BUtterfield 8

by John O'Hara

To the best of my recollection, no Hemingway character is ever called out for casually asserting white male privilege. In Hemingway’s fiction everyone who matters—author, protagonist, reader—is politely assumed to be a member, or at least a tributary, of the club. For O’Hara, privilege is rooted in bigotry, and he’s tacky enough to say so.

To read O’Hara is to discover how much more people used to say and do, in private, than most novelists, even daring ones, could bring themselves to write.

she is too complexly alive, too sexual, too alcoholic, too intelligent, too hopeful, too much her own person not to be mangled by the demands of the marriage plot.

To anyone else she was defiance; but she knew that it was only going on. You just go on.

People ought to tell you things like that. Your own mother ought to tell you everything about that—and then she would recall that what ought to be and what actually was were two quite different things so far as her mother and sex were concerned. Mrs. McBride accepted the working theory of the Church that sex education of children was undesirable, unsanctioned; and when Nancy was fourteen her mother told her that “this is something that happens to girls”—and that was all she ever told her until Paul and Nancy were to be married. Then Mrs. McBride provided the second piece of information to her daughter: “Never let Paul touch you when you are unwell.”

I can’t have you for a friend if you’re going to throw things up at me that I told you in confidence.

“No, except that it takes away from your point about producing public enemies, your family. You can’t look like a gangster and a typical Yale man.” “That’s true. I have an answer for that. Let me see. Oh, yes. The people who think I am a Yale man aren’t very observing about people.

The most successful flouncing out in indignation is done through swinging doors.

One of the differences between Gloria as she was and as she might have been was that in 1921 she might have been “considered attractive by both sexes,” and in 1931 she was considered attractive by both sexes, but with a world of difference in the meaning and inner understanding of it.

He was glad she was not his daughter, because he could love her more. Fathers have to love their daughters and sometimes there is nothing else, but an uncle can love his little niece, and they can be friends, and she will listen to him and he can be as extravagant with her as he pleases.

You know? You think the next day you’re going to be a marked woman and everybody on the street will know. But they don’t. And men. Men are so funny. Mothers tell us all our lives that boys lose respect for girls that they go all the way with. But they must have changed a lot since my mother was our age.

Ann would sit on the beach with them, looking up now and then from her magazine and calling them by name and answering their foolish questions and teaching them to swim. She would have enormous breasts but she would not get very fat. Her arms would fill out and look fine and brown in evening dress. And, Gloria knew, Ann would slowly get to disliking her. No; that wouldn’t be like Ann. But Gloria would be the only person like herself whom Ann could tolerate. Every Ann probably has one Gloria to whom she is loyal. And the girls they had gone to school with, who had made the cracks about Ann’s being Lesbian—they would turn out to be her friends, and she would ride with them and play bridge and go to the club dances. They would meet sometimes in the afternoons, parked in their station wagons, waiting for their husbands, and their husbands would get off the train, all wearing blue or gray flannel suits and club or fraternity hatbands on their stiff straw hats, with their newspapers folded the same way all of them. And she, Gloria, would visit Ann and Bill once each summer for the first few summers, and the men with the hatbands would make dates for New York. Oh, she knew it all.

Well, every Gloria, she reminded herself, also had an Ann whom she tolerated and to whom she was loyal.

Give a woman her child or her children, and the hell with the men. It was incredible that before her very eyes Gloria had seen all the stuff about motherhood, which she thought was pretty much the bunk, being demonstrated by a police bitch and her litter. But it made her feel good again. It put Bill Henderson in his place as the mere father of Ann’s children, and let him put his nurse up on the operating table or do whatever he liked. He wasn’t important once he did his part toward making Ann’s babies. If you loved a man, so much the better, but you didn’t have to love him, you didn’t even have to know him.