Ever since he burst onto the scene in 1934 at the age of 29 with his dazzling first novel, "Appointment in Samarra," appreciating John O'Hara has been a complicated matter.
For one thing, he wrote so much in the 3 1/2 decades between his debut and his death in 1970 -- thousands of pages -- that it was difficult to separate the good work from the bad or indifferent. For another, there seemed to be two O'Haras in one career: the bestselling novelist who turned out sprawling (some said bloated) epics that spanned generations, and the short-story and novella writer of dream-sharp tales, as crisp yet as dense as a film shot by James Wong Howe. And then there was O'Hara himself: a combative man; a belligerent, violent drunk; a burner of bridges; his own worst enemy; a man who coveted honors and complained when he didn't get them (and even when he did). Outliving his contemporaries, he outlived his own artistic context. In his final years, he was a political conservative in a time of protest, a relic of the raccoon-coat era in the age of Woodstock.
In "The Art of Burning Bridges," Geoffrey Wolff, a novelist and author of the highly regarded biography "Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby" and the memoir "The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father," has separated the various perceptions, beliefs, myths and lies surrounding O'Hara and put them together again in a cohesive account.
"My aim," writes Wolff, "is ... to restore to John O'Hara's complicated history those human and occupational particulars that make him a writer worthy of attention." With its "human and occupational particulars," Wolff's biography sets for itself an O'Hara-esque goal, and Wolff, director of the graduate fiction program at UC Irvine, meets it with a brilliance worthy of its subject on the best day of his best year.
Wolff makes clear from the start that he can't do everything. "The problem for a biographer with no direct experience of the young John O'Hara," he writes, "is the necessity of leaving unexplained the major mystery of his personality; namely, why so many men and women found it pleasing to be in his company." Partly, Wolff guesses, O'Hara's regrettable behavior was characteristic of those hard-drinking times, a period when "falling down drunk was a cause of mirth, and a bad story told well on oneself was a reputation-enhancer."
