The Man for the Job

THE CAPE COD LIGHTER (425 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($5.95).

Among the many shortcomings of literary life in the U.S. is its lack of a mean old man. There are plenty of lovable old men--Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller--but no old curmudgeon who clubs young reporters with a tongue like a blackthorn stick and sends them scurrying back to their editors filled with terror and fine quotes. It is a grievous lack. Almost every other part of U.S. society has had such a man: the House of Representatives had its Uncle Joe Cannon, the tobacco industry its George Washington Hill, labor its John L. Lewis and baseball its Ted Williams.

Fortunately the vacancy seems certain to be filled. The applicant is John O'Hara, who already qualifies in every particular except age. He is a vigorous 57, and will have to marinate a few years longer to achieve the full grandeur of his office. Otherwise his credentials are excellent. He wears tweeds, has been photographed in the company of an impressively ugly walking stick, and lays his tongue smartly across the backs of churls.

"I Can Guess." O'Hara does his best churl thrashing in his prefaces. The churls denounced in the introduction to the author's Five Plays (TiME. Aug. 18, 1961) were, naturally enough, the producers and directors who conspired to keep the plays off Broadway. But O'Hara's customary target is, of course, the book reviewer. His attitude toward reviewers is, more or less, that he has spent 40 years learning how to write, and that if they do not approve of the results, they should feel perfectly free to go drown themselves.

The preface to The Cape Cod Lighter* his latest collection of short stories, is O'Hara's best yet. He explains the "spiteful vindictiveness'' of reviewers for TIME and the weekly reviews by saying that they are all failed novelists. The great man adds loftily: "I never see the little magazines, so I don't know what the hell goes on there, but I can guess."

Vacant Depths. What of the book that follows? The stories are among O'Hara's best. If there is nothing very new, neither is there anything repetitive, a testament to the ingenuity with which O'Hara mines the invented earth of Gibbsville, Pa., and the ugly towns of eastern New Jersey. As usual, the social range of his characters--from the carriage trade to tradesmen who sell carriages--is wider than their moral range, which is the few degrees between halfway-decent and not-very-nice.

Also as usual, O'Hara appears not to see deeply into the characters whose surface he describes so well. This may be deceptive. It can be argued that he has caught their souls' likenesses well, that in their depths there is just not much to be seen.

The collection's best charting of vacant depths, perhaps, is a novella called Pat Collins. Like the author's brief, bitter novel. Appointment in Samarra, it follows the decline and fall of a Gibbsville auto dealer. Some readers may find it better than Samarra, and that is saying a lot. In fact, if John O'Hara were not so good at writing prefaces, it might be hoped that he would continue to devote himself to short stories.

* The title will seem wholly enigmatic to readers who do not know that a Cape Cod lighter is a kerosene-soaked brick, convenient for starting fires in living room fireplaces.

Readers who know this may be puzzled anyway.

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