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What is even sadder than the passing of these saloons is the fact that so many writers cut their teeth describing the characters that hung out there. John O’Hara, one of my favorites, was a real city writer, drinking in Irish bars with cops and sports stars, and hacks who wrote about sport and crime in the city. Toots Shor was a very famous restaurateur and character, and as New York as one gets. He loved Joe DiMaggio, who could do no wrong, and Joe only stopped speaking to the rudest man in New York, as Toots was known, when Toots badmouthed Marilyn Monroe after she left the Yankee clipper. Toots regularly threw O’Hara out when the novelist became too aggressive with customers after a few drinks, but he was always welcomed back with open arms and a few tears the next day.

O’Hara was the master, along with Papa Hemingway, of leaving things unsaid, unwritten actually, as he followed boxers and detectives in their chosen professions and got it all down on paper. In today’s world, O’Hara would have to rely on magic realism, or some other gimmick, in order to write the way people actually speak. Places are so noisy and the music is blasted, and people just play with their apps, there’s no conversation at all. (Céline, who made his name by listening to how the French working class spoke, would have remained a doctor and unknown.) In O’Hara’s fiction there is a lingering sense that the best days of the city are in the past, as are those of the characters he writes about.

John O’Hara was a hell of a fellow. Hemingway used to make fun of him, and always considered him a snob who wished he had been born an aristocrat. But Papa was wrong. The old Irishman wrote the snobby side to perfection, in Appointment in Samarra, From the Terrace, Ten North Frederick, and the epistolary Pal Joey. He was admired by his peers and if ever proof was needed that he was a great writer, a ghastly Japanese American book reviewer for the New York Times once called him a bad writer and a lout. Almost as good as a Nobel Prize for literature.