John O'Hara Weighs in

ARSE-inine?

https://www.thesteepletimes.com/movers-shakers/arse-ass-difference/

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GENERATION GAP? SPECIAL REPORT BY MATTHEW DAVIS

SEE BELOW FOR DETAILS 

UVA Professor's Students Disagree with 

His Analysis of a John O'Hara Short Story. 

Are They Right? 

Professor Matthew Davis Explains:

What does it mean when three hundred bright college students disagree with your interpretation of a story? Or rather, what does it mean when you teach a story to three hundred students over the course of sixteen semesters and those students come up with all sorts of interesting ideas about the story, but not a single one of them comes up with the set of ideas that seems most plausible to you? 

Those are questions I’ve been asking myself recently -- because these things have happened to me. In English classes at the University of Virginia, I often teach a short story by John O’Hara called “Straight Pool,” and, over the years, my students have floated a wide range of interesting ideas about this story, but none of them have interpreted the story in quite the way I interpret it. 

 “Straight Pool” is a four-page story that I usually teach as an example of a dramatic monologue. It was originally published in The New Yorker in December of 1933 and has been reprinted in a few anthologies over the years, including Points of View, edited by James Moffett and Kenneth McElheny. 

 In the story we overhear a man speaking to a buddy while the two of them are shooting pool in a pool hall. The narrator sometimes discusses the action on the billiards table, but mostly he talks about his wife, Mae, who has been having crying spells and acting erratically recently. He is completely puzzled by his wife’s crying spells. He doesn’t understand why they occur. He doesn’t understand why they begin or why they end. Sometimes Mae cries. Sometimes she stops crying and just stares at him -- and he can’t understand why. Recently Mae has stopped cooking breakfast and doing the dishes, and she’s taken to getting drunk at night. The narrator says that he took Mae to a doctor, but the doctor found nothing physically wrong with her. 

He tries to stay with her and comfort her, but he can only stand so much of the crying and odd behavior, and eventually, when he can’t stand it anymore, he evacuates to the pool hall, where he delivers his monologue. There’s one more thing about the husband’s monologue that seems like it might be important to mention: the husband tells his buddy – whose name is Jack McMorrow -- that Mae spends a lot of time talking about . . . Jack McMorrow.

It seems Mae has been telling her husband not to go to the pool hall. She says she doesn’t want him to go there and talk to Jack McMorrow about her. The husband says he won’t. She says she doesn’t believe him. She thinks he will go to the pool hall and talk to McMorrow. And in fact he does end up going to the pool hall and talking to McMorrow, so it seems she was right to worry about that. McMorrow and the narrator continue to play pool for awhile while the narrator goes on venting about his wife and her crying spells and the staring and the boozing. 

At the end of the story, the narrator tells McMorrow that he and Mae have just had a big fight: Yesterday she didn't get up for breakfast, and last night when I came home from work she wouldn't say a word. And then tonight when I came home, the same story over again. Cockeyed [drunk] again. "What's the idea?" I said, and we had it out hot and heavy, but she didn't want me to leave, so I said I'd leave all right, and she was lucky if I came back. I got the hell out of the house as sore as a boil. I guess I oughtn't to be talking about her like this, especially to you, because you're the one she thinks is always talking about her, but I have to talk to somebody. I think I'll go to Brooklyn and get drunk. How about it? . . . What's the matter? You quitting? ... Oh! If I'd of known you had a date, we could of made it twenty-five points. You're ahead anyhow, and I don't feel like shooting much. Guess I'll go to Brooklyn. My brother just got a gallon of apple .... And that his how the story ends – mid sentence. 

When I teach “Straight Pool,” I always begin by asking my students what they think might be wrong with Mae. Responses vary, but I usually don’t have to call on more than four students before someone says, “I think Mae is having an affair with Jack McMorrow.” Usually several other students immediately chime in to agree with this idea. However, there is always a second group of students who are skeptical or unconvinced by this theory. This is almost always the first major interpretative disagreement about the story that surfaces, and I like to diagram the disagreement on the chalkboard as a fork in a road, where each fork indicates a possible “path of interpretation.” 

John O’Hara Short Story Contest

Ages 5-10: Design a bookmark about something in your community. 

Ages 10-14: When John O’Hara wrote novels and short stories that used Schuylkill County as the location, he often changed the names of  businesses and places in a way that you knew what he was writing about. For example, Schuylkill Haven became Swedish Haven, Tamaqua became Taqua, and Pottsville became Gibbsville. Write a short story (up to 1000 words) about your community that uses the same approach.

Ages 15 and up: Write a one-shot (up to 2000 words) based on John O’Hara’s stories. Examples are prequels, sequels, alternate universe, or “what if this character had done that” explorations. 


Entries are due at the Pottsville Free Public Library  by December 14th.
For more details, visit the Pottsville Free Public Library  Facebook event page.
Announcement of winners will be Friday, January 31st when the  Pottsville Free Public Library celebrates John O’Hara’s 115th birthday




The PJ depends on reader support. Please help us by contributing directly via PayPal, or by contributing editorial content via PhiladelphiaJunto@ymail.com. Empowered by WritersClearinghouse | S.P.Q.R. 1976 Richard Carreño, Editor Copyright MMIXX. All Rights Reserved.

O'HARA AND HEMINGWAY

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.

PEAL & CO., LONDON

SHOE SHINE

By Richard Carreño

[WC News Service]

I might be in the running for this year's Imelda Marcos Prize for Acquiring Too Many Shoes. JV, Men's Division. I have almost fifty pairs. In all designs, colours, and materials. Wing-tips, cap-toes, monk straps, bowlers, duck boots, boat shoes, Chelsea boots, hiking boots, an assortment of slip-on moccasins, rubber field boots, tennis shoes, brogues, and lots of things in suede. And opera slippers. More than I need, of course. But that's a bit beside the point, init?

 

I have my favourites; usually preferring lace-up Oxfords.

 

Apart from sport shoes, my choices are mostly all in leather in either black or brown. Though I do have blue pair of suede wing-tips and a sort of orangery-coloured pair of Oxfords. (I got these in Madrid).

 

All are in name-tagged in wood (mostly cedar) shoe trees. All are polished to a spit-shine. This kind of maintenance is labour-intensive. I use good tools. Horse-hair brushes and the like. Like John O'Hara, I do the polishing myself, finding the cleaning and brushing, in an odd way, as O'Hara did, relaxing and therapeutic. And I won't deny taking pleasure in the wafting aroma of boot wax that fills the air of my dressing room.

 

When done, laces are tied. Buckles are buckled. And the shoes are queued in rows, by colour and style. They shine like Horse Guards on parade.

William T. Vollman

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY
John O'Hara: Strange Characters
O'HARA'S NOVELS RE-EXAMINED
By William T. Vollman
The Baffler
Books Discussed
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: P...

John O'Hara UnFriends Brendan Gill

LOA Befriends Pal Joey

By JAMES MacDONALD

Exeter, England

The Library of America has just published John O'Hara's libretto for Pal Joey in a two-volume collection called American Musicals, edited by Laurence Maslon.

 

I'm delighted, having waited for it for more than fifty years. I was afraid Wilie O'Hara Dalaney, O'Hara's daughter, was going to give the rights to the Richard Greenberg rewrite; but it's the real thing, all right. It also marks O'Hara's first appearance in LOA.

Incidentally, I read John Updike's New Yorker review of The Art of Burning Bridges. A terrific corrective of O'Hara's taciturn image, as well as of his feud with Brendan Gill. Apparently the break with the magazine had little to do with Gill's A Rage to Live review; O'Hara asked to be paid for stories the magazine rejected.

 

Mr. New Yorker

Brendan Gill

By RICHARD CARREÑO

[WritersClearinghouse News Service]

Brendan Gill was ten years younger than O'Hara, but his level of production -- sheer wattage in words contributed to The New Yorker -- probably exceeded John O'Hara's output. Gill wrote fiction, drama, film, and architecture reviews, comment, and profiles. Short of Harold Ross and William Shawn, Gill was 'Mr. New Yorker.' That distinction wasn't lost on O'Hara; it was probably enough to put him on O'Hara's very long enemies list.

Putting O'Hara's enmity over the top was Gill's negative of review in The New Yorker of O'Hara's blockbuster, A Rage to Live. Their relationship was already testy. Gill wore his Irish gently. O'Hara did not. Gill's Yale education and Scull & Bones membership came to him naturally. O'Hara was always striving for Ivy-covered totems and Establishment acceptance.

Encounter with O'Hara

 What's it like to encounter the author John O'Hara and arguably his finest book, Appointment in Samarra, for the first time? Ray Chellel, who retired as British 'public' school teacher in classical literature several years ago, had just that encounter. Chellel was born in Barrington, Rhode Island, graduated from New York University, and sped soon after in the 1960s to London. He's been in the UK ever since, now living in Kent. He remembers Barrington, at the time a 'dry' town, as something like a Gibbsville. 'Booze was banned, but everybody drank like fish.' He recently sent this appraisal to The PJ.

Four-Wheel Appeal

Samarra really is a tour de force, and hard to believe that it was his first novel. I love the clear, sharp prose, and the microcosmic snapshot of 1930 America which Gibbsville, with its snobbery, racism, sexual predation, hypocrisy, and its pervasive criminality that was intensified, if not created, by Prohibition.

 

Gibbsville is certainly not 'Our Town.' The book reminds a little (but only a little) of Fitzgerald. But much more cynical, without FSF's lyricism or stubborn belief in the luminous beauty and just-out-reach possibilities represented by the Green Light at the end of Daisy's dock. From my scant knowledge of American literature, maybe Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road is a better comparison -- although he is commenting on the 1950s. 

John O'Hara Remembered



'Oh yeah, let's take this outside.'

 Norman Mailer almost killed one of his wives. John O'Hara, when besotted by drink, was no gentleman. But in today's lit'ry circles, Mailer often gets a pass. O'Hara never does. Get to meet 'the Master of the Fancied Slight,' as O'Hara was known, in the following brilliant new dissection of the author's life by Charles F. McElwee III.  

 TOUCHY, TOUCHY
BY CHARLES F. McELWEE III
[SPECIAL TO WITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]
John O'Hara wanted acceptance, but acceptance required penance. The author's acerbic, self-destructive personality limited the accolades and tributes he demanded. O'Hara had too many enemies, and he added many in his exhausting life. An Olympian grudge holder, O'Hara routinely blacklisted friends for no particular reason.

 

He was a brawler, a boozer and a blowhard - the holy trinity of a jerk. Bars were O'Hara's boxing rings, and he slugged and rumbled at negligible or imagined provocations. He threw fists at a dwarf in New York's "21" Club, only to be knocked down by another dwarf who joined the fight. He even smacked a woman for a tardy lunch arrival. The high society O'Hara craved loathed him for his alcohol-soaked brutality. Everyone knew him as "a master of the fancied slight." 

 

Kazin Disses O'Hara

Alfred Kazin: Smug vs. Slug

IT'S PERSONAL, REAL PERSONAL

BY RICHARD CARRENO

[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

Despite his age, seventy nine, literary guru Alfred Kazin is as feisty -- and nasty --  as ever. Since I thought the old cuss was dead, I wasn't expecting that Kazin, now the unofficial heir to the Edmund Wilson mantle of public intellectual, to rise to any occasion, much less one of such loathing that I encountered recently [3 May 1994] when the eminence grise cum greasy geezer showed up at Harvard's Emerson Hall  for the first of a series of lectures reviewing his remarkable lit'ry life.

    Oh yeah, he still hates John O'Hara. And I mean it's real personal.

    I reread On Native Grounds just to refreshen my acquaintance to Kazin's animus for O'Hara. The book came out in 1942. Kazin was twenty-three. My God, this guy been nursing his O'Hara grudge that long! Not very good for the digestion.

    But why? Sure, O'Hara was often a difficult party -- often disliked; sometimes hated. Had he, like others, been the butt of one of O'Hara's drunken tear-ass spats? Or, was O'Hara, the master of 'the perceived slight,' simply seeking vengeance? Was this Kazin's revenge?

See 'Kazin Speaks Out of Class' in right gutter for more on the critic's venomous dislike of John O'Hara

     Kazin dutifully checked off all the pre-War writers he had known. Check. Check.Check. New Yorker contributors. Check. O'Hara?

    'Why didn't I mention O'Hara?' Kazin said, glaring at me. He gripped the lectern. Then standing back, he blurted, 'Why? I'll tell you [the you was meant to equate me with a moronic slug] why? Because O'Hara was a minor writer. That's why!'

    Anything personal?

PHL Lit'ry Salon

PHL Exhibit 'Philadelphia's Literary Legacy'
Photo: Richard Carreño/WritersClearinghouse News Service

 

WHO'S MISSING?

BY RICHARD CARRENO

[WRITERSCLEARINGHOUSE NEWS SERVICE]

What do Rosella Brown, Teri Woods, Gardner Dozois, Lorene Cary, and Ben Bova have in common? Yeah, I know, you probably never heard of these authors, all with Philadelphia and Pennsylvania regional connections. Millions of passengers passing through Philadelphia International Airport are also scratching their heads. Yet they're among twenty-five Philadelphia-related authors, poets, and playwrights that PHL officials (you know, that lit'ry smart set) have designated as representing 'Philadelphia's Literary Legacy' in an exhibit recently mounted between Terminal A East and the old B connector. Nice try, PHL! And in 'partnership' with the Philadelphia Free Library, no less.

 

In fact, many of the Philly authors celebrated in the exhibited have a dubious claim to fame. Some are minor writers; some, niche writers; some, no-name writers. Half are women, and 'one' is actually a team, the well-known children's authors 'The Berenstain's' Yes, they actually spelled it that way!

 

Old John O'Hara Haunt

Pottsville Club Says Adieu to O'Hara Memories

BANK BLACKBALLS CLUB

BY STEPHEN J. PYTAK

[STAFF WRITER/POTTSVILLE REPUBLICAN HERALD]

POTTSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA

If author John O'Hara were alive today, he might be disheartened to hear the Pottsville Club is slated to close, according to one of the fans of his fiction, Mantura M. Gallagher, Pottsville.

"John O'Hara, I believe, would be sad to see what impact the demise of such a long-standing institution as the Pottsville Club might have on his Gibbsville. O'Hara was a member of the Pottsville Club and enjoyed being part of the upper crust of Pottsville society until his father, Dr. O'Hara, passed away," Gallagher, former Schuylkill County commissioners chairperson, said Monday.

But O'Hara, who was critical of social classes and institutions, may have had something else to say about changing times and the closing of a club he alluded to in his novels.

Vincent D. Balitas, Pottsville, who started "The O'Hara Journal," a literary magazine published locally between 1978 and 1982, did not want to speculate on O'Hara's views when called for comment Wednesday.

"O'Hara's dead," Balitas said before hanging up the phone.

Goldleaf on O'Hara

NEW YORK STORIES
The following is Part II of Robert Knott's interview with John O'Hara Society member Steven Goldleaf, editor of the upcoming volume of O'Hara's New York Stories.

 

Robert Knott: What were some of the challenges the editing process entailed?

Steven Goldleaf: During the editing I realized that I was having arguments with John O’Hara.  I could sense his presence when I would decide, for example, to make something uniform throughout the stories.  Some of these were very small things, like the spelling of “grey”—with an “e” or an “a.”  He had it both ways.  I thought it would be nice to have it consistent, but I imagined O’Hara’s objection: “No, that has to be spelled in the British way because….”

 

I’m not crazy enough to literally have this argument with a dead person, but in my head I thought: “Yes, sir, but for consistency….”  And sometimes they were rather substantial issues.  You think of editing as being rather easy, just select some stories, put them in order and publish them, but there were some issues that were tricky.  Did I mention the story “Sportsmanship?”

New O'Hara Collection

NEW YORK STORIES

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

Robert Knott: How did the book come about and why choose the New York stories?

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.

Ava Maria! The One Guy She Didn't Screw...

Ava Gardner: John O'Hara's Pal, at his feet

... But Surely He Wished He Had

 

'She described their life together. 'I was happy traveling with the band, hanging out with Artie [Shaw, her husband] and his literary pals. Guys like Sid Perelman, Bill Saroyan, John O'Hara. Artie said all I had to do was keep my mouth shut, sit at their feet, and absorb their wit and wisdom. I was happy to do that. I was comfortable with those guys.' -- Ava Gardner, in a profile by Peter Evans in the July 2013 edition of Vanity Fair.

The PJ depends exclusively on reader support. Please help us continue by contributing directly via PayPal, or by contributing editorial content via PhiladelphiaJunto@ymail.com. Empowered by Writers Clearinghouse | S.P.Q.R. 1976 Richard Carreño, Editor Copyright MMXIII All Rights Reserved

Hold the Phone

Richard and Friends


Me and Mini-ME

Me and Conor Cruise O'Brien

Commuting to work on the El

Yeah, that's me with Papa on left and John O'Hara on right

 

Philadelphia...

... Off  Broadway
By Richard Carreño
[Writers Clearinghouse News Service]
Back then, the Adelphia Hotel, designed by Philadelphia's great Horace Trumbauer, at 13th and Chestnut, was like the old Taft in New Haven. That town's Shubert was Philly's Forrest, a try-out theatre. What was also memorable was that loads of New York theatre folk here, including John O'Hara, who used to hang at the Adelphia with the other New York brethren and Broadway sharpies. Some also stayed there. Not O'Hara, who was partial to the Warwick, further uptown. Where he was the night when Pal Joey (viz Broadway sharpies) was playing previews at the Forrest. Actually, he and Bud Shulberg, who was tagging along, were actually probably spending more time at the Adelphia, in the bar, the English Tavern. (When they weren't boozing at the Pen & Pencil Club, that is).

 

Keeping Our Appointment...

... With John O'Hara

A 'visit' with Philadelphia's favourite author
in a city that keeps his memory alive

By Richard Carreño

[Writers Clearinghouse Press Service]
If you remember buying pink-colored button-down shirts at Brooks Brothers (when the real-deal Brethren of yore was at Chestnut and 15th); the old 'Y' off Broad (chockablock with GI's on leave or ready to ship out); the eery, back-in-the day feeling of Suburban Station (packed with Grace Kelley look-alikes in white gloves on Saturday shopping sprees), well, you're either an aging Baby Boomer about to go bust, or, perhaps, simply, a reader of John O'Hara.