Hollywood to 52nd Street

PIPE NIGHT -- John O'Hara-- Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

In the typical John O'Hara story, a character wants something, needs some thing or works for something -- a date, a job, a reconciliation -- and is at the point of getting it when everything goes wrong, the tables are turned, his friend becomes his enemy, his girl laughs at him or some body punches him, physically, intellectually or spiritually, on the nose. Three of the stories collected here (most of them first published in The New Yorker) deal with face slappings, knockouts, punches in the jaw. Thirteen deal with their social equivalents: snubs, cuts, insults, brush-offs and cold shoulders. The others tell of rudenesses, deceits, infidelities or--more often--pathetic pretenses cruelly unmasked.

In Graven Image, a down-at-heels Har-vardman, member of the swank Porcellian Club, begs for a Washington job from the brainy Under Secretary who had been snubbed by Porcellians in college. He gets along fine, is promised the job, then spoils everything by expansively recalling college-club days. "Fellows like you," he bumbles, "you never would have made it in a thousand years." In Radio, a husband slaps his wife, tells her he has discovered her infidelities, and that he can hit her "as much as I want to, because, Baby, you're stuck." ("Uh-huh," she says, "I'm stuck.") In The King of the Desert, two wise cracking pansies torment a stolid football player in a Hollywood bar until he knocks one of them out ("We'll fix you in Holly wood, Mister").

In Leave, a sailor home from the Pacific finds his girl married, bruises his knuckles on her husband when the husband invites him to take her out. In A Respectable Place, a drunken cop shoots up Matty Wall's bar and the police benefit society gives him $175 to repair it. Then the cops pass Matty without speaking, his daughter gets a parking ticket, the beer truck un loading at his place gets a summons for obstructing traffic, and when Matty tries to return the $175, he is accused of bribery.

In a brief introduction Wolcott Gibbs pays a toastmaster's tribute to John O'Hara's remarkably accurate ear, to his clear perception of the difference between satire and burlesque, to his characters who, though they are "great ones for cliches, which they usually get just a little wrong," are never caricatures. O'Hara's virtue, says Gibbs, is that he is thoroughly at home an the varied worlds between 52nd Street and Hollywood Boulevard, in one of which "every lady is a tramp and every man an enemy," and in another, "it is possible to be bored to death or to break your heart in the most exclusive surroundings." Readers may agree with him, and yet conclude that Author O'Hara deserves higher marks for technical facility than for deportment.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.