com] I alluded to a story called “The Golden” that we did not include because it is a suburban story. But I used it to make a general point about O’Hara’s characters, of which it was a good illustration. I ended up alluding to several stories that were eliminated from the final table of contents.
RK: The table of contents does
heavily emphasize the later stories. Why?
SG: I don’t think the early
stories are as interesting literarily as they are historically.
They give you an idea about what got O’Hara interested in writing
about New York City, but the quality of the stories is less
pronounced. Also, I don’t think the later stories have
received all that much attention. If you look at the
posthumous collections like The Time Element and The Good
Samaritan, I’m not sure they sold as well or were as well
received and I’m not sure everyone has had an opportunity to read
some of those stories. O’Hara was also not able to publish
most of his later stories in journals and many were only available
in these collections. If you didn’t see the collections you
didn’t get to read the stories.
SG: Sure. One of
the stories that I was surprised didn’t make it was a story called
“Now We Know,” an interaction between a bus driver and a woman
he was flirting with in Queens. It is an early story and
not very weighty or significant, but it was one of the better early
stories. I’m not even sure why it ended up being excluded
except that I had to keep drawing up lists of stories that we might
be able to dispense with and I was pretty much taken up on all of my
offers. But I was surprised that I had even suggested that it
could be cut.
(Robert Knott is
an officer of the John O'Hara Society).