BUtterfield 8

PENGUIN
 
CLASSICS

BUTTERFIELD 8

JOHN O
’HARA
(1905–1970) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote seventeen novels, including
Appointment in Samarra
, his first,
BUtterfield 8
, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, and
Ten North Frederick,
which won the National Book Award, and he had more stories published in
The
New Yorker
than anyone else in the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, he lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died.

LORIN STEIN
is the editor of
The Paris Review.

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First published in the United States of America by Harcourt, Brace and Company 1935

This edition with an introduction by Lorin Stein published in Penguin Books 2013

Copyright John O’Hara, 1935

Copyright renewed John O’Hara, 1962

Introduction copyright © Lorin Stein, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

ISBN 978-1-101-60296-6

“To me, O’Hara is the real Fitzgerald.”

—FRAN LEBOWITZ,
THE PARIS REVIEW
, 1993

Born in 1905 in Pennsylvania coal country, the son of a small-town doctor, John O’Hara leapt to prominence with his first novel,
Appointment in Samarra
(1934), about the downfall of a car dealer in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pa. With his second novel,
BUtterfield 8
(1935), O’Hara turned his sights on Manhattan and produced one of the great novels of New York in the Depression. For the next three decades, his fiction shuttled back and forth between Gibbsville and New York. Many of his short stories have stood the test of time, but as a novelist he never surpassed his first efforts. His novels of the mid-thirties are his classics, and they deserve to be much more famous than they are.

According to Fran Lebowitz, O’Hara is underrated “because every single person who knew him hated him.” This is an exaggeration, as O’Hara’s biographers (most notably Geoffrey Wolff) have shown, but he could be unpleasant, and his personality sometimes overshadowed his genius. When he was drinking (roughly, from 1919 to 1954), he was notorious for picking fights with whoever had the bad luck to be standing at the other end of a bar. Sobriety curbed his temper, but not his violent yearning for recognition or his self-punishing snobbery. In later life, O’Hara still cadged matchbooks from clubs that wouldn’t have him as a member, and he demanded from his publishers not just high advances but also gifts and lunches at the Ritz. He was addicted to the tokens of success. O’Hara spent particular energy lobbying Yale for an honorary degree, in vain: as then president Kingman Brewster explained, “He wanted it too much.”

Yale comes up a lot in
BUtterfield 8
and in much of O’Hara’s later fiction. It was a sort of obsession of his. (Ernest Hemingway once took up a collection “to send O’Hara to New Haven”: O’Hara was in his thirties at the time.) To his lasting chagrin, he never attended college. When he was still in high school, his father died suddenly, leaving the family penniless. From the time he was a teenager, O’Hara supported himself with his typewriter, first as a reporter in Pennsylvania, then in New York, later by writing fiction. Over the years he published 247 stories in
The New Yorker
(still a record) and a string of best sellers, but he never got over the change in his family’s fortunes, for the O’Haras had lived well when he was a boy, and he never stopped feeling locked out of the upper class. He was morbidly conscious of being Irish American. As his alter ego in
BUtterfield 8
,
the beat reporter Jimmy Malloy explains to the debutante Isabel Stannard: “I am a Mick. I wear Brooks clothes and I don’t eat salad with a spoon and I could probably play five-goal polo in two years, but I am a Mick. Still a Mick . . . The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people.” For O’Hara, this was an ultimate condemnation, both of the unobserving people and of himself.

No one could call O’Hara unobserving. On the topics of class, sex, and alcohol—that is, the topics that mattered to him—his novels amount to a secret history of American life. So do his stories. O’Hara may not have been the best story writer of the twentieth century, but he is the most addictive. You can binge on his collections the way some people binge on
Mad Men
, and for some of the same reasons. O’Hara is always recording surface stuff: the make of the car, the shirt label, the record on the phonograph, all the little signifiers that grown-ups are not supposed to care about, and do. Paradoxically, this gives the effect of depth. Reading O’Hara, you suddenly understand your grandfather’s watch fob so deeply, so completely, that your grandfather would find it embarrassing. At least this has been my experience, though “embarrassing” is not the word my grandfather would have used. He’d have said O’Hara was tacky, and he’d have been right. O’Hara’s tackiness is his great advantage over more respectable writers of his time.

Take Hemingway and the famous first two sentences of
The Sun Also Rises
: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” That, according to the Hemingway code, is how men are supposed to think about their inferiors—about Jews, the Irish, nouveaux riches, about wannabes in general. If you’re a Hemingway narrator, you show that you know what’s what, then you move on. Class dismissed. O’Hara is touchier than this. He can’t help it. He feels for—feels
with
—the Cohns of the world. In
BUtterfield 8
, a Jewish movie executive named Kahan is taken to lunch at the club of his architect, a gentile named Farley. In the locker room, Kahan bumps into an old college classmate, Weston Liggett. The moment is awkward. “He didn’t know me,” Kahan explains to Farley afterward, “but I knew him right away”:

“I didn’t know you went to Yale,” said Farley.

“I know. I never talk about it,” said Kahan. “Then once in a while I see somebody like Liggett, one of the big Skull and Bones fellows he was, and one day I met old Doctor Hadley on the street and I introduced myself to him. I can’t help it. I think what a waste of time, four years at that place, me a little Heeb from Hartford, but last November I had to be in Hollywood when the Yale-Harvard game was played, and God damn it if I don’t have a special wire with the play by play. The radio wasn’t good enough for me. I had to have the play by play. Yes, I’m a Yale man.”

In O’Hara’s books, everyone’s a wannabe someone. We soon discover that the “big Skull and Bones fellow” is cowed by his Brahmin wife (“Liggett was precisely the sort of person who, if he hadn’t married Emily, would be just the perfect person for Emily to snub”), just as the Mick reporter is cowed by his deb. Liggett has affairs to even the score; Jimmy talks tough. At one point, swaggering in front of Isabel, he refers to a “swell” black maid who did him a kindness as a “nigger woman.” Interestingly, Isabel checks him: “I should think she was swell enough for you to call her a colored woman instead of a nigger.” To the best of my recollection, no Hemingway character is ever called out for casually asserting white male privilege. In Hemingway’s fiction everyone who matters—author, protagonist, reader—is politely assumed to be a member, or at least a tributary, of the club. For O’Hara, privilege is rooted in bigotry, and he’s tacky enough to say so.

This demystifying attitude—this realism in matters of class—sets O’Hara apart from his great hero and fellow Irish American, F. Scott Fitzgerald. If O’Hara had written a Gatsby, or Wolfsheim, it would be from the inside, not through the innocent WASP eyes of Nick Carraway. We’d know exactly where the money came from and how it got laundered. With O’Hara there’s no Vaseline on the lens. If he had written
The Great Gatsby
, we’d see Gatsby and Daisy sharing a cigarette in bed.

For O’Hara is equally indecorous when it comes to his characters’ sex lives. According to Charles McGrath,
Appointment in Samarra
“is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple . . . having sex and on Christmas morning, no less.” Along the same lines,
BUtterfield 8
may be the only American novel whose heroine masturbates two pages in, not for the reader’s titillation, but just because she is a human being and it’s something we humans do.

This heroine, Gloria Wandrous, is one of O’Hara’s true originals: a young woman endowed with beauty, a strong libido, and large sexual experience, who is neither a pornographic fantasy nor a femme fatale. To put it simplistically, Gloria is a sexual subject, not an object. Over the course of
BUtterfield 8
, we hear about threesomes, orgies, “Lesbians,” “fairies,” consensual rough sex, brutal sadism, abortions, even the new technique of artificial insemination—all from her point of view. Even more striking, we see Gloria in a close, erotically charged friendship with a man, Eddie Brunner, who loves her and is not her lover. Theirs is not the only such friendship in American fiction, but it is one of many touches that make the novel seem uncannily up-to-date, much more up-to-date than the “modernized” 1960 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor.

In the movie, Gloria is a call girl who wants to “go straight” and get married. But the Gloria of O’Hara’s novel is, crucially, not a prostitute, and she considers the prospect of marriage with deep ambivalence. Based on a real-life acquaintance of O’Hara’s named Starr Faithfull, Gloria is a creature of the great sexual revolution of the twentieth century—the one that occurred in the twenties, thanks to cars and speakeasies. To read O’Hara is to discover how much more people used to say and do, in private, than most novelists, even daring ones, could bring themselves to write. The publishers of
BUtterfield 8
made O’Hara remove the word “fuck” from his manuscript (they seem to have replaced it with the phrase “stay with”). Even so, even now, you could hardly place the book on a high school syllabus. O’Hara is forthright even on the subject of child molestation. This belongs to the plot of the novel: suffice it to say that O’Hara conveys the horror of sex abuse precisely because he honestly observes the sexuality of the child and of the adults around her. That kind of honesty is still rare today.

O’Hara is just as honest about alcohol. The nightlife he depicts in
BUtterfield 8
is a chaos of fistfights, infidelities, and one-night stands. Not coincidentally nearly all the main characters have what we would call a drinking problem. Either, like Gloria’s friend Eddie, they are temporarily on the wagon (as O’Hara was for the few months it took him to write the book) or else, like Gloria, they live on a treadmill from hangover to hangover, punctuated by nights of oblivion. After he quit drinking, O’Hara blamed Prohibition as much as the Depression for turning his generation into “the losing, not the lost, generation.” In his mind, Prohibition created a culture of reckless drinking, and his alcoholics are not tragic heroes—Hemingway’s shell-shocked stoics or Fitzgerald’s “beautiful and damned.” They’re just ordinary, bourgeois, for whom hangover cures and cocktail recipes are the safest possible topics of conversation. Here, too, O’Hara offers the pleasures of a social historian. What other novelist would explain the origins of the Bloody Mary as an emetic? “A trip to the bathroom and the worst of this kind of hangover was gone.”

To his contemporaries, the single greatest pleasure afforded by O’Hara’s work—at least the one they noticed most often—was his dialogue. He has had brilliant imitators, most notably Raymond Carver (a debt first pointed out to me by my college advisor, John Hollander), but his musical repetitions and his love of the vernacular, the way he gets you to enjoy the phatic fuzz of American talk—these have never been surpassed. Take these three voices from
BUtterfield 8
, each distinct, each with a comedy and selfhood of its own:

“We only quarrel, if you’ll look back on it, we only quarrel for one reason, really, and that’s the way you talk to me.”

“Squop chicken? I never get enough to eat when I eat squop chicken. I told you that when we sat down. You gotta give me that. I told you when we sat down, I said frankly I said this is not my idea of a meal, squop chicken. I’m a big eater. Were you in the Army, Mr. Liggett?”

“Ever since I’ve known you,” she said, very loud, “you’ve asked me nothing but questions.”

Compared to this, Hemingway’s characters sound button-lipped, like deponents in front of a stenographer. O’Hara’s conjure up actual people in a bar.

On O’Hara’s gravestone it is written: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional.” O’Hara came up with the epitaph himself. The claim is debatable (and tacky), but it’s useful when reading
BUtterfield 8
to bear that ambition in mind, for O’Hara always had it. The phrase “BUtterfield 8” denotes a telephone exchange on the Upper East Side, where the action begins; it also signals that the action will be up-to-the-minute: the “8” was a new addition as of December 1930. In other words, the title announces that this is a New York novel set in the immediate aftermath of the crash. In the story of this party girl and her circle, O’Hara means to capture the zeitgeist.

Now and then O’Hara interrupts the narrative with a newsreel montage, in the manner of John Dos Passos:

On Monday afternoon an unidentified man jumped in front of a New Lots express in the Fourteenth Street subway station. Mr. Hoover was on time for the usual meeting of his Cabinet. Robert McDermott, a student at Fordham University, was complimented for his talk on the Blessed Virgin at the morning exercises in her honor. A woman named Plotkin, living in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, decided to leave her husband for good and all. . . .

These
faits divers
foreshadow the very end of the book. I won’t give it away, except to say that probably no one has ever loved it—and to suggest that a shaky ending is sometimes the price a novelist has to pay for having, indeed, told the truth about his or her time. Although Eddie daydreams that he and Gloria might get engaged and rival the tragic loves in
This Side of Paradise
or
A Farewell to Arms
, she is too complexly alive, too sexual, too alcoholic, too intelligent, too hopeful, too much her own person not to be mangled by the demands of the marriage plot. At least, that is how I read the last few pages of the novel, as an admission of O’Hara’s glorious defeat by Gloria Wandrous: a defeat—and triumph—of which any professional would be proud.

LORIN STEIN