Word: hara
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LOCKWOOD CONCERN by John O'Hara. 407 pages. Random House...
Since the deaths of Faulkner and Hemingway, John O'Hara is unquestionably the most famous of living American novelists. Yet he is notoriously discontented with this grudgingly conceded eminence; he is given to complaints that he never won the highbrow vote or the Nobel Prize. And critics who find his work unsatisfactory put him into a considerable swivet...
However, there is evidence that O'Hara shares the critics' dissatisfaction with his creatures-a circumstance that may explain his touchiness. At all events, in his latest novel O'Hara may again be seen at work like a frustrated Pygmalion, infuriated because the being he has articulated with such skill and wired for authentic speech is somehow, after all, not quite human...
Fired all the Same. O'Hara had some special ink for the men who canceled him. "When syndication is involved," he wrote in his final column, "a bush-league editor likes to king it on his remote little throne. His paper may be paying something like $15 a week for a column, but the editor can play big shot by 'firing' a writer he has never met, is not likely to meet, and never should meet. The editor has convinced himself that he, like my movie producer, can bang out as good a column...
...telephone pad." To illustrate a friend's poem in 1948, he made his most haunting "doodle": three powerful vertical bars with three hard-pressed black ovoid forms caught between each. They could have been prisoners trapped behind bars or, as Modern Museum Curator Frank O'Hara suggests, "bulls' tails and testicles hung side by side on the wall of the arena after the fight." Motherwell titled it Elegy to the Spanish Republic, and has obsessively used the visual metaphor 102 times in the intervening 17 years, even adapting it to the Irish Rebellion, until it has become...