Agatha

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

Interesting Links

“He Told the Truth about His Time” (Lorin Stein, The New Yorker)

“A Natural Writer” (John Updike, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Actual Thing,” William Maxwell
• “Lavender with a Difference,” James Thurber
• “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” John Updike

Buy this book
John O’Hara: Stories
Sixty stories and novellas in all | 860 pages

John O’Hara in 1962. (Photo by Carl Mydans/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

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In March 1959 James Thurber wrote to a New York Post reporter writing a profile on fellow New Yorker colleague John O’Hara, who had been a friend for “thirty years, off and on, but mostly on”:

John O’Hara being Irish and artist is doubly interesting, twice as complicated, and maybe three times as difficult as he would be if he were only one of those volatile beings. . . . He can always tolerate a major aggression, but takes fire about minor misunderstandings, and thus gained the name of being “Master of the Fancied Slight.” . . . I guess a man cannot have an ear and eye and mind as sensitive as O’Hara’s without also having feelings that are hypersensitive. He is, of course, one of the major talents in American literature.

Read as a whole, Thurber’s letter was probably meant as a humorous encomium for a fellow writer and friend, but O’Hara’s reputation for orneriness seeps through. The irony, perhaps, was that such characterizations came from Thurber’s pen; as Charles McGrath recalls, “At The New Yorker in the mid-1970's, it was still possible to hear editors debating which of the magazine's illustrious contributors had been the bigger jerk and the more impossible to deal with—James Thurber or John O'Hara.” McGrath also writes that “in his later years O'Hara mellowed considerably,” particularly after he give up drinking in the mid-1950s.

O’Hara’s propensity for feelings of betrayal and for grudges led, in part, to his absence from the pages of The New Yorker for more than a decade. In August 1949 his latest novel, A Rage to Live, was published to extraordinary sales and generally good reviews. One of the least favorable notices, however, appeared in The New Yorker itself, where Brendan Gill called it “sprawling” and “discursive” and compared the sexual content of the novel to the Kinsey Report. O’Hara felt betrayed, and a decade later bitterly complained to Thurber that “the most dramatic event in my association with magazine was a review written by a snotnose.” Compounding O’Hara’s resentment toward the magazine, according to John Updike, was its refusal to pony up a “kill fee” for each story it declined to publish: “O’Hara felt that New Yorker short stories were so specialized that a writer could not sell elsewhere a story written with its pages in mind.” For the next eleven years, O’Hara boycotted the magazine and wrote virtually no short fiction at all, focusing instead on long blockbuster novels.

Finally, in the summer of 1960, O’Hara offered to submit his work to The New Yorker again—but only if an editor came out to his home in Quogue and accepted a story on the spot. William Maxwell, an editor who had worked well with O’Hara before the break, agreed to spend the night. After reading two novellas not up to the magazine’s standards, he was delighted to realize that the third, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” was good enough to publish in its entirety, and O’Hara received a reported ten thousand dollars. One of the longest works of fiction ever published in The New Yorker, “Imagine Kissing Pete” is widely regarded as among his best works of fiction.

The breach repaired, O’Hara would write almost thirty stories for the magazine over the next three years. Between 1930 and 1967 he published 247 stories in The New Yorker alone—the all-time record for any fiction writer—and dozens more in other magazines and in book collections. It would be difficult to overstate the influence of this body of work on American letters. McGrath writes that O’Hara “liberated the story from the formulas of popular magazine fiction of the ’20s—the reliance on surprise climaxes; the elaborately articulated structure of beginning, middle and end. . . . Hemingway typically gets credit for this revolution in story writing, but among practitioners O’Hara was probably more influential.” In his editor’s note for a new Library of America edition collecting sixty of O’Hara’s stories and novellas (including “Imagine Kissing Pete”), McGrath adds:

He was a gifted and sensitive writer, with talents quite different from those of his more highly regarded contemporaries: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. His strength and his limitation was that he was stubbornly earthbound. There are no similes in his work, no flights of lyricism or fancy writing, no hints of a deeper meaning beyond the moment. Nothing in O’Hara is “like” anything else. Things are vibrant and valuable for their own sake, and he described them—the make of a car, the cut of a suit, the song on the radio, the brand of cigarette, the sound of a broken tire chain on a snowy morning—with a scrupulousness that bordered on devotion. . . .

He became, among other things, one of the great listeners of American fiction, able to write dialogue that sounded the way people really talk, and he also learned the eavesdropper’s secret—how often people leave unsaid what is really on their minds.

The stories from O’Hara’s later period, says McGrath, “were longer and plottier. . . . He was easier in his own skin, and it shows a little in the writing: there are fewer stories about loneliness, isolation, or exclusion.” In celebration of the release of the new Library of America edition, we present here one of those later stories, about a wealthy woman who “had had three husbands and an undetermined number of gentleman friends” and who is navigating the challenges of growing older.

Notes: O’Hara includes several references (pages 466–67) to various mid-century haunts of the upper crust. Pine Valley is a golf club in southern New Jersey, generally considered among the best golf courses in America, with highly restricted access; the resort town of Thomasville, Georgia, is the home of the Glen Arven Country Club. Canoe Place, built in 1923 was an upscale inn and dance pavilion in Hampton Bays, New York, legendary for attracting bootleggers and gangsters, as well as the sons and daughters of the wealthy; six miles away in Southampton were the tennis courts and facilities of the ultra-exclusive Meadow Club (founded in 1887 and still in operation). The course at Elizabeth Arden (page 470) was hosted at the health retreat of cosmetics and beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden (pseud. Florence Graham, 1878–1966) on her Maine Chance Farm estate in Maine.

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Both dogs had been out. She could tell by the languid way they greeted her and by the fact that Jimmy, the elevator operator, had taken his twenty-five-cent piece off the hall table. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd

John Updike (1932–2009)
From John Updike: Collected Later Stories

Interesting Links
“Auyantepui”: Bart Moon’s recollection of his Venezuelan adventure with John and Martha Updike (American Diplomacy)

“At Play in the Backyard of the Psyche,” Marilynne Robinson’s review of Updike’s story collection Trust Me (The New York Times Book Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Kindling,” Raymond Carver
• “The Swimmer,” John Cheever

Buy the books
John Updike: The Collected Stories
2-book boxed set • 186 classic stories • 1,949 pages
List price: $75.00
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Web store price: $60.00

Calista Moon and John Updike, 1981. In the background is the helicopter that had crashed while taking them to the top of Auyantepui in Venezuela. Photograph by Bart Moon, courtesy of UNC's American Diplomacy website.

“As helicopter crashes go it was a gentle one,” recalls Bart Moon about one of the most mortifying events he experienced during the years he served as a U.S. Foreign Service officer in Venezuela. He had been entrusted with the comfort and security of embassy guests John and Martha Updike on the last day of their week-long stay in early 1981, one in a series of visits by American cultural dignitaries. The group had started the morning by flying a Cessna plane to a small airport, where they transferred to a large helicopter that would take them for a picnic at the top of Auyantepui, a tepui (“table-top mountain”) protruding about 3,000 feet from the surrounding jungle. As they approached the landing spot atop the tepui, the helicopter suddenly plunged, crashed, and toppled onto its side. Fortunately, other than a scraped leg, nobody was hurt, and the party spent the afternoon traipsing around the top of the mountain:

We took dozens of heroic-survivor photos [and] peered nervously over the edges of this new world. . . . Meanwhile, John, the essence of cool, was busy indulging a surprising passion for botany. . . . At the same time Martha and [Bart's wife] Calista had wandered off on an exploratory walk of their own. This was worrisome because the mist that would engulf us from time to time was so dense that one could hardly see one step ahead. Because we were situated close to the rim of our island in the sky, one misstep and our party of eleven would be ten.

A few hours later, two freight helicopters rescued the party and brought them back to the airport. The day’s adventure wasn’t quite over, however. One of the rescue helicopters, upon landing, clipped and damaged the wing of the group’s Cessna. “We would have to go slowly, but the plane was perfectly safe,” Moon was assured. “I didn’t buy it for a minute,” he adds, but they all made it safely back to Caracas. During the final leg of their trip, John wrote a note for the Moons to give to their daughter, a college student back in Massachusetts. It read, “Dear Claudia, Your parents are very brave.” In later years, Updike sent several cards and letters to the Moons, including one that described the afternoon on the top of Auyantepui as “easily my happiest time in Venezuela.”

Living through two crashes in a single day didn’t slow down Updike a bit. In 1981 he saw Rabbit Is Rich through to publication; it spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list and would become the first (and still the only) novel to win the American literary trifecta: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award (then known as the American Book Award). He also completed the interconnected stories that would be collected as Bech Is Back and finished several new short works (the first of which, “The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd,” was accepted and published by The New Yorker soon after his return to the States; the second, “Venezuela for Visitors,” was inspired by his trip).

Updike included “The Lovely Troubled Daughters” in the 1987 collection Trust Me. Reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review, the novelist Marilynne Robinson singled out the story for praise:

“The Lovely Troubled Daughters of Our Old Crowd” describes the grown children who once played together at the peripheries of the buoyant social lives of their young parents. . . . They still haunt their hometown “as if searching for something they missed.” The transgressions the narrator remembers rather nostalgically, seeking to account for the fear he sees in these young women, are not remarkable—suburban cordiality overstepping its limits. He sees their importance for the first time in these inhibited lives. The disproportion between cause and effect, the manners of one generation sealing the fate of the next, set the conventional in a sharp, transforming light.

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Notes: Among the cultural references in Updike’s story: D.R. (page 118) stands for Design Research, a furniture and housewares retailer in Harvard Square that closed in 1978; Stingers (p. 119) are cocktails composed of three parts brandy, one part crème de menthe; Steiff animals (p. 120) are collectible stuffed animals made in Germany; Stop & Shop (p. 121) is a New England supermarket chain.

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Why don’t they get married? You see them around town, getting older, little spinsters already, pedalling bicycles to their local jobs or walking up the hill by the rocks with books in their arms. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.