Bad Behavior Boys

...Although Mrs...

...Thurber's own work—the prose as well as the cartoons—is the ne plus ultra of this philosophy, even when it seems most fantastic...

...His breathless, confiding, slangy style can be annoying, but that is a minor fault...

...O'Hara approved of the Catholic curriculum, she discouraged her son from consorting with his new schoolmates...

...White before him, O'Hara published his first squibs in Franklin P. Adams' column "The Conning Tower" and then made his way to the New Yorker...

...Thurber's slow and, eventually, almost total loss of vision was a professional tragedy...

...What ever became of John O'Hara...

...We got to give em pokers to bend, women to lay, guys to smack in the puss...

...The Alumnae Bulletin," the first of an incredible ran of 265 O'Hara stories accepted by the New Yorker, appeared in April 1928...

...The really captivating stuff starts around 1927, when the 32year-old Thurber began his long (too long, he came to believe) association with the New Yorker...

...O'Hara is on his way, if he persists in his course, to becoming the Toots Shor of literature...

...By contrast with O'Hara, his colleague James Thurber is almost as famous today as he was during his lifetime...

...It is interesting, therefore, to hear him muse, in a 1938 letter to Katherine White, on the dangers involved in the type's having become too prevalent: "We've had an awful lot of the sad drifting little men muddling gently through the most trivial and impalpable of situations, ending up on a faint and, to me, usually evasive little note of resignation to it all, whatever it all is...

...As Wolcott Gibbs observed, O'Hara had "a strong distaste for sunlight and preferred to stay in bed until the worst of it was over...

...His verbal wit seems so casual that one can only take his word for how hard he worked at it, and the prose flows as smoothly, the jokes as freely in the letters as in the published, polished work...

...I had said that it was necessary for the purposes of hauteur in such expressions as 'whom are you anyways?'" Like O'Hara, Thurber was in his own words a "bad behavior boy" on occasion...

...Thurber's relations with William Shawn and the new regime were shaky, at best...

...Walter Winchell,* Charles Brackett, Don Skene, Frank Getty,* Arthur Caesar,* Harold Lloyd* and wife,* father* and daughter...

...laid off the bottle...

...On grammar: "[I am] holding out for the preservation of'whom,' which many people...

...No," Patrick replied...

...Like his contemporary John P. Marquand, O'Hara enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and went immediately and horribly out of fashion almost the moment he died, in 1970...

...As soon as all the people who knew him die off, people will come to share my opinion...

...Fran Lebowitz has said, "He's one of my favorite writers...

...To Ross he insisted, "the closer you come to what a human being might say, the funnier your caption is going to be...

...Lloyd Garrison—to name but a gross...

...But O'Hara redeemed himself, personally and professionally...

...John sank to seeking manual labor and even charity before he eventually found a niche in newspaper work...

...Like Robert Benchley, James Thurber and E.B...

...Though Thurber got grumpier with the passing years, he did not get less funny...

...His obvious talent subsequently got him many jobs...

...Where would Trollope, Thackeray, James, Balzac, Proust, and any number of other great novelists be without these subjects...

...rough Catholic kids were not welcome in the family's home...

...Every note—from answers to college students wanting to know about his theories of fiction, to complaints to New Yorker staff members or dense editors at Harper & Brothers, his publishers, to missives to his neurotic relatives back in Ohio— is laugh-out-loud funny...

...After his father died in 1925, the 20-year-old John, along with his mother and his seven younger siblings, found that in spite of Patrick's landholdings and apparent wealth he had left practically nothing in the bank...

...I have no desire to write for the new bunch, although they are all right and I will finally," he said, and he was not entirely sure Shawn had a sense of humor...

...Founding editor Harold Ross was never too thrilled with his work, which he perceived as highbrow and experimental—"I'll never publish another story by O'Hara I don't understand," he announced at one point...

...Well, yes, it does sound horse's-assy...

...I have marked with a star the names of the people who I think would remember me if they were to see me tomorrow...

...All of us have had a fling at fantasy and formula, but they should never predominate...

...White, Gibbs, Peter de Vries, et al...

...This both enriched and harmed his art...

...his equally obvious unfitness for office routine got him fired from every one of them...

...Howard Dietz* and spouse,* Tommy Guinan,* Senator George, Dennis Tilden Lynch,* McKay Morris,* George de Zayas,* Mrs...

...The nadir of his career, perhaps, was the humiliating drubbing Brendan Gill gave him in the pages of the New Yorker and the ridiculous feud, with both Gill and the magazine, that ensued...

...Snobbery, vulgarity, the shades of social status and pretension, the addiction to objects of luxury, the innumerable social uncertainties, the comic juxtaposition of social assumptions—the novel thrives on them, and best knows how to deal with them...

...The mature Thurber seems to have been incapable of writing anything that was not funny...

...But the opening 100-odd pages are marked by a hysterical and sophomoric flippancy, so you would be wise to skip them...

...She is probably right...

...O'Hara was obsessed by social class and its countless gradations...

...But the novel must also deal with much more...

...nor could anyone believe it of O'Hara after reading Geoffrey Wolff's unsparing but generous biography...

...Certainly it is no pansy Fuller Brush Man tapping...

...Writing like this," he told Ross after several unsuccessful eye operations, "is a lot like having sexual intercourse while wearing an open parachute...

...O'Hara's nearly 40-year association with the magazine was famously stormy...

...The publication in 1945 of his best-selling anthology, The Thurber Carnival, and its distribution throughout the world in an Armed Services edition, made him a household name...

...George Bellows' prize fighters had no faces, but that didn't mean they had no faces...

...After 1941 he couldn't see what he drew, and he had a very hard time switching from writing to dictation...

...But not quite...

...Thurber wrote to de Vries that "the best thing the New Yorker has ever done in comic art is the probable or recognizable caption dealing with the actual relationships of people in our middle-class society...

...By 1947 he had to give up drawing entirely...

...On Fiction Bad Behavior Boys By Brooke Allen Writing to a friend just a few months after his arrival in New York, the provincial young John O'Hara asked a little ruefully: "Does it sound horse's-assy to say G ve had such a busy life lately...

...Thurber's fame rests as much as anything on his matchless portrayal of the "Little Man," apotheosized in the "Woman and House" cartoon and as Walter Mitty, among other examples...

...He has succeeded, at least up to a point...

...Now comes The Thurber Letters, (Simon & Schuster, 816 pp., $40.00), edited by Harrison Kinney with the help of Thurber's daughter, Rosemary, and it is something of a shock...

...If he was a snob, a paranoiac—"The Master of the Fancied Slight," as he was known at the New Yorker—and a belligerent drunk, he made no effort to hide these faults...

...He also disapproved of the very long pieces Shawn published: "In recent years I have constantly heard people around the office saying profoundly, 'Length is no object...

...Interestingly, too, given Thurber's reputation for malice and misogyny, there is only one truly cruel letter in a total of almost 800 pages...

...His human figures, stylized to an extreme, are entirely recognizable and even banal bourgeois American types...

...The death of his beloved wife Belle at the age of only 40 left him with an eight-year-old daughter to care for, and he rose to the occasion: He married again, quite well...

...One anecdote that offended the Whites, for instance, had Ross listening in on a conversation about Willa Cather and eagerly asking, "Willa Cather...

...He dared to hope that his bad behavior was not "fundamental...

...Not because the letters reveal a different Thurber from the one of the stories and pictures, but because they are just as good as the great stories and fantasies themselves...

...His first drawing was submitted to the magazine's art department by White: "Naturally enough," says Thurber, "it was rejected by an art board whose members thought they were being spoofed, if not, indeed, actually, chivvied...

...When Fate knocks in German, by God you hear it...

...and effected a reconciliation with the New Yorker that produced, between 1960 and '67, an extraordinary series of stories...

...As New York Times essayist Harvey Breit rather ruthlessly put it in 1956, "By his decisive use of the word 'class' to denote his highest praise, Mr...

...If The Art of Burning Bridges does not rehabilitate O'Hara, new editions of Appointment in Samarra and the short stories might do the trick...

...Thurber's articles on Ross ran in the Atlantic in 1957 and '58, and were collected in book form as The Years With Ross...

...Harry Houdini,* John Haynes Holmes, Wm...

...As a small child John was removed from the "good" (Protestant, upper-middle class) elementary school in town and placed at St...

...he asked his father...

...This is the task Geoffrey Wolff (author of The Duke of Deception and Black Sun, a biography of Harry Crosby) has set himself, and he attacks it with a fitting respect for the challenge involved in The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John ?'Hara (Knopf, 400 pp., $30.00...

...American life being what it is, we couldn't leave the Little Man out of it...

...He was, on paper if not always in life, sane, sensible, often profound, and both humorous and witty...

...To an old friend back in Ohio he wrote, "I draw now with a Zeiss loop, and look like a welder from Mars...

...His parents' double standard nourished his natural defensiveness until he picked at his Irishness "like a scab," one friend would later note...

...Depression and other health difficulties took their toll, as did the death of Ross in 1951...

...His other well-known works—My Life and Hard Times (1933), "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and his cartoons— are similarly so familiar that in this country we take them for granted...

...O'Hara's belligerence was not always unjustified...

...Another cartoon, "The Seal in the Bedroom"—probably Thurber's most famous—was also initially rejected by Ross, who objected that "a seal's whiskers do not grow this way...

...The fact that one sees no hair on my men does not mean they are bald," he wrote patiently, when one of the art staff just didn't get it...

...The writer's upbringing was certainly one to give a socially sensitive child some confusing notions about his place in the American hierarchy...

...We are Americans...

...He thought the New Yorker had become "the most editor-conscious magazine in the world" and suffered from "a false sense of infallibility," as well as "exclusivity, and snobbishness and aloofness...

...The best letters, in fact, are to his friends and colleagues there: Ross, E.B...

...His comments on humor, and especially on the genesis of the New Yorker cartoon and his own drawings, will fascinate anyone who has been charmed by his absurd and devious esthetic...

...No one who reads these letters could believe that it was...

...Of Beethoven: "So pocht das schichstal an derpforte (sic), and the translation 'Thus Fate knocks at the door.' We must all study German...

...Ross' appreciation of my wilting was the one I wanted most...

...This impressed Ross so," Thurber writes, "that from then on anything I drew was the way something I drew went, so it didn't make any difference...

...He was recognized as brilliant and unique when he was in his 30s, and his reputation grew steadily as he grew older...

...In fact, it says a lot about the degeneration of relations between Thurber and the Whites, among other New Yorker family members, that at the magazine the pieces were read with resentment as a veiled attack on Ross...

...Here is an idea of the people I've met and spoken to either on assignments or socially: F.P.A[dams...

...As Wolff intelligently reminds us, "in many good writers' best work they understand and elucidate weaknesses that in their lives they are powerless to control...

...But so does O'Hara's whole life, and anyone who attempts to tell his story must reconcile the many excruciating aspects of the man's character with his great talent and his ability, despite every kind of provocation, to retain the affection of friends and lovers...

...would like to eliminate...

...But you people like to have everything made so explicit...

...Patrick's and the Sisters of Joseph: "I got a cassock and surplice, and raised my mother's foolish hopes that she had produced a Jesuit...

...I should like to add this slogan to those now current: Length is no objective...

...In a sympathetic essay that ?'Hara treasured, Lionel Trilling remarked that "The novel was invented, one might say, to deal with just the matter that O'Hara loves...

...Then, reconsidering:] I have decided that the Little Man, the bewildered man, the nervous, beaten, wife-crossed man, is a realer and stronger thing in American life than the Cain men who lay Mexican women in churches or the Hemingway men that choke guys to death...

...They could not by any stretch be interpreted as anything but a valentine, even a love letter, to the late editor...

...O'Hara of course envisioned himself as a Yale man, but his rebelliousness almost prevented his making it through high school...

...One of young John's earliest memories was seeing, on a "Help Wanted" sign, the addition "No Irish need apply...

...While never underestimating what he aptly calls O'Hara's "motiveless truculence," or his monomania, Wolff also exposes the vulnerabilities and better qualities that became more evident in the later years...

...Earlier biographies by Finis Farr (1973), Matthew J. Bruccoli (1975) and Frank MacShane (1980), he felt, failed to capture the essence of their subject: "What I had found missing in their accounts—the specifics of why a cherished friend was cherished—I had the hubris to believe I could name," Wolff writes...

...Wolff's study is engaged, sympathetic, frequently funny: a good read and a fine defense of an infuriating human being...

...Did he write The Private Life of Helen of Troy...

...After a disastrous first marriage, O'Hara was a good husband to two wives and a very loving father...

...Life is no good to me at all unless I can read, type and draw," he admitted to his doctor, but with friends he was brave and even managed to be funny on the subject...

...Did the sign apply to them...

...His father, Patrick, was Somebody in the coal-mining town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania: a respected doctor and surgeon, a prominent member of the Schuylkill Country Club, and the owner of a 160-acre gentleman's farm...

...White responded, "That is the way a Thurber seal's whiskers grow...

...This is certainly true...

...he was neither the first nor the last New Yorker contributor to rail against what he called the "silly f—ing goddamn carping" of the magazine's editorial process...

...Following the high quality and enthusiastic reception of his first three books, Appointment in Samarra (1934), The Doctor's Son and Other Stories (1935) and Butterfield 8 (1936), O'Hara's career went into a tailspin: He produced a series of long, sensationalistic, self-indulgent novels that Wolff calls "tomes...

...They thought Ross was being held up to ridicule, but the real point of it all was that, in Thurber's words, Ross "wanted to surround himself with geniuses and never realized he was one himself...

...it is one thing for a character to accord the ultimate value to membership in Harvard's Porcellian Club or Yale's Skull and Bones, and another for the author to share this delusion...

...O'Hara himself, referring to his friend Scott Fitzgerald, said it best: "An artist is his own fault...

...And when as a young man he was fired from Time magazine for tardiness and drunkenness, he observed, rightly or wrongly, Henry Luce giving him "that Protestant look...

...The last two are distinct qualities, as he points out: "The proof of humor is the ability to put one's self on awkward public record, just as the proof of wit is to do that to others...

...But O'Hara was championed by Katherine White and Gibbs, and later by William Maxwell (who told Wolff, apropos of this most difficult of all the magazine's difficult writers, that being an editor at the New Yorker was like working as an animal trainer...

...Yet no one named "O'Hara" could truly feel secure...