Ugly Moments

HELLBOX (210 pp.)--John O'Hara-- Random House ($2.50).

A hellbox, as the publishers helpfully note on the jacket, is the place where printers throw broken type. These 26 stories by John O'Hara (an Old Newspaperman himself) have the neat and durable ring of O'Hara's best writing. They also have O'Hara's special effect of making the reader feel he has bitten something brassy. To O'Hara's hopeful admirers the stories may look like 26 more notes for the novel they think he ought to write--and, from that point of view, wasted sticks of type.

The book is a hellbox in a wider sense: about two-thirds of the stories record brief episodes of evil. O'Hara is an expert at ugly moments, probably the best expert in contemporary U.S. writing. Like many of his stones, these have such painful audibility that they make life itself seem an ugly moment unduly prolonged. The figures in his Inferno are mainly Broadway, Hollywood and resort people with a few professional criminals thrown in.

In this smart, sad and savage world, a nightclub owner automatically becomes a pimp for a big Hollywood producer, a small-time gangster messes up a chorus girl's marriage by re-seducing her for the sake of a hideout, a playboy is murdered politely by the man whose girl he makes a pass at. Just as ugly are other stories in which a drunken father fills his son with cold shame, a cynical screenwriter deceives a horrible adolescent, a beautiful but unbearable white girl from Texas tries to make trouble in a Harlem nightspot.

There are a few sympathetic characters and some quiet, even funny, stories. Moreover, in exploiting his vicious subjects, O'Hara implicitly exposes and condemns them. Kindness, fidelity and honesty are rarely portrayed--and of course never mentioned by name--but their rarity makes them all the pleasanter when encountered. Meanwhile O'Hara extracts all the flavor to be found in the manners and talk of U.S. types who have been hurt and hardened in a corrupt world.

The ultimately dispiriting quality of O'Hara's writing has been variously explained. One explanation: since his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, he has worked out a kind of ring technique for polishing off his subjects in one fast round. Subjects on which he might have to go the distance are not taken on; such subjects include whatever, if anything, O'Hara may love.

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