AS WE HAVE SEEN IN CHAPTER 8, THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH century brought a turn in the literary fortunes of OK. It never became the subject of a famous poem or the focus of a novel, but gradually it became OK to use OK in works of fiction without raising eyebrows. OK, sometimes in its more unobtrusive form okay, had lost its connotation of slang as it lost the memory of its silly origin. The literature of the past eighty years shows OK fully at home in its present-day uses.
For example, in Damon Runyon’s short story “‘Gentlemen, the King!’” published in Collier’s magazine in 1931 and narrated in his distinctive pseudo-elegant gangster slang, okay plays a role:
So this lawyer takes me to the Ritz-Carlton hotel, and there he introduces me to a guy by the name of Count Saro, and the lawyer says he will okay anything Saro has to say to me 100 per cent, and then he immediately takes the wind as if he does not care to hear what Saro has to say. But I know this mouthpiece is not putting any proposition away as okay unless he knows it is pretty much okay, because he is a smart guy at his own dodge, and everything else, and has plenty of coco-nuts.
Henry Miller’s 1934 Tropic of Cancer, in between the erotic passages that prevented its publication in the United States for a quarter century, includes some OKs:
Chicle, when it is gathered by chicleros, is O.K.
If he chooses to add martyrdom to his list of vices, let him—It’s O.K. with me.
Zora Neale Hurston has an OK—just one—in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about African American communities in Florida:
“ … Ah set in de kitchen one day and heard dat woman tell mah wife Ah’m too black fuh her.…”
…
“So she live offa our money and don’t lak black folks, huh? O.K. we’ll have her gone from here befo’ two weeks is up. Ah’m goin’ right off tuh all de men and drop rocks aginst her.”
Ezra Pound, poet and pro-Fascist, had his own way with OK. In a 1938 letter from Rapallo, Italy, where he was living, to President Joseph Brewer of Olivet College declining the offer of a job and complaining about “the bestiality of curricula” at colleges, Pound comments:
Another question re/dissociation of ideas … The student shd SEE the actual producer. O. Kay. that is one side of the problem. I wonder if Ford [Madox Ford] has clearly cut it away from the other.… A country which does not FEED its best writers is a mere stinking dung heap.
William Faulkner was not above using an occasional OK, though it is scarce in his works. Here it is in his 1939 novella The Old Man :
“Take a drink or two. Give yourself time to feel it. If it’s not good, no use in bringing it.”
“O.K.,” the deputy said.
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), with its down-to-earth characters, has several dozen examples, including these:
“If you men want to sit here on your ass, O.K. I’m out getting men for Tulare County.”
“O.K.,” he said tiredly. “O.K. I shouldn’, though. I know it.”
Raymond Chandler, chronicler of the Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe, preferred the spelling okey in his novels, including The Big Sleep (1939):
The purring voice from over in the shadows said: “Cut out the heavy menace, Art. This guy’s in a jam. You run a garage, don’t you?”
“Thanks,” I said, and didn’t look at him even then.
“Okey, okey,” the man in the coveralls grumbled. He tucked his gun through a flap in his clothes and bit a knuckle, staring at me moodily over it.
And in Farewell, My Lovely (1940), after Marlowe has been drugged:
I sat up once more and planted my feet on the floor and stood up.
“Okey, Marlowe,” I said between my teeth. “You’re a tough guy. Six feet of iron man. One hundred and ninety pounds stripped and with your face washed. Hard muscles and no glass jaw. You can take it. You’ve been sapped down twice, had your throat choked and been beaten half silly on the jaw with a gun barrel. You’ve been shot full of hop and kept under it until you’re as crazy as two waltzing mice. And what does all that amount to? Routine. Now let’s see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.”
That spelling even comes through in a Portuguese translation:
“Okey, Marlowe,” falei entre os dentes, “você é durão.…”
OK is found in the American hero’s thoughts in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940):
But you have behaved O.K.
But with the wire length you are using it’s O.K., Robert Jordan thought.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man uses OK in a variety of ways:
“Okay, okay, take it easy,” Halley said.
“Okay now,” he said, “you can try to kid me but don’t say I didn’t wake you.”
“Okay, brothers,” the voice said, “let him pass.”
“You’re all right, boy. You’re okay. You just be patient,” said the voice.
OK shows up near the beginning of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953):
“Sure, she’ll be okay. We got all the mean stuff right in our suitcase here, it can’t get at her now.”
John Updike’s 1959 Rabbit, Run includes OKs in dialogue:
“Yeah. O.K. I’ll be right out.”
“It’s O.K., I’ll pay, ” Rabbit says.
OK is scattered throughout Joseph Heller’s World War II satire Catch-22 (1961):
“Now, you go home and try it my way for a few months and see what happens. Okay?” “Okay,” they said.
“Okay, fatmouth, out of the car,” Chief Halfoat ordered.
Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1965) makes liberal use of OK in dialogue:
“O.K., sugar—whatever you say.” Dick started the car.
“O.K. The first show was called ‘The Man and the Challenge.’ Channel 11.”
He unlocked the door and said, “O.K. Let’s go.”
“Oh, they’re together O.K. But driving a different car.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II semi-memoir Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) uses OK too:
“You’re all right, Sandy,” I’ll say to the dog. “You know that, Sandy? You’re O.K.”
And somewhere in there a nice man named Seymour Lawrence gave me a three-book contract, and I said, “O.K., the first of the three will be my famous book about Dresden.”
Toni Morrison has OKs in Song of Solomon (1977):
“Okay,” Freddie said, and threw up his hands. “Okay, laugh on. But they’s a lot of strange things you don’t know nothin about, boy.”
and in Beloved (1987):
“Some?” he smiled. “Okay. Here’s some. There’s a carnival in town. Thursday, tomorrow, is for coloreds.…”
Celie, the narrator in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), uses OK:
She giggle. Okay, she say. Nobody coming. Coast clear.
Bobbie Ann Mason’s 1982 collection Shiloh and Other Stories (1982) includes OK in the title story:
“This is a pretty place. Your mama was right.”
“It’s O.K.,” says Norma Jean.
and in “The Rookers”:
“Fluoride’s O.K. It hardens the teeth.”
These examples have been from the mid- and late twentieth century, but twenty-first-century writers continue to be comfortable with OK, sprinkling it more or less sparingly in their writing. Tom Wolfe’s hefty 2004 novel of modern college life, I Am Charlotte Simmons, has a whole chapter titled “You Okay?” It’s the one thing Charlotte’s date at a fraternity formal in Washington, D.C., says to her when he takes her virginity in a drunken, sweaty episode in a hotel room. “Are you okay?” he asks, to which she murmurs “Mmnnnnh,” wishing she could yell at him to stop. And then when he is finished:
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh,” he went, in a tone of immense satisfaction as he rolled over completely on his back. And then he said, “You okay?”
After that, Hoyt and the others who come and go in the hotel room ignore her except occasionally to wonder whether she is OK, when obviously she isn’t. Then at the end of the chapter:
Dreadfully hung over, a malady she had never experienced before, Charlotte had a brief coughing spasm in Maryland, and Hoyt said, “You okay?”
She went, “Mmmnh,” just so he would have a response, and she wouldn’t say anything more. A couple of hours later, as he let her out in front of Little Yard, he said, “You okay?”
She didn’t so much as glance at him. She just walked away with her boat bag. He didn’t ask twice.
And Stephen King doesn’t shy from OK in his 2008 novel Duma Key, where it appears more than eighty times:
“Okay,” Ilse said at last.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’m worried.”
Things on Duma Key had been okay … then strange … then for a long time they’d been okay again. And now …
“Edgar?” Jack touched my elbow. “Okay?”
I was not okay, and wouldn’t be okay for a long time again.
As these examples show, present-day writers employ OK without hesitation, particularly in dialogue, reflecting the present-day use of OK in actual everyday speech. Yet OK seems not to be as frequent in fiction as it is in real life. It’s just OK, not much of a spicy ingredient for crackling dialogue.
There’s a notable exception, however, that is saturated with numerous OKs. It is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), about a man and his young son (about ten years old) wandering through a postapocalyptic American landscape where the sun never shines and every living thing has died except a few surviving and desperate humans. Much of the book is dialogue, and you can scarcely find a page of dialogue without OK. The dialogue itself is bleak, stripped bare of quotation marks and some other punctuation marks, like this, near the beginning of the book:
Okay.
Okay what?
Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That’s okay.
In the middle:
He looked down at the old man and he looked at the road. All right, he said. But then tomorrow we go on.
The boy didnt answer.
That’s the best deal you’re going to get.
Okay.
Okay means okay. It doesnt mean we negotiate another deal
tomorrow.
What’s negotiate?
It means talk about it some more and come up with some other deal. There is no other deal. This is it.
Okay.
And near the end:
Just dont give up. Okay?
Okay.
Okay.
I’m really scared Papa.
I know. But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be lucky. I know you are. I’ve got to stop talking. I’m going to start coughing again.
It’s okay, Papa. You dont have to talk. It’s okay.
McCarthy himself, like most of us, is a bona fide user of OK. Interviewed by Oprah Winfrey in 2007, he said, “You’d like for the people who would appreciate the book to read it. But as far as having many people reading it, so what? It’s OK. Nothing wrong with it.”
In a November 2009 discussion with a Wall Street Journal writer, McCarthy said, “A lot of the lines that are in there are verbatim conversations my son John and I had.” Actual present-day conversations abound with OK, so that might account for its abundance in the book. And OK is only in the dialogue, not the third-person narration.
But perhaps also, OK seems suited to the end of the world, at least in McCarthy’s vision, as it fades from gray to black.