JOHN O’HARA’S ‘HOW CAN I TELL YOU?’: AN ALLEGORY OF HEMINGWAY’S SUICIDE
By Steven Goldleaf
On July 3rd, 1961, as news of Ernest Hemingway’s death began to circulate, John O’Hara had been sitting in the TV room of his summer cottage at Quogue on the south shore of Long Island with his daughter Wylie, who had just turned 16. Suddenly, O’Hara bolted for his bedroom to retrieve a framed photo, taken some thirty years earlier, of the two successful and prosperous young authors flanking the owner of Manhattan’s Stork Club. Tears streamed down O’Hara’s cheeks. Showing the photograph to his teenaged daughter, he told her, “I understand it so well.”
“It,” of course, was Hemingway’s suicide, and O’Hara never shared his understanding with anyone outside of that Quogue cottage. Inside the beachfront cottage that day, Wylie didn’t press her father for further details of his understanding, so the remark remains to this day tantalizing. “I understand it so well.” On numerous occasions over the past few decades, I’ve spoken with his daughter, who last month turned 73, and Wylie O’Hara Holahan Doughty, as charming and forthcoming as a literary executor is allowed to be, regrets that those bare details are all that she remembers from that day in 1961.
Hemingway’s suicide was generally not very well understood, or even accurately described, in the days and years after July of 1961. Observers, even after learning details showing that his death was no gun-cleaning accident, as his widow claimed at the time, and even after reading what reporters and biographers and critical analysts had to say in making sense of it, were mostly puzzled by it, rather than immediately understanding and accepting of Hemingway’s decision to end his life. To a degree, “it” still seems inexplicable, the willful death of someone who had been lionized as “the most important… author since the death of William Shakespeare” some three and half centuries earlier, so O’Hara’s immediate claim of thorough understanding sticks out as highly unusual. Despite all of the analysis and knowledge that has emerged since 1961 from psychologists’ and literary critics’ studies of suicide, and of the self-destruction of authors and artists and creators of all stripes, from Sylvia Plath to Robin Williams to Anthony Bourdain, we still lack a single clue as to what was on the mind of John O’Hara that overcast July afternoon.
Or do we? I believe that O’Hara, who never commented on or explicated his cryptic remark about Hemingway’s death, has nonetheless left us with that single clue in his work, a short story that allegorizes Hemingway’s suicide. Being a work of art, it doesn’t attempt to address that issue directly or explicitly, and indeed O’Hara’s short stories are very rarely explicit or directly expository. This one is elliptical, perhaps even by O’Hara’s standards, but there is evidence that the Hemingway connection is there, and that evidence is what I’d like to present to you today.
The textual basis for interpreting this story as allegorical of Hemingway’s death is simple enough. O’Hara wrote it in the second half of 1961, or early the next year, and it appeared in The New Yorker of December 1, 1962. It is a very short story of only 2,000 words, so short that I could probably just read it verbatim to you this morning, which might be the most persuasive display of O’Hara’s design. I will recommend that you do have a look at it—if you don’t have access to the
NYer online, it also appeared in O’Hara’s 1963 collection of stories entitled The Hat on the Bed. More of a character sketch than a short story, as many of O’Hara’s fictions are, the plot is easily summarized: a successful car salesman stops in a bar on his way home from a very productive day’s work and finds that alcohol does nothing to relieve his melancholy mood. When he leaves the bar, after engaging the bartender in a discursive conversation, he goes home where he pointedly conceals from his wife the good news about his day on the sales floor. The couple goes to bed, but in the middle of the night, the salesman gets up and retrieves his shotgun from its case.
There are several poignant details I’d like to highlight for you in this story, but the line to which O’Hara draws the most obvious attention is the line of dialogue he uses for the story’s title: “How Can I Tell You?” which is the salesman’s response to his wife’s inquiry about what’s troubling him. “How Can I Tell You?”
The implication, of course, is that the protagonist of the story himself doesn’t know what is troubling him, so he has no way to convey even to the most caring and concerned of sympathetic listeners the causes of his mysterious and all-enveloping despair. O’Hara’s stories bear an elliptical quality, this one more than most, because inarticulateness, the inability to express in words his most profound doubts and fears is the ultimate cause of the salesman’s paralyzing despair.
O’Hara’s choice of a small-town New Jersey Ford Motor Company salesman might seem a peculiar choice to allegorize a world-famous author, but O’Hara makes that peculiarity the main subject of conversation between his salesman and the bartender he speaks to. He orders straight bourbon, pointedly refusing any particular brand, and he ignores the glass of soda the bartender serves him on the side. “He waited for some pleasant effect,” O’Hara writes, “and when none came, he finished the drink in a gulp.” He then orders a second shot of whiskey, and that one too has no pleasing effect. The bartender chatters on blithely, about brands and blends and types of whiskey, ending his discourse with an observation that he read in some magazine: “You know, in this business,” he tells the stone-cold sober salesman, “we get these magazines, I guess you have them in the car business. Trade publications, they’re known as.”
The salesman’s response is “Even the undertakers.”
The bartender says, “Huh?” and the salesman elaborates, “The undertakers have trade publications.”
“They do, ah? Well, wuddia know, I guess every business has them,” says the bartender.
“Every business is the same,” the salesman says, “when you come down to it.”
The bartender then amiably asks what’s the connection between selling cars and selling liquor, aside from both having an ultimate goal of making money, and the salesman says “What you just said. We’re all in it for the money. You. Me. Undertakers.”
Soon after this exchange, the bartender decides that he can’t charge a patron money when he’s getting no benefit from his product, and the salesman heads on home.
The point of the exchange is the pointlessness of individual professions and interests and occupations. Everyone, including undertakers, salesmen, bartenders, editors of trade publications, and authors, are all engaged in earning their livings, and there is no pleasure to be taken, drunk or sober, in the things any of us does to make a living, no matter how gifted any of us may be at our profession. Being especially skilled at one’s profession, in fact, as the introductory scene reveals the salesman to be, and as the bartender shows himself to be in the next scene, and as Ernest Hemingway had spent his entire career establishing himself as, is useless to anyone deriving no joy from his giftedness.
O’Hara named his bartender, by the way, “Ernie”—a detail I’ll leave to you for evaluation.
O’Hara takes considerable care, in the first scene, to establish that this salesman is not simply having one good day on the showroom floor, but has for many years been by far the most accomplished salesman at the dealership. Moreover, he has a family that cares for him, his children, his wife, his sister and his mother all respect him and admire him and depend on him. But he leaves his wife sleeping in their bed, and O’Hara writes, “Nevertheless, he went to the hall closet and got out his 20 gauge and broke it and inserted a shell.”
In other words, O’Hara has gone out of his way to establish that the despair this car salesman feels but cannot articulate has nothing to do with any rational concerns this man might have. When I referred to Hemingway earlier as “the most important… author since the death of William Shakespeare,” I was quoting from a front-page Sunday New York Times review of “Across the River and Into the Trees” written by John O’Hara. It was a positive review, that some felt was “a fawning appreciation of [an] otherwise panned novel,” even suggesting that Hemingway was “offended at what he saw as O'Hara patronizing him.” http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/OHara.html. But O’Hara devoted little space in his review to the novel itself, which he did not heap elaborate praise upon; rather, much of his review was devoted to Hemingway’s lifelong body of work and to Hemingway’s methods of writing, and to Hemingway’s life, all of which O’Hara did shower with slavering praise. Along the way, O’Hara took some potshots at academic analysts of contemporary fiction, to whom both men shared a visceral aversion, and at journalistic critics, particularly those at the New Yorker, which O’Hara had in the past year broken with, heatedly and violently and publicly, and which coincidentally had just published four months earlier Lillian Ross’s profile of Hemingway that pointedly addressed the subject of his excessive drinking. “[F]or Eustace Tilley to raise an eyeglass over anybody's drinking is one for the go-climb-a- lamppost department...”, O’Hara wrote somewhat irrelevantly in his review of Across the River…, “With the long piece on Hemingway, the magazine achieved a new low,” thus settling a score for Hemingway as he also attacked his own newest enemy. To Hemingway, this spirited defense of his drinking habits may have seemed gratuitous and self-serving for O’Hara, who was still widely known for his own excessive fondness of spirits. Much of this review, ostensibly about Hemingway’s novel, redounded on O’Hara, which Hemingway may well have resented. O’Hara concluded by noting that “What matters is that Ernest Hemingway has brought out a new book,” neatly sidestepping the quality of Hemingway’s new book.
There were certain biographical parallels between the two writers’ careers, which O’Hara may well have been drawing attention to in his remarks about Hemingway’s life: Hemingway’s father had been a physician, Hemingway did not attend college, Hemingway had worked as a reporter, Hemingway published a book every other year on average and stood accused by some critics for excessive prolificacy and was mocked by others for his excessively mannered plainness of style, all of which apply perfectly to O’Hara as well. The title piece of O’Hara’s first collection of stories, in fact, was “The Doctor’s Son,” about a teenaged boy accompanying his father on a gruesome series of house calls, ending with a traumatic and shocking death—the resemblance to Hemingway’s autobiographical “Indian Camp” is closer in technique and subject matter than this summary might indicate.
The competitive relationship between the two writers had for decades been troubled. For both men, relationships with all other writers fell into two categories, “troubled” and “very troubled,” each viewing contemporary writers of fiction primarily as rivals but also as among the very few qualified to hold an opinion on each other’s work. Between O’Hara’s rhapsodic 1950 review of “Across the River…” and Hemingway’s death eleven years later, two major changes in Hemingway’s stature as a writer occurred, and these two major changes were in contradictory directions: the world outside of Hemingway’s head had elevated him to literary pre-eminence, marked by but not limited to the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for The Old Man and the Sea or the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, while the world inside that globe had disparaged Hemingway’s own opinion of his ability to write, often his utter inability to write at all. In other words, by 1960 there was the largest possible gulf between the world’s appraisal of Hemingway’s talents and his own appraisal of those talents, and that gulf had become utterly intolerable to him.
In that same decade, O’Hara had also undergone some major changes, all stemming from his giving up alcohol use after the sudden death of his wife, Belle, in 1954. Unwilling to raise his young daughter Wylie as a single parent with a life-threatening drinking problem, O’Hara stopped drinking entirely in 1954, and for the final decade of his life, produced more fiction, including “How Can I Tell You?” than in any previous decade. This change gave him a unique perspective on the hardships and obstacles that writers must face: in 1967 O’Hara discussed the distractions that kept writers from realizing their truest goals as “anything from booze to women to greed to too much praise,” four distractions he and Hemingway were mightily tempted by. That final distraction, “too much praise,” is perhaps the oddest, since both writers, perhaps all writers, but certainly Hemingway and O’Hara, saw writing as a competitive art, one in which they were in constant struggle, competing fiercely with past masters and present rivals. What O’Hara understood about Hemingway was his fear of getting praise for work that, deep inside himself, he knew he no longer could produce by own high standards.
O’Hara understood Hemingway as few others could claim to, but he also understood the act of suicide, not least because he had suffered from life-long depression, and suicidal ideations, himself. O’Hara’s suicidal ideations were fiercest in the early 1940s, almost immediately following his greatest success as an author and as a playwright. The hit musical Pal Joey, with songs by Rodgers and Hart, based on O’Hara’s short stories and the dialogue he wrote for the stage show, provided the revenue stream and the renown that made him, for the first time, a wealthy celebrity. But soon after this life-changing success, O’Hara wrote to a friend in 1944 that he was so “sick of myself that it’s a good thing I don’t use a straight razor. Or live in a tall building.” O’Hara suffered from self-loathing periodically, and had written about suicide, and its causes and murky origins and etiologies, throughout his entire career. His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934 described an outwardly prosperous, healthy, happily married young American businessman who, at the
novel’s climax, shockingly decides to kill himself.
One of the things that contributed to the novel’s notoriety was the deliberately unresolved question of why, exactly, Julian English takes his own life. This theme was repeated in other O’Hara novels about suicides, and numerous short stories, including “How Can I Tell You?” The protagonist of O’Hara’s next novel, Butterfield 8, ends her life, and the novel, by committing suicide, as do characters throughout O’Hara’s work. Other characters merely contemplate killing themselves for reasons that they cannot make clear to anyone. The feeling they have, that their lives have reached a terminal point despite all outward appearances, is what compels their behavior, not the judgment of observers.
His fascination with the subject of suicide predates O’Hara’s career as a writer. In a letter written in 1928, introducing himself to Katherine Angell, a fiction editor at the New Yorker, O’Hara concluded by writing “Other dope on myself are: My father was a doctor, I am just 24 years old, and my favorite word (not that you…asked me) is inevitable.”
That final word, “inevitable,” appears as the final word of another letter O’Hara wrote some 38 years later, at the age of 60, explicating its appeal to him. It was in a brief letter of condolence O’Hara wrote to his friend, Kate Bramwell, whose son Jerry had just committed suicide. It is dated 3 January 1966, and since it is brief, I’ll read it to you in full:
Dear Kate,
If trouble could get used to trouble, you would be used to it by now, but it doesn’t work out that way. How do your friends lessen your sorrows? They don’t, except by wishing they could.
Many years ago I made a study of suicide for my first novel, and I have never stopped studying it. Of one thing I am convinced: from Julian English to Jim Forrestal, from Louie Macy Gates to young Jerry Bramwell, no one who committed suicide could have done anything else. There is an inevitability to it that has a logic of its own, so powerful as to prevail over self-preservation, therefore more powerful than the most fundamental of our instincts.
We are sorry for the sadness to you and Jerry and the girls, but who can argue with the power of the inevitable?
Affectionately,
John
I didn’t identify “Louie Macy Gates” for you, mainly because no such person ever existed—the compiler of O’Hara’s Selected Letters, Matthew Bruccoli, apparently mistranscribed the name O’Hara wrote, which was “Louise Macy Gates,” the widow of former FDR advisor Harry Hopkins and a suicide in 1963. Forrestal was the former U.S. Secretary of Defense. These were all, in other words, socially prominent, successful, famous, well-off, charismatic figures who had nonetheless opted to kill themselves—or as O’Hara saw it, who had no option other than suicide. The final word of his letter to Mrs. Bramwell, again, was “inevitable.” A word that was not only of consoling value to Jerry Bramwell’s mother, but which also speaks to O’Hara’s understanding of
the reasoning process in the mind of a suicide that, to others, seems inexplicable or even perverse, varying from anything like “reason,” especially in those who outwardly have every reason to live.
I don’t think O’Hara meant “Inevitability” to be synonymous with “Fate,” although it might seem so. The title of his novel Appointment in Samarra refers to a legend passed on by Somerset Maugham in which a merchant spots across the marketplace the figure of Death, who waves at him. Frightened, the merchant flees to the distant city of Samarra. When Death is asked why he waved at the merchant, he explains “I was startled to see him here today. I have an appointment with him tomorrow in Samarra.” In avoiding a misstep, a faux pas, O’Hara’s suicidal characters make a fatal step—in other words they may think, and it may appear, that in committing suicide they are saving themselves from pain, or from humiliation, or in Hemingway’s case, from arrest by the FBI or the IRS, or some other fabulous horror that will destroy them. If they believe these fates to be actual inevitable disasters looming over them, despite what a rational observer might make of their situations, then it makes all the sense in the world for them to flee right into the arms of Death.