Last month, I wrote about a fascinating experience I had a few months ago when I went back to my Ph.D. alma mater Penn State to receive a Centennial Fellow Award in honor of the university’s hundred-year old liberal arts program. My friend Prof. Sandra Spanier showed me several Hemingway letters that she was preparing for inclusion in the upcoming massive publication of Hemingway’s letters. I described what it was like to see Hemingway’s handwriting and to feel as if I was present when he wrote the words.
Another fascinating experience involved being allowed to enter John O’Hara’s study. O’Hara (1905-1970) was a respected, much-read author whose works include APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA (1934), BUTTERFIELD 8 (1935), and TEN NORTH FREDERICK (1955), for which he received a National Book Award. Perhaps his best-known book is PAL JOEY (1940), which was adapted into a Gene-Kelly-starring Broadway musical and a Frank Sinatra film.
After O’Hara’s death, his widow donated his study to Penn State’s library. Everything was photographed, distances were measured, and objects were transported to the University Park campus.
In the rare book area, visitors can peer through a large window and view the impressive reconstruction of the study. As a favor, a library administrator took me to an off-limits area, unlocked a door, and allowed me to walk into the study.
Fans of my work know how I affected I am by the power of the past. CREEPERS is a good example. There, five urban explorers infiltrate a hotel that has been abandoned and sealed for many decades. Inside, everything remains the same as it was years earlier.
That eerie sense of going back in time is what I experienced when I entered O’Hara’s study. The carpet, the dark-wood walls and desk, the worn leather chair, the manual typewriter, the ashtray, the many awards, the posters for the musical versions of PAL JOEY, the photographs of O’Hara with celebrities of the time, the numerous editions of O’Hara’s books, each with a cover whose illustration is an artwork . . .
I almost heard echoes from fifty years ago. What made the past extremely vivid was that the chairs and the desk were unusually low by our standards, showing how much taller people had become since the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties.
It’s a lesson of some sort that hardly anyone reads O’Hara these days or would recognize the celebrities in the photographs. That’s the nature of fame. And yet the author’s powerful presence was everywhere. I almost expected him to walk through the door and demand to know what I was doing in his study.
How exciting it would have been to sit down in the low chairs and chat for a while. What was it like to have a Broadway musical the songs for which were written by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart? Would O'Hara have told me that in 1940 the musical wasn’t fully appreciated? Only in the 1950s was it recognized as a masterpiece.
Perhaps in the same way, O’Hara’s work might one day come back in favor.
