John O’Hara, “Wise Guy”

The story opens:

Most of the people in the damn place were hacking away at their disgusting lunch, but I was still drinking Martinis and sitting alone in this thing that I guess could be called a booth, although it wasn’t even the height of my shoulder….. Those that came in together would blab-blab about what they were going to drink, and then, when they would order their drinks, they would have the same things they always had. Those that came in by themselves would light their silly cigarettes and bore the bartender with their phony politeness, just to prove to anybody at all that they knew the bartender.

This reads pretty differently than most of the stories in the anthology I’m reading (Hellbox). I would imagine that anybody who reads mid-20c American fiction would have the same reaction I did to this scene of a man drinking alone in New York, moodily hating all the chatty phonies within earshot — oh, this is a Catcher in the Rye imitation thing. But “Wise Guy” was published in the New Yorker on May 18, 1945 — Salinger’s first story in Caulfield’s voice, “I’m Crazy,” doesn’t come out until December.

I don’t think Salinger was imitating O’Hara. My sense is that the germ of Catcher in the Rye already existed for Salinger during the war.

But even if he was — I mean, the O’Hara is fine, but you go back and look at any of Catcher-era Salinger and it’s like nothing else. Yes, superficially, it’s cranky like this O’Hara passage but every sentence sings with life, joyous despite itself.