John O'Hara (1905-1970)
The short story is not an American
invention, but American writers at least since the time of Poe have developed
it with a special inventiveness. There
was not a lot of fiction on the dusty shelves of my boyhood home, but there
were more volumes than I could believe by O. Henry, who, I thought, must be the
most famous and productive writer in our country. Many years later I learned that there were many
people—including the kind of people who grew up in big houses in Fairfield
County with real libraries before going to school at St. Paul’s—who never heard
of him. I am not sure I ever heard his
name mentioned in forty years of conversation with learned colleagues in my
English Department. But he was big in my
early reading life. O. Henry (it’s a
pen-name, of course), who died before the beginning of World War I, was a
master of the “surprise ending”. The
influence of De Maupassant is pretty obvious, but I hadn’t even heard of him at
the time.
The genre is called the short story for a reason. It has to do whatever it is going to do—or not
do—fairly quickly. In the short
story the not doing part can be quite
as important as the doing. Think of the
masterpiece by Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which nothing
happening is what happens, unforgettably.
Quite often the reader doesn’t get a subtle short story in a single
reading.
I have recently been reading in a
collection of stories by John O’Hara, who virtually dominated the fiction pages
of the New Yorker when I was in
college. O’Hara does have a few
“surprise endings,” but they are generally prepared for by what I shall call
the unnoticed middle. A couple of nights
ago I read one of his gems, “Appearances”.
This story appeareded in 1962 in a collection, one of the few of
his stories not first published in a
magazine. Admittedly, I was nodding; but
when I got to the end while I was sure that something had happened, I could not
tell you exactly what. O’Hara is the
chronicler of the middle classes of the Main Line—meaning roughly the stretch
of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia to Boston, with emphasis on the
former—during the years of post-War affluence and social malaise. His natural peers are Updike and Cheever, but
he has a sadness all his own. His themes
are perhaps the usual: mortality, adultery, alcohol, missed opportunity,
inescapable pasts. Several of those
themes were in “Appearances,” but determining what it was about would require a
second reading.
The mode of “Appearances” is third-person
narration, but its principal character is one Howard Ambrie, middle-aged
nondescript bourgeois living comfortably with his wife Lois on Long
Island. The couple have just returned in
their car from some evening event. We
learn early on that their recently divorced daughter, a teacher, has
temporarily returned to the family home.
The first part of the story details a conversation, or perhaps an argument,, between Howard and Lois. At issue is whether Howard plans on the
following day to attend the funeral of somebody named Jack Hill. Hill, we learn, was a friend of Howard’s for
fifty years, though the closeness of the friendship is questioned in subsequent
dialogue. Jack’s bereaved widow, Celia,
is likewise an old family friend. Lois
is rather shocked to hear that her husband does not intend to be at the funeral,
and especially shocked at the reason he offers.
He has scheduled a game of golf he doesn’t want to miss. After a certain amount of revelatory
bickering, however, he does agree to go to the funeral after all.
The rest of the story takes place
in the daughter’s room, where she is visited first by her father and then by
her mother. We quickly learn that the
daughter—and the divorce triggered by her sexual impropriety--is relevant to whatever is or is not happening. She seems
to be an only child, and has an apparently frank and open relationship with
both her parents; but the eavesdropping reader soon discovers that the
intimacies of her parental communication are delicately compartmentalized. In what seems a careful deference to the
daughter’s agency and independence, her father has chosen not to inquire too
closely into the details of the extra-marital affair with an unnamed married
man that doomed her marriage. His hopes
are now for the future, and for her prospects for a second marriage with a
doctor she has been dating. “This time,”
he advises her, “you ought to have children right away…It might have kept you
together, Amy, a child. We had you the
first year, your mother and I.”
Not surprisingly, the daughter is quizzical:
“’Father, you’re practically
implying that if you hadn’t had me…’”
“ ‘I know what I’m implying,’ he
said. ‘And I know you’re no fool. You know it’s often been touch and go with
your mother and I. You’ve seen that.’”
The main literary theme here, I
suppose, is the familiar one of the reduplication of pathologies within
families. But O’ Hara is an absolute
master of middle class vernacular. We
don’t quite know Howard Imbrie’s place in the great scheme of things until we
listen carefully. As we learn in the
story’s first line he lives in a house with a “porte-cochère,” and he
presumably would never say “Me and my wife went to the movies.” But he does say “…with your mother and I.”
As grammatical solecisms go, this one is no big deal; but it serves as
what I have called as “unnoticed middle” for its story—unnoticed by me, at any
rate, on first reading.
Imbrie bids his daughter goodnight
and leaves the room. But the mother soon
enters it, asking her daughter, “What was that all about?” Now we discover that the intimacy of mother
and daughter, at least so far as the subject of “Appearances” is concerned, is
more along the lines of a conspiracy.
But even in revealing what the reader must already be suspecting
concerning the man to be buried on the morrow and the Prodigal Daughter, O’Hara
deftly uses the heart-to-heart between Amy and her mother to bring out further
sad limitations and bigotries that seem perhaps to come with the porte-cochère. The author does this all in about three
thousand words. Just between you and I,
this is no mean trick.
