O'Hara: A Biography by Finis Farr (review)

278Reviews Edel's arrangement of the letters complements in many ways his arrangement of the life in the biography. He once announced (in The Master) that his edition of the letters would provide the basic sources for the biography, but thataimhas clearly changed. Even if the third and fourth volumes are much more substantial than the present ones, four volumes are going to include closer to five than ten per cent of the extant corpus, and making the most generous allowances for the exclusion of letters which are trivial or redundant, that means that a huge amount has been left out. Edel argues "that in an age of photo-duplication [scholars] no longer need total publication" (I, xxxii) and thus seems to be aiming this edition at that increasingly uncommon phenomenon, the common reader. To this one can only protest that it is not easy for scholars to get photo-copies of the many letters which are in inadequately documented private hands and that the needs of the common reader havebeen admirably served for over twenty years byEdel's own Selected Letters of Henry James. The editorial hand is very light as to footnotes, and while opinions will differ over that, one has to respect Edel's desire not to get in James's way. Unhappily, however, it is also often capricious. Few scholars and almost no common readers will want to know that Edgar Van Winkle, the boy who received James's earliest extant letter, "was later chief engineer of the Department of Public Parks in New York" (I, 6) . But when Henry and William are having a serious quarrel over the former's administration of their father's estate, and Henry characterizes his last letter to William as "heated" (II, 404), almost every attentive reader will want to know why that letter is not included here. And when Henry remarks, ofChristine Nilsson, "What apity she is not the heroine ofatale, and I didn't make her!" most readers would like to know not only that Mile. Nilsson was a "Swedish opera singer" (1, 249) but that she was also a famousbeauty, and that Edith Wharton madeher the first person we meet in The Age of Innocence. Mrs. Wharton also managed to spell her name correctly, unlike James and Edel, or, perhaps, unlike the printers. There do seem to be an extraordinary number of printer's errors here. They are easily spotted in Edel's prose, but not so easily in James's, since Edel announces that he has let significant errors stand and has silently corrected others, but has given us only the vaguest definition of what constitutes a significant error. But perhaps it is ungenerous to complain so much. There are many James letters here that have never seen print before, and if they have sometimes been handled with a carelessness one would not expect, they have also been handled with taste and delicacy and the largest authority ever available in James scholarship, and for that we must all be grateful. University of Illinois at Chicago CircleChadwick Hansen Farr, Finis. O'Hara: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 300 pp. Cloth: $8.50. To write a biography of John O'Hara is no simple task. In the first place, his Pennsylvania boyhood plays an unusually prominent part in much of his fiction, and his penchant for describing physical detail makes tracing the influence of the Pennsylvania background particularly demanding. O'Hara also made an exceptionally large number of friends and acquaintances throughout his life, and his literary output was unusually large, running to more than thirty volumes of novels, short stories, plays, and essays, not including a large number of uncollected stories, miscellaneous writings, and correspondence . Studies in American Fiction279 It is no great surprise, then, to discover that Finis Farr's biography is something less than an unqualified success. O'Hara is one of the few literary artists whose lives are so varied and complex as to benefit from and demand the rigorously systematic method of Carlos Baker's recent biography of Hemingway. Instead, once Farr gets O'Hara out of Pottsville, he adopts a framework which is only approximately chronological and is consequently somewhat confused...