"It Was Death That Jostled Me"
by Robert Roper
MARCH 25, 2013 TAGS:
Last year marked the 79th anniversary of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, one of the three or four greatest and most richly readable American novels of the 20th century.
Written in just four months, while O’Hara was living in an $8-a-week rooming house at East 51st Street near Third Avenue, Manhattan, the novel begins with an epigraph from Somerset Maugham:
Written in the pit of the Depression, Appointment is about an historic moment unnervingly like our own, after a severe stock market crash but before the full dimensions of the ensuing catastrophe have become evident. O’Hara’s sexy, charismatic, doomed hero is Julian English, a young man who runs the Cadillac dealership in Gibbsville, Pa., a town modeled closely after O’Hara’s own Pottsville, where he grew up as the son of a respected doctor. In normal times the Cadillac dealership is a dead cinch for big profits in a bustling coal-industry town, but times are not normal and although the relatively well-off white folk of Gibbsville are celebrating Christmas Eve with a lot of drinking and dancing and flirting at the country club, Julian is feeling the tremors of something bad coming, something economically and existentially dire, and in a moment brought on by too much booze and anticipatory despair, he throws a Scotch and soda in the face of a man to whom he owes a considerable amount of money:
From this casual and almost comical action grows, unerringly, a terrible doom. Julian is possibly the most admired man in all of Gibbsville. Yes, he drinks too much, but he’s handsome and bright and glamorous, and among other advantages he enjoys the affections of his captivating young wife, Caroline, whom some readers have found to be the first sexually plausible woman in our literature. Caroline feels the injury to their prospects and to the local society of which they are a gleaming ornament as keenly as Julian does, and she wants him to repair the damage, beg forgiveness of the wealthy man (a big investor in the Cadillac agency, as it turns out), and Julian tries, but the man cannot be appeased, and the novel’s readers get anxious with a terrible suspicion: that some gestures cannot be taken back. Some fates are indeed written. Even in our boosterish, progressive American world of mortgages and gleaming new automobiles and the second chance, time runs out.
Each of us has an appointment somewhere, if not in Samarra, then in Trenton, or Philadelphia, or Boca Raton. But this tremor of terrible foreknowledge passes, as Julian seems to get some traction on his problem; he has good friends in Gibbsville, he also has that smart wife working hard on his behalf, and how bad can things be, after all? Even the rich man may eventually come around. But the problem, the fatal problem, is not really in the coming economic hard times or even in the rigid social structure of a place like Gibbsville; it resides, intractably, in the young man himself, in his inspiring but flinty and prideful essential character, in his very bones and animating stuff. That which makes him seductively attractive to women and to other men is what leads him into a downward spiral, it’s his toughness, his impatience with phonies, his lack of fear. He would have made a great leader of men on St. Crispin’s Day; a gallant infantry captain in the thick of things at Antietam. Or maybe what distinguishes him isn’t a lack of fear so much as a disdain for all consequences – he feels fear, he is entirely human in his awareness of how badly he has damaged himself and his beloved wife, but even so, bring it on. Just bring it on, and the hell with the bastards.
In February 1934, while in the middle of writing the book, O’Hara described it to his brother Tom as “essentially the story of a young married couple and their breakdown in the first year of the Depression.” What makes the story sad, fascinating and sad, is how Julian’s troubles are refracted in the subtle chemistry and magic of an ongoing marriage, a marriage so far childless but intensely alive with sexual ebb and flow, a rich marriage of just the sort of grownup longings and intoxicating intimacies that we readers wish to see protected. But protect it Julian cannot, finally. Almost the only thing that matters to him is the esteem of his responsive wife, but his nihilism at last extends even to that. Half in love with his own extinction, he puts everything at risk. Goes all in.
Readers unprepared for the last act of Appointment in Samarra sometimes wish to put the book away from them. They shake their heads, reading the swift, terrible sentences again and again, as if looking for a way out, a conditional clause, a hope. Julian is like a beautiful younger brother dangerously full of gifts, one who floats out of range of help on the very energy that makes him so attractive. What happens to him is hard enough, but the tragedy comes searingly home via the grief of his wife, who has learned how not to love him, who has been alienated from him by his recklessness, but whose half-mad soliloquy at the end reads like something out of Aeschylus. Her heart will never heal from the loss of this fated charmer, we fear, and we close the book in a state of quiet alarm, looking this way and that for the softening gesture, the footnote (“don’t worry, this is only a work of fiction”), uneasy in our American surroundings, our comforting fragile world.
Written in just four months, while O’Hara was living in an $8-a-week rooming house at East 51st Street near Third Avenue, Manhattan, the novel begins with an epigraph from Somerset Maugham:
DEATH SPEAKS:
There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
Written in the pit of the Depression, Appointment is about an historic moment unnervingly like our own, after a severe stock market crash but before the full dimensions of the ensuing catastrophe have become evident. O’Hara’s sexy, charismatic, doomed hero is Julian English, a young man who runs the Cadillac dealership in Gibbsville, Pa., a town modeled closely after O’Hara’s own Pottsville, where he grew up as the son of a respected doctor. In normal times the Cadillac dealership is a dead cinch for big profits in a bustling coal-industry town, but times are not normal and although the relatively well-off white folk of Gibbsville are celebrating Christmas Eve with a lot of drinking and dancing and flirting at the country club, Julian is feeling the tremors of something bad coming, something economically and existentially dire, and in a moment brought on by too much booze and anticipatory despair, he throws a Scotch and soda in the face of a man to whom he owes a considerable amount of money:“Julian … sat there watching him, through eyes that he permitted to appear sleepier than they felt. Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly? Why couldn’t he stand him? What was there about Reilly that caused him to say to himself: ‘If he starts one more of those moth-eaten stories I’ll throw this drink in his face’… the whole drink, including the three round-cornered lumps of ice. At least one lump would hit Reilly in the eye, and the liquid would splash all over his shirt ... down inside the waistcoat and down, down into Reilly’s trousers, so that even if the ice did not hurt his eye, the spots on his fly would be so embarrassing he would leave.”
From this casual and almost comical action grows, unerringly, a terrible doom. Julian is possibly the most admired man in all of Gibbsville. Yes, he drinks too much, but he’s handsome and bright and glamorous, and among other advantages he enjoys the affections of his captivating young wife, Caroline, whom some readers have found to be the first sexually plausible woman in our literature. Caroline feels the injury to their prospects and to the local society of which they are a gleaming ornament as keenly as Julian does, and she wants him to repair the damage, beg forgiveness of the wealthy man (a big investor in the Cadillac agency, as it turns out), and Julian tries, but the man cannot be appeased, and the novel’s readers get anxious with a terrible suspicion: that some gestures cannot be taken back. Some fates are indeed written. Even in our boosterish, progressive American world of mortgages and gleaming new automobiles and the second chance, time runs out.
Each of us has an appointment somewhere, if not in Samarra, then in Trenton, or Philadelphia, or Boca Raton. But this tremor of terrible foreknowledge passes, as Julian seems to get some traction on his problem; he has good friends in Gibbsville, he also has that smart wife working hard on his behalf, and how bad can things be, after all? Even the rich man may eventually come around. But the problem, the fatal problem, is not really in the coming economic hard times or even in the rigid social structure of a place like Gibbsville; it resides, intractably, in the young man himself, in his inspiring but flinty and prideful essential character, in his very bones and animating stuff. That which makes him seductively attractive to women and to other men is what leads him into a downward spiral, it’s his toughness, his impatience with phonies, his lack of fear. He would have made a great leader of men on St. Crispin’s Day; a gallant infantry captain in the thick of things at Antietam. Or maybe what distinguishes him isn’t a lack of fear so much as a disdain for all consequences – he feels fear, he is entirely human in his awareness of how badly he has damaged himself and his beloved wife, but even so, bring it on. Just bring it on, and the hell with the bastards.
In February 1934, while in the middle of writing the book, O’Hara described it to his brother Tom as “essentially the story of a young married couple and their breakdown in the first year of the Depression.” What makes the story sad, fascinating and sad, is how Julian’s troubles are refracted in the subtle chemistry and magic of an ongoing marriage, a marriage so far childless but intensely alive with sexual ebb and flow, a rich marriage of just the sort of grownup longings and intoxicating intimacies that we readers wish to see protected. But protect it Julian cannot, finally. Almost the only thing that matters to him is the esteem of his responsive wife, but his nihilism at last extends even to that. Half in love with his own extinction, he puts everything at risk. Goes all in. Readers unprepared for the last act of Appointment in Samarra sometimes wish to put the book away from them. They shake their heads, reading the swift, terrible sentences again and again, as if looking for a way out, a conditional clause, a hope. Julian is like a beautiful younger brother dangerously full of gifts, one who floats out of range of help on the very energy that makes him so attractive. What happens to him is hard enough, but the tragedy comes searingly home via the grief of his wife, who has learned how not to love him, who has been alienated from him by his recklessness, but whose half-mad soliloquy at the end reads like something out of Aeschylus. Her heart will never heal from the loss of this fated charmer, we fear, and we close the book in a state of quiet alarm, looking this way and that for the softening gesture, the footnote (“don’t worry, this is only a work of fiction”), uneasy in our American surroundings, our comforting fragile world.
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COMMENTS (1)
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James MacDonald wrote on February 11, 2010 4:44am
Any recognition of John O'Hara is to be welcomed. But to single out Appointment in Samarra, his first novel, is to cast a shadow over the rest of his career, which lasted more than 35. Samarra should therefore be seen a an introduction to O'Hara's work. [Report Comment]
