JOHN O'HARA said that school spirit was horse shit. The day before he was to graduate as valedictorian of Niagara University Prep School, he visited every bar in town. The next day, the school took away his diploma.

The same attitude also got him fired. It led him to drinking binges, sexual frustrations, divorces, and prolific writing.

His first novel, Appointment in Samarra, described sexual relations among the people of "Gibbsville"--which was modelled after the author's hometown of Pottsville, Pa.--so explicitly for the time that people "who I knew very slightly and who were certainly never in my mind as characters, threatened to sue me for defamation of character," O'Hara later wrote.

IF O'HARA'S LIFE and writings had not been so wild and iconoclastic, the gaps in context and continuity in Frank MacShane's recent biography, The Life of John O'Hara, A Rage to Live, would be fatal. As it is, the book reads more like a novel than a biography. The narrator, choosing a limited point of view, does not fill in many why's or how's.

O'Hara himself probably would not approve of MacShane's writing. "Practically all good writing is a form of protest," O'Hara wrote. Narration of facts, not circumstances, and plot summary, rather than character analysis, rarely constitute protest.

MacShane raggedly splices quotes into otherwise smooth scenes. For instance, O'Hara, at a bar in Hollywood with a fellow writer, Robert Benchley, has just struck a woman and slapped Benchley's cigar out of his mouth. The next morning O'Hara calls Benchley:

O'Hara: I just wanted to say I'm sorry.

Benchley: For what, John?

O'Hara: For what I did last night.

Benchley: Look, John, please don't apologize to me. You're a shit and everyone knows you're a shit, and people ask you out in spite of it. It's nothing to apologize about.

O'Hara: Do you mean it?

Benchley: Of course I mean it, John. You were born a shit just as some people are born with blue eyes, but that's no reason to go around apologizing for it. People take you for what you are.

Several pages later, MacShane quotes O'Hara again: "Although I may often have felt like belting a woman, I have never actually taken a poke at one except in anger."

The real relationship between Benchley and O'Hara fails to be understood for the sake of such humorous anecdotes. MacShane flunks in character development, where O'Hara is at his best.

For O'Hara knew the bunny-hug, the turkey trot, the tango, the fox trot and the polka, and had a good sense of humor. Thus, the woman who earned his wrath at the speakeasy might have earned another reward in different circumstances.