Ted O'Mara
An old friend of Val's, who arrives with a few hundred dollars, puts it on the table for everybody, and moves in.
He wants to strike it rich, quickly and somewhere else.
The book
At a glance
- An old friend of Val's, and a lodger in the couple's flat
- At a New Jersey lake, when both were about eighteen
- An orphanage, a Southern carnival, years in Asia, the army, and the telegraph company
- Sells Val's printed prose poems door to door, then runs the Florida scheme
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeTed O'Mara is a character in Plexus, the 1953 novel by the American writer Henry Miller. Plexus is the middle book of a three-part autobiographical novel called The Rosy Crucifixion, narrated by Miller himself under the name Val and set in New York in the middle 1920s. O'Mara is an old friend of Val's; they met when both were about eighteen. He turns up about ninety pages in, at the moment the household runs out of money, and stays for most of the book.
He is the friend who has been everywhere: an orphanage he ran away from at ten, a carnival in the South, years in China, Japan and the Philippines, a spell as an army sergeant. He is also the one who does the legwork on every scheme Val invents, and the one Val's wife Mona never quite warms to, because he asks her direct questions about where she has been.
Miller gave real people invented names throughout the trilogy, and this profile describes the character as the book draws him. It is taken from the Grove Weidenfeld printing of the text, read in the Internet Archive's scan.
How the book draws them
- He arrives and empties his pockets on the tableO'Mara has quit the telegraph company where he and Val both worked and spent months on a fishing cruise in the Caribbean, which left him with money. The first thing he does on reaching the flat is pile all of it on the table and call it the kitty, for the three of them to use. It is a few hundred dollars, enough either to clear their debts or to live on for a month or two.
- How they metThey were seventeen or eighteen, and they met in the dark at a railway station in New Jersey. Val was on holiday by a lake with a friend when their employer drove down and brought O'Mara along as a surprise. It was midnight by the time they reached the farmhouse and nobody wanted to go to bed, so they rowed out towards the middle of the lake, three miles across and black as pitch, and O'Mara took his clothes off and dived in. He surfaced somewhere they could not see, panting, and said he had got stuck in the bulrushes. Then he floated a while to get his breath and swam on, with the others following in the boat and begging him to climb back aboard.
- The orphanage, the carnival, the armyHe ran away from an orphan asylum at ten. Working a carnival somewhere in the South he met the man who took a liking to him and brought him North to a job. He had been a top sergeant before the war and could argue that a sergeant matters more than any general; officers he spoke of with contempt or with hatred. Val's summary is that O'Mara gave everything and expected everything, and had no moral sense whatever.
- The talk that ran until three in the morningMost of Val's friends found O'Mara tiresome. Val could listen to him all night and only asked questions. He talked about the years he had spent in China, Japan and the Philippines, and about the women there with tenderness; about deep-sea fish, about snakes, which he handled like pets, and about trees and flowers, of which he seemed to know every variety. He talked as well sober as drunk. The next day was always lost.
- He goes through the books in the flatAlmost the first thing he does on arriving anywhere is survey what there is to read, and he works through it slowly. Val preferred O'Mara's opinion of a book to those of better-read friends, because there was no criticism in it: if a book held him it was good, or great, or marvellous.
- He sells the printed sheets on footAfter looking through Val's prose pieces, O'Mara said no editor would ever take them — which Val knew was right. When Val proposed printing and selling them himself instead, O'Mara thought the idea excellent and took the streets: up early every morning, working Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island. He was disgusted that Val's own friends would only take a month's subscription, and said he could do better with total strangers.
- Too blunt for the householdMona does not warm to him, and Val has to referee. When she came home after midnight with a story about the admirer who had bought the food and the liqueur, O'Mara used to interrupt with questions about what the evening had actually involved, and eventually learned to keep quiet and grin instead. Around midnight he also got restless and worried aloud about where she was and whether she could look after herself.
- The road to MiamiDuring the Florida land boom O'Mara decides the three men should go south and make enough in a few weeks to send for Mona — as waiters, bellhops, shoeshines, anything. He and Val hitchhike; outside Charlotte, after an hour with nobody stopping, they stand in the middle of the road until a car brakes. In Jacksonville, when Val collapses in the lavatory of a Salvation Army shelter that wants a quarter for floor space, O'Mara and Ned carry him out.