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Recently, I picked up a copy of Collected Stories of John O'Hara, selected and edited by Frank MacShane, and what a good decision that was! It's far too easy to forget that at short story length, O'Hara was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I've been working my way through it a story at a time, leaving space in between to think about what I've read and marvel at the craft of it.
This is not a Complete or Best Of volume--it leaves out "The Bucket of Blood," which to my mind is right up there with "Imagine Kissing Pete"--but it is chockablock with astonishing work. "The Hardware Man" takes the rivalry of two hardware store owners a hundred years ago and invests in their conflict the moral gravity of two of Shakespeare's kings. "Our Friend the Sea" skirts the edge of melodrama but the big reveal, I think, is the contrast between the man the protagonist thinks he is and the man he is shown to be, to himself though not the world at large. "The Pig" has a very successful lawyer who has just discovered that he has six months to live. He confides in his best friend, mostly because he needs somebody to listen, but also because he has a difficult choice to make--and the friend's story of a combat incident in WWII is so apt that it convinced me it was how I should act, should the need ever arise. All these are clearly written with love of the form. "We'll Have Fun," whose meaning and intent I'm still mulling, required more research into the care and medicining of horses than the story's financial return could possibly have justified. (It also has a lesbian woman pleasantly free from all the tropes and assumptions of the times.)
And there is one story, but I'll not tell you which one, that reads light and frothy until, in the final sentence, O'Hara pulls the rug out from under the reader to show what's been hidden in plain sight all along.
During his lifetime, John O'Hara was known for his scandalous novels. O tempora, o mores! They are not scandalous anymore. Worse, a number of them were obviously quickly-written software for movies. As a result, his reputation is now greatly diminished. It was also unfortunate that his father's death while he was in prep school impoverished his family, which put the college of his dreams out of reach and left him too-obviously aware of his lack of social status ever after. Hemingway famously growled that someone "should start a bloody fund to send up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale."
Forget all that. Read his short fiction. There is not a ghost of a whisper of fantasy or science fiction in anything of his I've read. Ignore that too. Read his short fiction. A lot of his stories start out looking like they're going to be formulaic. A pox on that as well. Read his short fiction.
The man was a master. He deserves to be remembered.
Above: The Library of America collection of O'Hara's stories. The volume I've been reading from doesn't have his picture on the cover.
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