Customer Reviews

The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O'Hara

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I am a passionate proponent of O'Hara and was bitterly disappointed in the new bio, which, aside from telling us absolutely nothing factually new about this great underappreciated writer, waxes self-indulgent, neglects O'Hara's major achievement in the novella, skimps on the last 20 years of its subject's life, provides none of the historical context for O'Hara's fiction, and betrays a lack of comprehensiveness and comprehension.

Wolff adds nothing new to previous biographies, though his prose style is superior. He evidently spoke with very few people, or gathered little from those he did speak to. He completely relies on previous biographies for his facts.

The cardinal flaw is that Wolff discusses relatively few of O'Hara's writings, and only these in terms of how they reflect the writer's personality. A personality Wolff seems to loathe. Wolff concedes that he originally intended to write a totally different book about O'Hara, then got sidetracked. Much like Edmund Morris in his Reagan biography, Wolff imposes his own neuroses on the subject, occasionally making his own concerns as a writer central. Who cares?

Of the many reviewers so far, only John Updike offers any insight and some redress. His is the only review that has confronted Wolff's ill-advised approach. Interestingly, writing in the New Yorker, Updike also takes Wolff to task for misrepresenting the magazine and its editors. Lord knows how many other inaccuracies there are in the book. It is outrageous that such commentators as Jonathan Yardley, Charles McGrath and even Larry McMurtry have taken this book at face value and used it as an occasion to derogate O'Hara.

Typically, Wolff repeats ad nauseam O'Hara's many drunken exploits, but does not examine at all the impact of O'Hara's going permanently on the wagon the last 17 years of his life. Surely, if his besotted condition contributed to his loutishness, then his sobriety must have had some effect as well.

Most lamentable is that Wolff doesn't venture an intelligent reassessment of O'Hara. He just retails the usual complaints, thinks O'Hara peaked with Appointment and Samarra and the early stories. He offers no explanation as to how this evidently inept novelist became so popular, nor does he provide even a token traversal of the some 400 short stories and the magnificent novellas. In fact, he seems only to have read McShane's selected story collection.

It is telling that Wolff devotes more pages to O'Hara's two much-maligned essay collections than to The Lockwood Concern, Ourselves to Know, Elizabeth Appleton or any of the phenomenal late short story collections.

There was no purpose for this book. It adds no information not provided elsewhere, provides no insight into O'Hara's preoccupatino with suicide and lesbianism, indeed, provides no reason why anyone should be interested in O'Hara.

The big loser here is probably Random House. This book will make them little money and the opportunity for a well-deserved O'Hara revival has been shot.

I delayed writing this review because I don't like trashing anyone's work. But this book is so infuriatingly bad that I finally felt compelled to blow off steam. O'Hara deserves better. The reader certainly deserves far better. And Knopf, a one-great publisher in sad decline, should have either done extensive editing on this horribly self-indulgent mess or simply not published it. As an O'Hara fan (who recognizes his flaws as a writer and, certainly, as a man) and a born-in-"Gibbsville" insider, I assure readers that the author did not do the most basic research on O'Hara's home town. On the contrary, Wolff appears to have fabricated a number of quotes he claims to have collected in Pottsville/Gibbsville. But the voices don't sound like the voices I know, in tone or content, and the quotes suspiciously support the author's utterly inaccurate thesis that O'Hara's never been accepted "back home." Well, in downtown Pottsville, there's a handsome statue of O'Hara. Every year, there's a "John O'Hara Weekend," with performances, readings and seminars. O'Hara still appears so often in local newspapers and magazines that you'd think he was still living and writing. I grew up reading his work--and never heard any of the silly, parochial--and, of course, anonymous--criticism Wolff claims to have encountered immediately upon arrival during his apparently brief visit to Pottsville, the inspiration for so much of O'Hara's greatest fiction. And Wolff even gets basic facts wrong, from ethnic composition to the location of hotel bars. Later in the book, as well, he continues to indulge his habit of quoting anonymous sources who perfectly support his eccentric, self-adoring themes. And the prose itself is a mix of trash bio that makes Kitty Kelly read like Boswell and gonzo-tone scream-of-my-precious-consciousness slop that should have been submitted to the author's psychiatrist, not to a publisher. Poor O'Hara--his own worst enemy during his life, now afflicted with biographers who are his worst enemies after death. O'Hara was a great, if flawed, author, currently underestimated. Indeed, he merits a serious critical biography that does more than simply repeat the traditional wisdom that his late, sprawling novels had little merit; on the contrary, despite their flaws, novels such as A Rage To Live and From The Terrace offer incomparable social portraits of America during the first half of the 20th century--and his first novel, Appointment In Samarra, is flawless, a middle-class (though not middle-brow) Gatsby. I recommend reading his own work, rather than this appallingly bad pretense at biography. Finally, I apologize to all, even to the author, for writing such a negative review...I would rather praise a book. But this biography is so disgracefully bad that I felt obliged to warn other readers off. Any of the earlier O'Hara bios would be a much better choice for those interested in O'Hara's troubled, troubling but remarkably productive life.

Wolff has no real feel for O'Hara's strengths as a writer. He should have just written (dully) about his father and let O'Hara out of it. O'Hara still needs a first-rate critical biography. Wolff is a negligible writer; maybe he feels some affinity or identification with the later, diminished O'Hara who wrote the "Tomes." Wolff has yet to write anything worth reading. Sonny Mehta is driving Knopf into the ground. Isn't he the doofus who fired Gordon Lish?

It is safe to say no one who's not interested in John O'Hara or Geoffrey Wolff will pay good money for this book in its first few days after publication. O'Hara is a half-forgotten writer these days, popularly imagined to be a manufacturer of middlebrow potboilers, though from the 30s to the 60s he was in the front rank of American novelists and was arguably the finest contemporary writer of short stories.

But I expect this book to hang around the backlist for many years to come. A subterranean O'Hara revival has been bubbling for a while, and this may be the book that forces it into the light of day. Hurrying that process along is one of Geoffrey Wolff's main objectives, he explains at the start of the book.

My only gripe is that in hurrying it along, Mr. Wolff neglected to get the thing proofread. An astounding number of factual errors and typos appear in the book, suggesting that the 'manuscript' went straight from Wolff's typing apparatus to the printshop. The errors range from minor ('Lackenau Hospital' for Lankenau Hospital, 'Kay Keyser' for Kay Kyser) to extraordinary (Wolff calls the Hemingway character Robert Cohn "Robert Cohen"; not only is Robert Cohn a major character in Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises but the book _opens_ with that very _name_!).

A subtler, more egregious error is Wolff's repeated reference to a Scott Fitzgerald novel as "The Beautiful and the Damned." This was a boo-boo made by some perfunctory newspaper obits when Fitzgerald died, and biographers have been snorting over it ever since. Sometimes he gets the title right, which suggests that Wolff didn't even do much rereading of his own final ms.

Usually I think it petty to list proofreading errors in the course of a casual review. I offer the above with the suggestion to the eminent Mr. Wolff that he get a couple pairs of fresh eyes to proof the damned thing before it gets into its second printing--which will come soon enough, I am sure.

Mistakes aside, this is a thumping good page-turner. Wolff wisely does not linger over every hangover, book review, and barroom punchout, but hurries the O'Hara career along with everything else, leaving just enough room for a few pages of tasty critical comments on the major O'Hara novels and stories. He does not spend too much time on the never-ending thumbsucker of why O'Hara's reputation faded and (for the present) vanished, though he suggests (as did Fran Leibowitz in an interview) that the main problem is O'Hara's personality. There are just too many people still alive who hated his guts.

A simpler explanation for O'Hara's eclipse is simply that fashions change. Nobody was reading Herman Melville in 1890. Sinclair Lewis was pretty much out of fashion after after 1930, though he kept cranking out novels in his patented formula for another 20-odd years. In John O'Hara's case, he was just reaching maturity in the 1940s and 50s when American letters underwent a bouleversement from which it has yet to recover. Essentially, old-stock Americans in the lit biz were being snuffed out and replaced by special-interest groups who promote their own agenda mercilessly. Enough said.

Geoffrey Wolff does not tire about writing about himself or his father--that 15 minutes of fame he had in "Duke of Deception" ...This is fine, as far as it goes, but when he alludes in the opening pages, to the fact that it was (yikes!) similarities to his father that made him interested in writing about O'hara, we should all take note: this is not attentive biography but a pop-psychotherapy session in which wolff, at our expense and to our annoyance, digs into his own tired and exhausted demons....there are too many factual errors, too little scholarly research and in short, way too much Wolff-on--Wolff ad nauseum in this book. Who cares about you, the reader keeps asking of the pushy, ever-intrusive narrator? All we want is a little credible, correctly spelled, carefully researched information on O'Hara. Which we dont get...If Wolff wants to write fiction or autobiography, he should have the courage to call it such, even if it may not sell. It is not noble to social climb on a dead man, at a party or in print, and this John Updike scathingly points out in his New Yorker review of Wolff's "presumption"...Wolff seems to see himself as a post-mortem literary colleague to O'Hara. Whatever!

In the acknowledgments section, Wolff profusely thanks his editor, Gary Fisketjon, for his very detailed reading of the manuscript. Do we need further evidence of just how talentless an editor Fisketjon is? And is there a literate copyeditor left in the house? Knopf used to publish exquisitely edited books; now the house is just a cut or two above a vanity-press operation. As for Wolff, he lacks the intellectual, writerly, and emotional wherewithal to write about someone as complicated as O'Hara. The book is an embarrassment. Knopf should be issuing refunds.

Geoffrey Wolff definitely expresses why John O'Hara was not accepted as a high-quality novelist nor as a light-hearted person. O'Hara, as they now say, had issues.

And many of O'Hara's issues were self-induced through his temper, his defensiveness and his drinking. Of course, O'Hara was brilliant and a hard-worker, and one might say his search for success was very much an very American trait.

But he had insecurities, jealousies and feuds which caused the "elite" reviewers and critics to avoid embracing him. Perhaps they were a bit harsh?

Wolff calls O'Hara's last novels "tomes," even though these books were bestsellers and were made into successful movies. Wolff seems to prefer his short stories and O'Hara's first book, "Appointment in Samarra."

Personally, I enjoy most O'Hara creations and his epitaph (self-written) claims he was the best interpreter of his times. I agree, even though Wolff does not.

If Wolff errs in his biography, he errs with his own wordiness, perhaps being more of a literary critic than a biographer. He did try to find the soul of O'Hara, and found a good bit of it in O'Hara's love for his daughter and grand-daughter. Kids, in a way, are like dogs. They sniff you and accept or reject you. O'Hara was very well-accepted by these kids. He may have been a mongrel, but one with a good heart.

I wish Wolff could have seen more of this heart through all of O'Hara's crankiness.

by Larry Rochelle, author of ARROW and TEN MILE CREEK

John O'Hara was evidently not a very nice man. He had more than his share of problems with alcohol, jealousy, and anger. He bore grudges, physically bullied others, and frequently lied. Those who knew O'Hara or have studied his life seem to agree on all these points.

Geoffrey Wolff, however, seems to think that these characteristics justify him in contradicting himself, failing to verity facts, devoting only one paragraph to the last three and a half years of O'Hara's life, and generally using a biography of John O'Hara as a platform from which to pronounce his opinions on subjects ranging from Norman Podhoretz's Making It (page 315) to the likelihood that James Thurber threw a second glass of whisky at Dashiell Hammett after throwing one at Lilian Hellman - during an incident at which O'Hara seems not to have been present (page 131).

The laziness and poor quality of the research and editing are evident throughout the book. Let these stand as examples:

On page 52, Wolff writes "According to at least two biographers, O'Hara's grade of 97 was the highest ever recorded at Niagara (an absolute that this biographer, who confesses to a lazy failure to chase down and pin facts of this nature, absolutely disbelieves)." I would have thought that, if the grade was worth reporting, it would be worth researching. As it is, Wolff turns his own, self-described laziness into an excuse to call into question the accuracy of two other biographers.

On page 42, Wolff describes O'Hara at age fifteen as "taller than six feet". On page 179, he states that O'Hara "caused to be reported that 'he was married once, is six feet one inch tall and weighs 184 pounds.' (So he added an inch; doesn't everyone?)" Well, was O'Hara "taller than six feet", or was he exactly six feet tall? I don't really care, but since Wolff is accusing O'Hara of dishonesty, shouldn't the facts on which his claim of O'Hara's dishonesty rests not contradict each other?

O'Hara was a great author, even though he was far less than a great person - a statement that can accurately be made of his earlier contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He deserves better than this.

Well, Kakutani of the NY Times said it best when she pointed out the
obvious: that this narcissistic author is only interested in writing about parallels with himself. In any event it becomes obvious to the reader that the book is merely a longwinded and unresearched autobiographical apologia. In Wolf's attempts to feign moral censure, what comes through is rather wolf's hope that o'Hara's thoroughly distasteful qualities might somehow be rehabilitated to socially accepted values; and the book comes off as an all-too personal excuse for lost opportunities, envy and social climbing in pathetic extremis--all of which one wonders if wolf understands from experience. Ultimately a reader has to ask whether it is worth twenty bucks to spend hours with Wolf writing on himself beneath the marquis of someone far more talented. Wolf honorably concludes of O'Hara that he "just can't like this man" but it rings hollow. Turning vice into virtue is an ambitious endeavor, and one that Wolf is not good enough a writer to effect. As Kakutani implied, burning bridges takes no courage, no vision, nor a whole lot of talent. Contrary to the title, burning bridges is not an art-- but it is worth noting that the people who often fail at art become the most dedicated arsons.

I have been plugging along through this book and trying to figure out why reading it is SO HARD. I've just read Michiko Kakutani's TIMES review as well as those here and feel vindicated. I'm afraid this book tells as much about Wolff as it does about O'Hara; and neither presents an appealing picture.

Wolff cannot decide what he wants to do nor even what his function is. That is, does he or doesn't he want to rescue O'Hara's reputation? Is he doing analysis, literary criticism, biography, autobiography (he can't seem to keep himself out of it), academic research? He cannot, either, decide on a voice or consistent style. Wolff slides from formal to informal to slang; and that slang is sometimes contemporary and sometimes that of the 20's and 30's.

Further, Wolff should have been aware that just as the Pottsville area residents scoured O'Hara's books for local information, gossip, and gaps, so would they with books ABOUT O'Hara. Thus, inaccurate references and misspellings, like "Lackenau" for LANKENAU leap out at readers who know the coal region and Philadelphia. Other reviewers have made the same observations.

So why continue trying to finish this book? I recently read "Appointment in Samarra" and just finished "Butterfield 8." Some background on O'Hara seemed to fill out my understanding, and I had heard the book discussed on the radio. Clearly, the book's pitfalls weren't a prominent element of the conversation.

Since I have nine days remaining before I need to return the book to the library, I will press on. However, if I cannot finish this one, I will try another of the biographies and recommend that you DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.