O'Hara's Rage to Produce:

...And also in the third story there is a portrait of the woman who is the key, Nancy, the so beautiful woman who would "much rather be admired for her brains...

...That triumph is simply the survival of the misbegotten marriage— through much downward social mobility and considerable accompanying infidelity...

...Reviewed by David T. Bazelon Contributor, "Partisan Review," "Politics," "Commentary," "New Directions" "I WANT TO get it all down on paper while I can," says John O'Hara in his introduction to these three novellas...

...All believable...

...In a way, "Imagine Kissing Pete" is the Julian English counterpoint story: Pete McCrea had more reason over the years to kill himself than Julian did, but he lived on through the sewer of the Depression and other disorganization, and be and his wife sort of won out...

...for Malloy "he provided anecdotes about the rich the kind of information I liked to hear...

...This is a story of triumph over adversity, but Pete's activities in this direction are not the special triumph of the story...

...It's an affirmative story...

...In search of this admiration, the beautiful Nancy domineers intellectually and even manages to kill one husband and shape almost entirely the second shapeless one...

...Whatever else one thinks of him, it must be recognized that O'Hara is one of the most serious and devotedly ambitious, productive craftsmen in the country today...

...And when Ellis, successfully married, tells Malloy in that story that he, Malloy, is "the lonesomest son of a bitch I know"—his actress had just walked out on their synthetic love affair—there are immediate inexplicable tears...

...We're Friends Again" gets moving when Charley Ellis produces tears of grief for his dead wife...

...Almost all of O'Hara's books since 1949 contain some reference to Julian or his wife, Caroline...

...There is a curious thing about these stories: I was struck by men weeping...

...There are later a number of short stories featuring Malloy, and he appears briefly in several novels (including Butterfield 8: O'Hara covered the news story on which the Gloria Wandrous tale was based, so Malloy appears as a reporter at the end of the novel...

...There is so much Author's Self-Consciousness in these stories that we are even given a character sketch of the author's source of information...

...In the present novellas (especially the first and third ones) he has returned to the autobiographical format of "The Doctor's Son" and Hope of Heaven—with a vengeance...

...that he was not able to live on his early magazine writing "without a steady job" (page 17...

...Finally the war saves the situation (as it saved many situations) and there is a happy ending —one which I found very affecting, but each reader I suppose will have to decide for himself between its sentimentality and its esthetic truth...

...The other two—"The Girl on the Baggage Truck" and "We're Friends Again"—are virtually straight autobiography, including more Author Self-Consciousness than anything else of O'Hara's...

...Pete McCrea cries because his wife appreciated a gift, and that is the turning point of his marriage in "Imagine Kissing Pete...

...Along the way we are given a description of what O'Hara himself was doing the night of the country club dance at which Julian English threw a drink in Harry Reilly's face and thus set in motion the course of events leading to his suicide in Appointment in Samarra...

...All three novellas are first-person narratives told by James Malloy, who is O'Hara himself throughout his writing...

...In the days or years that remain to me, I shall entertain myself in contemplation of my time and be fascinated by the way things tie up, one with another...

...There is also in this story the beginning of the portrait of Polly Williamson, a Boston type of lady of stature, who appears again and more fully in "We're Friends Again...

...James Malloy as character and narrator first appeared in O'Hara's famous early story, "The Doctor's Son...

...Before Sermons and Soda-Water, the only other long Malloy story was Hope of Heaven, O'Hara's Hollywood novel, published in 1933...

...This story covers about 30 years of misery of two mismated Gibbsvillians—a disrespected young man, and one of the beauties of the crowd who marries him to spite both herself and a dashing New Yorker with inadequately honorable intentions...

...These two stories—which are connected by several characters other than Malloy —are substantially memoirs...

...At times he strikes one almost as a man possessed...

...But Charley Ellis is a well-drawn, affecting character in "We're Friends Again...

...but "Imagine Kissing Pete" is the only one of the three that is at all fictionalized, that is, contains scenes in which Malloy is not present...

...In the end, after a disfiguring accident, she comes through as a woman of character...

...Fascinates me, too...

...I much prefer his guesses to Fitzgerald's...

...Now that is necessarily an ideal rather than a genuine literary program, but O'Hara is certainly making a manly and masterful effort in his chosen direction...

...This reflective, personal tone results in a certain amount of fatuity, but I for one forgive it all for the deep sincerity of the underlying impulse: a very talented man trying to encompass all his experience that he finds significant...

...I think he is generally quite sensitive to criticism, and apparently a bit more so about a book in which he felt he was revealing himself...

...Once again I got something from this outsider-Irishman's feeling about what it means to be rich (O'Hara is rich now, incidentally, but that isn't the feeling he is writing about...

...It is called "Imagine Kissing Pete" and appeared last fall in The New Yorker, thus marking the end of an 11-year mad that started with a despicable louse-up review by Brendan Gill of O'Hara's A Rage t? Live in 1949...

...Malloy is also weeping as part of the happy ending of that story...

...A writer belongs to his time, and mine is past," says O'Hara...

...that his forced retirement from night life "was not nearly so difficult as I had always anticipated it would be" (page 71...

...Pete, whom none of the girls could imagine kissing before his marriage, turns sexually wild soon after his honeymoon and more than imagines kissing a number of the girls...

...As in all of O'Hara, it is the portraits of women and the more or less feminine sense of social connections that, despite some pretty obvious failings and a certain aimless lack of intensity, induces one to feel the presence of a big talent and significant voice...

...This book was not well received, and O'Hara seems to have been quite hurt by its reception: He did not publish another novel until 11 years later...

...This last is Charley Ellis, the narrator's upper-class friend, a drinking companion who went into his father's Wall Street firm although he wanted to write...

...The Girl on the Baggage Truck" concerns an aging movie queen for whom Malloy serves as a press agent in and around New York...

...What he has gotten down on paper here, in these three long stories, is a passel of evocative truth mostly about New York in the '30s...

...The second story, however, is more Gibbsville than otherwise, and is probably the best of three...

...And that's O'Hara, I think: He really knew Ellis, but he had only met Williamson...

...Sermons and Soda-Water is his 17th book in about three decades...

...He did an excellent short story on this theme many years ago...

...We meet her first as a nervous, tough-talking broad who is losing her hold on stardom and fairly anxious as well about her boy-friend —and this, that and the other...

...This third story also contains a very nice sketch of Malloy's girl friend in a "synthetic" New York affair, a minor Broadway actress built like a subway kiosk, and indeed almost as superb as the movie queen...

...Even in "Imagine Kissing Pete" we learn (again) that O'Hara was "the only boy in our crowd who was not away at college" (page 9...

...With a mission, that is, to tell or evoke the truth about it all...

...But also I must confess that his picture of Junior Williamson, who appears as a really wealthy kind of Rockefeller, doesn't amount to much—except a paragraph or two intimating why or how women are impelled to help him get the pleasure he demands...