The New York Stories Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE NEW YORK STORIES

  JOHN O’HARA (1905–1970) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote seventeen novels, including Appointment in Samarra, his first, BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Ten North Frederick, which won the National Book Award, and he had more stories published in The New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died.

  STEVEN GOLDLEAF is a professor of English literature at Pace University in lower Manhattan and the author of John O’Hara: A Study of the Short Fiction.

  E. L. DOCTOROW’S novels include Homer & Langley, The March, City of God, The Waterworks, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, Lives of the Poets, World’s Fair, and Billy Bathgate. Among Doctorow’s honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. Doctorow lives in New York City.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2013

  Copyright © John O’Hara, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1939, 1946, 1947, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966

  Copyright © United States Trust Company of New York, as executor of and trustee under the will of John O’Hara, 1972, 1974

  Introduction copyright © Steven Goldleaf, 2013

  Foreword copyright © E. L. Doctorow, 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  E. L. Doctorow’s foreword appeared in Selected Short Stories by John O’Hara (Vintage Books, London). Published by arrangement with The Random House Group Limited, London.

  These stories appeared in the following books by John O’Hara: “Frankie,” “Pleasure,” “The Public Career of Mr. Seymour Harrisburg,” and “Sportmanship” in The Doctor’s Son (Harcourt, Brace, 1935); “Good-bye, Herman” and “Portistan on the Portis” in Files on Parade (Harcourt, Brace, 1939); “Bread Alone” in Pipe Night (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1945); “Ellie” and “A Phase of Life” in Hellbox (Random House, 1947); “We’re Friends Again” in Sermons and Soda-water (Random House, 1960); “Call Me, Call Me,” “First Day in Town,” and “It’s Mental Work” in Assembly (Random House, 1961); “The Nothing Machine,” “The Sun-Dodgers,” “The Women of Madison Avenue,” and “Your Fah Neefah Neeface” in The Cape Cod Lighter (Random House, 1962); “Agatha” and “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor” in The Hat on the Bed (Random House, 1963); “The Brain” and “Can I Stay Here?” in The Horse Knows the Way (Random House, 1964); “The Assistant,” “Late, Late Show,” “The Portly Gentleman,” “The Tackle,” and “The Weakling” in Waiting for Winter (Random House, 1966); “The Private People” in And Other Stories (Random House, 1968); “At the Cothurnos Club,” “Encounter: 1943,” “Family Evening,” and “Memorial Fund” in The Time Element (Random House, 1972); and “Harrington and Whitehill” in Good Samaritan (Random House, 1974). Some of these selections were originally published in Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and Sports Illustrated.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  O’Hara, John, 1905–1970.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The New York stories / John O’Hara ; edited with an introduction by Steven Goldleaf ; foreword by E. L. Doctorow.

  pages ; cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-698-13625-0

  I. Goldleaf, Steven. II. O’Hara, John, 1905–1970. Agatha. III. Title.

  PS3529.H29N49 2013

  813'. 52—dc23 2013013890

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  About John O'Hara

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by E. L. DOCTOROW

  Introduction by STEVEN GOLDLEAF

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  THE NEW YORK STORIES

  Agatha

  The Assistant

  At the Cothurnos Club

  The Brain

  Bread Alone

  Call Me, Call Me

  Can I Stay Here?

  Ellie

  Encounter: 1943

  Family Evening

  First Day in Town

  Frankie

  Good-bye, Herman

  Harrington and Whitehill

  It’s Mental Work

  John Barton Rosedale, Actors’ Actor

  Late, Late Show

  Memorial Fund

  The Nothing Machine

  A Phase of Life

  Pleasure

  Portistan on the Portis

  The Portly Gentleman

  The Private People

  The Public Career of Mr. Seymour Harrisburg

  Sportmanship

  The Sun-Dodgers

  The Tackle

  The Weakling

  We’re Friends Again

  The Women of Madison Avenue

  Your Fah Neefah Neeface

  Foreword

  John O’Hara and the Short Story

  John O’Hara was a newspaperman before he turned to fiction and the seeming ease with which he wrote his stories and novels must have come of that facility given to reporters who write against a deadline. His output was prodigious, some seventeen novels and hundreds of stories. In many instances his prose has a reportorial tone. The presumptive reality in an O’Hara first sentence is almost insolent. He is a writer who has made it his business to know things and likes to tell you what he knows.

  O’Hara published his stories mostly in The New Yorker magazine so they are usually characterized as New Yorker stories, as if that were a subspecies of the form. In fact few of the pieces here dwell in that upper-middle-class suburban milieu that is popularly thought to define such fiction. It is more accurate to say that O’Hara practices the classic form of the modern short story developed by Joyce and perfected by Hemingway: The entry point is close in time to the denouement, the setting is circumscribed, and the piece ideally yields some sort of revelation or what Joyce called an epiphany. Writers today have mostly abandoned this tight form—contemporary stories are more likely to have greater extension and to cover expanses of time and space that recall the premodernist tale of the nineteenth century.

  That O’Hara was an aggrieved writer who lived a tempestuous life is attested by the number of biographers he has had—four at last count. Born in 1905, he grew up, an Irish Catholic kid
, in the WASP town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where the caste system that only tolerated an O’Hara was to haunt him the rest of his life. He had hoped to go to Yale but the family’s impoverishment after his father’s death made that impossible. He never did attend college, turning instead to whatever jobs he could find as long as they weren’t in Pottsville. He had learned reporting there on the local paper and migrated eventually to New York, where he worked for various papers and magazines, including the Herald Tribune and the Morning Telegraph and Time. But from his teenage years O’Hara had been a drinker, and he was by his maturity a formidable alcoholic. This condition magnified an abrasive and truculent nature, presumably bred of his sense of himself as an irredeemable outsider. His life was an emotional shambles until he turned to the writing of fiction, and with his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, a book that was widely praised and that launched him on his productive life, he found his true calling. Even so, whatever recognition he would receive in his long writing career, it would never be enough for him. His rage and resentment focused on the literary establishment’s lack of regard for his achievement. He married three times, always up, and would settle in those communities, Quogue, Long Island, Princeton, New Jersey, that were an emblem of social success. But O’Hara aspired to a status that is ever beyond the reach of one so obsessed. There is a story about him that when, in 1964, he received the prestigious Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he stood before that assembly, speaking bitterly of the critical vilification he had all his life until that moment endured, and broke down, weeping.

  None of this would matter to us as his readers if, at the same time, John O’Hara’s lifelong grievance had not provided him with a rigorous schooling in the class structures of American life. His sensitivity to class in America is the engine that drives his writing, his empowerment, and the issue that dominates his best stories. His authorial voice—almost always omniscient—can be reflective, ironic, compassionate, or amused, but no character he speaks of is without a manifestation of class. Distinctions are made between townies and summer people, between those who wear the little golden pig of Harvard’s Porcellian Club and those who cannot dream of it, between the bank trustee and the bank manager, the Hollywood wise guy and the westerner, between the aged and the young, between white and black, Protestant and Jew. But if he sometimes veers close to stereotype, he will surprise you with the complexity of a piece. The young man of family may be arrogant, snobbish, or simply stupidly complacent. The black butler in service to a house for a lifetime may be outspoken to the point of rudeness. The man of pedigree may be begging for a job. The snappish wealthy woman may be in mourning for her dead son.

  O’Hara has a wide reportorial range; he is comfortable with characters at every level of society. Barkeepers, showgirls, wealthy widows, family doctors, cops, lovesick boys, nightclubbing drunks, federal officials, small-town school board members—his coverage is worthy of a Balzac. He knows that a description of physical appearance is incidental to effective characterization. His people are made from their positions in life, their relationship to one another, their clothes, their values, but above all from the way they talk. O’Hara’s remarkable ear for American speech serves him time and again for his renderings. Thus, an elevator operator will say he “use’n’t” to stop at a certain floor. A secretary boarding a bus says to a flirtatious bus driver: “I have a good notion to report you. The nerve.” A university club man speaking to an outsider says: “I don’t know why fellows like you—you never would have made it in a thousand years . . . but I’ve said exactly the wrong thing, haven’t I?” A chorus girl named Reba Gold is displeased with her married lover, Seymour Harrisburg, who is importuning her: “Take your hands off me,” she says. “I and you are all washed up.”*

  The copyright notices indicate that some of the stories here were first published between 1933 and 1947. In those years, having barely emerged from the disastrous social experiment of Prohibition, America suffered the Great Depression and then went to war. None of these monumental events are given direct mention. We know of World War II only as a woman mourns her son, or someone speaks of gas rationing, or a young naval officer dreams of the civilian life he will lead someday. One can wonder about this—how a writer who is as much of a photographic portraitist as O’Hara could so constrict his focus: no rum runners here, no Okies fleeing the dust storms, no workers on strike, no soup lines, no soldiers leaping from their landing craft or storming the redoubts of Iwo Jima.

  Criticizing a writer for what he has not written is something that may be useful during the writer’s lifetime, as questions about what literature should do, should be, are argued and reargued, and writers can come to define themselves or find realization as perhaps they would not were there no critical clashing of swords. But when the writer is no longer alive, such criticism may only be useful as a means of identifying the nature of his achievement. As readers, we take what we can get.

  Perhaps it is relevant to note that O’Hara worshipped Ernest Hemingway and clearly understood the key to that master’s short fiction: When composing a story, withhold the essential information—do not mention whatever it is that causes the characters to act as they do. O’Hara understood how such restraint is a means of fictive power, and he works this way in the gems of this collection. Read “A Phase of Life”: A man and woman in an apartment talk idly of a past in show business that was clearly a better time in their lives. When the doorbell rings the man picks up a poker from the fireplace and goes to the door. But the arrivals turn out to be people he knows. He serves them drinks. He brings out a projector and shows them a movie.

  Everyone except the man retires to the bedrooms and when a while later the guests emerge, they pay up and leave. The larger social condition underlying the story is left for the reader to infer.

  And wasn’t it Anton Chekhov who advised a young writer not to describe the moon shining but to show in a fragment of glass a glint of moonlight?

  E. L. DOCTOROW

  * From the story “The Public Career of Mr Seymour Harrisburg,” one of two or three in the collection that show O’Hara was not without prejudices of his own. He was of the same generation as Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, that found anti-Semitic expression useful in their work. In this case the authorial tone is one of derisive amusement.

  Introduction

  Dozens of John O’Hara’s most powerful stories are set in New York City, where he lived from the age of twenty-three, on and off, throughout his long career. Born and raised in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, a small city he called Gibbsville in his fiction, O’Hara lived intermittently in Hollywood as well. Those two locales have already been presented in the collections Gibbsville, PA (1992) and John O’Hara’s Hollywood (2007), both edited by the late Matthew J. Bruccoli, leaving New York City as a major locale not represented by a geographical volume. A fourth setting of O’Hara’s stories is a general “suburbia,” usually the suburbs of New York, many of which could have been presented here if not for the abundance of strong stories set in the confines of the city itself, and perhaps a fifth geographical setting would be “Miscellaneous”: O’Hara set one of his finest stories in Washington, D.C., but only one, as far as I can tell, and one story is set in rural Ohio, and one other in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and so on. But these three locations—New York City, Hollywood, and “Gibbsville”—constitute the bulk of his stories’ settings. Presenting them in geographical collections gives readers a concentrated sense of what O’Hara felt made each place special.

  O’Hara’s short fiction falls into two discrete temporal groups: the stories dating from before 1950, when, because of a falling-out, O’Hara stopped writing for The New Yorker, and those dating from after 1960 (O’Hara eschewed the short story entirely in the 1950s). The pre-1950 group has already been extensively represented in collections, some chosen by O’Hara and then, after his death in 1970, others chosen by various editors. For example, The S
elected Stories of John O’Hara, published in 2003, draws exclusively from stories written before 1949. The present volume, unlike Gibbsville, PA or John O’Hara’s Hollywood, does not seek to include every O’Hara story set in New York City: The large number of very brief stories published by The New Yorker in the late 1920s and early 1930s would alone present too much material for inclusion here, and are of varying quality and historical interest. The New York Stories includes many more of the later, less frequently reprinted stories, as well as the strongest of O’Hara’s early New York stories.

  O’Hara’s stories could, of course, easily be arranged by subject matter or theme instead of geography. While it might seem that O’Hara’s stories about show business, for example, would naturally be set in Hollywood, some excellent show-business stories, such as “John Barton Rosedale, Actor’s Actor” and “The Portly Gentleman,” are set on Broadway. In fact one of O’Hara’s finest examinations of show business, “Arnold Stone,” is even set mostly in Gibbsville (oddly it is omitted from the inclusive 854-page volume Gibbsville, PA). O’Hara’s keen interest in business, as differentiated from show business, might appear to belong to New York City, but again some of his strongest stories about the intricacies of business, such as “The Hardware Man” and “Yostie,” are set, seemingly incongruously, in the “third-class city,” as he called it, of Gibbsville. For the most part, however, O’Hara’s stories about business, about tycoons and their private clubs, or about working-class people and their struggles and pleasures, are set in New York City.

  • • •

  In the early twentieth century, New York City was the world capital of literature, and the ambitious young O’Hara aimed to succeed there as a writer before he ever left Pottsville, submitting items to New York columnists from his hometown until his physical arrival in the spring of 1928, when he worked for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and press agencies as well as freelancing his accounts of sporting events, celebrity interviews, and “casuals,” a term covering all types of short pieces, including supposedly overheard conversations, which may or may not have been fictional, but which did get his foot in the door of The New Yorker, a brand-new slick magazine that ended up publishing most of his later short fiction. His earliest work for The New Yorker was journalistic—punchy, demotic, and fact-based—but O’Hara’s aim was to write fiction, an aim he consistently realized after publishing his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, in 1934.