A Rage To Live

JOHN O'HARA said that school spirit was horse shit. The day before he was to graduate as valedictorian of Niagara University Prep School, he visited every bar in town. The next day, the school took away his diploma.

The same attitude also got him fired. It led him to drinking binges, sexual frustrations, divorces, and prolific writing.

His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, described sexual relations among the people of "Gibbsville"--which was modelled after the author's hometown of Pottsville, Pa.--so explicitly for the time that people "who I knew very slightly and who were certainly never in my mind as characters, threatened to sue me for defamation of character," O'Hara later wrote.

IF O'HARA'S LIFE and writings had not been so wild and iconoclastic, the gaps in context and continuity in Frank MacShane's recent biography, The Life of John O'Hara, A Rage to Live, would be fatal. As it is, the book reads more like a novel than a biography. The narrator, choosing a limited point of view, does not fill in many why's or how's.

O'Hara himself probably would not approve of MacShane's writing. "Practically all good writing is a form of protest," O'Hara wrote. Narration of facts, not circumstances, and plot summary, rather than character analysis, rarely constitute protest.

MacShane raggedly splices quotes into otherwise smooth scenes. For instance, O'Hara, at a bar in Hollywood with a fellow writer, Robert Benchley, has just struck a woman and slapped Benchley's cigar out of his mouth. The next morning O'Hara calls Benchley:

O'Hara: I just wanted to say I'm sorry.

Benchley: For what, John?

O'Hara: For what I did last night.

Benchley: Look, John, please don't apologize to me. You're a shit and everyone knows you're a shit, and people ask you out in spite of it. It's nothing to apologize about.

O'Hara: Do you mean it?

Benchley: Of course I mean it, John. You were born a shit just as some people are born with blue eyes, but that's no reason to go around apologizing for it. People take you for what you are.

Several pages later, MacShane quotes O'Hara again: "Although I may often have felt like belting a woman, I have never actually taken a poke at one except in anger."

The real relationship between Benchley and O'Hara fails to be understood for the sake of such humorous anecdotes. MacShane flunks in character development, where O'Hara is at his best.

For O'Hara knew the bunny-hug, the turkey trot, the tango, the fox trot and the polka, and had a good sense of humor. Thus, the woman who earned his wrath at the speakeasy might have earned another reward in different circumstances.

THE BOOK HAS its ups as well as downs, however. After all, a tight end on the Harvard football team says that there are only two types of people: the Irish, and those who want to be Irish. One finds oneself trapped in adoration of O'Hara.

MacShane's research included conversations with O'Hara's brothers, sisters, wives and more distant relatives. He lists hundreds of contacts in the acknowledgements, including Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., John McPhee, William Saroyan (apparently still kicking around), Frank Sinatra, John Cheever and John Updike. They all find their way into the narrative. O'Hara's employers--Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, The New Yorker, Random House and the Screenwriters Guild--allowed MacShane to dig through O'Hara's files.

The story amounts to this: having been booted from school two or three times and having disappointed his father's ambition for him to become a chip off the old block in the medical profession, he became a day laborer in a steel mill and a pit man in a railroad roundhouse. He spent most of his nights drinking "bootleg" liquor at clubs and speakeasies but somehow found enough contacts and friends to get a job with The New Yorker.

In New York, O'Hara continued his drinking and romances at the Stork Club, El Morocco, Larue, the Algonquin and Rudy Vallee's nightclub. At St. Martin and Mino's, on East Fifty-Second Street, he met Wolcott Gibbs, fiction editor of The New Yorker, who became a lifelong friend. In his novels and short stories, O'Hara renamed Pottsville Gibbesville in the editor's honor.

He also met Heywood Broun, a columnist for the World, a Harvard graduate who attacked former President Lowell for encouraging the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. O'Hara agreed with Broun's views and began writing for his newspaper.

O'Hara's most successful period began in the war years, when he became good friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton. Fitzgerald said that O'Hara was "in a perpetual state of having discovered it's a lousy world."

THE FACTS and figures pile up, endlessly, but a different organization might yield a work comparable to Buccoli's authorized biography.

MacShane's presentation of O'Hara's novels places him among the ranks of Masterplots contributors. While the bare essentials necessary for understanding a cognescenti's critique of A Rage to Live are present, for example, the reason for O'Hara's choice of lubricious sexual lives of Harrisburg residents as a subject remains obscure.

Ironically, MacShane might best be criticized by quoting O'Hara's description of a meeting of English professors from eastern universities; "it sounded like two hours of prep school boys talking about fucking."