November 23, 1961--In what became a tradition throughout the rest of the decade, Random House published, on Thanksgiving, a feast for readers: another book by one of its bestselling authors, John O’Hara. Assembly marked a return to the short-story genre that O’Hara had forsaken because of an 11-year quarrel with the principal outlet for his short fiction, The New Yorker. By the end of the Sixties, the enormously prolific author, a onetime acolyte of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, had surpassed them in the amount and variety of his short fiction. From 1960 to his death 10 years later, at age 65, he published seven story and novella collections: Sermons and Soda Water (1960), Assembly (1961), The Cape Cod Lighter (1962), The Hat on the Bed (1963), The Horse Knows the Way (1964), And Other Stories (1968), and The O'Hara Generation (1969), a best-of collection.
The 139 short stories, novellas and novelettes published in this decade are remarkable, in and of themselves, but they are even more so when one considers their commercial and artistic achievement. The prickly author may have given Random House hives, but there was a reason why it put up with his frequent bullying, sulking and demands: he made it lots of money. The novels, of course, were to be expected, but even the short stories sold far better than the norm. Assembly, for instance, went through three Random House and 11 Bantam paperback printings.
Fitzgerald, one of the more assiduous short-story writers of his age (approximately 160 published in his lifetime), complained about only having the same few experiences to fall back on. (See today’s Quote of the Day.) This was never an issue with O’Hara. While the main question eliciting information from the author of The Great Gatsby was the rather insolent, “How much money do you make?”, the author of Appointment in Samarra used his old skills as a reporter to interrogate people about their lives. Because he found women especially fascinating, he could also summon the charm that so many people missed because of his crusty exterior to get them to talk all about themselves.
Following a near-fatal ulcer in 1953, O’Hara had gone permanently on the wagon, pouring his energies into his typewriter instead of the nearest watering hole. That enabled him to avoid the early alcohol-hastened death and decline of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, respectively--and to go far beyond their work over a lifetime in the short form. The 374 stories he wrote over four decades was more than double Fitzgerald’s total, and eight times Hemingway’s.
None of this is meant to denigrate the very real achievements of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the short form; it simply means that O’Hara belongs in their class as 20th-century masters of the genre.
O'Hara's break from short-story writing largely resulted from a negative review of his sprawling 1949 novel A Rage to Live by New Yorker critic Brendan Gill. His vow not to submit more articles to the magazine began to weaken by 1958, when former friend Wolcott Gibbs dourly joked that all O'Hara needed to come back into the fold was Gill's execution and approximately $50,000 in damages.
Two years later, fiction editor William Maxwell pulled off the diplomatic coup of the decade--O'Hara's return to the magazine as a contributor--when he accepted for publication the marvelous novella "Imagine Kissing Pete." In the summer of 1960, the novelist plunged back into the form with brio, cranking out most of the stories in two sittings of three hours each.
When critics and biographers note that O’Hara could be his own worst enemy in not winning greater critical approval, they’re usually talking about his mile-wide truculent streak. But it might have been equally true of his commercial instincts. In his biography The Art of Burning Bridges, Geoffrey Wolff notes that O’Hara refused to have his stories anthologized because he thought they would cut into the sales of his story collections.
That was a dubious judgment in any case, but it also meant that at least a generation of college students--as well as future English professors--would not be exposed to his exceptional short fiction.
The title of the volume holds a double meaning. It not only refers to the 26 stories collected or “assembled” here, but to the Assembly, the elite social organization that sets the rules for Gibbsville, the fictionalized version of O‘Hara‘s hometown, Pottsville, Penn. The use of the term in this second context clues the reader into the novelist’s continuing concern with the mores that govern society.
Assembly, like O’Hara’s other short stories of the decade, differs from his almost uniformly terse, hard-edged, often plotless short fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, in length, detail and attitude. Increasingly, he had taken to writing letters to his beloved daughter Wylie about his memories of growing up in the coal-mining region of eastern Pennsylvania.
Perhaps he sensed that the attention of the younger generation was shifting elsewhere, and they needed to understand what life had once been like. He did not want to leave this process to "in the hands of the historians and the editors of picture books," he wrote in Sermons and Soda Water: “I want to get it all down on paper while I can. . . . at fifty-five I have no right to waste time."
That last comment ties O’Hara to writers who would follow him who, in their sixties and seventies, also wrote with a deepening consciousness of aging: John Updike and Philip Roth. In the past, O’Hara would have been tempted to regard most of his characters with almost Olympian irony. At this point in his life, however, he could only regard with compassion how desperately they grasped for moments of grace, love and happiness as they became more and more besieged by loss, illness, death, loneliness and despair.
O’Hara could write about Hollywood stars, Broadway actors, Wall Street up-and-comers, and Park Avenue grande dames. But I think he was most at home with the coachmen, coal-miners, barbers, journalists, doctors, country-club habitues, and others in Gibbsville, which he wrote about with the range and vividness of Thomas Wolfe’s Altamount and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.
The short-story collection Gibbsville is the indispensable place to start with this group, then. But I recommend that you hunt down the out-of-print 1980s edition of this, which is 10 stories and 300 pages more than the 2004 paperback reprint.
This is the richest opportunity for a reader to discover not just the full range of his characters from all walks of life, but also why he told Wylie that he believed strongly in the motto of her girls’ school, St. Timothy‘s: “truth without fear.”
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