Rich Little Poor Boy

By Paul Gray

THE O'HARA CONCERN by MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI 417 pages. Illustrated. Random House. $15.

For a failed preppie from Pottsville, Pa., John O'Hara did not turn out so badly. He published 13 novels and 374 short stories during his 65 years. His Pal Joey sketches inspired the book for one of Broadway's landmark musicals. He was celebrated in New York and Hollywood and enjoyed an income of millions. He was even lucky in love: after the death of his beloved second wife,

Belle, he married another woman equally devoted to him and his work. He was also the most miserable, self-sorrowing author in the American pantheon. The reasons seem as petty as his tantrums: Yale would not give O'Hara an honorary degree, the critics curtsied to Faulkner and Hemingway but not to him, the Nobel Prize was never to be his. Successful beyond avarice, O'Hara proceeded to fume through life like the eternal arriviste.

Why? Instead of tackling this question, Biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli takes up the late O'Hara's cudgels and flails away at the writer's "enemies." "For the record," declares Bruccoli,

"The O'Hara Concern is intentionally biased by my conviction that John O'Hara was a major writer who was underrated by the critical-academic axis sometimes called The Literary Establishment." If such an axis existed, Bruccoli would be a card-carrying member; as a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and director of the Center for Editions of American Authors (a far-flung scholarly empire churning out overfootnoted and overpriced texts), he is a totally critical academic.

In fact, such an axis is wholly imaginary. Bruccoli's own research reveals that estimates of O'Hara's work ranged from raves to pans throughout his long career. If a conspiracy was afoot, it was singularly anarchic. What is worse, the unfriendly reviews that Bruccoli quotes are invariably more persuasive than his own dust-jacket gushings about works that are "superb," "brilliant," "powerful" and "extraordinary."

O'Hara's importance needs no such inflation. His "Gibbsville" region is a worthy addition to American social geography, and his odd, tormented personality contained enough fascinating quirks for several men. "John, I'm your friend," Robert Benchley once told him, "and all your friends know you're a son of a bitch." Almost from the moment the callow young reporter reached New York in 1928, he gained notoriety as a prodigious writer, a snob and a mean drunk. He kept blacklists of friends who had offended him. One such victim was Author Budd Schulberg, who was cut by O'Hara at the "21" Club. When a bar fly began insulting Schulberg, O'Hara snapped, "Nobody can talk to a friend of mine like that," then continued snubbing the young novelist.

Dunce Cap. The success of Appointment in Samarra (1934) bolstered O'Hara's self-esteem without relieving an iota of his insecurity. The novelist of the future, he protested, will take "the best of James Joyce, the best of William Faulkner, the best of Sinclair Lewis, the best of Ernest Hemingway and, naturally, the best of me." Reviewers who praised him received pathetically vulnerable letters of thanks.

Awards moved him to tears. As a tormenting reminder of the college past he never had, O'Hara kept a mock Phi Beta Kappa key with a dunce cap on the top, engraved "Nope Never Made It."

A less partisan biographer might have made more of these rampant contradictions. Yet The O'Hara Concern does show a side of the author that his posturings obscured. With remarkable discipline, O'Hara stayed on the wagon for the last 16 years of his life. He could be generous to friends and competitors (he extravagantly called Hemingway "the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare"); his letters to his daughter reveal a tenderness that few outsiders ever suspected.

O'Hara's writing will never win the laurels that he desired. He was over shadowed by greater talents, and he was preoccupied with surfaces in an age that plumbed the depths. His habit of using brand names (Franklin cars, Brooks Brothers shirts) to indicate character al ready seems quaint, done in by the likes of Ian Fleming. Despite his huffing ef forts, Bruccoli does not prove that O'Hara was underrated as a writer. But he offers telling evidence that O'Hara was underrated as a man.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.