Log24

Two More Skewed Mirrors

Background: Previous three entries and
The Crucifixion of John O’Hara.

1. From The New Yorker,
   issue dated Sept. 22, 2003…

   John Updike on John O’Hara —

   And yet the ultimate units of society, the human individuals lost within the crushing agglomeration of hostility, rivalry, snobbery, exclusion, and defeat that O’Hara felt in his bones, have aspirations and hopes and passions, and can be regarded with tenderness by a writer whose bleak and swift style seems at first not to care. A small story from “Files on Parade” (1939) titled “By Way of Yonkers” sticks in my mind as especially moving. Its two principals, the young woman unnamed and the man named only in the last sentence, exist on the lower levels of Depression survival. She, with her gunmetal stockings and Cossack hat and “neat, short nose with jigsaw nostrils,” seems to be a hooker. She arrives at the man’s shabby apartment so late that he tells her she must have come by way of Yonkers, and when he asks “How’d you do?” of the engagement that delayed her she not quite evades the question:

   “Oh—” she said it very high. Then: “All right. Financially. But do we have to talk about it? You and me?”

   She talks instead about her fading appetite for liquor, and the expense of dental care. He, lying inert and fully dressed on his bed, talks of being broke, of not wanting to take money from her, of how he can’t seem “to make a connection in this town.” The town is New York, and he is a minor gangster thrown out of work by the repeal of Prohibition. But he has met a man who offered him a connection in Milwaukee, and he is going to go there for a long time. The concluding words are unspectacular and unexpectedly sweeping:

   [She asks,] “Any chance you being back in town soon?”
   “Well, not right away, honey. First I have to build up my connection again.”
   “Well, I don’t have to tell you, I’m glad for you. It’s about time you got a good break.” She resumed rubbing his ankle. He put his hand on the top of her head.
   “Yeah? You’re as good a break as I ever got.”
   “Ah, Christ, Bill,” she said, and fell face down in tears.

   One is moved not only by their plight of presumably eternal separation but by the dignity that O’Hara, in a literary time of programmatic pro-proletarian advocacy (Odets and Steinbeck and Mike Gold), instinctively brings to his two specimens of lowlife. He does not view them politically, from above; he is there in the room with them, and one is moved by the unspoken presence of an author so knowing, so unjudgmental, so nearly an outcast himself.

2. Johnny Cash singing “Hurt” —
   
   The video can be seen here.

Ah, Christ, Johnny.