Occasional Sin

Again, I must admit that my education as an English major was completely lacking in American literature. So, I filled in another gap, earning a merit badge for reading John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live. The title alone made me think about the Legion of Decency and those movies and books it banned as unsuitable for Catholics. I can close my eyes and almost be convinced that his Butterfield Eight was displayed in a glowing red banner in the back of Saint Margaret Mary's. All those mortal sin movies merge together into one mass of “unfamiliarity,” so much so, I thought this book was made into a movie starring Susan Hayworth. Which one I am thinking of, obviously not this one. I even went to far as to check on Wiki to see who was the female lead in the movie version of ARTL – it was Suzanne Pleshette, a type-casted Grace Tate if ever there was one. (Sidney is sort of a Bob Newhart kind of guy, but that acting duo was years after Bradford Dillman as her husband.) However, this rendition, except for the names of the characters, bears little resemblance to O’Hara’s novel and it was never favorably received, either by the Church or movie critics.

Speaking about reviews, sort of like Gunter Grass and The Tin Drum, O’Hara’s novels were often reviled by his contemporaries on ad hominem basis. I guess O’Hara must have been a bit of an overbearing curmudgeon. His class warfare themes are plainly a personal grudge. Reading this book sixty plus years after its publication, it does have elements of a great American novel, if not a great love story.

Grace has been described as a nymphomaniac, a condition O’Hara attributed to her having been raped by a boy (who eventually grows up to be mayor of the capital of Pennsylvania) while her brother stood guard at her closed bedroom door. This incidence of teenage testosterone apparently marked her for life as susceptible to the slightest whim of phernomes. Once happily married, her lust arises more episodic than chronic, never lasting more than a few romps, and both she and her conquests go on their way to live in the same community, feeding rumors but otherwise leading normal lives.

O’Hara’s narration is a bit trite in that many key characters are killed off, Grace’s husband from polio, her first adulterous lover in a flaming car crash. What success O’Hara has, I believe, falls into two major areas. First, he is top notch in moving a story through dialogue rather than by using an all-knowing narrator with aloof observations or reading the main character's internalized thoughts. His regional and class based dialects delineate the town's social taboos and privileges. In populating such a broad canvas of minor and supporting characters, O’Hara also achieves a Zola or Dreisler like setting. The story could only exist in a small state capital in the first few decades of the twentieth century.

O’Hara wrote a book that pushed the standards of what could be written in America in the 1940s about sex, adultery, and lust. Yet by today’s standards, he is not only oblique when it comes to fornicating in a car, but he dances around those instances when people are attracted to the same sex. He contrives to use Grace’s under-education to have her confuse incest with incense and homosexuality with being overly macho, much like her youngest son confuses polio as infantry paralysis.

How to explain the title then when I expected Grace to be voracious when it came to lust? Guess even my major concentration and love of Alexander Pope were not enough to recognize it being taken from the poem Epistle to a Lady:

“Say, what can cause such impotence of mind?
A spark too fickle, or a Spouse too kind?
Wise wretch! with Pleasures too refin’d to please;
With too much Spirit to be e’er at ease;
With too much Quickness ever to be taught;
With too much thinking to have common Thought;
You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,
And die of nothing but a Rage to live.”

And so in my heart, my sense of romance, and all my other senses, English poetry here once more betters American fiction.