Joey on the Cake Line

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s

Interesting Links

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: John O’Hara’s Pal Joey remains an exemplar of the epistolary novella” (Thomas Mallon, The Paris Review)

“The Tortured History of John O’Hara’s Pal Joey” (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Christmas Poem,” John O’Hara
• “The Lily-White Boys,” William Maxwell

Buy the book
John O'Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s
Appointment in Samarra | Butterfield 8 | Hope of Heaven | Pal Joey

Cover artwork from the souvenir program for the 1952 Broadway revival of Pal Joey.

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“That was the only good thing I ever got out of booze, but mind you, Wilson, I wasn’t on a bender at the time I wrote it. I was perfectly sober!”

When the novelist John O’Hara was interviewed by gossip columnist Earl Wilson in 1948, he revealed how his most famous character, Pal Joey, was born during a post-alcoholic haze in a Manhattan hotel. A decade earlier O’Hara and his wife had just returned from a summer in England and were staying with her parents on the Upper East Side. His third novel (Hope of Heaven) was a commercial flop, the Hollywood novel he had hoped to write remained unwritten, and he was, as he admitted to Wilson, “broke.” So he told his wife he was heading back to Philadelphia to pound out his next story for The New Yorker at the Ben Franklin Hotel, where he occasionally stayed to work on his writing.

He never made it. Instead he met up nearby with some companions and “got stiff.” The next day he checked into The Pierre, a hotel thirty-three blocks south of his in-laws’ apartment, and spent another two days drinking. He woke up early Saturday morning and asked a hotel attendant what day and time it was.

At that point remorse set in. I asked, ‘What kind of god damn heel am I? I must be worse ’n anybody in the world.’ Then I figured, ‘No, there must be somebody worse than me — but who?’ Al Capone, maybe. Then I got it — maybe some night club masters of ceremonies I know.

By noon O’Hara had finished a draft of the first Pal Joey story and was on his way back home, where he confessed his misdeeds to his wife yet had the story to show for them.

“Pal Joey” was immediately accepted by The New Yorker and appeared in its October 22, 1938, issue. Editor-in-chief Harold Ross was particularly enthusiastic about the story and requested additional pieces featuring the same character. By the time the first story had appeared in the magazine, O’Hara was in California working as a screenwriter for RKO Studios (and later for Twentieth-Century Fox). When New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell rejected one of the follow-up episodes, O’Hara reminded him that Ross had promised “when both of us were sober, that if I wrote him ten Pal Joey pieces I could say the hell with Hollywood.” All told, twelve would appear in the magazine, and fourteen stories—all written as letters from Joey to the emcee’s far more successful “friend” and rival Ted—would be collected as a book in October 1940.

“I don’t know whether you happened to see any of a series of pieces I’ve been doing for The New Yorker in the past year or so,” O’Hara wrote in early 1940 to Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. “I got the idea that the pieces, or at least the character and the life in general could be made into a book show.” Rodgers and his partner, lyricist Lorenz Hart, liked the concept and agreed to score the musical, for which O’Hara would write the book. George Abbott, who was hired as director, remembered the original script as “a disorganized set of scenes without a good story line,” so the show was reworked before and during rehearsals and O’Hara approved the changes whenever he happened to show up at the theatre. Gene Kelly, who had just starred in The Time of Your Life, took on the role of Joey, while Vivienne Segal costarred as Vera, a character newly created by O’Hara for the show. The musical opened on Christmas Day 1940 and was a hit, running for 374 performances on Broadway despite (or, perhaps, because of) its risqué subject matter. Brook Atkinson, The New York Times critic, panned the show, finding much of the content inappropriate for a musical comedy: “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical out of an odious story, Pal Joey is it. . . . Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”

In the late 1940s Doris Day had a Top Ten hit with the show’s most famous number, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” The song’s popularity led to the first studio recording of the show, which in turn led to a 1952 stage revival starring Harold Lang and Segal, reprising her role as Vera. O’Hara made a few changes to the second act and Rodgers revised several lyrics. (Hart had died in 1943.) The show proved even a bigger hit, enjoying a fifteen-month run of 540 performances—the longest of any revival of a musical in Broadway history to that date. This time Atkinson sang a different tune, praising “the tight organization of the production, the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.” Recalling that he had not been “enchanted” the first time he saw the show, Atkinson now acknowledged that it “broke the old formula and brought the musical stage to maturity. . . . Pal Joey was a pioneer in the moving back of musical frontiers, for it tells an integrated story with a knowing point of view.”

“Joey’s is an American voice from the second act of the American century,” writes the novelist Thomas Mallon, “a time when the country’s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world.” We present from The New Yorker’s 1939 Christmas issue one of John O’Hara’s original Pal Joey stories. In a mere four pages, it showcases the louche, tough-guy patter that would make its creator a rich man.

Note: Onawentsia Club, mentioned on the last page, is a country club in Lake Forest, Illinois.

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FRIEND TED:
Well Xmas is coming and the geese are getting fat, please put a penny in the blind man’s hat as the old saying use to go. . . . 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 Company Is Not Responsible

Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
From Mary McCarthy: Novels & Stories 1942–1963

Interesting Links
“Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, and the Short Story That Ruined a Marriage” (Frances Kiernan, The New Yorker)

Obituary: “Mary McCarthy, 77, Is Dead; Novelist, Memoirist and Critic” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “General Macbeth,” Mary McCarthy
• “The Actual Thing,” William Maxwell

Buy the books
Mary McCarthy: The Complete Fiction
The Company She Keeps | The Oasis | The Groves of Academe | A Charmed Life | The Group | Birds of America | Cannibals and Missionaries | stories
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2,066 pages
List price: $90.00
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Detail from Tom Hackett Walking Along Commercial Street Past the Delight, Delight, Delight House, undated, oil on board by American artist Mary Hackett (1906–1989). Visit the Provincetown History Preservation Project site to see the full painting. The Delight House (mentioned in McCarthy’s story) was in front of the Atlantic Coast Fisheries Cold Storage Plant in Provincetown.

Mary McCarthy met the literary critic Edmund Wilson in 1937 at the office of the newly relaunched Partisan Review, whose editors eventually hired her to write theater criticism. She and Wilson married the following year and their seven-year marriage was tumultuous and occasionally violent. “By 1944 my parents' marriage was pretty well on the rocks, with my mother ensconced in New York and my father holding the fort with me in Wellfleet,” Reuel Wilson recalled in his memoir of a childhood spent on Cape Cod. By the end of the year, “my mother and I took final leave of the house my father was renting on Henderson Place in uptown Manhattan, just off East End Ave. All that remained for them was to haggle over the terms of a divorce.”

In spite of the tumult of her marriage, the early 1940s marked a turning point for McCarthy’s writing career. In 1942 her debut book, The Company She Keeps, with its six interrelated stories, became the scandale du jour, both for its accounts of sexual liaisons that vaguely resembled her own experiences and for its thinly disguised composite portraits of members of the New York intellectual and Provincetown bohemian milieus. After reading a couple of the stories when they had appeared in periodicals, New Yorker editor William Maxwell invited her to contribute to the magazine. Thus, biographer Frances Kiernan writes, “McCarthy arrived at The New Yorker as a fully formed writer known for her immaculate prose, her wit, her glamour, her sexual adventures, and her vexed marriage to the eminent critic Edmund Wilson, as well as for the impossibly high standards of her Partisan Review theatre criticism and the shocking candor of her fiction.”

Yet Maxwell went on leave before any of her pieces actually appeared in the magazine, and it was Katharine White who returned to the The New Yorker’s staff and bought “The Weeds,” a story that unsparingly fictionalized McCarthy’s stormy relationship with Wilson and that was perhaps the nail in the coffin of their marriage. Unusually lengthy for fiction published at the time in the magazine, “The Weeds” effectively established McCarthy as one of its stable of writers—but it was actually not her first story for The New Yorker. Maxwell had previously accepted “The Company Is Not Responsible,” a story that (as Kiernan notes) “was mild and even heartwarming and nothing like anything she had ever written.” The story languished in the magazine’s stockpile until White dusted it off and published it after accepting “The Weeds.”

Describing a group of strangers who unexpectedly bond “together, in amity,” on the bus to Provincetown, “The Company Is Not Responsible” was never included by McCarthy in one of her books but has now been restored to print, along with several other uncollected stories, in the just-published Library of America edition of Mary McCarthy’s complete fiction.

Notes: On pages 850–51, McCarthy namechecks several real-life Cape Cod and Provincetown references. Established in 1798, the Atlantic House has served a notably bohemian and eccentric crowd since the early 1900s and a predominantly gay clientele since World War II. McCarthy and Wilson’s teenage son, Reuel Wilson, went to the bar with his mother in the 1950s and recalled that “Provincetown nightlife, with its all-female bands and transsexual performers, was quite an eye-opener.” The Delight, Delight, Delight House is pictured above and described in the caption. The girl named Halcyon almost certainly refers to Halcyon Cabral (Durst), whose Portuguese ancestors immigrated to Provincetown in the 1870s and whose family was prominent in the development of its business center and wharf from the 1940s to the end of the century. Camp Edwards is a U.S. military training base, established in 1931 on Cape Cod. On page 852, the passengers sing two songs. “My mother sells snow to the snowbirds” is from the bawdy song “How the Money Rolls In,” sung to the tune of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” German composer Friedrich Silcher’s popular song “Die Lorelei” (1837) set to music the poem of the same name by Heinrich Heine. The excerpt translates:

      And on one peak, half-dreaming
      She sits, enthroned and fair;
      Like a goddess, dazzling and gleaming,
      She combs her golden hair.

      With a gold comb she is combing . . . [trans. Louis Untermeyer]

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There was a girl named Margie, a girl named Ann, a honeymoon couple, a man named George, the girl called Blondie, and me; a middle-aged woman, a drunken sailor, four Harvard boys, a machinist’s mate (first class), the driver—called Mac, though that was not his name—and several supernumerary passengers, among them noticeably a soldier with a pipe. . . . 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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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 Actual Thing

William Maxwell (1908–2000)
From William Maxwell: Early Novels & Stories

Interesting Links

“Art of Fiction” interview with William Maxwell (John Seabrook, The Paris Review)

“Imperishable Maxwell” (John Updike, The New Yorker)

Previous Story of the Week selection by William Maxwell
“The Lily-White Boys”

Buy the book
William Maxwell: Early Novels & Stories
Bright Center of Heaven | They Came Like Swallows | The Folded Leaf | Time Will Darken It | stories •  997 pages

Also available
William Maxwell: Later Novels & Stories
The Château | So Long, See You Tomorrow | stories | 990 pages

Take Your Choice, 1885, oil on canvas by American artist John Frederick Peto (1854–1907). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art website.

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Illinois native William Maxwell first arrived in New York City in 1933, hoping to find employment and having just received a Master’s degree from Harvard. During the next two years he published his first novel, Bright Center of Heaven, and placed stories in various magazines—but the lack of jobs during the Depression forced him to leave the city several times, either to Wisconsin, where he performed odd tasks at an artist’s colony, or back to Illinois, where he graded papers for room, board, and $4 a month.

In February 1936 Maxwell completed his second novel, They Came Like Swallows, told from the point of view of an eight-year-old child living through the devastating 1918 influenza outbreak, and it was acquired by Eugene F. Saxton, the editor-in-chief for Harper & Bros. Through Saxton’s influence, New Yorker fiction editor Katharine S. White purchased two of Maxwell’s short stories.

That summer, while his book was being prepared for press, Maxwell returned to Manhattan, still hoping to find a job. “My publisher gave me three letters,” he recalled, “one to The New Republic, one to Time, and one to The New Yorker. I was unsuited for The New Republic because I was politically uninformed. I don’t know if I was unsuited to Time as well; I got to The New Yorker before I got to Time, and they hired me, and that was that.” During his interview at The New Yorker, White asked what salary he hoped to receive: “Some knowledgeable acquaintance had told me I must ask for $35 a week or I wouldn’t be respected, so I swallowed hard and said, ‘Thirty-five dollars.’ Mrs. White smiled and said, ‘I expect you could live on less.’ I could have lived nicely on fifteen. A few days later I got a telegram from her asking me to report to work . . . at the salary agreed on: $35 a week.”

Maxwell’s early duties included informing cartoonists of acceptances and rejections, but by the end of December (when the two stories purchased earlier appeared in the magazine), White and senior editor Wolcott Gibbs began training Maxwell to edit fiction, memoir, and humor. In March 1937 They Came Like Swallows appeared and was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club for its April dual main selection. When Maxwell received his first check for $8,000 from the book club, he “went into Wolcott Gibbs’s office to tell him and could hardly walk, stunned by the overwhelming sum.” During the following year The New Yorker accepted five more of his stories, including “The Actual Thing,” in which the thirty-year-old Maxwell depicts a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor obsessing over the inevitability of death.

By the mid-1940s Maxwell had increasingly and comfortably grown into the role of shepherding and editing authors for the magazine—often to the neglect of his own writing. One author in particular had been sending stories to Maxwell for nearly five years, hoping New Yorker staff members would overcome their reluctance during wartime to publish fiction featuring disaffected youth. Finally, Maxwell moved ahead and scheduled for the December 1946 issue J. D. Salinger’s story “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” featuring the character Holden Caulfield.

Note: Among the books squirreled away in the attic are a volume of works by Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899), an American lawyer and orator known for forceful speeches supporting agnosticism; The Clansman, a 1905 historical novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. that romanticized the Old South’s resistance to Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and that served as the basis of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation; and Truxton King (1909), the third of six best-selling novels by George Barr McCutcheon about love and intrigue in the royal court of the fictional Central European country of Graustark.

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The odor, if it was an odor, came from the other end of the attic, Mr. Tupper decided. He was looking about for a long wooden croquet box which had certain of his possessions in it—his Knights Templar sword, the works of Ingersoll, and an album of pressed flowers from the Holy Land. . . . 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 Lily-White Boys

William Maxwell (1908–2000)
From William Maxwell: Later Novels & Stories

Interesting Links
Two interviews: Christopher Carduff on William Maxwell’s early writings and later writings (PDFs, Library of America)

An interview with William Maxwell (Audio, NPR’s Fresh Air)

Previous Christmas selections from Story of the Week:
• “The Christmas Dinner,” Washington Irving
• “The Christmas Fireside (for Good Little Boys and Girls),” Mark Twain

Buy the book
William Maxwell: Later Novels & Stories
The Château • So Long, See You Tomorrow • stories & improvisations • 990 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $31.50

Also available
William Maxwell: Early Novels & Stories
Bright Center of Heaven • They Came Like Swallows • The Folded Leaf • Time Will Darken It • stories •  997 pages
List price: $35.00
Web store price: $31.50

Save $20! Buy both volumes for only $50

The author of dozens of short stories and six novels (including the National Book Award–winning So Long, See You Tomorrow), William Maxwell worked at The New Yorker for four decades, beginning in 1936. By the 1950s, comments Christopher Carduff, “he was coming into his own” as a fiction editor at the magazine, which “under its second editor-in chief, William Shawn, was transformed into something more daring and inclusive and, for Maxwell, congenial than it had been under Harold Ross.” Among the many writers Maxwell shepherded during his career were Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov, Mavis Gallant, Harold Brodkey, John Cheever, and John Updike, who described Maxwell’s editorship as “one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction.”

“Although he wrote several superb short stories,” Carduff notes, “the story was never Maxwell’s favorite form.” But his duties as a magazine editor and as father of two daughters made it difficult for him to write novels, and Shawn encouraged him instead to write prose pieces for the magazine. He continued writing and publishing stories and sketches, and re-reading his favorite books, right up until his death in 2000, at the age of 91. In his essay, “Nearing Ninety,” he wrote that he was “not concerned about” the prospect of dying, comparing it “to an afternoon nap that goes on and on through eternity. . . . What spoils this pleasant fancy is the recollection that when people are dead, they don’t read books. This I find unbearable.”

Often included on annual lists of classic Christmas stories, “The Lily-White Boys” was written when Maxwell was in his late seventies and originally appeared in a special 100th issue of The Paris Review. In a review of holiday tales for the online magazine Untitled Books, Viola Fort hails Maxwell’s story as “brief and perfect” and describes its effect on the reader:

Like picking up a book and turning to a page at random, these lives, one feels, will continue whether we’re witness to them or not. The story itself is a flash of lightning illuminating a particular episode. Maxwell’s skill is in hinting at whole lifetimes in the space of five pages. . . . Maxwell cuts through the tinsel and the pitch-perfect carolling to a moment of quiet reflection on the years that have passed and the years to come, and there lies Christmas.

Maxwell biographer Barbara Burkhardt agrees, writing that the “tension between the piercing beauty and haunting sadness of human existence provides drama that courses beneath Maxwell’s spare, restrained, yet graceful prose.”

Note: The lyrics on the first page of the story are from the traditional English carol, “Green Grows the Rushes, O.”

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The Follansbees’ Christmas party was at teatime on Christmas Day, and it was for all ages. Ignoring the fire laws, the big Christmas tree standing between the two front windows in the living room of the Park Avenue apartment had candles on it. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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