Hollow O'Hara
Schickel, Richard
Hollow O'Hara by Richard Schickel T>y this time nearly everyone who is interested must know that John O'Hara's new novel, From the Terrace (Random House. 897 pp. $6.95) is a bad book. I don't...
...It is the biography of a man the "thinking" O'Hara obviously admires—a member of the big money power elite named Alfred Eaton, who is decent, attractive, intelligent, ambitious...
...That is a hard thing to say about a writer, but what else is one to think—especially when every page of his novel gives testimony to his belief in money as a sort of modern philosopher's stone...
...Even when the writer himself basically shares the viewpoint of the group under analysis, he must retain the objectivity— the sense of humor, if you will—to satirize his own beliefs, even himself (as John Marquand has frequently done...
...Born of well-to-do, unhappily married parents, he is with us from birth to spiritual death in his 50th year...
...Setting aside the matter of characterization for the moment, we note the same slip-shod work at the plot level...
...There is a rich Texan who begins as a symbol of simple, open honesty and ends as a boring, power-mad old lecher...
...We can multiply examples of this lack of psychological validity...
...But until the end of From the Terrace he has written a book with quite an opposite undertow...
...In O'Hara's case the anger takes the form of rather desperately insisting on on the validity of the truths contained in the codes of Ivy League and Racquet Club gentlemen and on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal...
...His Alfred Eaton is a man O'Hara clearly admires...
...Arthur Mizener tells us that "sex has become an absurdity" in this novel, which is true, and that O'Hara's " 'thinking brain...
...it is just that it is impossible to believe that the monster she becomes could have grown out of the determinedly "nice" girl she was when O'Hara introduced her...
...Therefore when he does, in effect, destroy himself we cannot believe what we are reading...
...One leaves the book with a feeling—nothing more than that—that this is a purely commercial venture on his part, that its chief function is simply to earn its author a great deal of money...
...is a hopelessly inadequate substitute for the sound emotions it has more and more replaced since O'Hara began to give his views...
...This O'Hara has failed to do...
...Up to now O'Hara has obviously been sympathetic to his characters—to Julian English and Joe Chapin and even to his marvelous heel, Pal Joey...
...But he has always retained an ability to see these people objectively, with cool detachment...
...I suspect that it is some vestige of his objectivity which caused O'Hara to pull his eminently successful hero up short, after 850 pages of success, at the moment when real happiness seemed to be his, and turn him into a drifting failure in the last 40 pages of From the Terrace...
...These, quite simply, aren't good enough answers to the problems of existence today...
...The novel is hollow at the center...
...Equally unbelievable is the reaction of intelligent and humane Alfred Eaton when he discovers what she has become...
...The old O'Hara, he of the sharp eye and the good emotions, just couldn't let the new O'Hara get away with this tribute to power...
...Then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, she takes up with an old flame who introduces her to all manner of promiscuity and perversion...
...But perhaps I have taken O'Hara too seriously, for he is a highly professional writer...
...characters are developed, then disappear just as we are becoming interested in them...
...It is not that such a woman could not exist in reality...
...He has lost the precious gift of being able to draw back from his personal engagement to take a long, hard look at the meaning of the lives he has committed to paper...
...The untruths O'Hara has allowed himself, the lack of craftsmanship, would alone be enough for us to dismiss From the Terrace from serious consideration, but there is another failure to consider...
...Despite the lapses in the sections dealing with business, there is enough of the old O'Hara's ability to capture the surface of life, the way people talk, how they look at parties, what they feel about the material objects with which they surround themselves, to keep one interested, just as there are individual scenes which can be admired out of their context...
...They include, I'm afraid, a worship of money along with a semi-mystical belief that its possession automatically confers wisdom on its possessors...
...He admires Alfred Eaton, his man of power, too much...
...O'Hara's failure is that the key situation in Alfred's life, the emotional center around which the rest of the book is built, is simply unbelievable...
...Conflicts are prepared, then dropped before their resolution...
...The novelist of manners," writes Kazin, "who has always depended on a tradition stable enough to include the satirist himself, now finds himself angrily crying out against the absence of values themselves...
...There is a mother who takes a couple of lovers for no good reason...
...When Alfred states his values, as he all too often does, he obviously speaks for the mature O'Hara, and the values of the mature O'Hara are not very pleasant...
...This is not to say that O'Hara should not write, if he wants to, a book about the hollowness of success—trite as that theme may be...
...This, too, is true, but the causes of the current failure are both simpler and more complex than that...
...There is even shoddiness in the reportage of life's surface—something which has, up to now, been O'Hara's strong point...
...The social novelist, the novelist of manners if you will, is, in essence, a reporter who, as Alfred Kazin has lately noted, "nails life down by writing about a social class from a definite point of view...
...After a series of youthful sexual adventures, Alfred at last marries a woman who seems—for a hundred pages or so—to be everything any man could possibly desire...
...I don't believe however, that the reviewers have been specific about the causes of its failure...
...This is not the case in From the Terrace...
...We can believe his anger, but we cannot believe, once he divorces this woman after some 15 years of travail and marries his truly loved mistress of those years (with whom he fell in love at first sight in another credulity-straining moment), once he has gained distinction as a sub-cabinet official during the war, that Alfred Eaton could become the utterly defeated and hopeless creature that he is in the novel's last pages...
...There has always been more of this surface brilliance than depth of insight in the work of O'Hara, but the final judgment on From the Terrace must be that its well-rendered scenes, the smoothness of its writing, signify nothing but confusion and anxiety...
...He is not a man with a will to self-destructiveness...
...His material on the operation of a Wall Street firm seems extremely thin...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
