John O'Hara is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature: he's never got the proper respect and he spent much of his career complaining about it. At best, he's been called a "first-rate second-rate writer" in a clever phrase that seems to nail his literary reputation.

I'm here to try to change that.

For many critics, O'Hara is part of that twentieth-century, second-quarter, generation of celebrated American authors—headed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner—but not in their top ranks. Some rate his short stories among the best but disdain his novels, half-heartedly praising his first, Appointment in Samarra (1934), but seeing degeneration since that early promise. His later long works, his most popular with the public, are dismissed as gaudy bestsellers of upper-crust sex and dissipation.

Even his prolific production of short stories, published in magazines for more than four decades (setting the record for appearances in The New Yorker) has been held against him. Especially in his latter career, it is charged, he was just knocking them out. The stories lost focus, meandered and became irrelevant, it is said

Part of the problem may be that O'Hara outlived and out-produced many of his acclaimed contemporaries. In the 1960s his letters and published commentary of that era showed him to be a conservative crank, obsessed with seeking status in the establishment. His major work then was still going over the times and subjects of his earlier work.

He was also known in literary circles—among the fellow writers he praised and in whose ranks he yearned to be accepted—as a piece of work: a mean drunk and a petty, self-promoting sycophant. Even when he wrote a fawning appreciation of Hemingway's otherwise panned novel, Across the River and into the Trees, the master was offended at what he saw as O'Hara patronizing him.

Famous peers

But surely it's past the time now when O'Hara's name should evoke odious comparisons to his contemporaries. Or when mentions of his work should stir discussion of his possible failings as a man. More than forty years after his death, with several of his novels still in print and his best stories still being anthologized, we may be compelled to raise him a notch or two in our canon of great American literary figures.

In his early years, O'Hara was accepted as a leading chronicler of his times. His first novels, Appointment in Samarra (1934) and BUtterfield 8 (1935), and his first stories, collected in The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935) and Files on Parade (1939), were recognized as offering a command of the forms with a conversational style and dispassionate voice that was equal to but distinct from the work of his famous peers

Like other prominent writers of the era, he applied journalistic skills of clear-eyed reporting and clarity of style to his fictional subjects, which were often the social mores of his times.

Moreover, he seemed to deal with lighter-weight themes than the other greats of his time. He focused ever more intently on the ironies of social life, usually—but not always—of the upper middle classes. Like William Makepeace Thackeray, Theodore Dreiser and Henry James before him—and Tom Wolfe after him—he examined minutely the unwritten rules and byplay of status and sexual relationships in various levels of society.

But his unadorned, colloquial style may have undercut the seriousness of his achievement, so he never received the same credit as those others.

He started off well. Appointment in Samarra cleverly shows the intertwining of characters from all strata of Gibbsville (a stand-in for his own Pennsylvanian hometown), the analysis disguised in the ironical story of an affluent local Cadillac dealer's self-destruction. His second novel BUtterfield 8 (1935) delves into the relationship of a proud, promiscuous, lower-class woman with an upper-class businessman.

Rescheduled appointments

His first major work to hit a critical and popular snag was Hope of Heaven (1938), taking place in Hollywood, to which he was being drawn as a screenwriter. The novella was considered weak and implausible. But today it reads as compressed writing of satirical verve, akin to Nathanael West's similarly themed The Day of the Locust (1939).

But the short stories always kept coming and O'Hara bounced back in a big way with another novella, cobbled together from a series of short stories taking the form of letters from a self-aggrandizing jazz musician. O'Hara's worst critics have always given him credit as at least a masterful dialogue writer, though often suggesting this is a minor achievement detracting from his serious writing. Pal Joey (1940) should have squelched that notion. Written entirely in one voice narrating a series of letters, it is usually overlooked as literary fiction, but it's a small gem of subtle, disciplined writing, a lesson in how to make a character say more than he thinks he is saying.

O'Hara also adapted Pal Joey for a stage musical, with Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart providing the songs. It was a hit on Broadway with Gene Kelly in the lead and has been continually revived ever since.

After these early artfully compressed works of near-perfect colloquial writing, O'Hara's approach to his craft began to change, producing a series of sprawling family dramas. These epics of upper and upper middle-class conflict proved among his most popular works, topping bestseller lists and being adapted into movies. But they also provided ammunition for his detractors.

The first of these big work was one of his longest and most controversial. A Rage to Live (1949), about business and personal affairs among the movers and shakers of another Pennsylvania town. It scandalized some critics and readers with its frank (for that time) sexuality. Some also found the story superficial, the prose long-winded and the dialogue rambling, sometimes taking up entire chapters.

It has to be admitted the writing in the 700-plus pages of A Rage to Live is looser than in O'Hara's earlier novels. At times the characterizations become thin and the narrative disjointed. But a canny reader can discover O'Hara expanding upon his past achievements, experimenting with directions in which to take the modern novel. Most people's stories in real life are not parcelled out in neat ironies, as in his early novels. Our lives are not always shaped by profound motivations, O'Hara seems to be saying. Our personal narratives follow few dramatic arcs. They are rambling and repetitive, with abrupt breaks of deaths, illnesses and infidelities. O'Hara is seeing how much he can get across with a minimum of obvious artifice. Using just the language we all speak. The surface minutiae of life we all experience?

The experimentation is not all successful. But A Rage to Live is interesting if you look at it as a watershed in O'Hara's career. And the story does stay with you, as do one or two of the characters.

His next few novels generally plow the same fields, with similar or greater success. O'Hara kept going back to the time and place he was determined to record for posterity in detail: the first half of the twentieth century in America. Ten North Frederick (1955) and From the Terrace (1958) are both thick, untidy novels following the travails of rich dysfunctional families. The former won the National Book Award and the latter is O'Hara's own favourite—a massive 900-page opus filled with continuous pages of sporadically engaging dialogue.

In addition to showing O'Hara badly needs a tougher editor at this point in his career, From the Terrace also reveals the completion of O'Hara's transformation into an ultra-conservative with his idealized examination of the principled man of corporate business, which comes close to Ayn Rand's rants.

An obsession with sexuality doesn't help. Every character of every age, wealth and gender is ready to leap into the sack with every other character at any moment's notice—and to talk about the details. The book is a more nuanced precursor to the simpler trash novels of successive decades. Women in particular come off badly.

Similar critiques can be aimed at the last—and my favourite—of his great popular epics. Ourselves to Know (1960) is 400-plus pages of drama among the Pennsylvanian bourgeoisie of the late eighteen hundreds and early twentieth century, far back enough to almost make it historical fiction. It's filled with not always necessary descriptive details of affluent society then and of overflowing dialogue, spelling out characters' every thought. And it features the frankest talk of sexuality yet.

But bad as this sounds, Ourselves to Know actually makes for compulsive reading. Possibly due to the modernist shaping of the narrative. It's the dreaded story within a story within a story, but O'Hara works it out winsomely. We know from near the beginning that a pathetic figure in the town is a former well-to-do civic leader whose social downfall came years ago after he murdered his wife. But you have to read the entire novel to learn what happened, as the old man starts telling his story piecemeal to a sympathetic college student and continues his tale to the young man over the next few decades.

Unfortunately, sub-themes of homosexuality and religion are handled here in ways that would put off most recent readers. More indications of O'Hara's reactionary turn in mid life.

The big screen

About this time, Hollywood, which had earlier tried to use O'Hara as a screenwriter, caught on to his books as material for movies. Between 1957 and 1965, a slew of uneven cinematic adaptations came out. Frank Sinatra took the lead in a decent film of the musical Pal Joey, Gary Cooper starred in a diminished Ten North Frederick, Paul Newman and Joanna Woodward paired in a popular but mediocre From the Terrace, and Suzanne Pleshette played the sexually savvy leading lady of a forgettable take on A Rage to Live. Even BUtterfield 8 was adapted, decades after its publication, as a trashy movie, with an updated story set in 1960, complete with a car chase and Elizabeth Taylor as the call girl.

Other novels followed in the 1960s, though with decreasing critical and commercial impact. Notable, though seldom mentioned now, is The Big Laugh (1962), called "the greatest Hollywood novel ever written" by O'Hara fan Fran Lebowitz. Its near-complete reliance on dialogue to convey character makes it similar to a movie script, though this (as usual with O'Hara) is generally cited as a criticism.

Another neglected late entry is The Instrument (1966), a likewise dialogue-ridden novel, with a terrifically crafted first chapter—harking back to Appointment in Samarra—that gives way to a thin, wandering story. It's worth reading though to see the novelist not just still plying his trade but developing his art, coming up with new ways of using human conversation in fiction.

So where does our re-assessment of John O'Hara's career take us? To raising him at least a notch, from best of the second-raters to maybe the second tier of first-raters.

If that sounds like damning with faint praise, well, let's give him time. Keep reading him and you may be tempted to place his better work among the best of American writing in the mid-twentieth century.

— Eric

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