Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

Author:John O’Hara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

The biographer has certain rights and duties and among them is the right, which is also a duty, to say that at such-and-such a point the biographee’s life left one phase and entered another. It is not the same as saying that a change occurred overnight, for there are few occurrences—if there are any—that bring about radical and quick change in the lives of human beings. Change is almost always fluid; rapidly fluid, or slowly fluid; but even major events in a human life do not make the overnight personality changes that they are too often said to make. Marriage, parenthood, the successful culmination of an enterprise, a severe punishment, a dreadful accident resulting in blindness, a frightening escape from danger, an exhilarating emotional experience, the unexpected report of a five-inch gun, a sudden view of something loathsome, the realization of a great major chord, an abrupt alteration in a human relationship—they all take time, to be absorbed by the soul, no matter how infinitesimally brief a time they took in occurring or in being experienced. Only death itself causes that overnight change, but then of course there is no morning.

If it is foolish to say a man’s life is over while there is life in him that will respond to new life (whether the new life is in the form of a drug out of the live earth, or new love exchanged)—it is just as foolish to deny that in a man’s life a time comes when he does not respond, because he is unwilling, or unable. It is that time, that point, which now has been reached in the chronicle of Joe Chapin. And what does the biographer gain by saying more than that Joe Chapin went on living for those extra years? When Joe Chapin had begun to cease to feel—unable and unwilling to respond to new life—the story became not Joe Chapin’s but the stories of other people, and with Joe’s part in the stories one of diminishing importance. Their stories, to be sure, are just as important as Joe’s story, but they are other stories, not Joe’s, and this is his.

Well, then, what was Joe’s life during the final, unresponding years?

It was night after night of the warming companionship of Arthur McHenry in the den at 10 North Frederick Street. From there Joe watched the Anschluss and the carryings-on in Washington and never told the story of Kate Drummond. The new highway was by-passing Gibbsville, and the two friends could not decide whether it meant that Gibbsville was becoming important, or passé. A large bakery was going up on South Frederick Street, and Joe’s opposition to the change in zoning ordinances was disregarded. A Gibbsville High School boy became runner-up in the national junior singles championship, and neither Joe nor Arthur knew the boy’s parents. A man at the Lantenengo Country Club told Joe that a fellow named Chapin, who never played golf, underwrote the expenditures of the greens committee (which was not completely true).

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