THIS YEAR MARKS THE CENTENNIAL of John O’Hara’s birth. He was born on January 31, 1905, married my mother, Katharine Barnes Bryan, on January 31, 1955, and died in his sleep in their Princeton home on April 11, 1970. I was a freshman at Yale when he married “Sister,” as my mother was known; and by the time of his death 15 years later, I had been married twice, had three children, become a published novelist, short story writer, and journalist, and was every bit as much in awe of O’Hara’s literary output and talent as I was when I had first read him as a teenager.
It was through O’Hara that I got my start. He had read a short story I had written about an incident that had taken place when I was in the Army in Korea and thought it good enough for him to introduce me to the great New Yorker editor, William Maxwell.
Maxwell didn’t like it; but he, too, thought I could write and after asking me what story ideas I had, suggested one that eventually did appear in the magazine. O’Hara never read another word I wrote unless it was in a letter. He didn’t want anyone to think he was helping me.
By the time I knew him he had finished with his drinking, and not a moment too soon. He had been a churlish, combative drunk, not above taking a swing at a lady who had arrived late for their lunch, or punching a midget in a bar who he thought was staring at him. This is not to say he wouldn’t still get sour. (All he had to do was read one of Time magazine’s reviews of his books.)
He and my mother adored each other. He was fiercely possessive, jealous. O’Hara’s hours were those of the night newspaper desk. He would work all night, then get up in the late afternoon, seldom bothering to change out of pajamas, bathrobe, and slippers. One afternoon he came out of his study in their Princeton home and discovered my mother sitting on the living room couch talking to a man he did not know. O’Hara took one long, black look, stormed back into his study, and slammed the door. Afterward, when the man had left, my mother went in to ask O’Hara what was wrong.
“It’s quite obvious,” he replied stiffly, “you are inviting your lover right into our house.” My mother explained that the man was an upholsterer who was measuring the couch for slipcovers.
One summer he and my mother and John’s daughter Wylie all traveled to Dublin. He shipped his Rolls Royce over in the belly of one of the Queens so he could drive it in Britain. It was an obscene expense, but O’Hara wanted to ride in style. One afternoon he parked the Rolls atop a hill in Dublin and remained standing beside the car while my mother and Wylie went shopping. While he was there a little street urchin came up to him and asked, “Is that your car, sor?” O’Hara said it was, and the boy responded, “‘Tis a massive machine.” As far as O’Hara was concerned he had been repaid the expense of the shipping.
A silver-plated ice bucket sits on my bar–a gift from O’Hara to my mother.
He had it engraved:
Backgammon and Good Hands Trophy,
1955
Champion
John O’Hara Points 1,225,880
Reserve
Sister O’Hara
He was a ferocious competitor who couldn’t stand to lose. Often in the early evening the two of them would sit at the little card table beneath his bookcase filled with all the Random House Modern Library books (gifts from his publisher and friend, Bennett Cerf) playing Scrabble. It would generally take no longer than 15 minutes for O’Hara to become apoplectic with rage. He would have been carefully hoarding his letter tiles to clear his tray when my mother would put down “mop” or somesuch nickel-and-dime word right where he had been planning to go.
At the memorial service held for John at Random House about a month after his death, Charles Poore gave the eulogy. Poore, whose thoughtful reviews of my stepfather’s books in the New York Times provided O’Hara rare moments of pleasure, called him “the Chaucer of our age of violent affluence.”
From where I sit, 35 years later, that description does not seem too big a reach. Go back to your bookshelves and pull down Appointment in Samarra or Butterfield 8 or A Rage to Live or that wonderful trilogy Sermons and Soda-Water, or From the Terrace, Ten North Frederick, Ourselves to Know, or any of his fat short story collections. He deserves to be read again. And he deserved many of the honors he so desperately hungered for and didn’t receive. That is why, in 1964, when he was presented the Award of Merit for the Novel by the American Academy of Arts and Letters (an award granted previously to Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, and Ernest Hemingway), O’Hara was so moved that, near the opening of his acceptance speech, he broke down in tears and had to hand his speech to John Hersey to finish. There wasn’t a member of the family there who didn’t weep as well.
C.D.B. Bryan is the author, most recently, of Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.
