294
PARTISAN REVIEW
himself as an author of fiction except in
The New Yorker:
A.
J.
Liebling
and Russell Maloney are two typical instances, and they
seem
to write
short stories merely because they are writing for
The New Yorker.
Thus
two other tendencies become clear, the process of making the short story
into a joke because one is a humorist, and the process of converting a
genuine piece of journalism into a halfhearted short story. It is prob–
ably needless to say that personal experience, memory, and conversation
are often the beginning of fiction. But in
The New Yorker
it is swiftly
becoming the end of fiction, in more ways than one.
A third kind of short story writer is also worth noticing, and with
wonder, astonishment, sorrow, and perplexity; the writer who, hav–
ing appeared in various kinds of publications, appears only in
The New
Yorker,
and then finally disappears! Where is Morley Callaghan? Per–
haps I should explain that for some time he seemed to be just as gifted
a writer of fiction as Ernest Hemingway and Katherine Anne Porter.
But this impression diminished as he began to appear in
The New York–
er,
and by now no one seems to have heard of him.
At the other extreme is John O'Hara who certainly belongs in
The New Yorker
and who in his fiction accomplishes what most of the
other
New Yorker
authors merely seem to parody; compared with
O'Hara, most of the others often seem like girls trying to play base–
ball. But O'Hara is the real McCoy. He has a rich gift for social ob–
servation, for knowing how people are, what they are because of
their background, and he has an acute, accurate ear which makes it
possible for his characters to possess reality when they converse. But
best of all, O'Hara is a snob (in the fundamental attitudes with which
he regards his characters) ; he is as sensitive to social distinctions as any
arriviste
ever was, and his snob-sensitivity provides him with inex–
haustible energy for the transformation of observation into fiction. It
was probably neither accident nor intention which made O'Hara call
the scapegoat hero of his first novel, Julian English; for English is an
Anglo-Saxon, he resents the Irish, he belongs to what is supposed to be
the upper class, and the tragic action which leads to his suicide is his
throwing a drink in the face of a man with the choice name of Harry
Reilly. It might as well have been Murphy, O'Mara, or Parnell. So
too in the story by O'Hara in the present collection, the hero is named
Francis Townsend, he comes of a good family and a rich one, he
smokes cigars in an Irish bar "as though William Howard Taft or
Harry Truman had just asked his advice on whom to appoint to the
Court of St. James"; and he certainly is the end of the town or at
least that part of the town, since he is drinking himself to death, having
