On His Hands

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Stories

Interesting Links

Interview with Steven Goldleaf: “John O’Hara in the 1930s” (Library of America)

“Balzac of the Fishbowl” (Samuel Goldman, City Journal)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Joey on the Cake Line,” John O’Hara
• “This Side of Paradise?” Heywood Broun
• “Old Flaming Youth,” Jean Stafford
• “Some Like Them Cold,” Ring Lardner

Buy the book
John O’Hara: Stories
Sixty stories and novellas in all | 860 pages
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Couple Sitting at Opposite Ends of Bench in Moonlight, 1923, oil on board by American illustrator Dean Cornwell (1892–1960). Courtesy Illustration Art.

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“Back in 1929 (or maybe it was 1930; it could have been either or both), I found myself free-lancing,” recalled John O’Hara a quarter century later. “There are, of course, two kinds of free-lancing: voluntary, and involuntary. In any case, and at that time, I was not a volunteer. The decision had been made for me by the city editor of the New York Daily Mirror.” He then divulged the reason why he was fired:

Indeed, man does not live by bread alone. Perhaps if I had cultivated a taste for baked goods instead of the Martini cocktail, I’d still be on the Mirror. But the study of the Martini as prepared at Racky’s restaurant, a block from my office, was an enjoyable way to start my day, which was supposed to begin at 6 p.m. Unfortunately for journalism, although happily for my social life, the day side of the Mirror would be at Racky’s, on their way home, just when I was on my way to work.

During his late teens and early twenties, O’Hara worked a seemingly endless series of short-term jobs: soda jerk, surveyor, inventory tabulator, cub reporter for the local paper, waiter on a ocean liner—he even applied to be an assistant to a bootlegger, who (wisely) turned him down. In January of 1928, the month he turned 23, he headed to New York with the hope of finding employment in journalism. For the next five years, he held a sequence of newspaper jobs, few of which lasted more than two or three months. O’Hara made a habit of cashing whatever checks he did receive in bars—with predictable results. At one job, he was canned his first day, when he didn’t show up for his initial assignment and his employer found out he was passed out in a speakeasy named, of all things, the Homeless Dogs.

Throughout this period, O’Hara dated Margaretta Archbald, a Pottsville resident he had been seeing on and off since 1923, when he was 18 and she was 22. Her wealthy Protestant family disapproved of him on numerous grounds: his age, lack of clear career plans, and Catholic background. She had preceded him to New York, and they resumed an uneasy, intermittent relationship disrupted by arguments at parties and many late nights when O’Hara would show up, drunk and surly, at the door of the apartment she shared with a friend. Their relationship ended for good in early 1930. When in late 1931, Robert Simonds, O’Hara’s best friend from Pottsville, experienced some doubts about his own long-term relationship, O’Hara send him advice:

I cannot entirely resist the temptation to stick my snoot into your trouble with Kate. I think you are now where Marg and I were several points in our lengthy battle. That is, you have arrived at a sort of cul de sac, with two ways out: you can get married, or you call it quits. But I sincerely feel that you ought to do one or the other and spare yourselves the anguish I had with Miss Arch, and which I undoubtedly caused. If I had had sense enough to break it off early in 1928, or if she had had sense enough to have let me alone in 1929, we'd have been spared 1930, the worst year in my life.

The next year, Simonds married Catherine V. Melley, the woman in question, and they remained married until his death in 1973.

Back at the beginning of 1928, even before the move to New York, O’Hara had begun blasting the offices of The New Yorker with letters and submissions: suggestions, ideas, anecdotes, sketches, and even stories. After many rejections, his first piece, “The Alumnae Bulletin,” a 200-word monologue, appeared in the May 5, 1928, issue after a staff reader pulled it from the slush pile. His writing began to appear regularly in the magazine, but he often tried the patience of the staff with his requests for advances for unwritten work. After his editor, Katharine White, chastised him, he sent her the following cover letter with the revised version of his latest story:

Here is ON HIS HANDS again, and we shall see what we shall see.

I am afraid I’ve been, latterly, more of a liability than an asset to The New Yorker, what with revised pieces, and advances, About the former, I shall try to be more careful in the future; about the latter, it won’t happen again.

Please know that I appreciate the many things you have done for me, I really do. Right now I am In a State about various things, not the least of which is My Work, which is having a transitional (though not left-bank) period. If anything good comes of it, I’ll owe a lot to you for your kindness and patience.

O’Hara made good on his promise of a “transitional” period: as biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli has noted, many of the stories O’Hara submitted that year “represented a clear advance in O’Hara’s work and are immediately recognizable as his. The stories—or sketches—still have very little plot. Their effect depends almost entirely on characterization, which is usually developed through speech.” The story O’Hara enclosed in his letter to White, “On His Hands,” may have been partly inspired by the undergraduates he met the previous spring, when he spent two boozy weeks crashing in a rich friend’s dorm room at Princeton after he had lost his job at Editor & Publisher. Although “On His Hands” was the forty-third piece of O’Hara’s short fiction published in The New Yorker, it was the earliest he later considered of sufficient quality to include in his first collection, The Doctor’s Son and Other Stories (1935). It is also the first story in the Library of America edition of his short fiction, and we reprint it below as our Story of the Week selection.

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Note: The first excerpt above is quoted from Sweet and Sour, O’Hara’s 1954 collection of columns on the writing life. The two excerpts from his letters are from the Selected Letters of John O’Hara (ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli.)

Charles F. Wetzel (1860–1943) founded Wetzel & Co., a high-end custom tailor shop on East 44th Street known especially for its elaborate Venetian Gothic palazzo. The company’s peak was during the first two decades of the century. During the 1920s Wetzel, with a diminished yet still exclusive and conservative clientele, moved uptown, and its previous location was demolished the year before O’Hara’s story was published. Christian Gauss (1878–1951), was a professor of modern languages at Princeton, one of the university’s deans, and a mentor to the Princeton undergraduates F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. Cabot was a prominent Boston family whose members included three U. S. Senators: George Cabot (1752–1823), Henry Cabot Lodge (1850–1924), and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (1902–1985). Located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Miss Comstock’s music school was a private day and boarding school founded and directed by pianist and educator Elinor Comstock (1856–1922).

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

On His Hands

Sloane slouched back in his chair and regarded his demi-tasse, the while he paused in his narrative. He was pensive. He bit his lower lip and slowly shook his head.

“So I think the poor kid liked me pretty much,” said Sloane.

His companion was impressed and sympathetic. “It certainly sounds that way, Tod,” said Blakely. “I think I know how you feel. I know I—”

Sloane disregarded Blakely’s comment. “She said she’d resign from college and marry me right away,” Sloane went on. “She told me that when I had her down for the Navy game. Yep. Even then she wanted to quit college. Which, of course, would have meant my quitting too. But I’m not the kind of a guy to wreck two lives that way. I mean to say, what would we have lived on? If the family stopped my allowance now, why, I wouldn’t have a cent till I’m twenty-one, see?”

“Yeah,” said Blakely, “that’s the hell of it. I know I practically had—”

“So I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot about this thing and wreck two lives. This love-in-a-cottage stuff is swell—if you have the cottage. But for God’s sake, I owe Wetzel four hundred dollars, and around college I owe another four hundred dollars or five hundred dollars. See, it wouldn’t have been fair to myself, and it wouldn’t have been fair to this poor kid. I couldn’t earn my living right off the bat. There wasn’t any use making us both unhappy on account of money. So I figured out, why not take a look at her family? Get the dope on what kind of people she comes from. Then if they looked O.K., why, I could talk to my Old Man and maybe they’d let us get married and give us something to start on.”

“That was sensible,” said Blakely.

“Uh-huh,” conceded Sloane. “So at Christmas I told the Old Man I was going out to Chicago to visit the Tuckers.”

“Oh, yes. Elinor Tucker. Sure, I know Elinor. Swell girl.”

Sloane glared. “Well, yes. Not only Elinor, though. The whole family. My Old Man and Mr. Tucker went to college together, and I went to prep school with Brick Tucker. So I said I was going out there and I wired Brick all about what I was going to do, so he wouldn’t spill the beans, and off I went to Dayton, Ohio.” Sloane smiled reminiscently and shook his head.

“Well, she met me at the station, in a 1921 Pierce limousine. That was a pretty good start, because no damn nouveau-riche family has a 1921 Pierce limousine. They’d have a brand-new shiny wagon, all brass. So that old Pierce was a good sign. But still there was that unfortunate name. You couldn’t tell if she was one of the real old German families or just a pork-packer’s daughter.

“Anyhow, it was about three in the afternoon, and we drove out to the country club, instead of going right to her house. We had quite a scene. Poor kid.

“Then we went to her house to dress for some party. The little I saw of the house was O.K. Nice furniture and nice magazines lying around and so on. But I didn’t see anybody but her father. Her mother was at a bridge and her kid sister was at dancing school. Which didn’t prove anything, because out there every respectable kid in town gets invited to dancing school. But her father was the guy that had me guessing.

“I met him just as I came downstairs. The babe was still dressing, so when I went in the library her father was there. He looked up and smiled and reached out his paw and said, ‘Hello there, my boy. You’re the Tod Sloane I’ve been hearing so much about.’ So he told me to sit down and asked me if I wanted a drink or a butt. Made me feel at home. We talked about nothing particular, but he kept up that ‘my boy’ stuff. Why, my Old Man never called me ‘my boy’ in his whole life. Gauss calls me ‘my boy’ when he’s on the verge of firing me the hell out of college. But I couldn’t dope this guy. I thought maybe the babe maybe dropped a hint that we were going to get married, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Well, I didn’t find out much more. The babe’s father went to M.I.T., which might make him a Cabot or an ironworker, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask where he went to prep school. Then the kid herself appeared and we went to this party.

“The party didn’t prove anything either. It was a swell party. Good food, and champagne—which I never touch—and a good band. Saw a couple people from Princeton but nobody I really knew. The right kind of people were nice to the kid and she was cut in on all the time, but that only proved something I know, namely, that she is a damned attractive babe. Why else would I bother with her?

“I stayed in dear old Dayton, Ohio, two days, and if you must know, didn’t learn a god-damn thing. Of course, then I had to go to Chicago because that’s where I told the family I was going.

“Don’t let anybody kid you about Chicago. It’s a swell Princeton town, Chicago. Naturally I played around with Elinor Tucker while I was there. Then I came back to New York until college opened, meanwhile writing to the babe in Dayton and she writing to me. We planned to meet in New York either in January, if she could make it, or February.

“Well, one thing and another came up and we didn’t get to see each other in New York. I think the poor kid sort of suspected that I wasn’t so sure about her family. In any case, the whole affair just dwindled away to nothing. I haven’t laid eyes on her since I was in Dayton. And who do you think I’ve been seeing every time I get up to New York? . . . Elinor Tucker! Absolutely. She’s going to a Miss Comstock’s music school. Just an excuse to be in New York, of course.”

“Elinor’s in New York, eh?” Blakely asked. “Say, tell me. How’s Elinor?”

Sloane looked intently, kindly at Blakely, and smiled. “Well, to tell you the truth, Blake, the first thing I know I’ll have her on my hands!”

First published in the March 22, 1930, issue of The New Yorker and collected in The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935).