Irving Said No

FIVE PLAYS (473 pp.)--John O'Hara--Random House ($5).

George Bernard Shaw's splendid custom of appending argumentative prefaces to his plays--and, in a few instances, of dangling a play from an especially grand preface--has been taken up by John O'Hara, who between novels and short stories has had a largely unrequited hankering for the theater. True, O'Hara has written only one preface for five plays, but that one rings with large-spirited ill will. Some of his plays, says the author, might have reached Broadway "if I had been willing to take writing lessons from directors, but I know of no director whose writing talent I respect." A hint that this is true comes a few sentences later: "Why do you suppose every Hollywood and Broadway ham, facing a receding hairline and a sagging chin, announces that he is retiring from acting to become a director?"

Dead Centers. Of the collection's first play. The Farmer's Hotel (which also appeared as a short novel), the author says that Rodgers and Hammerstein might have liked it, but Joshua Logan nixed the project. Logan must have been wrong, suggests O'Hara, because a stock-company production of the play moved the Fishkill, N.Y., Rotary Club to laugh, cry and call for the author. Later, "a prominent playwright" became interested, "but he wanted to rewrite the play and I did not want to reveal to him that it is an allegory, very tightly written."

No one, of course, can prove that Hotel is not an allegory--possibly of the French and Indian War, or the life of Florence Chadwick--but all that meets the eye is a very playable, if not brilliant, variation of the formula of Bus Stop and a thousand other dramas: throw an assortment of people together in a public place, add a snowstorm to keep them there and watch what happens. What does in this case is a lot of excellent talk, some acute revelation of character (but no character development), and a murder. Some of the characters and some of the talk seem to be included to no real purpose, and the central figure of the innkeeper is a puzzling dead center. But the play has a strength that holds the attention.

Curtain Lowerers. The Searching Sun, the best-made play of the book, has the same flaw as The Farmer's Hotel and two of the others--a figure at the drama's core for whom the author has deep sympathy, but to whom nothing happens. In Sun he is a crippled doctor who sees the disintegration of a neighboring family. He is a novelist's device, like Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, the reporter Jim Malloy, O'Hara's man-on-the-sidelines in Butter field 8 and Sermons and Soda-Water. In the tighter structure of a play, he is cumbrous and distracting.

The remaining plays are merely curtain lowerers. Veronique fails to revolve around a problem only writers can care about: Should a playwright write profitable comedies or unprofitable deep stuff? The Way It Was is a timid venture back to Butter field 8 country, intended to be a musical. O'Hara's long account in the preface of why Irving Berlin turned it down is almost as embarrassing as the moraine of first drafts, letters to the editor and encysted insults that Norman Mailer shored against his ruins in Advertisements For Myself.

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