Scold in Spats

MY TURN by John O'Hara. 214 pages. Random House. $4.95.

Here's O'Hara again, back only five months after publication of The Lockwood Concern. This time he's trying to make a little champagne out of pure fizz. My Turn is a collection of O'Hara columns that were featured and syndicated by Newsday, the Long Island newspaper (TIME, October 8, 1965). O'Hara's career did not last very long; some client newspapers dropped him, and Newsday itself did not renew his contract after 53 weeks.

In a tart final column, O'Hara claims that the newspapers canceled because he was too conservative for their tastes. Most readers who like O'Hara enough to plow through the book, which covers everything from politics and education to journalism and television, will concede that he has a legitimate beef.

Certainly, as columnists go, old Newsman O'Hara (New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily Mirror, TIME) writes as brightly as most and less fatuously than many. While his Coolidge-era conservatism often placed him not only outside the mainstream of U.S. opinion but outside shouting distance of the river bed as well, it still is a sorry commentary on the press that some editors apparently became disenchanted with him because he supported Goldwater ("It's time the Lawrence Welk people had their say"), criticized the Kennedys ("Instant Adamses"), and loftily dismissed President Johnson ("an uninspiring, uninspired man").

Actually, if they had kept O'Hara long enough, editors would have discovered that he was impeccably impartial. He was simply a scold in spats. "We are living in the Age of the Jerk," he wrote in one of his last pieces. "The manifestations of Jerkism are all over the place and limited to no class or race. It is Jerkism when Negro hoodlums loot a shoe store. It is Jerkism when Ivy League types commit vandalism at a debutante party, and Jerkism when Bronx teenagers drop down to the Yankee Stadium outfield and steal Mickey Mantle's cap. It is Jerkism to lie down on the floor of the White House or on the tracks of the Southern Pacific to 'protest' anything. It is Jerkism to drink three Martinis, and Jerkism to pretend that Pop Art is Art. It is Jerkism for a boy to grow his hair like a girl's, and . . . Jerkism for a nonrabbinical student to grow a beard. It is Jerkism to be a Communist, and Jerkism to be a John Bircher."

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