Appointment on Long Island

I want to get it all down on paper while I can. The United States in this century is what I know, and it is my business to write about it to the best of my ability, with the sometimes special knowledge I have. I want to record the way people talked and thought and felt, and to do it with complete honesty and variety.

John O'Hara, who wrote those lines in a prologue to Sermons and Soda-Water, a trio of novellas published in 1960, likes to think of himself as a social historian whose principal medium happens to be fiction. When Historian Allan Nevins said that no one could really understand the U.S. of the 1930s without reading O'Hara's novel Butterfield 8, the author took it as the handsome compliment it was intended to be. The journalist in O'Hara ever lurks just beneath the surface of the novelist; Butterfield 8, in fact, was a piece of reportorial fiction based on a playgirl's mysterious death. Last week, the journalist in Novelist O'Hara was assured a proper hearing.

No Change. Beginning next month, his byline will appear in the weekend edition of Newsday, the highly successful Long Island tabloid founded in 1940 by the late Alicia Patterson. The new partnership delights both sides. Captain Harry F. Guggenheim, who took charge of Newsday after his wife's death in 1963, has maintained the paper's high rank as one of the largest suburban dailies in the U.S. (present circ. 400,000). Last spring, in an effort to attract new advertisers and reader ship, he attached a Weekly Review to the Saturday paper and began a search for distinguished bylines. O'Hara is the captain's most significant catch.*

At 59, O'Hara is looking forward to his return to active journalism, a profession that he left in 1933, after stints on the Herald Tribune, Hearst's New York Daily Mirror and TIME, to write Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, an immediate popular and critical success. O'Hara's contract at Newsday was drawn precisely to the O'Hara taste. "They agreed to print everything I said, and not change a word," he said, "and the dough was extremely attractive. I could live comfortably on it alone." Newsday plans to syndicate the O'Hara column, which will be titled "My Turn."

Grand Design. But for a man whose fiction has already put him in the 87% income tax bracket, there are more compelling rewards. "I do like to unload," O'Hara said. "I am a man of many interests. Every day when I read the papers I want to comment on something. If there's any grand design to my work, it has been to put down my time to the best of my ability, so that I will be as indispensable to historians of the future as Dickens is to the historians of the 19th century.

"In my novels I don't say very much about the day-to-day picture and about my own intensely personal feelings. For whatever they're worth, they're going to be in this column, as long as it lasts, and as long as I last."

*Others: Marguerite Higgins, the New York Herald Tribune's erstwhile foreign correspondent, and Ruby Hart Phillips, who was the New York Times's woman in Havana until Fidel Castro kicked her out.

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