A Plea for Tolerance of WASPS....(James Gould Cozzens)

"I merit the reproof, no doubt," Julius Penrose said. "I can't say instinct is silenced; but I, perhaps, ought to be! Perhaps I should not glance at Mr. Brophy's religion. First; prejudice is in itself held censurable; an evil thing. So I'm anti-Catholic, am I? Still, in passing, I'll confess I wonder, as one of them, why the only people who may be openly criticized, found fault with, and spoken ill of, are those of white, Protestant, and more or less Nordic extraction. I, it seems, am game and fair game for everybody—a kind of caput lupinum. Nobody writes the papers threateningly when I'm decried or disparaged. I don't say this is unreasonable. I myself have no wish to abridge any man's right not to like me if he so chooses. Only, in my bewildered way, I keep thinking there ought to be a turnabout. There isn'tl Not only may each bumptious Catholic freely rate and abuse me if I reflect in the least on his faith; but each self-pitying Jew, each sulking Negro, need only holler that he's caught me not loving him as much as he loves himself, and a rabble of professional friends of man, social-worker liberals, and practitioners of universal brotherhood—the whole national horde of nuts and queers—will come at a run to hang me by the neck until I learn to love."

(from By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens)


I’m in the middle of this long, quite excellent novel, now moving in the direction of legal procedural which might be imagined to be dull but it isn’t. Clean, crisp prose which by not soaring shows that it is already elevated. I only came to know of him through an O’Hara biography. Naturally Cozzens was native to clubs which would not have O’Hara for a member. Don’t believe what you read about him. Some of his statements are not so much trolling as exquisitely delivered dry flies at the banks where the critics hover like cannibal trout.

Appointment in Linebrook with John O'Hara

The other biography of John O’Hara that I’m reading is by Finis Farr which was published just 3 years after the death of its subject. Just from the first chapter I can say that it is better written that the MacShane production which seems to be a quickly run off item. The Farr book hews more closely to the life reflected in the stories, the log of his life, as it were. Was O’Hara an alcoholic? Yes I would say but not a ‘fucking alcoholic’ who is someone that you don’t like who drinks as much as you do yourself. For a good account of the wreck alcohol has wrought amongst American writers read The Thirsty Muse byThomas Dardis. Some of O’Hara’s pals are there featured but he gets a billing in the also starring.

Subverting the normal arc of a life, Finis Farr begins at O’Hara’s last day on earth which was much like many of the others since he had given up ‘the drink’ 17 years previously and took to writing big novels interspersed with short story collections in the years between. Appointment in Linebrook (his house) was pencilled with the minor stroke that admonisheth firmed up by the stroke that felleth.

The description of the study where he wrote through the night on his Remington Noiseless is so complete that Farr must have been there.

Professional care had assembled the reference books around the writing hutch, and the number of dictionaries alone would surprise anyone except another writer. In a commanding position stood the 2,515-page Oxford Universal Dictionary, concise in comparison to its thirteen-volume parent, the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, which O'Hara did not own. But he had an unabridged Webster, and thirty other dictionaries in various languages. Macmillan's Everyman's Encyclopedia supported the two Britannicas, and a dozen histories of Pennsylvania showed O'Hara's interest in his home state

There are innumerable memorabilia and photos, silver boxes and ash trays but other than reference books and editions and translations of his own work there is no literature. He seems not to have read much but assiduously kept up with things by taking 5 newspapers a day. He yearned to be admitted to the club of the great writers but his novels of the rich and dissolute lacked spiritual scale. He thought himself due the Nobel Prize. Reading the requirements for its awarding:

Among the five prizes provided for in Alfred Nobel's will (1895), one was intended for the person who, in the literary field, had produced "the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"

It is clear that the Nordic bluenoses would not consider his writing to represent an ideal direction. Any more than Joyce did.

He intended to buy a Rolls with the money if he won the Nobel. He bought one anyway:

O'Hara liked to use his money for the pleasure it would bring him and his family. He had always wanted a Rolls Royce and had promised himself that if he won the Nobel Prize he would buy one with the proceeds. But when it seemed unlikely that he would win it, he decided to buy the car anyhow. He went to New York to inspect the Rolls showroom and then, with feigned casualness, he ordered what he wanted by phone. It was a four-door Silver Cloud III, painted dark green. He asked that his initials be painted on the door and sent in his check for $17,300. Most of his rich friends had Bentleys, which is the same car as the Rolls except for the Rolls's distinctive radiator grille. But O'Hara decided he could not afford this kind of inverse snobbery. "None of your shy, thumb-sucking Bentley radiators for me," he wrote. "I got that broad in her nightgown on my radiator and them two R's, which don't mean rock 'n' roll. Maybe I ought to start going to the Friday concerts again. Who dat? Man, dat Johnny O'Hara, from Pottsville, writes like a son of a bitch, he do."

(from The Life of John O’Hara by Frank MacShane pub.1980.)

John O'Hara's Graven Image short story

Shall we read a story? Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin. Find E.L. Doctorow reading John O’Hara’s Graven Image (1943) at the New Yorker Podcast here:
podcast

My Thoughts:
So many layers, so many interpretations. I may be completely wrong about this but the anti-Semitic aspect that Doctorow sees seems to me to arise from his own Jewish sense of exclusion. You would need to be very ‘pushy’ indeed to want to join a club whose totemic animal was chosen to exclude the ‘chosen’. Another thing that was missed is the matter of loyalty. The hinge of the story is the recognition of the jerk in the blue suit who had been to Browning’s house in his father’s time. That connects to the Pocellian fraudster who commanded automatic loyalty. What would Browning’s father think of him, pork in pocket, if not cap in hand, going to Under mensch Secretary, one of the short assed ‘you fellows’. It is an unconscious reflex that causes Browning to throw the job back in in Joe’s face and win both ways firstly in the using of the under-secretary’s need to show dominance, a small man’s triumph, and secondly in saying just the wrong thing. One can imagine Browning talking to his fellow club members afterwards, saying –

- When it came to the point I just couldn’t go through with it.

O'Hara joins the O.S.S.

I can now relate what O’Hara did in the war. Essentially he tried to join it. His drinking had ruined his gut and he was afflicted with ulcers which meant he was barred from normal active service. Trying every avenue of influence he finally managed to get accepted by the O.S.S.

Nonetheless, O'Hara kept up his efforts to be taken into the services and approached Colonel William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services. To his surprise, he was accepted for training in the OSS and was sent to a camp in Virginia for the first steps. There he grew a beard and, in order to preserve the anonymity required of all candidates, he used his Pottsville nickname of "Doc." Again, he was stricken with illness and had to withdraw in less than a month's time. He then tried to find something in the merchant marine or the Red Cross, but these possibilities also fell through.

Just as well for the war effort.

I said mean things about his looking after his widowed and impoverished mother particularly because he went through a period of earning 1000$ per week in Hollywood and as a columnist for Newsweek. This my calculator says is 16+ thousand dollars in today’s money. However in 1940, MacShane writes:

By 1940, he began to realize that it was foolish for his mother to remain in Pottsville, living alone with her younger daughter Kathleen in a house suited for a family of eight. He and Mary therefore found a modest but pleasant apartment at 107 University Place, just south of Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village, and there he installed his mother and his Aunt Verna, together with Mary and Kathleen. O'Hara was very fond of his mother; they were friends. As she had a lively sense of humor and brought out her son's, there was always joking and laughter when they were together.

I’m really not sure what precise weight ‘installed’ has in this account. Does it mean he found the apartment or bought the lease. The family had a big house in Pottsville but that was probably re-mortgaged. This biography is very often slack on information but provides a good illustration of the massive demand for copy from writers in the age of the magazine. There were so many of them and they had such wide circulation that any talented writer had a outlet unlike the present day where ‘then he started a blog’ is a last post on a faltering bugle.

John O'Hara, drunken lout. (Frank MacShane, Biography)

To steal Yeats’s phrase O’Hara was a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’, a bully, a snob, a slapper of women – hard, and of course for the only reason we do not allow him to drift into grateful disrememberance, a fine writer. I’m reading along with his stories which were selected by Frank MacShane the biography also written by him. When with his early success he had the money to travel to Europe he was hospitably received in literary circles in London but his behaviour soon burned away that good will. His life seems to proceed from one smoking ruin to another. Back in Pottsville his mother was genteely impoverished but our boy partied on. Bad son, bad husband, promiscuous and willing to share his feats of venery. He shouted after a man leaving a club with an ex-girlfriend:
- I slept with that woman
- Well, I’m going to sleep with her tonight.
was the reply

As I was reading about his London months I thought – here’s a chance for you to visit the old sod but I bethought myself when I considered how his pure Irish roots were the great impediment to rising in the world of Pottsville and how much he resented that. Too painful a reminder for the exquisite sensibility of O’Hara.

This is where I am now. What did he do in the war - Man the batteries in the Hollywood Hills, defend it to the last roll of film?

Short Stories I'm reading

I'm reading three collections of short stories these days sitting at the window as the low sun strikes over the frost rimed lawn. Blaze the tom is catching those rays too on the cill. He's a young one in his first season, black with jade eyes and as yet unmarked by fights. Which leads me to Thom Jones's The Pugalist at Rest. There is in his work a finely wrought amalgam of scholarly violence with an emphasis on the conclusion which is usually a knock out. Jones knows what he is talking about having suffered brain damage as a marine boxer who met someone harder and badder than he was. He died recently.
pugilist at rest
Jones never was in Vietnam but he met the scholars coming home. His account of action there demonstrates the very great advantage that fighting on your own turf brings even when the visitors are highly fancied. They can always go home and bring trophy noses home with them, the home side have nowhere to go and can die well knowing that their graves will be kept by descendents. Thom Jones draws in reflections on the Greek statue to make his point. Powerful and horrible. 'Can we win next time' asked John Rambo. This is an answer.

Another writer who died recently in the fullness of years and attainment was William Trevor, master fabulist who specialised in characters who suffer slippage in the clutch when changing from 'in here' to 'out there'. He makes a world in his stories by establishing each character however tangential with a quirky reality. This isn't the clotting of dense plotting (oh!). It's the swift touches of the master. An Evening with John Joe Dempsey begins:

In Keogh's one evening Mr.Lynch talked about the Picadilly tarts, and John Joe Dempsey on his fifteenth birthday closed his eyes and travelled into a world he did not know. 'Big and little,' said Mr. Lynch 'winking their eyes at you and enticing you up to them. Wetting their lips,' said Mr.Lynch with the ends of their tongues.'

John O'Hara's stories are of a very high order too with not a lot of humour but considerable delicate attention to the nuances of class. Some are slight enough, you know that reversal of what Malcolm Cowley said of the short story 'something happens as a result of which everything chages'. Here nothing happens as a result of which nothing is changed or a stasis which is its own denoument. Not having an American ear I can't judge the accuracy of his dialogue, many of the stories have little else and my informed sources tell me that he was uncanny. It's all so long ago anyway, all we have now are the rhythms and the repetitions but they would remain as echoes to the educated ear.

In Goodbye, Herman a man comes home to find that his father's barber from his home town has been waiting with a package. In it is his fathers shaving mug:

Herman stood still while Paul undid the package, revealing a shaving mug. "This was my father's. Herman shaved him every day of his life, I guess."

"Well, not every day. The Daddy didn't start shaving till he was I guess eighteen years old, and he used to go away a lot. But I guess I shaved him more than all the other barbers put together."

Damn right you did. Dad always swore by you, Herman."

"Yes, I guess that's right," said Herman.

"See, Elsie?" said Paul, holding up the mug.

He read the gold lettering: "J-D-Miller, M.D."

"Mn. Why do you get it? You're not the oldest boy. Henry's older than you." said Elsie.

Herman looked at her and then at Paul. He frowned a little. "Paul, will you do me a favor? I don't want Henry to know it, that I gave you this mug. After the Daddy died, I said, "Which one will I give the mug to?" Henry was entitled to it, being the oldest and all. In a way he should have got it. But not saying anything against Henry - well, I don't know."

We were told that brother Henry had been in for a shave three times while he was there for his father's funeral. Maybe there was a demand, an 'ask' there like the reason the Yale president refused an honorary degree to O'Hara. "Because he asked".

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Appointment in Samarra (1934) as a first book at 29 has in it more than the promise to abolish the sneer on the face of those WASP college-men that patronise me. Slights to a short arsed Irishman are magnified into cosmic drama but this book got away on O’Hara. Edmund 'Bunny’ Wilson was one of those types that went to Princeton with Fitzgerald given a clip by O’Hara. And while I’m on about it, what’s this about him assaulting a midget outside 21? He was only just over 5' himself and those guys have a low centre of gravity and can be quite difficult to knock down. Terrific upper body strength too.

Anyways Caroline the wife of our preppie hero Julian English went out with:

. Joe Montgomery could be classified under many headings. Drunk. Snake. Rich boy. Well-dressed man. Debbies’ delight. Roué. Bond salesman. War veteran. Extra man. And so on. They all added up to the same thing. His chief claim to distinction was that he had known Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, and that made him in Caroline’s eyes an ambassador from an interesting country, full of interesting people whom she wanted to meet and to see in action. She did not know, of course, that she was a member in good standing of the community which she thought Joe Montgomery represented, which Fitzgerald wrote about.

I said that this book got away on O’Hara and became bigger than the clip it was to deliver and I was about to say that Wilson was wrong in his assessment of too much focus on peripheral characters. Now Julian English is not a Star of India or a Koh-i-Noor so to set him off he needs lesser gems. A Grundrisse analysis would say that anthracite is setting enough and certainly O’Hara gives those hewers of wealth the Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Polish miners their due but leaves them in the underground. To offer a facile opposition 'the underworld’ plays a greater role in Appointment. Booze had to be sourced in those far-off days of Prohibition when as someone remarked ‘inebriety was a national pastime’. Ed Charney comes into it, he’s the bootlegger. Al Greco is there too as the all-purpose hood, delivery boy and minder of Ed’s mistress. There are others and for a slim book it has a large population and is like a suitcase that is getting overfull. You have the sense that maybe he had to sit on it to fasten the catches. But never mind like the novels of Wodehouse which hover eternally over a single warm summer in the 1930‘s, O’Hara likes to revisit and revise. In a novella Imagine Kissing Pete he makes a glancing mention of Julian English’s throwing a drink in Harry Reilly’s face. Jim Malloy as O’Hara’s alter ego is telling that story and he remarks how it seemed just a trivial spat.

But it wasn’t because the lump of ice hit Reilly under the eye and blackened it. You can’t be giving a man a black eye and not expect war. Particularly a man to whom you owe a lot of money. The mind of the gentleman lush is well drawn by someone who was a tricky drunk himself. The interior monologue captures that blend of drunken paranoia and testing the gods by an act of folly - yes I will swim way out past my normal length and if can make it back the universe may be quits with me and the slate will be clean. But out on that ocean is a lonely place and there is little patience with yet another fine mess.

Julian English the protagonist of Appointment is the cynosure of all the young marrieds who were born into Lantenengo Street. He is generally reckoned to be a good sort with a stylish way of handling a cigarette, a drink, a car and a woman as they come into his purview. Everyone seems in thrall to his charm, the bootleggers like him - he’s not stuck up like the rest of them on that street. Yet he’s no longer quite as young as he was and his Cadillac dealership of which he is the front man and the emblem of sophistication, a hood ornament, is faltering. This is 1930 and corrections to the market have been occurring after a general outbreak of irrational exuberance. Nobody holds a grudge like the Irish particularly when your name is English and the undertaker Pat Quilty who seemed to be ready to pay cash is looking at a rival offer. Sorry for your trouble, Ju.

This is part of the American canon, even Hemingway admitted as much.

"If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra."