Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA
John O’Hara
A critical paper by
Anne P. Ogan

Appointment in Samarra accomplishes a great deal in a mere 250 pages.  It manages to create an incredibly convincing, detailed and believable picture of a town and countryside, people and relationships, business dealings and social life that will leave most readers with a vivid and lasting impression.

Using what might seem just a short-story sized framework – the action takes place over three days set mostly within a 20-mile radius – O’Hara manages to deliver successfully a full-sized novel: a dozen very real characters with distinct personalities and some psychological depth as well as a real plot with suspenseful, flowing action and a substantive thematic subtext of universality.  All in a brief, engaging page-turner – quite a feat.

How did O’Hara accomplish this?  Foremost, I credit what may be termed “style.”  O’Hara uses an omniscient narrator to set forth the scene, the action and the characters. Importantly, he creates a three-dimensional world and people with complex personalities by using several characters’ observations and their views of one another and by shifting fluidly from internal monologue to perfectly pitched dialogue.

Ultimately, however, the credit has to be attributed to O’Hara’s uncanny ability to grab not just le mot juste but the perfect detail that captures – almost poetically – a nuance uniquely descriptive or suggestive about a person, a moment, a scene.  For example, about college boys, he says simply this, “They were gay again now that the war was over and their universal embarrassment at not being in the fighting army was at an end” and it is enough.  And do we not understand exactly how Julian feels waking up after his night at the Christmas dance:

“He had felt physically worse many times, but this was a pretty good hangover.  It is a pretty good hangover when you look at yourself in the mirror and … [Y]ou do not see your eyes, nor the condition of your hair. … You first brush your teeth, which is an improvement but leaves something to be desired. … He looked at himself again, and wished to God he could go back to bed, but if he should go back to bed he would only think, and he refused to think until after he had had some coffee.” (pp.24-25)

Throughout, O’Hara needs very few words to create a complete, dead-on picture of what’s going on – in a character’s mind, in the mood or atmosphere of a group, or in the action because he picks up the telling point, the distinctive twist, in a sentence or two.  That is, O’Hara is facile (in the good sense of that word).

He shifts deftly from past to present, changing the scenes to move the story along at a pace he sets, brilliantly, as structured as a symphony.  The slow movements are the flashbacks: the tales of Caroline’s love life, Julian’s boyhood escapades of stealing and running away from home, the story of how Al Grecco got his name.  The most important incident in the plot, arguably – Julian’s throwing the highball in Harry Reilly’s face – doesn’t even take place “live”, but rather only in the retelling and rehashing, and in speculation of its consequences. It is that kind of unanticipated, unconventional artistry that makes Appointment in Samarra work, and makes it worthy of our admiration.

The technique of using a list in lieu of description, such as what had happened at the country club before the Englishes arrived on Christmas Eve (pp. 9-10), Dr. English’s memberships that show he “represented the best things in the community” (p.57), the list that Julian runs through in his mind of all the minor infractions of social rules and misbehaviors that others had committed at the country club and been forgiven for in the past (p.90-93), and Julian’s recapitulation of the past year’s business cast in the abbreviations he would have used to head his columns – these lists may not be as clever or as humorous as Nabokov’s list of Lolita’s classmates, but they contribute to the tautness and tightness of the novel, giving the reader a rich image without resorting to a lot of unnecessary description or exposition.

A less successful stylistic trick, perhaps, is the somewhat repetitive use of repetition as a means of emphasis or an attempt at capturing what people really say or say to themselves when they’re heated and angry.   
“Like saying I have cancer. I have cancer. If I did have cancer. You big charmer, you.  You irresistible great big boy, turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm like the water in the tub; turning on the charm turning on the  charr-arm, turning on the charm like the water in the tub like the water in the tub.”(p. 185)

In terms of style, O’Hara does so much right: the overall structure, the syncopated pace, the range in “voice.”  His descriptions are sometimes lyrical while the dialogue is tight, even terse. Contrast “Oh, shut up,” (Caroline to Julian, p.195); “I don’t want to,” (Froggy declining Julian’s invitation to sit together for lunch, p. 196); and
“… I didn’t come for a friendly chat.”
“Oh, no?”
“No.” (p. 196)

with the poetic

“It was cold, and the snow-covered golf course seemed not to be separate from the farmlands that bounded the course on the second, fourth, and seventh holes.  In the summer the golf course was so neatly shaved that it made him think of a farmer in his Sunday suit surrounded by other farmers in overalls and straw hats.  But now in the night there was no way of telling, if you did not know, where club property ended and real farmland began. As far as you could see, the world was white and blue and purple and cold.” (p.76)

The narrative flows inexorably toward the obvious conclusion, but each step on the way is necessary, developmental, interesting, engaging and fresh.

O’Hara is also a master in terms of characters.  Surely Julian is one of the “real” people we shall sympathize with forever; the only reason we won’t meet him is that, alas, he’s dead, having (really, in our minds) tragically taken his own life.  Won’t you think of him more often in the years to come than some of the actual people you once met, once worked with?  If Caroline is a little flat, a little stiff, isn’t it that she is genuinely a lot repressed?  Dr. English, Mrs. Walker and Helene Holman are also nicely fleshed out and distinct; very, very well drawn and definitely true to type, yet not stock characters.

Even minor characters and their juxtaposition are complicated enough to ring true: Irma Fliegler’s sympathy and respect for Lute’s decision on when to join the country club (when they can afford it) are completely consistent with the warmth and consideration she evokes from her sound, wise and affectionate husband.  Al Grecco’s anger and frustration are palpable, and can’t you just picture Alice Cartwright not letting Julian help her with her coat as she left to avoid “… you know what’ll happen (if I stay) …Not all right at all.” (p.230)

There are close to three dozen named characters in the novel.  The reader can see them – or at least “knows” them – better than if he had seen this story on film, so well does O’Hara pick his points of reference and place his characters in specific spots.  Not that they are stock characters (though a few are).  Rather, O’Hara’s talent for texture, for finding the telling idiosyncrasy or distinguishing detail, enables him to populate Appointment in Samarra with a wonderful cast.

But what does it all mean?  Who cares about small town society?  Who cares about the rich?  Certainly no one cares about the social gaffes of a few small-town rich folk.  Moreover, if it is just a “novels of manners,” isn’t it politically incorrect to waste time reading such books if not to write them?

What, then, accounts for the popularity of such books, from Jane Austen to Samuel Butler to Henry James and Edith Wharton on to Fitzgerald, Marquand, Auchincloss and Cheever to name just a few besides O’Hara.

It must be that in addition to their examination of social class and their shedding light on social snobbery, their own as well as their characters’, these authors are developing universal themes as well.

This novel is, for example, very much about the failure of love as a sustaining force.  The opening scene showcases the Flieglers’ successful (and fruitful) marriage, but Irma Fliegler notes before the book has hardly begun that “she wouldn’t trade her life for Caroline English’s, not if you paid her.  She wondered if Julian and Caroline were having another one of their battle royals.” (p.8)

Julian and Caroline tell each other and tell themselves they love each other. But it hardy seems true.  The failure of Julian and Caroline to communicate, let alone fulfill each other’s needs, is of course central to the plot.  But the novel is filled with numerous other examples of the failure of love: Ed Charney’s genuine love as well as passion for Helene Holman, who has no such feelings to return.  Caroline’s mother doesn’t even want to hear about her daughter’s problems, let alone come to grips with them or lovingly help her daughter.  And the past is filled with failed relationships: Julian and Mary Manners’s affair, Caroline’s brief and informal engagement to Joe Montgomery following her failed plan to marry her distant cousin Jerome Walker.

And, of course, the critical void where Julian and his father’s love should have been.  Because Julian is just 30, because O’Hara was just 29 when the novel was written, and because Caroline says so, it makes sense to blame Julian’s fatal psychological weaknesses on failed (or perhaps nonexistent) parental love.  Dr. English himself probably suffered the same fate: his father’s being a scoundrel by no means ensures that he didn’t love his son, but Grandfather English’s absenting himself from the scene via suicide surely contributed to Dr. English’s crucial inability to provide Julian with the love O’Hara would have us believe was essential to Julian’s well-being.

If an internally focused universal theme is not enough to make a book a “good book,” we have in Appointment in Samarra the ever-present consciousness of social strata. Not just jockeying and positioning for position, not just taking snubs seriously and wondering who can afford to serve enough whiskey and whether the evening’s host will order the club’s most expensive entrée for all the guests.  Every scene, almost every thought and every relationship hinges on pegging people by their hereditary backgrounds.  An enormous influx of immigrants had come to urban America just two or three generations before the novel is set, and now their children had ended up in small towns where they are thrown together, mixing socially if not martially, but with significant distrust. Economic mobility (upward and downward) makes them mix in business and as neighbors, but they don’t much like it. Interestingly, Julian is less likely than others to pigeonhole people by their different backgrounds.  His first love was the socially unacceptable Polish girl Mary Manners, and it doesn’t cross his mind that people will read his very personal affront to Harry Reilly as a generic insult to the Irish and even all Catholics.  Perhaps that’s why Julian is equally liked (and disliked) by members of all the ethnic groups in Gibbsville.

There is another theme, as well, making Appointment in Samarra a full-fledged novel and not just a long short-story or novella.  It is the broad question of the role of fate and free will interacting upon the protagonist’s life.  At the outset, the epitaph about Death suggests inevitability, but there seem to be so many points where Julian could have made different choices. It is Caroline who says “Oh, God, Ju, why did you do it? Why do you do things like that?” (p.29).  But it is also Caroline who thinks “It was time for him to die. There was nothing for him to do today…” (p.245). 
Questions for discussion:

1. Was Julian destined to meet death, to throw the drink, to have his business go bankrupt, to lose his wife -- or did he choose his own fate?  If so, what is the meaning of the epitaph?  Is there enough tension between the possibilities to make the novel successful?

1. The novel is sometimes criticized as being “dated.”  Gibbsville is a pretty small town and 1930 a very specific time, and the prejudices and animosities of class and background are very much in the forefront of the characters’ thinking as well as forming important subject matter and a critical backbone for the novel. Was O’Hara simply capturing the dynamic changes hitting mid-century America a generation after a huge wave of immigration or citing an example of a universal and timeless phenomenon?  Would O’Hara’s avoidance of some of the slang and lingo peculiar to the era (which usage was somewhat unusual and earned him credit at the time) have alleviated the problem of the book’s being “dated”?

1. Appointment in Samarra points up the awkward position of the “unmoneyed rich” and their differences from the poor.  Is this just due to its being set at the outset of the Depression ?  What is the role of money in the novel?

1. Discuss the role of sex in the novel.  Several plot twists hinge on sex, and many of the characters are motivated by sex.  Is it odd that in a story about the failure and dissolution of a marriage, Julian and Caroline seem to have a good sexual relationship?  Is it odd that they have a good sexual relationship since Caroline seems to have had very bad and remarkably little sexual experience or knowledge (think of her mother’s obliqueness)? What is the impact of Julian’s self-deemed sexual prowess?

5.  While the novel cannot be said to be strictly autobiographical, obvious parallels abound. What do you think Appointment in Samarra says about O’Hara’s state of mind as he approached 30? His first marriage had recently ended; his drinking was, if anything, more problematical than Julian’s (is O’Hara aware of that?); and his relationship with his physician father had not been very good (as bad as Julian’s ?) ?