BOOKS
FICTION CHRONiClE
A RAGE TO LIVE. By John O'Horo. Rondom House. $3.75.
THE CRACK IN THE COLUMN . By George Weller. Rondom House.
$3.00.
LOVING. By Henry Green. Viking. $3.00.
A Rage to Live
is a disaster, John O'Hara's own appoint–
ment in Samarra.
In
it he has abandoned the truculent stylization of his
early novels, their unilinear pencillings of paths to doom, and has let
go with luxurious unrestraint, as if to show that he too could write a
crowded social novel. Because his previous books were structurally so
simple he could control their materials through his embittered stance of
tough-guy moralism, and with his mimetic gift could work them to a
garish gloss; but
A Rage to Live
is limp, diffuse, tasteless, without in–
ventiveness or binding values. Not by accident, it is also his most ambi–
tious book; its very bigness reveals his intellectual barrenness.
O'Hara was never a truly serious artist. The major interest of his
work was always as a kind of superior reportage or as a contemporary
phenomenon, the best of the post-Hemingway tough-guy books.
In
his
early novels loneliness became a domineering system: each of his char–
acters went through glazed and fetichistic maneuvres determined by
iron laws of fatality, and were thus mere bits of rigid data, the very
contrary of those streams of changing qualities that the western novel
has assumed character to be. Consequently
Appointment in Samarra
and
Butterfield
8, for all their nagging moralism, could never rise to the
level of complex morality; they were merely skilled line-drawings of
middle-class mannerisms. O'Hara strained for significance (for beneath
his pose of American self-sufficiency does he not want to be profound
as well as skilled?) but 'could not achieve it. His infatuation with Fitz–
gerald may be seen as a yearning for the imaginative largesse, the sense
of grace and the penetration into darknesses that Fitzgerald commanded
and he did not. Hemingway was his real master, the lesser Hemingway
who taught a generation of reporters that talking through the side of
one's mouth was art and strapping one's emotion wisdom. And of all the
