More on John O’Hara: a critique from someone or other and my response to it

Tonight I was just about to sit down with the end of a bottle of Pernod (a great drink if you like aniseed and don’t believe all the guff that it has to be drunk in sunshine. It doesn’t, and you can get as pissed or not as you like depending upon the amount of water you add. As I get older, I find myself adding more and more) and finish off my second reading of the novel. As it happened I set down the full glass next to the sofa and as I went to put away my guitar, I kicked it over. Damn.

So instead I have decided to post my response to a critique of the novel by one Henry Gonshak who is, apparently ‘the Rose and Anna Busch Endowed Professor of English at Montana Tech’. I found it when I was looking up websites to do with the novel. You can read what Mr Gonshak had to say here. I wanted to leave a comment on the blog, but for some reason I couldn’t so I have emailed it to him. But, after kicking over my glass of Pernod, I decided - what the hell - to post my response here, too. Since emailing it and then deciding to post it here, I have slightly rewritten and expanded it, although not a lot.

I recently finished Appointment In Samara - and I can’t remember how I came across the novel and then bought it - and was so impressed, I bought a collection of John O’Hara’s New York short stories and Butterfield 8. The name of that second novel was familiar to me, because I’d heard about the Elizabeth Taylor film years ago and remembered that it was in some way ‘shocking’. But I only saw it recently and, at the time, I rather liked it.

Last week, I read the Butterfield 8 the novel, and once I had finished it, I immediately, as has sometimes become my habit with books which impress me, began again. That others don’t do so, or at least I’ve never heard of others doing so, baffles me a little. We will listen to recordings of music and watch films again, often very soon after we have just heard or read them, but no one seems to grant a novel the same respect.

I’ve done the same with films (watched on DVD or the internet) and all I can say is that the practice of reading a novel (or watching a film) like that pays off in spades. I have to say I disagree with you almost completely on your evaluation of the novel Butterfield 8, and must agree with you about the film. Having now read the novel my estimation of the Taylor film has plummeted.

It is, at the end of the day, just another piece of Hollywood melodrama, and although there are, as in most things, degrees of worth or otherwise - there can be ‘good’, well-made melodrama and there can be total crap - it was nonetheless nothing more than a piece of melodramatic schlock which might have done good business at the box office and garnered Taylor her Oscar, but in no way whatsover approached the subtlety of O’Hara’s novel.

In that sense it has nothing to do with the novel except sharing a title and vaguely, ever so vaguely, echoing its story. The novel is much, much, much more, and I can understand why when it was first published, and coming soon after Appointment In Samara, it made O’Hara’s name. But

John O'Hara

you [Henry Gonshak, the guy whose take on the novel I am responding to] don’t seem to rate it highly at all. And that, too, baffles me.

You supply the quote, quite possibly well-known, from (Wright State University English professor) Martin Kirch that ‘O’Hara’s achievements have been so long and thoroughly denigrated that he is now considered a novelist of the second, or even the third, rank’, and on the face of it that would seem game, set and match: it seems to say ‘O’Hara was once good, but not that good and certainly no longer as good as other novelists’. You say something similar (’In our era O’Hara comes across as a dated and minor writer who should not be classed with such brilliant’). But read Professor Kirch’s quote again: he says the ‘achievements’ have been ‘denigrated’.

Now that is an odd word to use if he means ‘re-evaluated’. But he doesn’t say ‘re-evaluated’: he uses the word ‘denigrated’, and when someone is ‘denigrated’, the implication is that he has been unfairly treated. And that’s how I read Kirch’s judgment: that O’Hara is still as good as he was, but taste has moved on to such an extent that he is seen as no longer cutting the artistic mustard. And so although you say you agree with Kirch, he does not seem to be saying what you are saying.

In your evaluation of the novel you make several factual errors, and I think these are important: you say Gloria Wandrous was 18 when the novel takes place. She wasn’t, she was 22. You also say the Weston Liggett, the man who picked her up - or was picked up by her - was divorced. He wasn’t: once he had confessed to taking Gloria to bed in the family home, he fully expected his wife Emily to divorce him, and offered to make it easy for her. But he wasn’t divorced - how could he be if the essential story at the centre of the novel takes place between a Friday night and the following Wednesday?

There is also more than a suspicion that, with Gloria now dead - and Liggett’s reaction being pretty callous in that all he thinks about in the aftermath of her death is retrieving the mink coat to avoid being implicated in any way - he will not be divorced and that he and Emily will evntually continue in their conventional, by now dull, marriage and both will continue to enjoy the life of an ‘upper-class’ wealthy American as before (possible recriminations notwithstanding - after all she is well-aware that he has had several affairs).

It is these two errors, and your judgment of Gloria as just another ‘spoiled rich girl, pampered by her indulgent parents’ make me suspect that you simply haven’t understood the novel and, pertinently, its endless subtleties. (Another error: Gloria didn’t have parents, she had a mother and William Vandamm, her uncle, though undoubtedly they did indulge her pitilessly and she was pretty spoiled.)

You don’t seem to take on board that Gloria was not just another good-time girl out for what she could get, and that the key to the tragedy of her life and death - if tragedy is, under the circumstances not a tad hi’falutin - and her unbridled promiscuity and virtually alcoholic drinking is most probably because she was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 by Major Boam and, crucially, felt she was unable to tell anyone. She did not feel able to tell the black maid who was in the house at the time, partly because of the casual and rampant racism abroad at the time of which she was equally as guilty as her peers.

When she did bring herself to tell her mother and uncle, her mother dismissed the story out of hand and, although, he didn’t react as his sister did, Vandamm also let Gloria down. Far more seriously, she was later thoroughly corrupted at the age of 15 by Reddington, a man who was ostensibly a pillar of his community (a detail which he brutally used to brush off similar incidents with a young girl in his hometown).

Now, however, already disillusioned by the disbelief she encountered when she was first violated, she seems to enjoy the sex, the drinking, the sniffing ether and the year-long abuse by Reddington. But, of course, deep down she didn’t, and it was the cause of the despair to which she woke up every morning. She seems to have lost all hope and decided just to go for it. It’s as though if she doesn’t feel valued, she can see no reason to value the world.

O’Hara - in my view - doesn’t create as you put it ‘a stick figure, and a rather tedious one at that’. Quite the contrary: Gloria is intelligent, sensitive, alert, on the ball and witty and, even at 22, no one’s fool. And she is an appealing figure, although you don’t think so. You seem not to have been on her side. I was. She is far more attractive than the gallery of shallow, boozy young men who use her and who are her daily companions. And she is very aware that her life is going nowhere. At the end of the novel she has some kind of epiphany and realises life doesn’t have to be like the life she is leading, and O’Hara suggests that she might, just might, be turning a corner.

Yes, she is still young and immature and believes she ‘loves’ Liggett. But, I suggest, even she, deep down, knows that is nonsense and that the affair - if it can even be called an affair, consisting as it does of two nights of sex and a lot of drinking - will go nowhere. Her death is wholly ambiguous: was it an accident or did she jump off the boat?

The encounter on that boat with Liggett in his cramped cabin is nothing but a sordid and embarrasing interlude, and she knows it. All he wants is sex with her, despite his middle-aged fantasy about being in love with her. She, after the pleasant afternoon she had spent with her mother and her surprising realisation that a marriage and love can, perhaps, be good after all, wants more. She doesn’t sleep with Liggett. She leaves him. And when they are due to meet upstairs, she comes towards him, but then ‘turns’ away and runs off. Did she trip over the low railing? Or had she decided to end it all. The ending is by no means ‘shaky’ or one intended to add spice to an otherwise ‘meandering’ novel.

There is nothing ‘meandering’ about the novel. O’Hara was rigidly disciplined in his build-up, from the scenes in speakeasies where Gloria’s crowd are nothing but a bunch of well-off, but stupid and vacuous halfwits, to the portrayals of the empty relationships of the Liggett’s, the Farleys - the wife casually decides she wants an affair with the actor, but can’t even be resolute enough to go through with it - Jimmy Malloy and Isabel’s on-off relationship, and that between Eddie Brunner and Norma Day, where Eddie reconciles himself to marriage to a ‘safe’ woman for all the wrong reasons, are all small pieces of a jigsaw which O’Hara quietly but deftly puts in place to give the overall picture of what choices a girl like Gloria - a girl with a history of being demeaned and abused - thinks she has.

Perhaps the back stories of the characters make the reader - you, perhaps - think that the novel meanders, but in truth nothing O’Hara writes is superfluous however it might at first seem. And, again I have to say, in my view, the final sentence in the novel is perfect and sums up the whole corrupted, perverted morality of the time and age he is describing: ‘The Reddingtons always went to a hotel where the women guests were not permitted so smoke.’ So as long as the trivial niceties of ‘good’ society are observed - for example that women guests were not permitted to smoke - everyone can pretend all is well in the world even though it damn well most certainly is not and they damn well know it.

At first blush O’Hara’s portrayal of a small part of New York society on just six days in 1930 would seem to be something of a miniature. But it isn’t. What he writes about - hypocrisy and a selfish, callous disregard for others - is universal and most certainly not restricted by being ‘of its time’. And that hypocrisy is just as shocking now was it was then. And that is why O’Hara’s novel is a great novel.

I understand Butterfield 8, only his second novel, was the high-water mark of his writing career and although her wrote several more novels, none was quiet as good and reached its class. Well, as I haven’t read any other them (but I intend to do so) I can’t comment. But I do know that O’Hara is a great writer - his turn of phrase, his dialogue, his insight, his seemingly casual way of writing, the looseness of it, his ability to portray depth when none is apparent - prove it for me.

So, I disagree with you. Completely.

Why this ‘newspaperman’ is not in the slightest embarrassed not to be regarded as a ‘newspaperman’. Chuffed, in fact; or to put it another way: fuck deadlines, embrace discipline. Then there’s why John O’Hara deserves to be better known, at least as well as once he was

This entry needs (and will get) a rewrite.

Well, I’m doing the honourable thing, the thing that has to be done on any last day of a holiday in a ‘Med country’ and that is to sit outside a bar and watch the world go by. I happen to be sitting outside the Teyma (or perhaps Bar Teyma) in Albocasser, district of Valencia (thought the exact nomenclature eludes me and I’m really not anal enough to look up exactly what administrative part of Spain Albocasser (or Albacasser, Albacacer or any number of different spellings I’ve seen) is in.

It’s not quite as romantic as it might seem as, now the lunch/siesta period has finished (it’s now 17.45), and they really do shut down for most of the afternoon, though the weather is not extraorinarily hot, everyone and his truck/tractor /car/moped has come alive and decided to roar, quickly or slowly depending on the tractor/truck/car/moped up and down the main street where I am sitting. But, well, who bloody cares, because I don’t.

I am also on my own, but that is no reflection on my host. It’s just that as I have got older, I am beginning – well, not even beginning – to ensure a little time on my own and I couldn’t even tell you why. I just do. For a hack (though surely I have long made clear that as ‘newspapermen’ are concerned) I am the least likely candidate to get the long-service medal – ‘newspapermen’ are supposed to ‘care about news’, be ‘news hounds’, be ‘first with the news’, regard it as a ‘privilege and an honour’ to serve the Fourth Estate. If what passes for ‘news’ really is ‘news’ – Kim Kardashian is still shagging Kanye West, but he’s already losing interest (you can tell by how, publicly, he’s still ‘deeply in love’); the unions warning Ed Miliband that unless he toes the line, it’s curtains as far as dosh is concnerned; Mary Berry was a real goer when she was a lass, but the BBC is saying nought – I don’t five a flying fuck about news.

Yes, there is news, and there are very admirable reporters and hacks out there doing a very good and often very dangerous job. But they are a distinct minority. As for the rest of us, all this brave talk about ‘needing a deadline’ is just pap for the suckers: the deadline my employers care about is 10pm because just a minute over getting the stuff down to the printers costs hard cash, and that, my hearties gets a lot closer to the beating heart of journalism, past and present, than any amount of waffle about ‘getting the story’.

Let me elucidate: in the golden age of print journalism, before TV and radio and latterly the net, which last about 100 years from the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers had real rivals. Each city, whether in Britain, the US, or in Europe, had at least two evening newspapers and it was a cuthroat business. The amount of advertising cash being spent was limited so, just to survive, let alone make oddles of cash to keep the proprietor happy, each newspaper had to grab as much of that cash as possible. That meant asuruing the advertisers that 1) more people read your paper than read the opposition; and 2) making sure you got your paper out onto the street first to make sure more people read your paper than the opposition. And that was where this ‘be first with the story came from’. No one is going to buy the Evening Beast to read about what’s happened if they have already bought the Evening Brute and already know what’s happened (and the names aren’t my joke but Evelyn Waugh’s or at least a variation of it).

There were once, of course, times when ‘the governing classes’ were dead against newspapers getting even a sniff of what they were up to and passing it on to the hoi polloi. That’s why, here in Britain, they imposed a duty on each paper to ensure it was too expensive for the plebs (for that was how they were regarded) to buy. And that is why one copy of a newspaper would be read allowed to a group of people, in libraries and taverns: at least the cost could be carried by a group. That is also why one element of the ‘governing classes’ fought tooth and nail agains each and every Education Act, to ensure the great unwashed would never learn to read. (That was the same reason why the Roman Catholic church, often on pain of death, wanted only Latin copies of the Bible to be allowed and did not want it translated into any of the vulgar languages, vulgar not here meaing quite what you think it means.)

But on the Tweedledum and Tweedledee principle, another segment of the governing classes, although in no way more disposed to ensuring the well-being of the great unwashed than their opponents, supported each and every Education Act on the grounds that ‘the others’ were opposing it (except, sadly, it really wasn’t all that simple – there were good men on both sides, but don’t let that delay a chap in full rant).

So at one time part of what newspapers were printing was worthwhile – the decisions of government, the debates in the Commons – although even then it wasn’t half has hi’falutin as Newspaper Romantics would have you believe: years ago, I went for an interview for a reporter’s job on the Northampton Chronicle, which was already in those days based in some soulless industrial estate. While I was waiting to be shown in, I spotted, under a protective glass cover a copy of the paper from the end of the 18th century and read parts of it. I happened upon the classified ads and there I came across two things: a lonely hearts column and an ad for wasing powder, which – believe it or not – included a ‘blue whitener’. Pluc ca change . . .

Yes, newspapers had an important role in ensuring a beady eye was kept on the goings on in parliament and in our courts, but arguably it is no longer a role they fulfill. Other media outlets do so.

Some still do, of course, but there is always more than half an eye on what might make money. Even the saintly Guardian, as Private Eye repeatedly records, is not above acts of utter hypocrisy, decrying dictatorship and the rest on one page while further on graciously accepting a dictator’s shilling for carrying what are euphemistically called ‘advertorials’, but should be called ‘advertisements’. But let them all plough their own bloody furrow.

Any hacks reading this might well object that I’m an em rule short of a layout, but what they hell. To get to the point (if I remember it, which somehow I doubt), ‘newspapermen’ are supposed to relish deadlines. I don’t. I like to try to get things done and dusted long before the deadline is reached, which, if nothing else – and there is a lot else – means you can go over what you have written again and again and try to improve it.

To be frank, which is not the same as honest, that is sadly something I don’t do immediately in these blog entries and it doesn’t surprise me that quite often a reader might ask her or himself ‘what the bloody hell is he on about now?’ Once posted, I will look through an entry and correct the spelling howlers I spot, and, if necessary, try to rewrite a passage to make sure it makes more sense.

But as a rule I sit here, waffle and pointificate, then post. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t thought about what I am writing, and, for example, what I have written above I what I thought about for years, partially to explain to myself just why my journalistic ‘career’ has been about as outstanding as Eddie the Eagles in ski jumping. If I can leave you with one thought, it is this: when next you hear a hack, whether a retired old fart reminiscing about his or her career, or a young turk pumping up the PR volume and trying to make out what a keen blade she or he is banging on about ‘needing a deadline’, just remind yourselves that it is so much bollocks. They don’t ‘need a deadline’, they just need a lot more discipline.

. . .

I am now well over halfway through re-reading Butterfield 8 (see, I remembered), and it is well worth it. In a sense I am reading the story for the first time because I can now take in the slight details and no longer be stalled and snared by those bits which snared and stalled me the first time round. Re-reading a novel – re-reading a novel just as soon as you have got to the end – is something I have done several times now and I can recommend it, especially if you do so immediately you have finished the novel (or short story or novella) for the first time.

As I said earlier, I had seen the film starring Elizabeth Taylor several years ago, and although I liked it then, I now realise, despite Taylor’s Oscar, that it is no more, and possibly even less, than just another piece of Hollywood schlock. In it Taylor, in keeping with the utterly hypocritical morality of the time, dies at the end because she was when all was said and done, and in Hollywood terms, a bad girl. Not so the protagonist of O’Hara’s novel, Gloria Wandrous. I have read that O’Hara was an alcoholic who was not just difficult to get on with but ‘impossible’. Perhaps, but he is also a very honest writer. Wandrous shagged around, took drugs, drank the city dry and had even dabbled in lesbianism (shock horror!) and – apparently – stole a mink coat.

Yet she was by no means a ‘bad girl’. She had been sexually abused at 11, and then again, for a far long period at 15, and it destroyed her. She is a bright, intelligent, savvy and very likeable young woman and when she dies (in the wheels of a paddle steamer after falling overboard – and it is really not clear whether it was an accident or whether she turned and jumped overboard), it is the sad end to a young and sad life.

There are other likeable characters – Eddie Brunner, a true friend who most probably has fallen in love with her in the best possible sense, but who decides he will settle for a more conventional woman because, well, it is safer; and Jimmy Malloy, another character who is at heart honest and has no illusions about the city he lives in. But there are also some deeply hypocritical characters, Weston Liggett, who more or less rapes Gloria and thinks he has fallen in love with her. O’Hara is merciless in his portrayal of they hypocrisy of conventional morality, conventional marriage, conventional love, the unthinking and odious racism of the well-off – even Gloria is not immune to that – and the mad and manic drinking and spending culture of the post-1929 crash era.

And Christ he can write well. I have already said how much I admire the ‘looseness’ of his writing but which is not in the slightest bit ‘loose’ in any other sense. Here is a bit, by no means typical, of his prose. (I copied it out a few days ago to post here. To be fair the passage goes on much further, but I think it makes my point.

Check him out, possibly again. You will not be disappointed.

The excerpt (Emily is Liggett’s wife:

Liggett was not quite one of these men; Emily certainly was not one of these women. For one thing Liggett was a Pittsburgher and Emily a Bostonian. That was one thing, not two. Liggett was precisely the sort of person who, if he hadn’t married Emily, would be just the perfect person for Emily to snub. All her life she seemed to be saving up for one snub, which would have to be delivered to an upper-class American, since no foreigner and no lower-class American could possibly understand what she had that she felt entitled her to deliver a snub. What she had was a Colonial governor; an unbroken string of studious Harvard men; their women. Immediately and her own was, of course, the Winsor-Vincent Club-Sewing Circle background. She had a few family connections in New York, and they were unassailable socially; they never went out. It came as a surprise which he was a long time understanding for Liggett to learn, after he married Emily, that Emily had never stopped at a hotel in New York. She explained that the only possible reason you went to New York was to visit relations, and then you stopped with them, not at a hotel. Yes, that was true, he agreed – and never told the fun he had had as a kid, stopping at New York hotels; the time he released a roll of toilet paper upon Fifth Avenue, the time he climbed along the ledge from one window to another. He was a little afraid of her.

If I have time, I shall add the rest of this passage. It doesn’t quite stand as it is here.

Pound plummets, stocks plummet, economy in dire straights: why? Well, the Scots might well – perhaps - en masse tell Perfidious Albion to take a running jump

Las Albadas: Year three, fourth day.

Well into my week of doing nothing and caring even less about it. Nothing much to report, really, except that somewhere along the line I’ve been bitten several times – about nine or ten times – and have the marks to show it. Where the spider came from, and why it had it in for me I don’t know. I most certainly do not have a ‘thing about spiders’ (being afraid of them, rather than wanting to shag them, as is the other meaning of ‘having a thing for’), and had I seen the bloody spider and/or caught it in the act, it would have become acquainted with the full fury of a Powell bitten. But spiders are a long way from the Scots desire for independence from Perfidious Albion (or, at least, the desire of many Scots for independence – just how many there are, or rather just how many there are who can be bothered to leave the TV alone for the 15 minutes it takes to go along to the polling booth and cast their vote, will be revealed a week on Thursday.

I mention this for two reason: first writing about the Scottish independence referendum and, well, possible Scottish independence allows me once again to post the pic I came across several years ago of a Scottish bar stool. Here it is:

Scottish bar stool

The second reason is to register my bewilderment, experienced again today for the umpteenth time, at the behaviour of ‘the markets’, or more specifically ‘the financial markets’ and ‘the stock exchange.

I’m not a complete naif about the workings of the economy, the stock market and the rest of that goddam-awful shite, and, whisper it quietly, I even own a few shares, although these are part and parcel of my ‘pension plan’ (the inverted commas, as ever useful for making a point, are intended to convey what a pitiful ‘pension plan’ it is: with luck I shall be able to pay my yearly electricity bill and my weekly bus far to the local food bank.) But the stock market seems once again to prove the truth of a realisation most of us come to at some point in our lives, that however upright, bright, pleasant, rational and attractive folk are individually – or, of course, depending upon the individual, not – gather them into a group of more than, say, ten or twelve and they lose most of their rationality and most certainly the group as a whole begins to behave like a dumb shit.

A herd mentality takes over, and I know, because I once bought (but never read) a book about the herd mentality of the stock market, the group behaves like someone with an IQ in minus figures. So, for example, an opinion poll this morning revealed that, according to its research (i.e. the number of folk they questioned down the pub last night) more Scots want to become independent and leave the United Kingdom than want to stay and – well, there are better ways of putting it and I know that by putting it in this very crude way and am also betraying my own sympathies – carry on sucking the Westminster dick. And what happened: apparently ‘billions were knocked off the value of the pound’ and ‘stocks fell sharply’. But why, for God’s sake?

The standard answer is that ‘the market likes stability’. Well, don’t we all, but a bit of uncertainty over how many Scots will be bothered to tootle along to the polling booth and add their X to the choice to ‘Tell England To Fuck Off!, is surely nothing but a summer storm. Yes, there are dire predictions that ‘business will suffer’, but anyone taking the long view – which the herd never does – will know it will all blow over and be business as usual quite soon.

Then there’s the other curiosity: although this one poll signified that a majority of Scots want independence, ever other poll held at exactly the same time came to the opposite conclusion: that the number of Scots who want their nation to stay as a part of the United Kingdom (and as I so crudely put it above, carry on sucking Westminster’s dick) is still greater.

Admittedly, over the months and years that these polls have been held the Yes vote has been gaining ground and the No vote, conversely, losing it, but ask yourself: if just one poll of many predicts an overall Yes vote a week on Thursday (September 18 , to make things easy for the innumerate), is that really good enough reason to go into panic mind and junk the pound? (The point should also be made that opinion polls are questionable from about ten different directions, but apart from mentioning it, I shan’t pursue if further, because, well, I can’t think of anything facetious to say on that score, so dull are opinion polls. I mean, what would your reaction be if you asked a son or daughter ‘what do you want be when you grow up, sweetheart?’ and the replied with a toothsome lisp ‘I want to be an opinion pollster, daddy’.

But back to the lunatics and fuckwits who run our banks, the stock market and upon whose utterly irrational behaviour depends whether stocks rise or plummet. Like a great many, I was baffled by the stock exchange for many years, just as I was baffled by ‘banking’, ‘derivatives’, ‘futures’, ‘the national debt’ and the rest of it. Then, not so many years ago, and having served for many years in the bullshit industry, the penny dropped: it is all very, very simple, but the schtick to stop folk realising just how simple it all is is to use jargon. Thus ‘debt’ – and we all know what debt is – becomes ‘highly leveraged’.

In fact just two days ago I read, just by chance I have to admit, a letter in the most recent issue of The New Yorker from the head honcho at S&P Capital in response to a piece a John Lanchester had written about the impenetrable jargon employed by the financial world to confuse the hell out of the rest of us. Lanchester chastised our bankers, brokers and their camp followers for describing ‘debt’ as ‘credit’.

Yes, wrote the S&P head honcho patiently in reply, of course, he took Lanchester’s point, but, you see in a sense ‘debt’ was ‘credit’. And he is right: I you owe me money, you are in debt and I have a credit. But that does expand a great deal more the already vast amount of land covered by the notion of bloody disingenuousness. Is, in a sense, ‘evil’ really ‘good’? At this point the bankers, brokers and their camp followers will certainly be nodding to each other and muttering ‘well, the trouble is this Patrick Powell chap doesn’t understand the subtleties of finance and banking’.

To which I reply: on the contrary, this Patrick Powell chap and a growing number like him are beginning to understand only to well the ‘subtleties’ of finance and banking. And they are getting rather fed up with carrying the can for the implications of those ‘subtleties’. This all started with a headline I spotted in several papers about how ‘the pound has plunged’ because one poll suggested ‘wee Scotland’ might finally be getting terminally fucked off with being patronised by the chinless Herberts who hold the reins of power in the United Kingdom.

There are, of course, two issues at stake here: Scottish independence and the herd mentality of another set of chinless Herberts who mad and manic panic can affect the immediate future of the British economy. And much as I’d like to waffle on for some considerable time, I am informed that supper is ready.

. . .

A few hours later

It is still another nine days to the Scottish referendum and I think from the above it is pretty obvious where my sympathies lie. I also get the feeling the the No Together campaign, or whatever they are calling themselves today, is panicking as only bullies can panic when they realise their bluff has been called.

All their sudden promises for ‘more power’ if you stick with us strikes me as just the kind of crap a violent husband promises the wife he has been beating up for the past 15 years: ‘Sorry, love, I really, really do love you and I’ll never hit you again. Promise.’ Several hours later, after yet another imagined blow to his ego, he lashes out, and the good lady packs her bag for ever.

My solution, and one which doesn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of ever coming about, not least cos Ireland, Scotland and Wales don’t trust England one inch, would be a truly federal arrangement, one in which all four constituent parts of the UK are equal partners, and the Commons is reduced to something like 200 MPs, with 50 (or whatever is regarded as an equitable number) representing each federal partner. But, forget it, that ain’t never going to happen.

So, my best wishes, Scotland. It might blow up in your faces, and it might not. But at least you will be shot of the English and their insufferable patronising attitude.

. . .

Later still (in fact, the following day)

It has come to my notice that in an entry (at some point somewher, I know not where now. Shame, eh?) I said (I ‘opined’ for Will Self fans) that when all was said and done I believed Scotland would be better off in the Union. It would seem I have changed my tune, but actually I haven’t.

I still think, if these things are considered in pounds, shillings, pence and salmon, that Scotland would be better off remaining in the Union. But there come times when not everything can be reduced to its financial value. (In the same spirit I heartily dislike the current obsession that reduced education, both secondary and tertiary (‘university’ for Will Self fans), to ‘finding a role in the workplace’ or some other such utiliratian and utterly soulless guff.

We don’t educate our young to work and become the next generation of worker drones, we educate them to expand themselves and their minds and to make the best they can of themselves in whatever way they choose to. OK, so 110pc of use do end up as worker drones, but there is not good case I know of for making the process easy and assisting the grandgrindian tendency.

In praise of John O’Hara, an apparently forgotten American writer who could write the pants of many past and present

I think I’ve mentioned the American writer John O’Hara in this blog before, or perhaps I haven’t. But I am about to do so now.

I had never before heard of him until somewhere I saw praised a novel called Appointment In Samara. I don’t know where I saw it praised or even how long ago, but, as I do all too often, I was enthused to buy it, logged on Amazon (brickbats available at all good independent bookshop for that particular internet service) and bought myself a copy. It arrived and then I promptly forgot about it and it languished on my bookshelf for, well, I don’t know how long. If I could remember when I first heard of it, I could, of course, tell you. But I can’t.

Last July I made my, now habitual, trip to South-West France to stay with my aunt – strictly, my stepmother’s sister, but I am one of those who likes to extend family as far and as often as possible) to be her ‘walker’ on visits to the range of concerts held at that time of year in the Bordeaux area. And while I was packing, I looked around for two books to take with me. At the time I was re-reading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States (which I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone for a very lucid and very useful counterweight to the widespread notion of ‘the Free World’ and how we are all immensely lucky to be living in it, if, of course, we are, and which is, rather predictably hated and po-poed by neo-cons of every stripe) and packed that.

Then I went to my bookshelf and again came across Appointment In Samara, and that, too, went into my bag. As it was I didn’t even open the history book, but read, not quite at one sitting, but at several long sittings, Appointment. And it is very good indeed. I often protest, and not with false modesty, that I am not at all well-read. For a man of my pretensions I am, in fact, abysmally badly-read (I’m assuming that phrase, too, gets a hyphen if it’s cousin does). But I do have very definite ideas on who are good writers and they are not overly conventional. For example, and despite his lack of ‘serious subject matter’, as far as I am concerned the late Elmore Leonard was an exceptionally good American writer. What he could do with words and sentences, which is, after all, partly what ‘writing’ is about, is remarkable.

I realise, being by my own admission, not ‘well-read’, I am on thin ice in my comments, so please bear in mind that I am aware of it. So, for example, quite a few of the world’s most recent novelists writing in English whose work I have attempted to read did not strike me in the slightest as being anything out of the ordinary. Take Martin Amis: I tried him, didn’t get far and gave up. Perhaps , given the hoohah about him in the Eighties – and he was very much an Eighties writer now rather living off past glories (and a new set of teeth, I understand) – I should have persevered. But I didn’t and I take the view that a writer should somehow persuade you to persevere. Amis didn’t.

Then there is Mr Will Self (whose name I thought, when I first came across it, was intended to be some kind of post-ironic, post-modern gibe at modern narcissism, where ‘modern’ holds true of each and every age since the dawn of time, whereas, in fact, ‘Self’ really is his surname): he gave me the distinct impression that by his use of extremely unusual words he was mainly doing nothing but showing off. Look up each and every ‘big’ word he uses and most certainly it is being used appositely. But why not keep it simple? Why, apparently, try to remind folk that they aren’t quite as bright as you are, or, at least, you think you are? Null points for Mr Self (who has, though, unsurprisingly, carved out quite a lucrative existence for himself among the mediocracy, with regular spots on Radio 4, columns in The Observer and as what is sadly often called a ‘social commentator’.

As I am often referred to as ‘Honest Pat’, I do feel obliged to admit that when I have heard a ten-minute piece by Mr Self on Radio 4, I found myself almost always agreeing with him, his intellectually overwrought expression notwithstanding, and that admission comes, as you will most certainly believe, through very gritted teeth.

As for contemporary American writers, I am on even thinner ice. Radio 4 runs its Book At Bedtime programme throughout the week, and a recent book serialised was the most recent by Donna Tartt. Perhaps something is lost in the process of adaptation, but I could not help thinking: she’s a big noise in Yanke literary circles? Really? Why? If some of her good writing had survived the adaptation, she’s not, in my book at least, at all. Good. Then there’s this the apparently current U.S. preoccupation with writing the ‘big novel’, with the suggestion that if it doesn’t come in at at least 600 pages, it’s crap. But let me repeat, there could be – and most probably is, given what I am about to write about John O’Hara – a greats deal I am missing.

. . .

All of the above notwithstanding, quite some time ago I became aware of what I regard as a virtue of ‘American writing’ which does not seem to be shared by British writers. I can, offhand, not think of any other way of putting it but to describe their writing as ‘looser’, and I really do not mean that in any derogatory sense. They seem less contrained, more fluid and fluent. But having said that and given my admission – it’s Honest Pat, remember – I shall say no more, because all I have to go on is the pitiful amount I have so far read. We, or at least, most of us have heard of Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Roth and the other one, whose name I can’t remember. So why does no one, it would seem, talk about O’Hara any more?

After reading Appointment In Samara and after finding out that a great many – around 400 – of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker (more gnashing of teeth by the neo-cons I should imagine, but let’s let that go for now), I bought a volume of his ‘New York’ short stories and very much like those I then read. And I also bought a copy of his second novel Butterfield 8 (Butterfield 8, if you’re a purist).

I finished reading it today and then did what I have previously done with other novels: I immediately started reading it again from the beginning and found that it was even better. I think that stems from the fact that once you have read a novel (and for me reading a novel is as much about ‘the writing’ as it is about anything else) you are more acquainted with it and can savour and appreciate aspects of it which earlier, at the first reading, were not quite as apparent. In the case of Butterfield 8 (OK, you purists Butterfield 8), the dialogue became livelier, in a sense more natural and, although very good at first reading, even better.

I gather O’Hara was respected for his naturalistic dialogue. But once you have read a novel, you – if it is a good novel, which Butterfield 8 is (and I’ll now dispense with the joke about purists) – you know the ‘shape’ and have an overview. Before you read it, you didn’t have that.

Reading O’Hara took a little getting used to. As a Brit and as a Brit who earns his daily crust working as a sub-editor (U.S. copy editor) I am sadly inclined to try to say what has to be said most effectively in the fewest number of words. (The ‘fewest number of words’ is a result of words costing money. That’s why all too often the ‘thats’ are removed from a piece because although they might be useful they are often not really necessary.) Then there’s what non-Brits might regard as Brit tight-aresedness (which is one way of putting it) .

For better or worse we are rather more rigid than non-Brits, often in our writing, hence my admiration for American writers who are good but ‘looser’. So when I first began reading O’Hara’s Appointment In Samara, I would be pulled up short by what might be regarded as oddities in his prose. But this was just a result of my training. Writers can, well all is said and done, write just how they want to, grammar or no grammar: what is important is the end result, not obeying what are at the end of the day merely conventional rulse.

For example, for us sub-editors it is something of a no-no to use the same word twice in the same sentence and we’ll strive to find an alterantive. For a writer, on the other hand, using that same word not just twice but three, four or five times, or however often she or he wants to might well be making a certain point. It’s often puzzled me that we will listen to pieces of music again and again and again, very often in the case of pop songs but also some jazz, rather more rarely with classical pieces, but watching a film again or reading a novel again, as soon as we have seen the film or read the novel, is regarded as, well, rather odd. People ask: why do you want to read it again? You’ve only just read it. Well, above is my answer: the first time is to get to know the novel – and surely to goodness most of us can agree that a novel is more than ‘the story’ – you can now really read it.

Years ago, when I was still at school and a spotty adolescent growing up, I had just one classical LP (older folk will know what that is, younger folk must be told it was the precursor of CDs). It was a recording, by whom I really can’t remember, of Mozart’s 40th and 41st symphonies. And I listened to it again and again and again. So now when I listen to it, I am at the point where I know what this passage is leading to.

There are other pieces and other books which I know as well. My favourite author is Evelyn Waugh, and although I haven’t read all his work (the short stories are very poor) I have read all his novels many times, and each time I get that same feeling of expecation: this bit is just so good. Has no one reading this never read a paragraph again because it is simply so well written. Well, I have, and reading novels again – or watching a film again or listening to a particular recording of a piece of music again, whether pop, jazz or classical – holds the same pleasure.

. . .

I first heard of Butterfield 8 as the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey. Ironically Taylor won her first Oscar for her role even though she hated the film. I saw it a few years ago and thought it was so-so. I have now read the novel on which it was – very loosely – based and although I am fully aware of the dyspeptic pseudo morality Hollywood had made its own since the Hays Act, think the film is – by comparison – abysmal.

Furthermore O’Hara’s Butterfield 8 is crying out to be made into a film again, if for no other reason that the corruped morality and the perverted notions of marriage and family it describes are as prevalent today. In many other ways a new version would be a very different film and I suspect could only be made by an independet filmmaker. And if you don’t understand any of that, read the book and I’m sure you would then agree with me.

A first dispatch . . . (with some pictures)

Las Albadas: Year Three, second day.

Pleasant as always. I was a tad indiscrete (or ‘indiscreet’ – subs please check as at this point I can’t be arsed) in my dispatches from this neck of the Spanish woods last year (or so I’m told), so I shall try for a little more discretion this time round: no names, no pack drill.

Arrived on Thursday, after stopping of at a bar in La Pobla Tornessa and when I discovered it now had wifi for free, gratis and without paying, ‘did the puzzles’ there and then and got them out of the way to make way for a hassle-free seven days (i.e. no scurrying around among my host’s friends and acquaintances as to who has wifi and would it be OK if I came along a did a bit of the work I am obliged to do come rain or shine, work or play). Arrived at just after 6pm and after a few gins it was off up into the hills for a barbecue with a friend of my host’s from when he lived in Cornwall and, would you believe it, the husband of one of the teaching assistant’s at the primary school my daughter and son attended in St Maby. It’s a small cliché, eh? It was a very tasty barbecue, and I enjoyed it immensely even though I must have eaten more meat than I usually do in three years. But what the hell.

Yesterday involved a shopping expedition to Castello or Castell0 – which spelling you subscribe to depends upon whether you are a native of the region of Valencia – to stock up an Heiniken, Larios gin, tonic and lemons, as well as one or two other essentials (including for me, English teabags: I was pleased to find among all the many brands used to prepare the panther piss which is passed off for tea almost everywhere in the world except Old Blighty, on offer was also PG Tips and Tetley teabags of which the Tetley was, at 80 for €3.80, was by far the best value. Brits thinking of heading abroad please note).

After that it was do nothing in the run-up to doing even less (in no particular order) which is my sort of holiday. I’m not really one for marching around museums and visiting other cultural artifacts. Some are, I’m not, and nor am I one for acknowledging any timetable of any description when on holiday. What is the point? Today it was a light lunch at one of the very many restaurants geared up for feeding local Spaniards their lunch. The Spaniards, it seems, are great ones for eating out and don’t need an occasion to do so. I have also been amusing myself taking various photos, of which here is a selection of four. And if you can’t see them, that means my phon is playing up and I cannot transfer them from it to my laptop.

Incidentally: how come this guy can post a blog entry with out wifi? you are surely asking yourselves. Simple really: wifi really is necessary to log onto my computer in London to do all the work, but for reading emails etc, I can use the 3G facility on my phone. It is by no means cheap - £3 for 100Mb (used up in a few secons) and then you pay through the nose – I can write this offline, then post it. And who said I wasn’t immensely clever? Hm

 

Those who are familiar with my host's work will recognise his trademark logo on the wall of his workshop here in Spain