{"id":91993,"date":"2015-11-16T13:02:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T18:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91993"},"modified":"2015-11-16T13:02:22","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T18:02:22","slug":"bewitched-bothered-and-bewildered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/16\/bewitched-bothered-and-bewildered\/","title":{"rendered":"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"},"content":{"rendered":"

John O\u2019Hara\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Pal Joey remains an exemplar of a rare form: the epistolary novella.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Robert Jonas\u2019s cover for an early paperback edition of Pal Joey<\/i>, ca. 1946.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ever see the movie<\/a>? Well, do yourself a favor and don\u2019t. You should pardon me for bringing this up right off the bat, but it\u2019s so beyond being a mere stinkeroo that I get ahead of myself and must apologize. But you can trust me; I shall get back to it later.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to start sounding like Joey Evans after listening to him come up off the pages of John O\u2019Hara\u2019s novella. In fact, even if you\u2019re holding paper and ink, Pal Joey<\/a> <\/em>is always an \u201caudio book\u201d in some other, fundamental sense of the term. The osmotic nature of Joey\u2019s voice affects even the other characters. Vera\u2014the rich older woman whom O\u2019Hara added to the theatrical adaptation\u2014says, in a moment of amazed exasperation: \u201cGood God, I\u2019m getting to talk like you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joey\u2019s is an American voice from the second act of the American century, a time when the country\u2019s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world. O\u2019Hara had the upwardly mobile luck to be in possession of the best ear anybody had for catching and transmitting the national lingo.<\/p>\n

Frank MacShane, one of the author\u2019s biographers, explains that the first Pal Joey <\/em>story, published in The New Yorker <\/em>on October 22, 1938, got written after O\u2019Hara went off on \u201ca two\u2010day bender\u201d instead of the stretch of work he\u2019d pledged to his wife:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

Then the remorse set in: He asked himself, \u201cWhat kind of god damn heel am I? I must be worse\u2019n anybody in the world.\u201d Then he thought a minute: \u201cNo, there must be somebody worse than me\u2014but who? Al Capone, maybe. Then I got it\u2014maybe some nightclub masters of ceremony I know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The New Yorker <\/em>asked for additional Joey pieces, and these \u2028hit singles soon became an album, a book of what we\u2019d now \u2028call \u201clinked stories,\u201d published in 1940.<\/p>\n

The stories\u2019 usual subject is Joey\u2019s current scheme\u2014to make \u2028it with one \u201cmouse\u201d (girl) or another and to get to New York, \u2028away from these crummy clubs in Chicago where there\u2019s \u201cone \u2028old guy playing cornet that looked as if he was worried for \u2028fear that the Confederates wd catch him for being a deserter.\u201d \u2028His chief tool, in business and pleasure, is the lie: telling a \u2028young woman that he went to \u201cPrinceton College\u201d and an \u2028entertainment reporter that it was \u201cDartmouth University\u201d\u2014before, of course, his family lost its money in the crash. A minute after spotting a girl with a nice figure who\u2019s looking into a \u2028pet-shop window, he\u2019s snowing her with the story of a dog \u2028named Skippy that he never even owned. \u2028<\/p>\n

The recipient of Joey\u2019s letters is Ted, a bandleader friend whose replies we never see but who, unlike his correspondent, is actually going somewhere. We can feel Joey, amid his protestations of pleasure, choking on the news that Ted has been \u2028booked at the Paramount in Manhattan and written up in \u2028Down Beat<\/em>. Joey himself is no further along at the end of the \u2028book than he was at the beginning, and O\u2019Hara\u2019s small fictional gem would be unbearable if it were twice as long as it is. \u2028The author knew when to stop\u2014late in his career he wouldn\u2019t \u2028exhibit such restraint\u2014and Pal Joey <\/em>remains one of the books \u2028that makes John O\u2019Hara an even greater master of the novella than he was of the short story. \u2028<\/p>\n

O\u2019Hara\u2019s restraint is writ small on each of the book\u2019s hundred or so pages, which contain enough of Joey\u2019s misspellings \u2028and malapropisms to make the reader marvel, but not so many \u2028as to make the text a chore, a thicket requiring a kind of \u2028line-by-line translation. The malapropisms, especially\u2014more \u2028glaring in print than in speech\u2014are rationed and perfect: \u201can \u2028establish band\u201d; a \u201cMexican folks\u2019 song.\u201d The results had readers of the thirties and forties \u201cbeating their paws off\u201d for the author, more loudly than nightclub patrons ever felt inclined to applaud the author\u2019s antihero. The last piece (\u201cReminiss?\u201d), in which O\u2019Hara has Joey sound drunk while writing, is a tour de force that builds and builds within its very short space. Joey becomes more and more direct, more and more angry, until, in his disappointment and failure, he lets Ted have it. If he doesn\u2019t tear up the letter, as he says he will, he\u2019s going to hate himself in the morning\u2014but we won\u2019t see that, because O\u2019Hara knew that this was the place to put the cover back on his typewriter.<\/p>\n

The decision by this master of speech to write an epistolary novella may seem peculiar: Why work in a form that contains little or no dialogue? But then one realizes that the epistolary voice is really all <\/em>speech, albeit as monologue rather than dialogue. One can imagine Pal Joey <\/em>being staged not only as the musical comedy it became but also as an evenin-length recitation, on the order of a performance by Ruth Draper, the great diseuse who remained at her peak while O\u2019Hara was reaching his.<\/p>\n

MacShane acknowledges that Joey \u201cowed something\u201d to the characters and techniques of Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon, and a reader will certainly hear Nathan Detroit\u2019s strivings and stumblings toward refinement in some of Joey\u2019s more self\u2010righteous moments (\u201cI do not know if you realize what has happen to me oweing to your lack of consideration\u201d). But O\u2019Hara does all of it, the vocals and emotions, with greater subtlety than Runyon. Joey\u2019s third dimension may not go very deep, but it goes far enough that you sometimes wince for him, whereas Nathan never prompts anything but a chuckle. Fancying himself \u201ca great student of human nature,\u201d Joey is actually clueless; the truth is he needs more <\/em>brass, not less, if he\u2019s ever going to push ahead like other great literary and movie heels of his day\u2014say, Sammy Glick and Sidney Falco. In Sweet Smell of Success<\/em>, J. J. Hunsecker, the gossip columnist played by Burt Lancaster, tells Sidney, with momentary admiration, \u201cYou\u2019re a cookie full of arsenic.\u201d Joey is a cookie filled with cookie dough; he\u2019s got a lumpy center that\u2019ll never be more than half\u2010baked.<\/p>\n

If Joey rarely succeeds at parlaying one thing into another, his creator succeeded in turning Pal Joey <\/em>into the biggest thing that ever happened to John O\u2019Hara: the musical that opened on \u2028Broadway on Christmas Day 1940. O\u2019Hara himself approached \u2028Richard Rodgers about an adaptation; he wrote the show\u2019s \u2028book, and you can hear him even in the bossy opening stage \u2028direction: \u201cCheap night club, South Side of Chicago. Not cheap <\/em>\u2028in the whorehouse way, but strictly a neighborhood joint.<\/em>\u201d \u2028O\u2019Hara \u201copened up\u201d the novella, putting in more patter and \u2028stage business for the girls in the nightclub chorus, and adding \u2028the character of Vera\u2014more formally, Mrs. Prentiss Simpson, \u2028surnamed no doubt for that other Mrs. Simpson, the era\u2019s most \u2028famous adulteress. \u2028<\/p>\n

Vera, who sets up Joey in an apartment and a nightclub, \u2028understands just what she wants from him and just how long \u2028she\u2019s likely to keep getting it. Romance is never going to trump \u2028realism in her, and when blackmail enters the picture, Vera \u2028knows it\u2019s time to call her friend, the deputy commissioner of \u2028police, to tell him she\u2019s \u201cbeen a bad girl again\u201d and needs to be \u2028extracted from a jam. Joey remains oblivious to the impulses \u2028and feelings she\u2019s so carefully been managing. In Sunset Boulevard<\/em>, when Gloria Swanson buys William Holden a suit, \u2028Holden feels draped with her shame and his; Joey feels nothing but \u201cthe trousers that cling to him,\u201d in Lorenz Hart\u2019s \u2028famous line, part of Vera\u2019s big number, the sexy and sagacious \u201cBewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.\u201d Dwight Macdonald, \u2028writing in 1960 about long-term developments in popular \u2028taste, complimented the lyricist in a devastating comparison: \u2028\u201cMidcult is the transition from Rodgers and Hart to Rodgers \u2028and Hammerstein, from the gay tough lyrics of Pal Joey<\/em>, a \u2028spontaneous expression of a real place called Broadway, to the \u2028folk-fakery of Oklahoma! <\/em>and the orotund sentimentalities of \u2028South Pacific<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pal Joey <\/em>was a success in its original production and an even \u2028stronger one during a 1951 revival. Then, alas, came that movie (1957), in which Frank Sinatra is too old and always looks too \u2028smart to be playing the lead. One can imagine Vera addressing \u2028Gene Kelly, the original Broadway Joey, as \u201cBeauty,\u201d back in 1940, but it feels a little late for Rita Hayworth to be doing that with the chairman of the board. Even worse, Columbia Pictures had her sing a version of \u201cBewitched, Bothered and Bewildered\u201d so bowdlerized it wouldn\u2019t have offended Mamie Eisenhower\u2019s ears: \u201cUntill I could sleep where I shouldn\u2019t sleep\u201d became \u201cWhat would I do if I shouldn\u2019t sleep,\u201d and when it came time for \u201cHorizontally speaking \/ He\u2019s at his very best,\u201d Hayworth was made to sing la-la syllables. The whole production is so anemic that it had to be supplemented with \u201cMy Funny Valentine\u201d and \u201cThe Lady Is a Tramp,\u201d two hits from an earlier Rodgers-and-Hart show, Babes in Arms <\/em>(1937).<\/p>\n

Worst of all? The picture makes Joey go off, happy\u2010endingly, with Linda, the girl he tried to seduce with the story of his dog Skippy, here renamed Snuffy, just as pointlessly as the whole story has been moved from Chicago to San Francisco.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Twenty-five years ago, I freelanced an appreciation of O\u2019Hara to Gentlemen\u2019s Quarterly<\/em>, and in preparing the piece I talked to my friend Frances Kiernan, a fiction editor for many years at The New Yorker<\/em>. She told me that<\/p>\n

\n

she used to read O\u2019Hara thirty years ago [1960], when she was a teenager, in order \u201cto find out how the world worked.\u201d But people don\u2019t do that anymore \u2026\u00a0the information is too dated to be useful, not outdated enough to be exotic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What I didn\u2019t know when I proposed the essay was that Art Cooper, GQ<\/em>\u2019s then\u2013editor in chief, had grown up in Berwick, Pennsylvania (a town mentioned in the last pages of Pal Joey<\/em>), and come to New York in the 1960s clutching O\u2019Hara\u2019s books as if they were exactly the how-to manuals Fran Kiernan described. O\u2019Hara was and remained Cooper\u2019s favorite writer, a fact that had more than a little to do with my being offered GQ<\/em>\u2019s literary editorship after my O\u2019Hara piece ran. Art, a larger-than-life character (I loved him), made a tremendous success of the magazine during the 1980s and \u201990s by somehow keeping it both up-to-the-minute and nostalgically devoted to the cocktail culture of his youth. He died in 2003, mid-martini, at his lunchtime banquette at the Four Seasons.<\/p>\n

As art recedes from my life, but not from my memory, I sense that \u2028O\u2019Hara\u2019s moment for a really breakout revival\u2014outdated <\/em>\u2028enough to be exotic<\/em>\u2014may at last be upon us. Do the youngest \u2028readers with this book in their hands know who \u201cWinchell,\u201d \u2028let alone \u201cDowney,\u201d is? Did they ever sit at a lunch counter? \u2028Meet a stenographer? No? Good! The farawayness of all these \u2028obsolete cultural references may mean we\u2019re nearing fulfillment of a prophecy I passed along in my 1990 essay: \u201cIt\u2019ll be a \u2028few more decades, says Kiernan, before O\u2019Hara comes back, \u2028the way Edith Wharton (a writer he admired) eventually did.\u201d \u2028<\/p>\n

If that moment is here, Pal Joey <\/em>is no less authentic, and no \u2028less dexterous, for having grown outr\u00e9. And if this is your first \u2028encounter with John O\u2019Hara, I can only say, in the words of \u2028Joey: \u201cLow and behold.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas Mallon\u00a0<\/b>is the author of numerous novels, including<\/em>\u00a0Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Watergate, which was a finalist for the PEN\/Faulkner Award. He has been published in\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0New Yorker,\u00a0<\/em>The\u00a0Atlantic,\u00a0and\u00a0the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times Book Review.\u00a0He is a professor of English at George Washington University.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay appears as the foreword to\u00a0<\/em>Pal Joey: The Novel and the Libretto and Lyrics<\/a>, out next month from Penguin Classics. \u00a9\u00a0<\/strong>Thomas Mallon.\u00a0<\/strong>Reprinted with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Penguin Classics will host a screening of\u00a0<\/a><\/i>Pal Joey<\/a> at Film Forum<\/a> on December 12. The film will be introduced by Charles McGrath.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John O\u2019Hara\u2019s\u00a0Pal Joey remains an exemplar of a rare form: the epistolary novella. Ever see the movie? Well, do yourself a favor and don\u2019t. You should pardon me for bringing this up right off the bat, but it\u2019s so beyond being a mere stinkeroo that I get ahead of myself and must apologize. But you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":326,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[20212,17820,20213,20214,16691,20210,20211,2075,6206,18813,5335,124,20208,20207,9247,15004,3072,40,20209],"class_list":["post-91993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-art-cooper","tag-broadway","tag-damon-runyan","tag-down-beat","tag-epistolary-novels","tag-frances-kiernan","tag-gentlemans-quarterly","tag-gq","tag-john-ohara","tag-lingo","tag-musicals","tag-new-york","tag-nightclubs","tag-pal-joey","tag-penguin-classics","tag-ring-lardner","tag-slang","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-thomas-mallon"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn O\u2019Hara\u2019s \u201cPal Joey\u201d at 75: Still an Exemplary Novella<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Thomas Mallon looks at O\u2019Hara\u2019s slim, pitch-perfect book, which inspired a Broadway show and a movie.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/16\/bewitched-bothered-and-bewildered\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered by Thomas Mallon\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 16, 2015 \u2013 John O\u2019Hara\u2019s\u00a0Pal Joey remains an exemplar of a rare form: the epistolary novella.Ever see the movie? 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