I should preface this by saying I promised John a column on Dollhouse, and am instead handing him one about John O’Hara. Joke’s on him, I guess.
Regardless, I picked a shabby O’Hara paperback--Sermons and Soda-Water, to be exact--off my shelf the other day. You see, I have a great many books and DVDs and comics lying around my shelves that I haven’t read yet, so every now and then I decide it’s time to take one of them, dust it off, and crack it open. Leafing through this particularly-ragged paperback (that, evidently, I purchased for fifty cents at some point in time I’ve since forgotten), I liked the synopsis for the second story it contained, “Imagine Kissing Pete,” quite a bit.
THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG MAN WHO DISCOVERED SEX BELATEDLY, AND THE HISTORY OF THE GIRL WHO MARRIED HIM ON THE REBOUND. OF LUST AND LOVE, OF ECSTASY AND TRAGEDY AND TEDIUM… BUT ALWAYS WITH AN EYE FOR THE TRUTH
declares the pull-quote from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (And yes, the quote really is in all caps, which I found amusing.) Now, who wouldn’t love to read that story?
I’ve been working on a screenplay that examines a number of broken relationships--a preoccupation of mine that’s been recently energized by my parents’ impending divorce--and though, hell, this sounds just the thing to keep me in the right head space to continue writing what I’m writing.
Then a funny thing happened halfway through the sixty-page story, and “Imagine Kissing Pete” went from simply being fuel for my own creative fires to the subject of an "Episodic Life" column. I’ve only ever read one other thing by O’Hara, his first novel, Appointment in Samarra. It’s about a man in a small town, marriage on the rocks (are we sensing a pattern here?), who ends up killing himself.
I don’t remember much about the book, except for some detail about him getting a drink splashed in his face or throwing a drink at someone else at a big country club party, and that he chooses to kill himself by leaving the car running in the garage. And the fact that the novel, ostensibly about this man--Julian English--doesn’t end with his suicide.
“Our story never ends,” O’Hara writes at the beginning of the tenth and final chapter, immediately following Julian’s suicide.
You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded. That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated. It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents. It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others. Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot. Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or in a rabbit’s foot. Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him....
I loved that passage when I first read it back in--oh, I don’t know, it must have been the summer of ’04--and I love it even more now. It’s an incredibly statement for a novel, a discrete, wholly contained unit of narrative, to make. O’Hara wrote this back in ’34, and here he’s drawing attention to the ways in which the actions of his protagonist ripple out to effect every other character we’ve met in the book. I can’t really think of many novels from that far back that are so aware of this fact. Of course, you can also read the metaphorical grenade up above as Julian’s suicide or as the novel itself, being lobbed into your own life, and when you take that reading on… well, O’Hara had an understanding of literature that was ahead of his time, especially considering the dominant New Critical paradigm at that moment.
But hey, what the fuck does this have to do with “Imagine Kissing Pete?” Well, the story takes place in a small town called Gibbsville, for one. And halfway through, its narrator, Jim Malloy, attends a large party at a country club. And afterwards, a friend of Malloy’s tries to tell him a story about a mutual acquaintance of theirs getting a drink splashed in his face. And none of this was really ringing any bells--like I say, it had been close to six years since I read Appointment, and my memory’s for shit in the best of circumstances--but then this paragraph cleared all the cobwebs off my addled brain:
I had to go back to New York on the morning train and the events of the next few days, so far as they concerned Joe and Phyllis Whipple and Frank and Mary Lander, were obscured by the suicide, a day or two later, of Julian English, the man who had thrown a drink at Harry Reilly. The domestic crisis of the Whipples and the Landers and even the McCreas seemed very unimportant. And yet when I heard about English, who had not been getting along with his wife, I wondered about my own friends, people my own age but not so very much younger than Julian and Caroline English.... He had not been a friend of mine, only an acquaintance with whom I had had many drinks and played some golf; but friends of mine, my closest friends in the world, boys-now-men like myself, were at the beginning of the same kind of life and doing the same kind of thing that for Julian English ended in a sealed-up garage with a motor running. I hated what I thought those next few days and weeks. There is nothing young about killing oneself, no matter when it happens, and I hated this being deprived of the sweetness of youth. And that was what it was, that was what was happening to us. I, and I think the others, had looked upon our squabbles as unpleasant incidents but belonging to our youth. Now they were plainly recognizable as symptoms of life without youth, without youth’s excuses or youth’s recoverability.
O’Hara wrote “Pete” in 1960 for the New Yorker. Twenty-six years after Julian’s suicide in Appointment, we’re still seeing the reverberations of that grenade. O’Hara weaves the suicide into the very fabric of Jim Malloy’s story, making it an integral part of the story. In “Pete,” we get to follow a set of characters from roughly the time-period in which Julian killed himself through the subsequent decades. In Appointment, O’Hara is able to follow up on the direct effects of Julian’s suicide, but “Pete” allows him to blow the scope out even further.
What O’Hara does here is offer us up something more than the simple narrative in which we understand that people are understood differently by different people, that a person’s actions can mean one thing to someone and another to someone else. It’s also about Julian’s role in a fictional sense. The character is not only seen differently in other people’s perspectives, he’s seen in different lights on a textual level. In Appointment, he’s a character; in “Pete,” he’s a symbolic figure. Each text perceives him in a different way.
And now for your musical interlude: Go here and listen to Solid Gold’s cover of Danger Zone. It’s kind of amazing. Especially if, like me, you spent a good chunk of your adolescence listening to the Top Gun soundtrack on repeat.
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