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Politics and the Social Order in the Work of John O'Hara

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Lee Sigelman
Lee Sigelman
Affiliation:
Lee Sigelman is Professor of Political Science at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506. An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C. Professor Sigelman wishes to thank Charles Bassett, Cecil Eubanks, Robert Hemenway, Ruth Nelson, and Carol Sigelman for their valuable comments on that version.
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Extract

Classic works of fiction almost always raise “penetrating questions about the foundations and effects of the political regime, i.e. human nature and its implications for society.” But popular fiction, too, can be an instrument of social and political understanding. As Gore Vidal has argued:

Writers of fiction, even more than systematic philosophers, tend to reveal unconscious presuppositions. One might even say that those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized. John O'Hara is an excellent example of this kind of writer.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , August 1986 , pp. 233 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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References

1 Zuckert, Catherine, “On Reading Classic American Novelists as Political Thinkers,” Journal of Politics 43 (08 1981), 685CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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15 O'Hara's treatment of his Irish characters caused considerable consternation among many Irish–American readers. Shannon, William, The American Irish (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 249Google Scholar, accused O'Hara of harbouring an “inverted hostility” toward the Irish. Browne, Joseph, “John O'Hara and Tom McHale: How Green In Their Valley,” eds. Casey, Daniel J. and Rhodes, Robert E., Irish–American Fiction: Essays in Criticism (New York: AMS Press, 1979), p. 130Google Scholar, went even further, accusing O'Hara of being “repelled by anyone who is Irish.”

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25 This fixation on descriptive detail sometimes carried O'Hara to extreme lengths. For example, he attached a foreword to Ten North Frederick so that he could publicly confess to his readers that even though in the novel they were about to read Joe Chapin's grandfather was said to have served as lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, this would have been impossible, for the office was not created until 1873. For O'Hara getting the details right was a hallmark of good writing.

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30 He did feel compelled to alert his publisher, Bennett Cerf, of the novella's symbolic thrust: “I also want to reveal to you that this is an allegory.… However, I am not calling it an allegory; I am presenting it as a short novel, and if the more alert critics and other readers spot it as an allegory (which I am sure they will), fine. It stands as a short novel, without the allegorical connotation. If you, as publisher, feel you would like to pass the word that it also is an allegory, you can use your own judgment about that, but I am not going to make any public statement to the effect until after the second meaning has been detected, and even then I am not going to do any interpreting.” Selected Letters of John O'Hara, ed. Bruccoli, Matthew (New York: Random House, 1978, p. 235)Google Scholar. Several weeks later, he seems to have had second thoughts about even admitting publicly that the novella was an allegory: “People I have talked with,” he wrote, “are now about 50-50 on the wisdom of letting it known [sic] that the book has a secondary meaning”; Selected Letters, p. 236.

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36 Ibid.

37 See, for example, Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

38 Ten North Frederick, p. 25.

39 Ibid., p. 25.

40 From the Terrace, pp. 420–21.

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43 Ibid., p. 205.

44 Ibid., p. 260.

45 Ibid., p. 263.

46 Ibid., p. 264.

47 Ibid., pp. 269–270.

48 Two by O'Hara, pp. 144–45.

49 Ten North Frederick, p. 338.

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53 Agee, James and Evans, Walker, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1960), p. 215Google Scholar.

54 This problem was not restricted to Ten North Frederick. Perhaps because he insisted on remaining “outside” of his characters, O'Hara left much to the reader's imagination and thereby virtually invited superficial interpretations of his work. That invitation was often accepted, as can be seen in Clifton Fadiman's dismissal of Appointment in Samarra as totally meaningless –Party of One: The Selected Writings of Clifton Fadiman (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955), p. 447Google Scholar: “The suicide of Julian English… is a tragedy in a vacuum, the tic of a young man who has had a couple of hard days and too much hard liquor.” Van Nostrand, Albert in The Denatured Novel (Indianapolis: Charter Books, 1960), p. 213Google Scholar, accepted the same invitation: “O'Hara keeps telling the same story that E. A. Robinson superbly told, of ‘Richard Cory’ who put a bullet through his head for no known reason.”

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