Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (86 page)

Scandinavia paid its wartime debt to Steinbeck with the award of the Nobel Prize in 1962. It was the period in which the new Jewish school of New York fiction (Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Malamud) was ascendant. The
New York Times
hailed Steinbeck’s achievement with a breathtakingly denunciatory editorial, questioning the mental abilities of the Swedish judges. In the same paper Alfred Kazin did an op-ed entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was less the laureate’s wreath than a toilet seat which his country placed on John Steinbeck’s brow. Steinbeck duly made his acceptance address a counter-attack on ‘an emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches’. Fight back as he might, the Prize was dust in his mouth. He wrote no more fiction – and, once the champion of the Hoovervilles, his politics wavered rightwards. Notoriously he supported Lyndon B. Johnson’s Vietnam policy and did some of the frontline reporting he had done in the Second World War. His health was not up to such exertions, however, and he died prematurely of heart failure before witnessing the squalid flight of his country’s helicopters from Saigon, wretched Vietnamese hanging on to the landing skids. Unluckier, even, than the Joads.

Stylish decency.
John Clute on John Hersey
Thoroughly obnoxious.
Jonathan Yardley on John O’Hara

The two Prufrocks swelling the scene in the epic blackthorn-stick contest between Hemingway and Steinbeck warrant a mention. Between them, the quartet represents four distinct adaptations of the realist traditions of American fiction. John Hersey was born in China, the son of Christian missionaries. He returned with his family to America, aged ten, and went on to study at Yale. Unprivileged, Hersey worked his way through university with menial jobs on the side. He completed his studies at Clare College, Cambridge (on full fellowship).

He worked briefly as a secretary to Sinclair Lewis, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, after graduation – but disliked the man. His gifts as a journalist were recognised early and in his mid-twenties he was recruited by
Time
magazine. By the end of the 1930s he was running their Chinese bureau (Hersey was fluent in Mandarin from childhood). He made his first, of two, marriages in 1940. He was an intrepid war reporter during the Second World War, covering the Allied invasion of Italy, being downed four times while flying in combat zones and witnessing, from the frontline, the bloody marine invasion of Guadalcanal. Although never uniformed, Hersey saw more battle than most soldiers; and risked his life more than most. Unsurprisingly he came to hate war.

Hersey is sometimes claimed as the father of ‘New Journalism’. He can as easily be portrayed as a pioneer of docufiction or, what he called ‘the novel of contemporary history’. Fiction, Hersey believed, ‘is a clarifying agent [that] makes truth possible’. His first effort in this clarifying genre was
A Bell for Adano
, published while the fighting was still at its height, in 1944. A mixture of war reportage (it began as a factual article in
Life
magazine), propaganda and fiction,
A Bell for Adano
was a bestselling book, a hit Broadway play, and a big-budget film (1945). It opens with the stark declaration: ‘Major Victor Joppolo, U.S.A, was a good man.’ Joppolo is an officer in ‘Amgot’, the ‘Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory’. His assignment is the Sicilian coastal village of Adano. Joppolo (Italo-American and bilingual) establishes himself as Adano’s benign
Duce
. A ‘good man’ – and a married man – he has an affair with a local girl (something that involved Hersey in a libel suit when the wife of the officer on whom Joppolo was based read the book).

Hersey reserves his greatest savagery not for the Fascists, who are buffoons, but for the American commander in chief, ‘General Marvin’ (i.e. General George S.
Patton). ‘I can tell you perfectly calmly,’ the narrator declares, ‘that General Marvin showed himself during the invasion to be a bad man, something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out.’ The novel is glued together by Joppolo’s efforts to acquire a bell for the church of San Angelo, to replace the one taken away for scrap metal during the war.
A Bell for Adano
won a Pulitzer prize. A year later, an assignment from
Life
magazine brought Hersey to occupied Japan. There he came across a document by a Jesuit missionary who had survived the atom bomb and he tried to interest the
New Yorker
in an article. Earlier he had written the story of torpedo boat PT109, and a certain Lt. John F. Kennedy, and was in good standing with the magazine. After much agonising, the editors William Shawn and Harold Ross decided to commission a 31,000-word piece, which would occupy the whole of their cartoonless 31 August 1946 issue.

Ostensibly reportage, Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’ employed the narrative techniques of fiction. It follows the experiences of six survivors – all intensively interviewed by the author: a clerk, a doctor, a tailor’s widow, a German priest, a surgeon and a Japanese Methodist minister. The interviewees were chosen to overturn the monolithic image of the subhuman ‘Jap’ promulgated during hostilities. The descriptions of the physical effects of the ‘Bomb’ were horrific: melted eyeballs, bone-rotting radiation sickness, and – the image that went around the world – a victim whose only relic was a shadowy profile on a wall; the rest of him vaporised. The
New Yorker
sold out in hours and reprinted several times to meet demand. In some quarters (notably his former employer,
Time
) Hersey was regarded as perniciously leftist. Undaunted, he followed up his Goyaesque ‘Horrors of War’ mission with
The Wall
(1950), a novel based on the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, while the world – and Stalin – watched.

Hersey returned in 1950 to his alma mater, Yale, as the master of Pierson College, and later a professor. He opposed the Vietnam War, and marched against it, activism which displeased his Ivy League employers. He continued to write novels, the best of which is
The War Lover
(1959). Set in one of the many ‘Mighty Eighth’ air force bases in England, the ‘war lover’ of the title is Buzz Morrow, a B17 (Flying Fortress) pilot, who drops deadly cargoes of high explosive on civilians in Germany with extraordinary skill and daring. He is brave, but borderline psychotic. But is that, Hersey’s novel ponders, the whole nature of ‘bravery’?
The War Lover
is not quite
Strangelove
but notches better than
Memphis Belle
. It was filmed, starring Steve McQueen as Buzz, in 1962.

Hersey divorced, married again, had five children in all, and died at Key West where he and his wife shared a compound with his friend, the African-American novelist, Ralph Ellison. He was fondly remembered by generations of students at
Yale. Writing his obituary, John Clute discerned a core of ‘stylish decency’ running through everything Hersey did – one could raise the epithet to ‘nobility’.

Stylish decency was never the calling card of John O’Hara. Words like ‘oaf’, ‘lout’ and ‘brute’ attach themselves to him, particularly in his drinking days. ‘A strange, unpleasant man,’ one critic calls him. Paul Douglas, the Hollywood star, once grabbed O’Hara by his necktie and made a good attempt at throttling him, after an especially obnoxious piece of drunkenness. Many wished Douglas had succeeded.

O’Hara was born an Irish Catholic, the oldest of eight children of a surgeon, in the small Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Pottsville. He recalls his upbringing in the short stories collected as
The Doctor’s Son
(1935) – there are particularly vivid descriptions of the 1919 flu epidemic. Intransigent from youth onwards, he was expelled from three schools – the last for drunkenness. His father died when John was twenty, which meant he could not, as planned, go to Yale. It embittered him for life (Ernest Hemingway suggested, sarcastically, that writers should chip in for a ‘fund’ to send him there to stop the bloody man complaining). Suddenly penniless, another no-good ‘Mick’, for a couple of years he jogged along with menial work (‘soda jerk’, gas meter reader, gardener) until, aged twenty-three, he landed a job as a journalist. It was the post-Prohibition era, and the jazz age; there was lots of easy money and easier morality. O’Hara was a facile reporter and got work from top papers in Philadelphia and New York. He also lost many of those jobs for drunkenness – and often nasty drunkenness. He married and divorced soon after, in 1933.

O’Hara had had stories taken by the
New Yorker
, which led him to think he might do something more ambitious in that line. Down to his last three dollars, he holed up in his New York lodging and set to writing a full-length novel to keep the wolf from the door. It was called
Appointment in Samarra
– the title borrowed from an oriental fable popularised by Somerset Maugham: a merchant’s servant sees ‘Death’ in Baghdad looking at him fixedly, and assumes he is soon to die. He tells his master: ‘I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.’ The merchant subsequently asks Death why he threatened his servant in Baghdad. Death replies: ‘That was not a threatening gesture … I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’ Kismet.

On the strength of his novel’s first few thousand words, O’Hara got an advance from his publisher. The story chronicles the last three days of a Cadillac dealership owner, Julian English, in ‘Gibbsville’ (i.e. the author’s hometown). A member of the town’s country club set, with a beautiful wife, Julian’s life is on the skids. Drunkenly, he throws a highball (ice cubes included) into the face of a man he owes money to,
‘Harry Reilly’. O’Hara took no care to mask the originals of his characters. Harry was, as all Pottsville recognised, based on the uncle of Bill O’Reilly, the Fox news commentator at whom many viewers may have wanted to throw things heavier than ice cubes. It is Prohibition and, like all his class, Julian hobnobs with bootleggers and gangsters. How else will the country-club set get their highballs? In return, the mobsters buy their limousines from Julian. Caroline abandons him when he’s caught canoodling with a floozy. Julian finally kills himself, on the front seat of one of his finest cars, the garage doors locked, engine poisonously (but silently – it is a Cadillac) running.

The novel was a hit and favourable comparison was made with
The Great Gatsby
. Like that novel,
Appointment in Samarra
has a virtue lacking in O’Hara’s late-life fiction – it is short. His follow-up,
BUtterfield 8
(1935) is similarly lean. A
roman-à-clef
, O’Hara’s heroine, Gloria Wandrous, is based on Starr Faithfull whose body was found at Long Island in June 1931. The autopsy revealed that she had been drugged, abused and beaten up before drowning. She was twenty-five years old, drank heavily, and was promiscuous. As a schoolgirl she had been debauched by Andrew J. Peters, the wealthy former mayor of Boston. O’Hara’s title alludes to the new telephone codes introduced by the New York Telephone Company in December 1930. Gloria is, literally, a call-girl. The narrative follows the last few drink-sodden days of Gloria’s life, in which her history of sexual exploitation, beginning with childhood molestation, is graphically described. The film rights to
BUtterfield 8
earned O’Hara a cool $100,000. The movie came out in 1960, starring Elizabeth Taylor, and won her an Oscar. Apart from pocketing the hundred grand, O’Hara had nothing to do with the glossy adaptation, which bore only glancing resemblance to the novel he had written thirty years earlier.

Now a hot property, O’Hara could sell his short stories everywhere (most prominently in the
New Yorker
). His next bestselling novel,
Pal Joey
(1940), takes the form of semi-literate letters (i.e. bundled short stories) to an anonymous ‘friend’ by a small-time club crooner and hoofer – a cheery, no-good louse. He always signs himself off ‘yr pal, Joey’. Ring Lardner’s
You Know Me, Al
was the clear inspiration – and a much funnier epistolary effort.
Pal Joey
was made into a Rodgers and Hart Broadway musical (viz the song, ‘The Lady is a Tramp’, i.e. ‘whore’), and a wholly preposterous movie starring Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth (1957). The film removed such unappealing features as Joey being an unrepentant gang-rapist.

O’Hara was now riding very high indeed. He had remarried in 1937 and, as Jonathan Yardley tartly puts it, ‘set himself up in Princeton, hobnobbed with the rich, lobbied shamelessly for literary awards and club memberships, togged himself out in expensive tweeds, riding boots and other accoutrements of the country squire
manqué, insulted just about everybody, including many who thought he liked them, and in general made himself thoroughly obnoxious.’ The distance between Irish Catholic and WASP in upstate Pennsylvania was one which he dedicated his life to crossing, and his fiction to anatomising. He was in demand as a journalist-commentator (he was, inevitably, infuriatingly provocative) and short-story writer. Yet he was going nowhere in his work and – resident mainly in New York – drinking pathologically. In the early 1950s O’Hara pulled his life together. Spurred by warnings by his physicians that he was on his way to his own appointment in Samarra, O’Hara kicked alcohol: it was a remarkable act of willpower. His second wife died in 1954, and he promptly remarried. After a row with the
New Yorker
, he resolved to write no more short fiction.

He embarked, instead, on a series of loosely interlinked massive social melodramas, set in ‘Gibbsville’, beginning with
A Rage to Live
(1949). They got bigger and bigger, selling ever better, culminating in the truly elephantine, near thousand-page,
From the Terrace
(1958). O’Hara thought these corpulent bulks his best work, and fully expected a Nobel Prize for them. Most readers (those he retains) see him as a novelist who peaked – impressively but temporarily – in the 1930s.