The Real Malloy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

O'HARA

by FINIS FARR 300 pages. Little, Brown. $8.50.

In 1960, with a decade of hard work and good living still left to him, John O'Hara published Sermons and Soda-Water, a collection of three novellas written in the voice of James Malloy, the writer's most obvious fictional alter ego. Like O'Hara, Malloy was the son of a small-town doctor, had been a newspaper reporter, pressagent and screenwriter. Now he was introduced as a successful novelist devoting himself to "the last, simple but big task of putting it all down as well as I knew how." This book was, as Finis Farr notes, O'Hara's farewell to Malloy. As he does not note, the leave-taking was a mistake --not necessarily because O'Hara abandoned the character but because for the most part he had already ceased to see the world through Malloy's ironic, knowing and satiric eyes.

Thus O'Hara lost touch with his best self--the outsider, permitted far enough inside various closed, interesting worlds to observe them acutely but not so far in that he made any special commitments to their inhabitants. His first great success had been 1934's Appointment in Samarra, a savage little study of how a few careless social gestures could destroy a pillar of smalltown, upper-middle-class WASP society. O'Hara knew that world well, but was not truly of it, being Irish and Catholic and the son of a man desperately insecure about his social footing. Later, when O'Hara turned to New York cafe society for the setting of Butterfield 8, he was also working with something he had known intimately in the course of his journalistic apprenticeship. Throughout his career, when he dealt with these worlds--or with Hollywood, where he also did time as a scriptwriter--his fiction rang not only with the good dialogue but rumbled with a ground base of moral disapproval as well. Farr notes that he never entirely succeeded in sloughing off the element of Catholic puritanism that had been bred in him as a child. Even as late as 1948, in A Rage to Live, O'Hara struck a rather stern tone. His subject--controversial at the time--was an upper-class woman named Grace Caldwell, who suffered from a lust that first shocks and surprises her, then comes to determine her conduct.

Shortly thereafter, in 1953, O'Hara nearly died after the hemorrhage of a gastric ulcer. Brushed by mortality, then almost crushed by it when his second wife died, he stopped drinking, and as he turned 50, settled down to one of the most determined, self-conscious and prolific assaults on posterity ever attempted by an American writer. The strategy was correct--most of the great social novelists have required many long volumes to explore the intricacies of how it all works. The results, alas, were fecund-rate.

O'Hara apparently decided that a great writer ought to be an advocate as well as an observer. Grace Caldwell's husband Sidney, a perfect Ivy League gentleman, had not been able to handle either his wife or the rudely bustling world of 20th century American commerce, and in succeeding books, O'Hara tried mightily to convert the type into a tragic hero, victim of his age. Joe Chapin, the small-town lawyer whose dream of being President of the U.S. is thwarted by the vulgar pols (Ten North Frederick), and Alfred Eaton (From the Terrace) are examples. In describing them O'Hara was writing not as the Malloy he had been but as the convert-defender of a faith that was never truly his.

He had envied the type's ease and style since childhood and continued in that envy when his father's death prevented him from realizing his first hope of heaven--a chance to go to Yale. Now, having written himself into something like their economic league, he joined their clubs, patronized their shops, styled his whole life on an absurd and possibly out-of-date model. In a letter to his stepson, quoted by Author Farr, he wrote that these people "really made this country what it is at its best. With all their faults-- and they were never vicious-- they are the best Americans, and when they cease to ex ist as a class, so will the United States as a nation." He added the hope that his writing might help "the continua tion, even if only for a minute in time, of this class."

Chronicling O'Hara's evolution to that sad point, Biographer Farr shows a lamentable tendency to accept O'Hara's own evaluation of his work uncritically, and to assume that he has done his job if he informs readers of how many printings a novel received. Still, this biography is valuable for the letters it reprints, the occasional obser vations of friends and family it records. The aging John O'Hara might have been well pleased by the book. Young Jimmy Malloy, though, would never have finished it. "

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