Word: haras
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...made vivid. "I took for granted that you'd be going to the funeral. I just took it for granted," Mrs. Ambrie explains. Her husband accepts this, saying "I suppose the same way people took for granted that Jack Hill (the deceased) was a friend of mine." But O'Hara leaves it to the couple's daughter, who had had an affair with the deceased, to utter the most depressing line of all: "Maybe now I can marry Joe and settle down in (suburban) Greenport and be what I always wanted...
Excerpted, O'Hara dialogue seems melodramatic, but in his stories it reads smoothly. Over the years O'Hara's ear for dialogue has become something of a legend, as critics never tire of reminding us. Yet he did not come by this talent easily: he worked at it as a young journalist. Fox example, in 1929 he got a New Yorker assignment to report the meetings of the Orange County Afternoon Delphian Society. As Walcott Gibbs reflected in 1938, after a while the stories became almost impossible to read, "the sensation was uncomfortably like being trapped among the ladies while...
...good ear is only one of several talents which critics generally concede to O'Hara. Another is a good eye. Lionel Trilling has pointed out that "he knows, and persuades us to believe, that life's deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn...
...Hara's fiction does not glorify American life, it satirizes it. The accuracy with which he describes our way of life in The Cape Cod Lighter is matched by the poignancy with which he mocks it. In "The Bucket of Blood" Jay Detweiler runs a small bar, and has an affair with a local prostitute. Finally he ends the romance when she wants to hustle in his joint, even if it means marrying him. "He was sorry to break off with Jenny, and amidst his regret was deep appreciation of the compliment to himself and to her business...
Cynical as he is, O'Hara believes in some kind of salvation. His solution, like his criticism, is neither new nor profound, but it is handled with extra-ordinary skill. For O'Hara, salvation comes through brotherhood, through man's deep love of man. Where people's hearts and lives connect, there is freedom and meaning...