THE BOOK HAS its ups as well as downs, however. After all, a tight end on the Harvard football team says that there are only two types of people: the Irish, and those who want to be Irish. One finds oneself trapped in adoration of O'Hara.
MacShane's research included conversations with O'Hara's brothers, sisters, wives and more distant relatives. He lists hundreds of contacts in the acknowledgements, including Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., John McPhee, William Saroyan (apparently still kicking around), Frank Sinatra, John Cheever and John Updike. They all find their way into the narrative. O'Hara's employers--Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, The New Yorker, Random House and the Screenwriters Guild--allowed MacShane to dig through O'Hara's files.
The story amounts to this: having been booted from school two or three times and having disappointed his father's ambition for him to become a chip off the old block in the medical profession, he became a day laborer in a steel mill and a pit man in a railroad roundhouse. He spent most of his nights drinking "bootleg" liquor at clubs and speakeasies but somehow found enough contacts and friends to get a job with The New Yorker.
In New York, O'Hara continued his drinking and romances at the Stork Club, El Morocco, Larue, the Algonquin and Rudy Vallee's nightclub. At St. Martin and Mino's, on East Fifty-Second Street, he met Wolcott Gibbs, fiction editor of The New Yorker, who became a lifelong friend. In his novels and short stories, O'Hara renamed Pottsville Gibbesville in the editor's honor.
He also met Heywood Broun, a columnist for the World, a Harvard graduate who attacked former President Lowell for encouraging the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. O'Hara agreed with Broun's views and began writing for his newspaper.
O'Hara's most successful period began in the war years, when he became good friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton. Fitzgerald said that O'Hara was "in a perpetual state of having discovered it's a lousy world."
THE FACTS and figures pile up, endlessly, but a different organization might yield a work comparable to Buccoli's authorized biography.
MacShane's presentation of O'Hara's novels places him among the ranks of Masterplots contributors. While the bare essentials necessary for understanding a cognescenti's critique of A Rage to Live are present, for example, the reason for O'Hara's choice of lubricious sexual lives of Harrisburg residents as a subject remains obscure.
Ironically, MacShane might best be criticized by quoting O'Hara's description of a meeting of English professors from eastern universities; "it sounded like two hours of prep school boys talking about fucking."