Appointment in Samarra (26 page)

I ve been there. Just driven through, though. Who do you know in Gibbsville? Do you know Caroline Walker? That s right, she s married. She married Julian English. Do you know them?

I know him, she said. Do you know Caroline at all?

No. I never met her. I just knew Julian.

Well, I didn t know him very well. I haven t seen either of them in years. So you re from Pennsylvania.

Uh-huh.

Mary Manners, he said, you re the prettiest girl I ever saw.

Thank you, kind sir, she said. You re all right yourself, Ross Campbell.

I am now. I will be if you go away with me this afternoon.

Not this week-end.

But next week-end I won t have Ed s car.

You can hire one. No, I have to watch my step. We shouldn t of come here, Ross. Rifkin comes here sometimes and his friends, a lot of movie people, they all come here.

Come on, while I have the car.

No, positively not. Not this week.

Lute, give me five dollars. I want to pay the garbage man.

Lute Fliegler was lying on the davenport, his hands in back of his head, his coat and vest on the chair beside him. He reached in his trousers pocket and took a five dollar bill from a small roll. His eyes met his wife s as the money appeared, and she was grateful to him for not saying what they both were thinking: that maybe they had better be more careful about money till they saw how things were. She went out to the kitchen and paid the garbage man and then came back to the living-room. Can t I make you a sandwich, Lute? You ought to have something.

No, that s all right. I don t feel like eating.

Don t worry. Please don t worry. They ll make you the head of it. You know more about the business than anybody else, and you ve always been reliable. Dr. English knows that.

Yeah, but does he? What I m afraid of is he ll think we were all a bunch of drunks. I don t mean that against Julian, but you know.

I know, she said. If only daytime were a time for kissing she would kiss him now. All this, the furniture, the house, the kids, herself all this was what Lute was worrying about. She was almost crying, so she smiled. Come here, he said. Oh, Lute, she said. She knelt down beside him and cried a little and then kissed him. I feel so sorry for Caroline. You, I

Don t worry, he said. I still get my check from the government, and I can get lots of jobs he cleared his throat in fact, that s my trouble. I was saying to Alfred P. Sloan the other day. He called me up. I meant to tell you, but it didn t seem important. So I said to Al

Who s Alfred P. Sloan?

My God. Here I been selling he s president of General Motors.

Oh. So what did you say to him? said Irma. THE END. Afterword Appointment in Samarra is John O Hara s best novel, and that is something very good indeed. O Hara is probably tired of hearing it described in this way; no writer likes hearing all his life that his first book is his best. Scott Fitzgerald once threatened to slug a fellow writer if be ever mentioned This Side of Paradise again, and O Hara is even more the slugging type of writer than Fitzgerald was. Like Hemingway, who has influenced O Hara and who thought of himself as slowly becoming wise and skilled enough to fight Stendhal to a draw, O Hara likes to think of himself as steadily improving. I m fifty-three years old, he told an interviewer when From the Terrace was published in 1958, and I think I ve gained the wisdom needed to handle a really big novel about a big subject. In the past, critics of my work have started with Appointment in Samarra and worked forward. Now, I think they ll start with From the Terrace and look back. This belief, if mistaken, is surely very natural, and readers are bound to sympathize with it, though O Hara does sometimes seem almost as sensitive as Hemingway was about criticism of his latest work, as if he were not so confident as he appears. O Hara once stopped writing short stories for The New Yorker which he does brilliantly because the magazine published an unfavorable review of one of his novels; he is supposed to have told the editor that unless The New Yorker got rid of that reviewer it would get no more O Hara short stories, and he was as good as his word for several years. Twenty years ago, Edmund Wilson defined the kind of excellence that makes Appointment in Samarra the fine book it is: O Hara, he said, is ... a social commentator; and in this field of social habit and manners ... he has done work that is original and interesting. & His grasp of what lies underneath it is not, however, so sure. We need to see what this distinction really means if we are to do full justice to Appointment in Samarra. If we concentrate on the story of Julian English, on his inner life and the inner lives of the other characters, we are likely to find the novel merely competent. These elements in the book are handled intelligently enough for its purpose, but that purpose is something else, and if we do not see what it is, we are likely to miss the book s real achievement. What, as Mr. Wilson asks, is the relevance to the story ... of the newspaper woman (pp. 38-39) ... whose career is described on such a scale? The account of her beginnings is amusing, but the part she plays in the drama doesn t seem to warrant this full-length introduction. That is certainly true if we insist that the real subject of Appointment in Samarra is the drama of Julian English s life and death. But if we insist on that, then the whole story of Al Grecco, of which the account of this newspaperwoman is a part, is equally irrelevant, though it occupies nearly a fifth of the novel and has an independent narrative life of its own. By this standard, too, the flashback about Caroline English s growing up is much longer than it needs to be; the story of Irma and Luther Fliegler, with which the novel begins and ends, is only superficially relevant; and the book s conclusion especially its wonderful glimpse of Caroline English s old beau, Ross Campbell, and Julian s Polish girl, Mary is anticlimactic. What makes Appointment in Samarra remarkable, however, is not the story of Julian English; it is the story of Gibbsville. All the characters, even Julian English, are here not for their own sakes, but because they represent significant social elements in Gibbsville; and Gibbsville is here because it is a microcosm of American life as it was actually lived at the end of the 1920 s (the events of the novel occur at Christmastime, 1930). When Appointment in Samarra was first published, everyone who lived in an American town anywhere near the size of Gibbsville was certain O Hara had been a close observer of his town. If Al Grecco and Ed Charney are irrelevant to the drama of Julian English, they are an important part of the drama of Gibbsville, and so is Lydia Faunce Browne, the newspaperwoman, who seems to Mr. Wilson a mistake. Lydia Faunce Browne became a newspaperwoman when her husband deserted her; we know the Brownes were a part of the Lantenengo Street crowd because the absconding Mr. Browne left large bills at the Lantenengo Country Club and at the Gibbsville Club. When Mrs. Browne goes to the fights, she represents Lantenengo Street; and when she describes a fighter named Tony Morascho by saying, Beauty! Do you know El Grecco, the celebrated Spanish artist? Surely you do. Well, there was El Grecco, to the life, the whole pattern of relations that connect the genteel, nominally cultured world of Lantenengo Street with the world of Ed Charney s Stage Coach Inn is established for us. The long flashback of Caroline Walker s girlhood contributes an equally important element to our understanding of Gibbsville; the life of Irma and Lute Fliegler shows us how the respectable domesticity of what we would call if we admitted we have classes the middle class contrasts with the upper-class life of the Englishes. The Flieglers live on Lantenengo Street, and Irma feels they very much belong there: is she not a Doane, and did not Grandfather Doane win a Congressional Medal of Honor in the Mexican War? But the Flieglers are conservative in a strictly middle-class way. They have several children (Caroline and Julian English deliberately plan to have no children for five years, because neither wants Caroline to become absolutely a married woman. A married woman with a child and false teeth and a husband who is running around with that girl from Kresge s ). The Flieglers will not join the country club until they can afford it (the upper-class characters get themselves posted regularly at the clubs for failure to pay their bills and are all in debt to Whit Hofman or Harry Reilly). There is a wonderfully subtle depiction of the class differences between these two groups when they meet at the Stage Coach Inn Christmas night. One might say that O Hara comes by his knowledge of Gibbsville naturally, except that if knowledge like this did not take a rare talent, everyone born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, around 1905, as John O Hara was, would have it. O Hara was the eldest of eight children born to a doctor a good deal like the Dr. Malloy who appears briefly in Appointment in Samarra and at greater length elsewhere in O Hara for instance, in the fine short story called The Doctor s Son, where Dr. Malloy s son, Jim, also appears, as he does as a writer around New York in Butterfield 8 and as the Hollywood scriptwriter and narrator of Hope of Heaven. Just as John O Hara, after getting fired from two prep schools, was graduated from Niagara Prep and had passed his entrance examinations for Yale, Dr. O Hara died, and there was no money to send John to Yale. It is hard to avoid feeling that this disappointment helped to fix in O Hara a combination of envy and dislike of the people who did become Yale or Princeton or even Lafayette gentlemen ( Merry Christmas, you stuck-up bastards! as Al Grecco says to Lantenengo Street) that seems to be the driving force behind his insatiable curiosity about the life of the American upper classes. There are few people who know this country better than I do, O Hara characteristically remarked not long ago. I know every important person in this country, or I know someone close to each of them. O Hara would probably be eager to offer you evidence if you challenged this fantastic claim, but it would be evidence of what drives him rather than evidence of what makes him a good writer, even if it were true. It is not O Hara s merely factual knowledge but his imaginative grasp of American life that makes Appointment in Samarra a remarkable book. This marvelous imaginative grasp of what it feels like for each social group to live in Gibbsville is the real subject of the book; the story of Julian English merely provides the plot. The long flashbacks about Al Grecco and Caroline English, the concluding account of Gibbsville s various class reactions to Julian s death, and all the other details not related in any significant way to Julian s life itself represent significant parts of Gibbsville s life. Moreover, to describe all this as social comment is not nearly good enough; it does not begin to suggest the quality of O Hara s insight or the sharpness of his observation. It may be that we do not know the personal motives of any of the characters do not, as Mr. Wilson says, really know why Julian English committed suicide and that O Hara s grasp of these aspects of life is not very sure. He does seem to depend for his explanation of the inner lives of his characters on some unanalyzed assumptions about men s natures, some habits, perhaps, of his own consciousness. Excessive melancholy and sensitivity, especially self-pity, combined with an extreme nastiness of manner, regularly characterize his heroes and more than once drive them to suicide. As Mr. Wilson says, heel for heel, Pal Joey is a comedown after Julian English, and though Julian sometimes knows he is a son of a bitch-at one point he says he is-it is uncertain that either he or O Hara knows he is a first-class heel. There is some evidence, in fact, that Julian is meant to be the true American gentleman, refined, aware, instinctively gallant, whose bad behavior is a result of his sensitive nature s being driven beyond restraint by the crudeness of the people around him. On the rare occasions when we are told about his deepest feelings, he is very sensitive; when he remembered the morning after that he had thrown a drink in Harry Reilly s face, for instance, the knowledge returned to him ... as though in a terrible, vibrating sound; like standing too near a big bell and having it suddenly struck without warning. We are told very early that Ed Charney, a shrewd judge of people, thinks highly of Julian ( That English, he s my boy. For my money I will take that English. He s a right guy. ), and we are regularly informed of Julian s charm, his grace as a dancer, his skill with women. He has all O Hara s passionate respect for the expensive appurtenances of life ( It s like playing golf with cheap clubs, or playing tennis with a dollar racket, or bad food. It s like anything cheap, he says). For Caroline, Julian had that gallantry that ... was attitude and manner; a gesture with a cigarette in his hand, his whistling, his humming while he played solitaire. & In the strict privacy of the country club s porch, he and Monsignor Creedon exchange what seem to be intended as the opinions of men civilized beyond the understanding of anyone else in Gibbsville. But what we are to think of the other aspect of Julian s character, it is difficult to say. He treats Caroline without consideration for her feelings, humiliates her publicly, and speaks to her in an unforgivable way because he is so intent on expressing his own hurt feelings that be never thinks of what she is feeling. Having done so, be insists that Caroline is behaving unforgivably if she fails him in the slightest way. Blind, without knowing, you could stick by me, he says to her. That s what you d do if you were a real wife, but, what the hell. He is filled with egotism and self-pity in a way he seems only rarely to suspect. The question is whether the reader is intended to see all this as forgivable (like the bad manners Hamlet displays in his antic moments) because Julian is sensitive in a superior way, or whether he is to find them unforgivable and think that Julian, heel for heel, leaves Pal Joey nowhere. The very fact that Mr. Wilson found Julian a heel on a heroic scale and that other critics have thought him a modern Hamlet suggests the novel s lack of clarity about the innermost lives of its characters. But no novelist can do everything, and the inner lives of the characters are not the main interest of Appointment in Samarra. What O Hara does see with marvelous exactness are the social motives of his characters; he knows exactly how they think and feel as members of their class and group. He knows what a man like Julian English carries in his pocket, what phonograph records he owns, what kind of car he drives, and how he drives it; he knows exactly how Frannie Snyder and Al Grecco can meet and how they will act together; he knows exactly how women first broke the taboo against their coming into the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club, who sits at what table there and why, what can be done and what not done when they do. Moreover, he knows these things not simply as facts but as experience. It was about two o clock, U. S. Naval Observatory Hourly By Western Union time, when Al Grecco appeared in the doorway of the Apollo Restaurant, and we can see, as Al has for years, that standard clock, inscribed with its typical American mixture of scientific boasting and advertising, that hung in the Apollo Restaurant as it hung in tens of thousands of public places all over America. In addition, we see these things through the eyes of characters we know well, through the eyes of Al Grecco, who loves Ed Charney and is as loyal to him and his organization as men are to well-loved families; through the eyes of Irma Fliegler, who nearly cries when she recognizes the courage of Lute s joking about Alfred P. Sloan when he is worried that he will lose his job after Julian s death; through the eyes of Harry Reilly, whose sister calls him anxiously in New York after Julian s death but remembers to ask him to buy Monsignor Creedon a new biretta. We know all these people well enough as social beings to follow what they are feeling and to experience with them what they experience. So we listen with Irma Fliegler to the clacking of a broken chain link in the quiet dawn of Christmas morning, or time with Al Grecco the familiar run from the Apollo to the Stage Coach Inn, or listen with Julian English to Paul Whiteman playing I ll Build a Stairway to Paradise on the Victrola. Through Julian s eyes we watch scornfully the lower class manners of Harry Reilly as he tells a story in the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club, or listen with Lute Fliegler to Pat Quilty, the Irish undertaker, refusing to buy a Cadillac, out of Catholic solidarity with Harry Reilly, whom Julian has insulted. Knowing the class and group feelings of all these characters, we can see and hear them behind the way Lute Fiegler talks to Julian English, or Caroline talks to her father-in-law, or Helene Holman to a drunken Julian, or even Al Grecco s way of speaking to Mrs. Grady, the Englishes cook. All these insights are pointed up for us by a story that is as tightly constructed as a well-made play. Appointment in Samarra even observes in its own way the unities of time and place and action. The