2016: Reading The Great Dethriffe 40 Years Later

    Dad was a journalist first and foremost, even when writing his three books of fiction. P.S Wilkinson, The Great Dethriffe and Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes were all thinly veiled accounts of his life, his relationships, his thoughts and feelings about the times in which he lived. Friends, family members and neighbors would pick up these books and read them the way I imagine celebrities thumb through People Magazine, half in hope and half in dread of finding themselves within the pages.

   My sister and I appear in The Great Dethriffe as Syd and Ashbel. In the book George Dethriffe and Alice live in Winander, CT ( a name Dad probably dug out of a book of William Wordsworth poetry to double for the gated village of Tuxedo Park, NY) . To take a break from an argument with Alice (Mom) , George (Dad) visits his children's bedroom in to look in on them and what follows is straight out of family lore :

   Ashbel lay curled up tightly, his mouth open, one delicate hand beneath his cheek. Syd, in her bed, lay arms and legs outstretched like a free-fall parachutist.
   What do they dream about I wonder? Once, when Ashbel was a little over two, I heard him speak just one word in his sleep. He said, "Truck!" and, oh God, I hoped he was dreaming of the most glorious truck there ever was. Ten huge wheels with chromium rims on either side, a high crimson cab with air horns sprouting like rococo angels' trumpets from its peak, a trailer of silver with bright lights for its trim, lights along that trailer like a midnight passing train.
   "Truck!" said my son and the wind rushed out of his throat like tumbleweed across a darkened interstate.
   I have never heard Sydney speak in her dreams. She, like her mother, holds it in.

I've been told "truck" is the first word I ever said. That description of my sister --holding it in --may be the only true fiction here. I don't believe my sister has any issues with communicating her feelings.

  Published in 1972, The Great Dethriffe can be read as a fictionalized account of the events that led to my mother and father's marriage and divorce, a subject neither ever wanted to discuss much with me. George Dethriffe and his wife Alice fell madly in love --"Marriage at first sight"--but five years later, the passion is gone. They are both cell mates in a marriage. Alfred Moulton, his best friend, is a writer who, early in the book, tries to convince Dethriffe he shouldn't marry Alice.

  "Does she love you, really?"
  "Yes," he said. "Yes."
  "More than she loves herself? Don't forget, Alice Townsend looks out for herself. And you have every right to be just as selfish as she is."
  "Well, I'm not sure how true that is," George said. "But, like I keep trying to tell you, you just don't know Alice!"
  "I'm just worried you're going to marry her for all the wrong reasons. I'm worried that you're getting married because you think it's time to get married." I turned back from the bar and sat down in my leather chair again. "You feel you're old enough, and you haven't got anything better to do, and so you're going to marry Alice Townsend. All I'm trying to suggest is that you still have time to get out of it if you want to."
  "But I don't want to," George insisted.
  "Alright., here's another idea. Why don't you, instead of getting married next month, why don't you take Alice with you and go off somewhere and live together. Hell, go someplace where no one knows you're not married. Try it out before you make it legal. I just have the feeling that you're getting married out of some misguided sense of responsibility."

Author photo and description which always bothered my sister and me. The "child" is our half-sister Amanda.

  And it was somewhere here, about 107 pages into The Great Dethriffe, that I realized Alfred Moulton and George Dethriffe were the same person. Quite the revelation for me! Alfred speaks in the voice of my father after his divorce, trying to look out for his younger version. I'm sure, in real life, both his friends and his brother, Saint, tried to talk Dad out of getting married five year after graduating from college. Here, the case for and against the marriage is made over the course of pages and pages of text, from the Kennedy administration through the start of Nixon's first term.
  My parents's marriage lasted fewer than four years. One day Dad left the three of us in the house in Tuxedo Park and moved into a small New York City apartment.


    It took me a moment to start the cold engine, and then I backed the car up and turned it around. Just before I left, I looked back in the rear-view mirror at the kitchen. Alice  had come to the door and was watching me. And I'm not entirely sure this is true because it seems so patently absurd, but I think...I think, that as I left, I saw her wave.

 Dad apparently led the life of a bachelor before his Mexican divorce went through, while my mom moved with us to Aiken, South Carolina.
  Dad died in 2009. I'll never be able to talk to him again and ask the thousands of questions that have come up as I've written this blog. But I can open his books and spend hours in his presence, making these very personal connections with him.

Major Influences on Dad's Writing, 1976

In a 1976 letter to Chris Cannon who handled publicity for Friendly Fire at G P Putnam's Sons

J Bryan III

  I suppose the major teacher of the craft has been my father, J. ( Joseph) Bryan III, who was an associate editor of the Saturday Evening Post for years, has written several non-fiction books, a biography of Admiral William F. Halsey, P.T. Barnum, and many articles in the old Post, Colliers, Life, Esquire and more recently the old Holiday and now Travel & Leisure.

William Maxwell

The man who had has the most influence on my style of writing has been Bill Maxwell of the New Yorker and Seymour Glass who wrote his younger brother: "If only you'd remember before you ever sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible but so simple I can barely believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself."( Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction).

    While I'm at it, let me throw in two more: the first was a quote passed across his desk to me at the New Yorker by Bill Maxwell, it's by W.B. Yeats: "Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain is irresistible." I now have that framed and hanging on my roll top like an exhortation from Chairman Mao.

W B Yeats

    The other is from an interview with Anthony Powell in a recent NYTBR which helps to explain the why and how of writing: "The great thing about writing is its two stages: first trying to make yourself understand; then, putting it to other people. The first is the most difficult."

Anthony Powell

   There had to be some way to understand the Vietnam War, to contain it in a frame of reference I ( we) could deal with. The point of Friendly Fire, or certainly a point, is that there is no enemy, there is only war.

Basking in the Reflection of Genius, 1958

Harold Bloom

     Dad says he was never much of a scholar but in his senior year he was one of 15 Yale University seniors accepted by Harold Bloom for his honors seminar. Bloom, who received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1985, was already a well known scholar of immense insight and intelligence and it is safe to say the big man, "militantly out of shape , with a pale, pasty complexion and heavy, doughy jowls" intimidated every student in his classroom.

     Dad remembered his Bloom honors class in a 1997 contribution to The Yale Alumni Magazine:

      We had started off with Blake, and for two weeks Bloom had spoken to us, lectured us, cajoled us; he kept alluding to "Orc cycles" --something which, evidently, had great significance and which we needed to be well aware of if we were going to have any understanding of Blake at all. I was left with the feeling I had missed a critical class: the one in which he explained what an Orc cycle was. No one else seemed confused, so I didn't dare ask. 

    Finally, at the end of the second week of classes, he and another classmate took a poll and realized not one student had the faintest idea what Bloom has been talking about thus far that year. Dad was elected to break the news to Bloom at the next meeting.

"P-p-professor Bloom," I stammered. " The class has asked me to...to ask you if you might tell us what, exactly, an 'Orc cycle' is." 
      Bloom's fingertips lifted to his face, his nails dug great creases in his jowls; and then like Star War's "Jabba the Hut, " he set about explaining. But even as he was telling us I knew I still didn't understand. That I would never understand!

    So instead, Dad did his senior thesis for Bloom on Wordsworth.

    ...something uninspiring about innocence as a literary device. But then, I had understood Wordsworth: all those lambs, daffodils, clouds, lakes, bridges without an Orc in view. My paper came back with a gentlemanly "C" and in Bloom's precise handwriting, his one simple straightforward declarative sentence: "Your style is frequently barbaric!"

On The Road to La Porte City, Iowa April 8, 1971

 To pass the time on his way to meet Peg and Gene Mullen for what was a possible New Yorker magazine article and became Friendly Fire , Dad made notes of the journey. He drove 561 miles in a faded yellow Volkswagon bus with an eight track tape player.

THURSDAY MORNING, APRIL 8, 1971

 Leave Guilford 8:30. Mileage 34213. Park at underpass off 95 to settle gear, check maps, gauges. Plucky Lindbergh in a VW bus. The Spirit of St Desperation.
 The sign on the Conn. Tpk: "Are You Dying For A Smoke?" and all the levels of paranoia that appeals to from cancer to marijuana bust.
  Plug Nilsson's "The Point" into the tape deck and heading South on 95 to "Me and My Arrow, straight up and narrow" Swinging into the exact change lane and laying out a 25 cent toll, have travelled this road hundreds, maybe thousands of times but shortly after the New Haven oil spill area, it's off and up 91 to Hartford.


 
It's 9:20. I've been on the road less than an hour and I miss Sam terribly? How can this be with all the anguish and tension she causes me and I cause her? Listening to Richie Havens on the Woodstock tape going through the outskirts of Hartford. I pass a school bus and a 7 year old boy in the back flashes me a Peace sign.

 

 An aging Pontiac passes me and its bumper sticker reads "I'm a Polka Fan". The Silent Majority speaks out at last! It's 33 degrees at 9:50 at Springfield. This is where I move onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. The line from James Taylor's song about Stockbridge to Boston. The fantasy of being on the road along Northampton ( Smith College) and Holyoke ( Mt Holyoke) and hitchhiking are two college girls. I pick them up, we get along fine and its mixed doubles in the Holiday Inn. Instead there is one bearded kid hitchhiking to Boston - the wrong way. And I find myself following a bloodmobile. Next fantasy: the truck is hijacked by an upstate colony of vampires who've come, capes flapping, out onto the road. Driven down from the hills by the harsh winter...

Dad drives into New York State, buys a bad meatloaf meal for lunch at Swann's ( for $1.85 + a 25 cent tip) and fills up the bus with 12.3 gallons for $5.10.

  The Erie Canal parallels the road. Lord how that must have been glorious the day the Canal was opened in 1825. Top hats off for Gov Dewitt Clinton, I will see the canal off and on to Buffalo.

  Farther on, on the left, is the town where Beechnut has its huge factories all in a row. Candies, gum, baby foods.

 I pass a sign for Route 233 Westmoreland and that makes me think about Calley. And what is there but to think of the Calley in us all. Was Calley more of a criminal because he killed 22 women and children than me who willingly selected nuclear targets over North Korea. We are both obeying orders. The criminals, surely, are the ones who give the orders as well. Route 233 Westmoreland.

Dad stops for a cup of salty coffee in Leroy, NY and fills up the bus with 12.9 gallons for $5.25. He's now wishing he drove Sam's jaguar. He's noticing an enormous amount of elderly people on the road.

  Fantasy: there is a conspiracy of old people. A secret gathering of them somewhere in the Dakotas. They are going to start a revolution. But of what sort?
  And then I am in the Buffalo area with regiments of high power lines marching out of Niagara Falls...At five o'clock I reach the exit for Niagara and pick up two hitchhikers from Canada. They are young and the one sitting up front is telling me how he likes to ramble around. "Trudeau," he says, "is a very grokky guy."..and out of impulse they've decided to continue onto Ohio where his friend's parents lived.
  I tell them I'm only going as far as Erie. A Toyota with two college girls go by and I tell the boys to make themselves a sign and we will hold it up to the window so that perhaps they can get a ride with the girls. We pass the girls and they blush and mentally cross their legs then write a sign saying they are only going as far as Pittsburgh.

  So I drop the boys and head into the Holiday Inn at the Erie PA South.
   During dinner in their mock-English restaurant I am entertained by "The Whispering Organ of Brad Swanson" and through the grill by the bar I see a powder blue faded blond who, with a surprisingly sweet voices, is joining in on "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometimes..."



   Outside the dining room there was a display of Swanson's three albums. His songs were When You're Smiling, Deep in the Heart of Texas, Quando Quando Quando, Ramblin' Rose, Paper Doll, My Happiness, Satin Doll, Whispering, Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh? Peg O My Heart
  There was a lovely sunset and Lake Erie looked almost clean
I called Sam from my room. And it is true. I did miss her. And Amanda. And even Magoo.
561 miles the first day.

The General

Dad first met H. Norman Schwarzkopf in October 1971. He was then a 37 year old lieutenant colonel not long back from completing his second tour of duty in Vietnam. Twice wounded, he had just been released from Walter Reed Army Medical Center and was recuperating at home with his wife, Brenda, and two year old daughter, Cindy.

 Seventeen months earlier, Schwarzkopf had been commanding the Americal Division's 1st Battalion of the 6th Infantry Brigade in South Vietnam's Batangan Peninsula when a young soldier a dozen yards from Schwarzkopf stepped on a mine. The explosion punched the kid up into the air, injured Captain Bob Trabbert and Schwarzkopf himself. The soldier's right leg was flapping out to one side. "I'm going to die! We're all going to die!" he screamed. As Schwarzkopf began inching across the mine field to reach the soldier, his legs began to shake uncontrollably:

  His knees were suddenly so watery that he had to reach down and grip them until they were stilled. Perspiration stung his eyes. The men watching him, waiting for him to move again. To his astonishment, Schwarzkopf said, he suddenly thought of the sign on Harry Truman's White House desk:"The buck stops here". 
   The kid was whimpering, "I don't want to die! You've got to get me out of here."
    "I'll get you out," Schwarzkopf said. "Just Keep Still. You're all right."
     Five feet...three feet...Schwarzkopf gently lowered himself across the wounded boy's body to keep him still. "I don't want you to move around," Schwarzkopf told him. "We're going to have to set that leg." 
    Schwarzkopf needed a splint and spotted a small, waist-high tree back where he had left Trabbert and three other men. Schwarzkopf called to them to cut some splints from the tree. Trabbert pulled out his sheath knife and passed it to one of the men. The soldier took one step toward the tree and triggered another mine. 
    Schwarzkopf was horrified. Trabbert had taken the full force of the explosion. His left leg was blown off, an arm broken backward so that the bone of the elbow socket showed, and a great hole was gouged in his head. He would survive, but three other men were killed instantly.
     For having crossed the mine field to rescue the wounded private, Schwarzkopf was awarded his third Silver Star. He says he had no other choice, It was his responsibility. And by being there in the mine field taking care of the boy instead of with Trabbert, his life was saved. "But you live with those things, " he said. "You become terribly fatalistic in combat."

Dad had interviewed Schwarzkopf repeatedly for Friendly Fire, a book he wrote about an Iowa family whose son, a sergeant in one of the infantry companies in Schwarzkopf's battalions, was killed by a howitzer shell fired by his own supporting artillery in Vietnam. Another death that deeply distressed Schwarzkopf.

These were some of the experiences that helped Schwarzkopf prepare for Operation Desert Storm command. For a 1991 article that appeared in The New Republic, Dad asked Schwarzkopf if he would be disappointed if his ground forces never got the opportunity to go into battle.

   "Not in the least!" he said vehemently. "I don't want to kill one more American! I don't want to see one more American die-- be it from accident or from battle. There's no blood lust on the part of myself or anybody else around here. What we want to do is accomplish the objectives of this whole thing, get it over as quickly as we can, and get back home. And I tell you, that's the attitude of everybody from the top general down to the lowest private."

LA Times Interview With Dad (1987)

100 Years of a Living Legend : C. D. B. Bryan Records Growth and History of National Geographic, the Society and the Magazine

November 04, 1987|BETTY CUNIBERTI | Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — C. D. B. Bryan, a successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, had not read the familiar yellow-bordered magazine for 20 years when he agreed two years ago to write a book on the National Geographic Society's 100-year anniversary.

Bryan had, of course, read the National Geographic magazine "as a kid. It was the kind of magazine your grandparents gave you."

Considering the source of the gift, it contained an unbelievable bonus for a young male mind: those pictures of bare-breasted native women.

Trademark Photographs

"It's their trademark," said the 51-year-old Bryan, who is best known for his Vietnam drama "Friendly Fire," about a soldier accidentally killed by his own forces. "Generations of schoolboys have grown up with this pre-Playboy."

In the 1950s and '60s, the Geographic became "bloody boring" in Bryan's estimation. Increasingly in the latter decade, protesting the war in Vietnam began occupying his time, so, bare-breasted women or not, he stopped reading it.

"I would read it when I went to the dentist, like everybody else," he added.

Nonetheless, Bryan agreed to write the book for the Harry N. Abrams publishing company, having already authored a commercially successful book for Abrams on the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum. Writing about the Geographic would, among other things, give him a financial base to work on a "Friendly Fire"-style account of a real family coping with a teen-age suicide, a book he is still working on.

To Bryan's surprise, not only was "The National Geographic Society, 100 Years of Adventure and Discovery" a lot more work than he had envisioned--two years of interviewing staffers and plumbing through files--but it has already become much more successful than he thought it would. It was released last week with a first printing of 750,000, it was chosen a Literary Guild selection and there are plans for translations and sales in foreign countries.

"None of us in our wildest moments thought it would do this well," Bryan said.

What apparently has proven irresistible is the 473-page collection of dramatic stories and photos of earthquakes, undersea and polar expeditions, volcano eruptions, microscopic cells and the peoples, vegetation and wildlife of foreign lands.

Not Always Flattering

The book also contains Bryan's unauthorized account of the history of the National Geographic Society, which is not always flattering to the main figures: Alexander Graham Bell, who was president of the society in 1898, and three generations of the Grosvenor family who followed him.

"Like every organization, it's filled with fiefdoms and riven with jealousies," said Bryan, who said he admired the society's "courage" in hiring an outsider to write its history. The society, which has had its headquarters here since its founding in January of 1888, gave Bryan complete access to its massive files, and Bryan spent months submerged in them.

Hearing the adventures of the explorers, photographers and writers was an adventure in itself for Bryan, a tall, pencil-thin, academic-looking man with glasses, who does much of his writing in a Guilford, Conn., cottage on Podunk Road.

"I loved 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' so I had sort of a vision of people trooping into the office covered with seaweed, dressed in safari jackets and snake-proof boots," he said. "But in fact they dress rather like members of the Metropolitan Club, in suits and ties for God's sake, very old-fashioned and very gentlemanly and probably more WASP than you would think they might necessarily be."

Despite their Washington-issue apparel, staffers were able to delight Bryan with, as he wrote in the book's introduction, "tales of bandit raids and angry mobs, of walking away from airplane and helicopter crashes, of being flung from boats into icy rapids, of having cameras bitten by crocodiles or retrieved only through tugs-of-war with venomous sea snakes, of surviving shark bites, capricious imprisonments and mysterious fevers."

"Where else but at the society would one learn of free-lance photographer Alan Root, who, while on assignment in Mzima Springs, Kenya, in 1974, was attacked by a bull hippopotamus? 'The next thing I knew,' Root said, 'he had my right leg in his mouth. The hippo then shook me like a rat.' After skin grafts, treatment for gangrene and a month's convalescence in a Nairobi hospital, Root recovered."

The society liked the book enough to give each magazine staff member one as a present and offer a cut-rate edition to its 10.5 million membership, but Bryan said there were disagreements about what went into the book.

"There were things they would rather not have seen in the book, discussions of the racial prejudice of one of the editors, a discussion of their rose-colored-glasses reporting, the confrontation between the very conservative members of the board of trustees and the less conservative and younger editors, and the palace revolution (as it came to be called) in the illustrations department, where they got fed up with funny little issues jam-filled with tiny little pictures."

Current society president and board chairman Gilbert M. Grosvenor, a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, said of the book: "While none of us may be comfortable with everything he says, this volume is the most objective, credible, frank and honest history of the society ever written."

Before the invention of television, the Geographic "was our window on how the rest of the world is," Bryan said. "It was a real public service. It was exciting."

Magazine Milestone

One milestone occurred in the November, 1896, issue, which contained the first photograph of bare-breasted natives to appear in the magazine. They were called "Zulu Bride and Groom," and the article that accompanied the photo stated: "These people are of a dark bronze hue, and have good athletic figures." Another of the most famous Geographic adventure stories of the pre-television era was Comdr. Robert E. Peary's tale of becoming the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909, an expedition partly funded by the Society.

After television began to show the world to itself, the magazine's primary contribution to American culture quickly became the development of color photography, Bryan feels.

"Nobody does it better," Bryan said. "Nobody has poured the amount of money and had the amount of money to pour into experimenting with different kinds of cameras and lenses and lighting equipment."

The magazine's circulation, which doubles as the society membership, went over the 1 million mark in 1930, then dipped during the Depression and rebounded over the million mark again in 1940. In its largest growth period, the circulation rose from 2.5 million in 1960 to 6.9 million in 1970. It hit its peak of 10.7 million in 1980 and has since levelled off to 10.5 million.

Who reads the Geographic?

As Bryan points out: "There can't be 11 million dentists in this country."

Trying to figure out exactly who did read the Geographic, a survey was taken in 1943 and, as Bryan reports in the book, among the 1,199,738 "loyal members" were: 39,543 housewives; 36,816 farmers; 11,715 dentists and dental surgeons; 13,710 executives; 32,589 clerks; 1,557 barbers; 3,000 undertakers; 39 bartenders; 228 politicians; 261 college matrons; 156 masseurs; 114 members of royalty; 15 poets and 3 tropical fish-raisers.

No More 'Rose-Colored Glasses'

The major journalistic criticism of the Geographic over the years, according to Bryan, has been its "rose-colored glasses" reporting, especially of major wars. This stemmed from staffers having to obey the guiding principles of editor Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, who decreed, among other things that:

"Nothing of a partisan or controversial nature is printed.

"Only what is of a kindly nature is printed about any country or people, everything unpleasant or unduly critical being avoided."

Bryan said one reason for this philosophy was the Geographic's need to stay in the good favor with countries so that staff members (numbering 200) could return. But the modern Geographic, said one staff member, has had the rose glasses off for "10 years," pointing to articles in the March issue on South Dakota's faltering farm economy, in the April issue on global pollution and the May issue on Chernobyl. There also have been memorable photographs of starving African children and Afghan fighters.

The world's largest nonprofit scientific and educational institution, the society has a number of endeavors beside the famous magazine and television specials. It has sponsored more than 3,200 scientific research projects and expeditions, publishes three other magazines, makes maps and classroom teaching aids and has a program to upgrade the teaching of geography in American secondary schools.

"I knew it could not help but be fun to do a book on the National Geographic," Bryan said. "Whether or not it would be worth two years of your life, I didn't know.

"And the answer is, yes, it was worth it."

Dad's Advice to Writers (1997)

From two different letters written in 1997:

I like Milan Kundera's line. "To be a writer does not mean to preach the truth, it means to discover a truth." Of course my favorite line about writing is from W.B. Yeats: "Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible"" I have that framed next to my desk -- along with the Moliere quote: "Writing is like prostitution: First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money." The best advice I've ever come across for writers is from J.D. Salinger's vastly under-appreciated short story "Seymour: An introduction." It was included in one of Seymour Glass's letters to his brother Buddy: "If only you'd remember before you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can barely believe it as I write it. You sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart."

...It sounds so simple doesn't it? It isn't of course, because no writer gets it right the first time through. No one said writing is easy. Nor is rewriting and rewriting, again and again, until your text reads as if it hadn't been written at all, but rather as if the proper words just appeared marching in their proper sequence like good little soldiers on after another, from sentence to paragraph to chapter to book. And how an author weaves those words together is what we think of as that writer's style, which is another way of saying his or her voice.

Festering Mutual Understanding

It never occured to Dad not to do military service "A Bryan," his father had told him, " has been an officer in every war this country has fought"--a true statement until Vietnam.

At one point Dad was stationed on Okinawa overlooking on one side the airfield where the torpedo plane in which Grandpa Joe was flying was hit by Japanese Anti-aricraft, and on the other side the bay in which his Uncle Lamont had his destroyer escort sunk out from under him by a kamikaze.

In Korea Dad was a nuclear targeting officer and was given an elaborate scoll of appreciation by the South Korean intelligence in which it said "You have done much to fester mutual understanding between our two nations".

The Stepfather: John O'Hara

"Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well."




That is the epitaph, enscribed on a tombstone in a Princeton cemetery, that John O'Hara wrote for himself.



The best selling author of dozens of novels and short story collections, including Appointment in Samarra, BUtterfield 8, Pal Joey and Ten North Frederick, O'Hara was as gifted a writer as any of his generation.


Ernest Hemingway, Sherman Billingsley and John O'Hara at Billingsley's Stork Club



Ernest Hemingway said "If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra."


But O'Hara, who grew up not in the posh country clubs of his characters but in Pennsylvania coal mining country, always had a chip on his shoulder. He developed a reputation as a terrible tempered "Champion of the Imagined Slight".


When The New Yorker's Brendan Gill offered to buy O'Hara a drink shortly after giving O'Hara's novel A Rage To Live a bad review, O'Hara said "I wouldn't sit down with a son of a bitch like you for anything in the world." There's a story of O'Hara getting into an argument with a midget sitting next to him and was about to punch him when a second midget showed up and the two together knocked O'Hara off his feet and began beating on him until the bartender broke it up.
O'Hara and Oma




But there is another O'Hara: My father's step-father. In a July 1985 article for Esquire, Dad remembered O'Hara as an "intensely shy, warm gentle man, a devoted father to his daughter, Wylie, patient, hospitable and affectionate with his visiting stepchildren and our spouses and children despite the obvious disruption we caused in his routine, and --especially in the case of my own fledgling writing career--generous with his asked-for advice."

Dad, Unknown, Me, O'Hara


The O'Hara routine meant we didn't see a lot of him when visiting Oma in Princeton. O'Hara wrote at night, usually from midnight until dawn. I remember visiting his study one morning and burning my fingers on lamps that had been on all night. I'd play with the mechanical banks and toy cars he'd lay down on the floor for me and stare at his collection of antique horns. (It's stunning to think that the entire study--with the toys, horns and those very same lamps can be visited at Penn State University.)

O'Hara's study at Penn State


O'Hara had at least two great loves in his life. The first was Belle, who gave birth to O'Hara's only daughter, Wylie, and died nine years later in 1954. The second, O'Hara often said, was the first person he saw when he entered Princeton's Trinity Church for the funeral: Belle's friend, my father's mother, Katharine Barnes Bryan. Friends called her "Sister", a childhood nickname.



After Oma's death, my dad and aunt came across a large brown bag filled with love letters O'Hara had written to our grandmother. They reveal a side of O'Hara no biographer or critic ever knew existed:


You are a lovely, splendid, dear, sensitive, knowing girl, and you are my wife and my life and I will be good to you and try to be good for you...Oh, my darling, you don't know the surpassing peace that your letters have given me. I wonder if it is so bad to be so dependent on another person as I am on you, you the symbol and cause, and , possibly, the real source of our love.



Do you know what? Not to make you self-conscious, but I think I can see how you look when you read this. Smile for John, Sister; these words are a kiss.



Oma and O'Hara



Although Appointment in Samarra did make The Modern Library's list of the best 100 English language novels of the Twentieth Century, I think the place to start is with "Do You Like It Here?" a short story about a new boy at a prep school who's accused by his corridor master of having stolen a watch.
Then you'll begin to understand why Brendan Gill ( yes, the very same Brendan Gill) ranks O'Hara "among the greatest short-story writers in English, or in any other language" and credits him with helping "to invent what the world came to call the New Yorker short story."

Happy 75th Birthday Dad!

Strange how such a giant man in my life could have been born so small.

Firollo Laguardia was the mayor of New York City when dad was born at Doctor's Hospital. The physician who delivered him also delivered my sister and me.

He was named after his mother's brother, Courty Barnes then stationed in the State Department's Far East Division.

Dad was one of the geat nappers even at a young age.

The engraved pewter cup is a time honored tradition. I suppose they're even safe to drink from.
Photos courtesy of Lansing

The Family Firm 1958

Dad was a Cadet 1st Lieutenant enrolled in the R.O.T.C. program at Yale University when he filled out his application to work at the CIA. He was hoping to edit or interpret written data "in a field pertaining to Army matters". His previous job experience included the 1955 summer he spent as a roustabout with Barnum and Bailey Circus and two summers as a handyman at the Block S dude ranch in Elk, Wyoming. Still Dad had reason to hope he'd get the job because both his uncle and father had worked at The Agency.

His uncle was Tracy Barnes, a former war hero who four years earlier managed the covert overthrow of the democratically elected president of Guatamala. In 1961 he was still the "golden boy" of the CIA when he helped plan and oversee the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an attempt to oust Fidel Castro.

My grandfather ran the Psychological Warfare Workshop at the agency. He hired a bright group, but as Evan Thomas writes in his book The Very Best Men "he seems to have recruited from the Princeton Tiger, his college humor magazine." He brought on board the writer Finis Farr and the legendary practical joker Hugh Troy. One propaganda stunt they come up with was to drop extra large condoms --labeled "medium" in English--on the Soviet Union.

The psywar staff did carry out one memorable propaganda stunt, funding the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm (1954). They managed to change the ending of the story to give it a distinctly anti-pig ( and therefore anti Communist) ending. My grandfather helped the CIA buy the rights to Animal Farm by introducing Orwell's widow to Clark Gable.

But if Dad thought he'd have an easy time getting accepted into the family firm, he was sadly mistaken. In P.S. Wilkinson his alter ego takes a lie detector test and "fails" questions about his sexuality. It ends with a physical by a lisping physician.

"You look very young. How old are you?"

P.S. felt the hair rising on the back of his neck. There was something horrible about the man's voice. It's tone. "Twenty-four," P.S. said.

You don't look that old."

A shiver ran through him, and P.S. started to sit down.

No, no!" the doctor protested. "Don't sit down yet. Let me look at you."

P.S. remained standing where he was. His skin felt cold and damp.

"My, you're tall?" the doctor said. "Are you long all over?"

"The Best of Friends at Farmington" 1966

In 1966, my dad, newly divorced and 30 years old, moved into a small apartment a block from Union Square.
His date book suggests he didn't spend every night sitting alone mourning his failed marriage. I'm guessing he went out on dates with young single women not unlike Linda Bates and Bitsey Turner, two characters in a short story published that year in Mademoiselle.



Though they were roomates at Farmington (Miss Porter's School), Linda and Bitsey attended different colleges and have drifted apart. Both work as secretaries but while Bitsey has a busy social life, Linda lives alone with a cat named Kafka and a TV set. After promising to get together for months, Bitsey finally visits Linda for drinks. Bitsey brings two young men with her. When she steps out of the room Linda overhears a conversation:

"Let's get out of here," Austin said.
"Soon," she heard Bitsey answer. "We have to stay a little longer. I promised her we'd stay for a while."
"But it's been almost thirty minutes."Austin protested.
"I thought you'd like her," Bitsey said.
"She's probably very nice, but..."Austin said. "Look, Bitsey, we have little secretaries like her all over the bank. I just don't want to see them after hours too. I thought she would be different. She went to Farmington with you. I thought, since she's been your roomate, she'd be different, that's all."
"Well, she's changed since then," Bitsey said. "She used to be a lot more fun."


The story strikes me as owing an awful lot to the New Yorker stories of his step-father, John O'Hara. O'Hara was the master of finding moments that revealed the fragile egos of his characters.

Dad in 1966

"The Best of Friends at Farmington" is also depressing as hell. Linda is sentenced to solitary confinement, to loneliness, by her so-called friend. I'm guessing, even when Dad had evening plans with the Lindas he met, he wasn't very happy.

Until today, I had never heard of this short story. I'm guessing Dad never felt it was one of his best. I think there were some other short stories in that box as well. One of the sixty-seven in my attic.