The Pottsville Balzac

“Oh, but John O’Hara was a difficult man!” wrote Brendan Gill in Here at the New Yorker, and so these letters testify. Gill had written an unkind review of A Rage to Live, which of course marked him as O’Hara’s enemy for life. The fact that the review had appeared in The New Yorker, with which O’Hara had had a long (though hardly fond) affiliation, made matters worse; so did the related machinations of James Thurber, who employed the opportunity to spike, temporarily, the friendship between O’Hara and The New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs. Such incidents came naturally in O’Hara’s life; he had a gift for making enemies.

He was also a snob of the worst sort: one without credentials. Quite a few of his letters complain of snubs; some of them were more imagined than real, and all were of the utmost triviality. He muttered about not being elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; he grumbled about an insufficiency of rosettes after his election. He labored for admission to the Century Club, and envisioned conspiracies behind his rejection. Conspiracies of a different sort were behind his failure to win the Pulitzer Prize, and the grim visage of Alfred Kazin hovered over his attempt to cop the National Book Award for Ten North Frederick. When he won, he confessed with typically dour wit, “I had to eat dirt (native grounds).”

MR

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Mitchell S. Ross

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“Oh, but John O’Hara was a difficult man!” wrote Brendan Gill in Here at the New Yorker, and so these letters testify. Gill had written an unkind review of A Rage to Live, which of course marked him as O’Hara’s enemy for life. The fact that the review had appeared in The New Yorker, with which O’Hara had had a long (though hardly fond) affiliation, made matters worse; so did the related machinations of James Thurber, who employed the opportunity to spike, temporarily, the friendship between O’Hara and The New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs. Such incidents came naturally in O’Hara’s life; he had a gift for making enemies.

He was also a snob of the worst sort: one without credentials. Quite a few of his letters complain of snubs; some of them were more imagined than real, and all were of the utmost triviality. He muttered about not being elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; he grumbled about an insufficiency of rosettes after his election. He labored for admission to the Century Club, and envisioned conspiracies behind his rejection. Conspiracies of a different sort were behind his failure to win the Pulitzer Prize, and the grim visage of Alfred Kazin hovered over his attempt to cop the National Book Award for Ten North Frederick. When he won, he confessed with typically dour wit, “I had to eat dirt (native grounds).”