Today is the birthday of John O'Hara. Nobody had more stories published in the New Yorker magazine, and no one was better at describing 20th century American life.
He was born in 1905, the son of a Pottsville, Pennsylvania physician. When he was twelve years-old his father offered to pay him $10,000 if he would agree to become a doctor. The boy refused. Instead, when he was 14, he stole his father's Buick. This harum-scarum tendency lasted him all his life. He possessed a devout wish for approval but he was as likely to throw the approval directly back in someone's face. He was social, but volatile, a swell friend but sensitive to slights and prone to grudges. Everybody in New York literary circles had their own O'Hara story. His drunken behavior, his kindnesses, his feuds, his sulks and bragging.
This alternately harsh and tender personality finds vivid expression in his stories. They may be the best picture we have about being alive in America at mid-century. What makes his writing so compelling is the transparency of the style. He is unfussy. Less blunt and mannered than Hemingway. Not elaborate like Faulkner, but detailed in his descriptions of place and time and relationships. Unlike Cheever or Fitzgerald, his sentences don't interpose a lovely style between the reader and the material described. The conversations sound spoken. It is all simply there and happening before you. His novels (except for Appointment in Samarra) tend to be baggy and undistinguished, but his stories deserve a much larger audience. John O'Hara appears five times in A Book of Ages. In 1970, the year he died, he was living in Princeton, New Jersey. He dressed in gentleman's tweeds and drove a Rolls Royce. It was also in this last year that he finally learned to swim. He was 65.
It's also the birthday of Norman Mailer, another writer with a chip on his shoulder, a product of New Jersey and Brooklyn, born in 1923. He wrote his first story when he was ten; it was 35,000 words long. He fought in the Pacific during World War II, and described the experience in his novel The Naked and the Dead. At the age of 44 he was arrested for participating in a march on the Pentagon, protesting the war in Vietnam. He wrote another book about that; The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize. Norman Mailer appears eight times in A Book of Ages.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Salinger and Holden
Word has gone out that J. D. Salinger is dead at 91. The story was broken by his agent, Harold Ober Associates, whose job since the early sixties has been to cash checks and discourage biographers; Salinger has published nothing in recent years. One pictures his house filled with boxes of stories he disliked as soon as he'd written them, unless he burned them to warm the house in the New Hampshire winters.
His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did. Is it the business of an author to be a public personality? Catcher in the Rye inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin, but was Holden Caulfield a self-portrait? Salinger attracted disciples, most of them young. One of them wrote a memoir about her creepy adolescent relationship with the famous novelist. It was a bestseller; but which of them was creepier?
Salinger was once a rebellious teen, but he also also put on a clean shirt and worked as a recreation director on a cruise ship, mustering a phony bonhomie for the prosperous vacationers. He wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, which was scheduled to run in the New Yorker when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, suddenly making his story too trivial to publish.
He joined the army, and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris, and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. Then he came home and wrote "the novel" and nothing was the same for him again. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters. It's all he needed to be. J. D. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages.
His Cornish neighbors protected him as carefully as his agents did. Is it the business of an author to be a public personality? Catcher in the Rye inspired teenage rebels and at least one assassin, but was Holden Caulfield a self-portrait? Salinger attracted disciples, most of them young. One of them wrote a memoir about her creepy adolescent relationship with the famous novelist. It was a bestseller; but which of them was creepier?
Salinger was once a rebellious teen, but he also also put on a clean shirt and worked as a recreation director on a cruise ship, mustering a phony bonhomie for the prosperous vacationers. He wrote a story about a kid named Holden Caulfield, which was scheduled to run in the New Yorker when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, suddenly making his story too trivial to publish.
He joined the army, and landed in Normandy on D-Day. He met Hemingway in Paris, and spent Christmas 1944 fighting in the Battle of the Bulge. He celebrated his 26th birthday in deep snow, under enemy fire. Then he came home and wrote "the novel" and nothing was the same for him again. He became, in a way, the Roger Maris of American letters. It's all he needed to be. J. D. Salinger appears six times in A Book of Ages.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Satirist's Satirist
Evelyn Waugh was born on this day in 1903. He was the second son of a prominent London publisher whom he cordially loathed. It was a childhood of mutual disappointment. In true English lower-upper-middle-class fashion Evelyn worked very hard at appearing not to try or to care and unsurprisingly failed at everything. He scorned everything valued by the society he grew up in while secretly coveting it all. He was sent down from Oxford after two years, considered becoming an illustrator, learned fancy cabinet-making, failed as a schoolteacher, attended parties with the Bright Young Things of the time. When he was 24 he attempted suicide by swimming out to sea. He turned back after being stung by a jellyfish.
At age 26, on a madcap impulse, he married the daughter of a Lord. She was also named Evelyn, and they became known as She Evelyn and He Evelyn, a matched set of semi-androgynous wits. He was 27 when they divorced. It was a cruel blow to his ego, but by this time he'd become a bestselling novelist, turning his disappointments into fiction.
His style is one of joyful malice, but reading about his life it's hard to tell whether he or the world was guilty of the first cruelty. Was he unloved or unlovable? Judging by his letters and books he seems thoroughly misanthropic, but he was much loved and had many friends. He climbed into the fashionable Country House set he admired but dressed and behaved in an aggressively unfashionable manner, which outraged everyone––but amused them privately. His most successful novel was probably his worst, a soppy, sentimental hymn to a rapidly declining aristocracy. His best novels are his earliest, funniest, bitterest ones, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop. Evelyn Waugh appears six times in A Book of Ages, and could have appeared a half dozen more.
It's worth noting that he passed his gifts along to his children. One son, Auberon, became an even more cynical, amusing, pitiless scold than his father.
At age 26, on a madcap impulse, he married the daughter of a Lord. She was also named Evelyn, and they became known as She Evelyn and He Evelyn, a matched set of semi-androgynous wits. He was 27 when they divorced. It was a cruel blow to his ego, but by this time he'd become a bestselling novelist, turning his disappointments into fiction.
His style is one of joyful malice, but reading about his life it's hard to tell whether he or the world was guilty of the first cruelty. Was he unloved or unlovable? Judging by his letters and books he seems thoroughly misanthropic, but he was much loved and had many friends. He climbed into the fashionable Country House set he admired but dressed and behaved in an aggressively unfashionable manner, which outraged everyone––but amused them privately. His most successful novel was probably his worst, a soppy, sentimental hymn to a rapidly declining aristocracy. His best novels are his earliest, funniest, bitterest ones, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies and Scoop. Evelyn Waugh appears six times in A Book of Ages, and could have appeared a half dozen more.
It's worth noting that he passed his gifts along to his children. One son, Auberon, became an even more cynical, amusing, pitiless scold than his father.
Monday, October 5, 2009
A Letter to 84 Charing Cross Road
Sixty years ago today, on October 5, 1949, Helene Hanff wrote a letter to a bookstore in London. Marks & Co. was located at 84 Charing Cross Road; Miss Hanff was located on East 95th Street in New York City. She'd read their ad in the Saturday Review (a magazine once influential and now dead) and asked if they could send her "clean secondhand copies" of books on a list she enclosed. Hazlitt, Stevenson, Leigh Hunt––she loved books of essays. Also English authors, mostly 19th century. (In the letter she disparages the "grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies" available at Barnes & Noble, which was where NYU students flogged their books.) This initial note began a twenty-year friendship.
Helene Hanff was a 33 year-old writer of radio and television scripts and unproduced stage plays. She never visited Marks & Co. Friends of hers who visited London stopped by the shop and described its details and its people to her; that's the closest she came. By the time she could afford the fare to London the store had closed and her book-dealer correspondent, Frank Doel, had died. Hanff didn't particularly like travel anyway. She traveled through books, and the books traveled to her. Despite her love of cigarettes and martinis, she lived to be 80. Helene Hanff appears once in A Book of Ages, writing that first of many letters. In 1970 the two-way correspondence was collected into a book of its own, which I still reread occasionally. It remains in print.
I remember reading 84 Charing Cross Road when it was first published. I was a 14 year-old book collector, and obtained most of my books not by catalog but by bicycle. I rode the ten or so miles from suburban Minneapolis to Nelson's Book Shop and Oudal's Used and Rare located downtown, bringing the books home in a backpack. Hanff and I had similar tastes, though I preferred Charles Lamb to Hazlitt and Hunt. I still have the books I bought then, the prices I paid remain unerased inside the endpapers. The 1900 Dent edition of The Last Essays of Elia (with illustrations by C. E. Brock) cost $2.
Helene Hanff was a 33 year-old writer of radio and television scripts and unproduced stage plays. She never visited Marks & Co. Friends of hers who visited London stopped by the shop and described its details and its people to her; that's the closest she came. By the time she could afford the fare to London the store had closed and her book-dealer correspondent, Frank Doel, had died. Hanff didn't particularly like travel anyway. She traveled through books, and the books traveled to her. Despite her love of cigarettes and martinis, she lived to be 80. Helene Hanff appears once in A Book of Ages, writing that first of many letters. In 1970 the two-way correspondence was collected into a book of its own, which I still reread occasionally. It remains in print.
I remember reading 84 Charing Cross Road when it was first published. I was a 14 year-old book collector, and obtained most of my books not by catalog but by bicycle. I rode the ten or so miles from suburban Minneapolis to Nelson's Book Shop and Oudal's Used and Rare located downtown, bringing the books home in a backpack. Hanff and I had similar tastes, though I preferred Charles Lamb to Hazlitt and Hunt. I still have the books I bought then, the prices I paid remain unerased inside the endpapers. The 1900 Dent edition of The Last Essays of Elia (with illustrations by C. E. Brock) cost $2.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Canterbury Tales
It was on April 17, 1387 that Chaucer's pilgrims set out on the road to Canterbury. Chaucer worked most of his life as a bureaucrat, but was also a soldier, a student of law, a traveler, a functionary in the royal court and sometime diplomat, a carrier of messages.
When he was 16 he was captured by the French at the Battle of Rheims and was ransomed by Edward III for £16. We know this for certain, perhaps because kings kept receipts.
He was 44 when he began writing the tales told by the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Ten years later, on April 17, 1397, he read the stories out for the first time at the court of Richard II, becoming, at age 54, the first real star performer in English literature.
When he was 16 he was captured by the French at the Battle of Rheims and was ransomed by Edward III for £16. We know this for certain, perhaps because kings kept receipts.
He was 44 when he began writing the tales told by the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Ten years later, on April 17, 1397, he read the stories out for the first time at the court of Richard II, becoming, at age 54, the first real star performer in English literature.
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