Sight, Sound, Mood

ASSEMBLY (429 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($5.95).

On the title page of his first collection of short stories in twelve years, John O'Hara has set a remark of Joseph Conrad's that is far more apt than most epigraphs: "My task ... is, by the power of the written word, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. That--and no more. And it is everything." At least it is everything that O'Hara does well (if, for this master of the ear, it is understood that feeling includes hearing). The peculiar limitation of the author's great skill is that, while no one can handle sight, sound and mood better, almost any journeyman novelist can deal with plot complications with more professional ease.

Contrarily refusing to accept this, O'Hara over the years wrote a succession of long, turgid novels that required two hands to hold, said not much, and invariably buckled of their own weight, since sight, sound and mood cannot sustain a span of 900 pages. Lately, however, he has begun writing short fiction again. Last year's trilogy of novellas, Sermons and Soda-Water, was a highly successful return to the style of his early work. Some of the stories in the present collection are even better.

Small & Nasty. At their best, O'Hara's stories have no murky depths, but a kind of mordant clarity. Exactly Eight Thousand Dollars Exactly is a quick, clear look at the phenomena of brotherly hate. A middle-aged no-good arrives at an industrial park to put the touch on his brother, who runs the place. He treads indifferently on the sensibilities of a couple of employees, listens stonily while his brother tells him he is worthless. But once he has the check in hand, he leaves with a sneer for his brother and, as a parting note, adds gratuitous slander of a girl they both knew years ago. That is all there is, or needs to be. In its small, nasty way, the story is perfect. O'Hara knows better, most of the time, than to rummage about in a character's childhood to show how he got that way; he understands a truth not grasped by psychological novelists: some characters always were that way.

Of the 26 stories in the collection, perhaps ten of them should have been thrown out by O'Hara's editors--if an author as well established as he still has editors. In one of the failures, a woman is supposed to have slept with her daughter's suitor to keep him (or so she tells herself) from straying to another girl. In another, a man who is neither drunk nor perverted accepts his host's offer to let him sleep with the host's wife, a former prostitute, for a fee of $100. These stories are no more plausible than they sound in summary.

Distinct Speech. With the hypnotized fascination of an outsider, O'Hara still writes about the Eastern establishment--gentry who can tell, from a snarled sentence heard in the night, not only that the speaker is Harvard, Racquet Club and drunk, but what brand of 20-year-old Scotch he has been drinking. The fascination has endured for years, and so has Hemingway's crack that someone should take up a collection and send O'Hara to Yale.

But this collection is proof that O'Hara is capable of a range that some of his contemporaries (like Marquand) did not even attempt. The book's best story, The Girl from California, is set in a lower-middle-class Italian-American household in Trenton. A young and only recently celestial movie star brings his actress wife home to see the folks. O'Hara reports brilliantly, without analysis, the tensions that develop and the tensions that were already there. Without any obvious tricks, he keeps several sorts of speech distinct. The women sound almost, but not quite, like the men. The third-generation Irish sound subtly different (and there is not much difference at this stage) from the third-generation Italians. The story's quality is not all in the ear; O'Hara lets the reader know, with ease and accuracy and without ever going near a bedroom, that the star and his wife have a friendly, physical love. And unobtrusively, in a dialogue that takes only a few pages, he shows respect and realistic mutual appraisal between the young man and his father. Perhaps these human truths are not cosmic; O'Hara does not claim that they are. But they are important.

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