Appointment in Samarra (2 page)

Appointment
is also authoritative about class and drinking—along with sex, O’Hara’s two other great themes. O’Hara was an avid student of both and, until he finally went on the wagon, a famously nasty and quarrelsome drunk. He even attempted once to punch out a dwarf at the ‘21’ Club in New York. Bars, especially in his early years, were a research laboratory for O’Hara—they were where he came by so much of that knowingness—and in his early novels alcohol is the volatile
fuel that propels the plot. When
Appointment
opens, Julian English is already well on his way to becoming a precocious alcoholic, if he isn’t there already, and in one way the story of his downfall is really the story of a single, epic binge, ending with a giant highball he mixes for himself in a flower vase.

Alcohol in O’Hara is the great loosener, a potion that makes people feel sexy and amorous, and in his books set during Prohibition it’s also a powerful leveler, a solvent eating away at the foundations of the social order and mingling the country club set with gangsters and their girlfriends and the likes of the bootlegger Ed Charney, a social arbiter in his own way and possibly the most powerful person in the county. Even the mixing of a living room cocktail, in a home as proper as Julian’s stiff-necked parents’, carries with it a whiff of corruption, and no one is exempt, not even the clergy. In one surprising scene in
Appointment
, Julian shares a companionable drink in a country club locker room with Monsignor Creedon, the pastor of the local Catholic church, who has to say Mass the next morning. He hesitates, looking at his watch, and then says, “All right. I’ve time. I’ll have one with you.”

The O’Haras were Catholics, and well-to-do. John was the eldest of eight children, born in 1905 to a prominent Pottsville physician. The family lived on Mahantongo Street (Lantenengo Street in the novel, the town’s toniest neighborhood) in a mansion that once belonged to the Yuengling brewing family. They owned five automobiles, a weekend farm, and a string of show horses, and belonged to all the town’s best clubs. Yet for whatever reason, O’Hara felt his Irishness and his Catholicism marked him as an outsider, and he became an obsessive observer of social hierarchy. He studied class indicators—clothes, college slang, fraternity pins and handshakes, membership lists—the way the Duc de Saint-Simon studied the rituals and pecking order at the court of Louis Quatorze. “To read him on a fashionable bar or the Gibbsville country club,” Edmund Wilson once wrote of O’Hara, “is to be shown on the screen of a fluoroscope gradations of social prestige of which one had not before been aware.”

As Julian reflects at one point, “by the time a man reached junior year in college he knew how he was situated in the country club social life,” and the novel extends this awareness of hierarchy into an entire social taxonomy. There’s Lantenengo Street, where the country club set lives, and then, down the hill, Christiana Street, home to the town’s middle class: a butcher, a motorman, a freight clerk, two bookkeepers for the coal company, a Baptist minister, a garage mechanic. The Flieglers don’t belong to the country club: when they want a drink or two they go with their friends, other Pennsylvania Dutch couples—the Schaeffers, the Ziegenfusses, the Hartensteins—to one of the roadhouses on the outskirts of town. Still farther out are the little coal mining villages, or “patches,” home to “the hunkeys, the schwackies, the roundheaders, the broleys,” who can’t afford bootleg liquor and drink boilo, or homemade moonshine, instead.

O’Hara himself became a shameless social climber and poseur, the kind of person who collected matchbooks and ties from clubs he couldn’t get into and left them casually lying around his house. Especially as a young man he was probably a know-it-all, but his book doesn’t show off. It has some of the same factual density, the careful attention to small detail, as Updike’s Rabbit novels, also set in a small Pennsylvania town, where Rabbit even becomes a car dealer. “I guess I love this place,” a mostly sober Julian thinks, looking over a snowy Pennsylvania landscape, and the same is true of O’Hara, who in his writing returned again and again to Gibbsville, making it an entire miniature world, a northern Yoknapatawpha. If you want to know what it was like to live in 1930s America,
Appointment in Samarra
isn’t a bad place to start. You can get some of the same information from Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
but not in such urgent fashion. And while
Appointment
is dated in some ways, its stinging class awareness—its sense of everyone looking over his or her shoulder and scrabbling for a place on the social ladder—feels as current as the novels of Tom Wolfe.

Patrick O’Hara, John’s father, died when his son was twenty, leaving behind a mountain of debt. This, along with getting
bounced from a series of prep schools, pretty much ended O’Hara’s dream of attending Yale, which was for him—or would have been, he imagined—what Princeton was for Fitzgerald. Instead he got a more varied education in bars and speakeasies and from working on the railroad, on an ocean liner, and as a hotel night clerk. Amazingly, as late as 1935, when he had already published three books, O’Hara was still fantasizing about New Haven. If he couldn’t get into Yale College, perhaps he could go to the Yale School of Medicine, he decided. But he did his real graduate work in a succession of newspaper city rooms, starting at the
Pottsville Journal
and ending at the
New York Herald Tribune
. O’Hara was a terrible newspaperman. He was always being fired for being tardy, hungover, or just plain surly. But he learned a reporter’s reverence for facts and sharpened what was already an acute ear for the way people spoke in real life.

In the late 1920s O’Hara started writing Talk of the Town pieces and short stories—“casuals,” they were called—for
The New Yorker
and began an association with that magazine that lasted some forty years, with occasional time-out for feuds and quarrels. (O’Hara believed that his
New Yorker
pieces were so specialized they couldn’t be sold anywhere else and that the magazine should therefore pay him even for the ones that didn’t work out.) O’Hara felt, perhaps rightly, that he was never as valued by
The New Yorker
as he should have been (his 247 stories are still an all-time record there), and all his life he carried a chip on his shoulder when it came to his literary reputation. He thought he deserved the Nobel Prize, and lobbied for it, just as he did for honorary degrees, which didn’t come, either. (When Kingman Brewster, Yale’s president, was asked why the university never gave O’Hara a degree, he replied, “Because he asked for it.”) O’Hara had the misfortune to work in the shadow of his contemporaries Hemingway and Faulkner, and by the end of his career, when his kind of social observation had gone out of fashion, critics picked on him mercilessly.

O’Hara wrote his own epitaph, which is inscribed on the grave where he was buried in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1970:
“Better than anyone else he told the truth of his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” That’s pure O’Hara: blustery, self-important, a little needy, but not entirely wrong. In general, he was among the least autobiographical of writers, more interested in studying the world and its ways than in studying himself, someone he already had a high opinion of. But we can nevertheless catch a glimpse of O’Hara—the young O’Hara—in Julian English. On the one hand, English, whose very name proclaims him to be a member of the WASP ascendancy, is O’Hara’s revenge on the people who he felt had snubbed him. It’s the self-made Irishman Harry Reilly who wins in the end. But English and his creator nevertheless have a lot in common. They were both doctor’s sons (though O’Hara lets us know that Dr. English was famously and dangerously bad at skull surgery, something his own father was renowned for), and both were disappointments to their fathers, who didn’t bother to disguise it. Both liked to take a drink and were apt to pick fights when a little tight. Both liked pretty girls. (O’Hara, who at the time of writing
Appointment
was recently divorced from his first wife—she was a well-born Episcopalian—was probably even more of a ladies’ man than Julian was.) Julian has some of O’Hara’s cynicism and prickliness and also his social awareness. In a conversation with his secretary, Mary, Julian can’t help noticing that “she represented precisely what she came from: solid, respectable, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lutheran middle class; and when he thought about her, when she made her existence felt, when she actively represented what she stood for, he could feel the little office suddenly becoming overcrowded with a delegation of all the honest clerks and mechanics and housewives and Sunday School teachers and orphans—all the Christiana Street kind of people.”

In some ways Julian, with his money, his beautiful wife, his perfectly tailored clothes, his starched collars and waxed-calf shoes, his Kappa Beta Phi key, and his assured position in society, is the person O’Hara dreamed of being. Yet in the novel—this is perhaps the crucial point of
Appointment in Samarra
—it’s not enough. There’s an emptiness in Julian, a sense that life
has already offered him all there is and it’s a disappointment. But O’Hara had still another quality: a toughness and grittiness, a determination to succeed and prove others wrong, that made him get up every morning—or, more likely, every afternoon—his head pounding, light another cigarette, and start typing.

O’Hara is also more generous than Julian, who is a bit of a snob. To the end of the book O’Hara retains his sympathy for his character, whom he could so easily have lampooned, just as he resists the temptation to satirize or revenge himself on people like Julian’s parents or Caroline’s mother—social types he must have loathed in real life. The most remarkable thing of all about
Appointment in Samarra
is its tolerance, its sweetness, even. In his later novels O’Hara became harder and tougher, more cynical, but this first book is full of affection for the world as he found it.

CHARLES M
C
GRATH

Appointment in Samarra

To F. P. A.

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 market-place 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.

—
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. She has earned her sleep, for it is Christmas morning, strictly speaking, and all the day before she has worked like a dog, cleaning the turkey and baking things, and, until a few hours ago, trimming the tree. The awful proximity of his heartbeats makes Luther Fliegler begin to want his wife a little, but Irma can say no when she is tired. It is too much trouble, she says when she is tired, and she won’t take any chances. Three children is enough; three children in ten years. So Luther Fliegler does not reach out for her. It is Christmas morning, and he will do her the favor of letting her enjoy her sleep; a favor which she will never know he did for her. And it is a favor, all right, because Irma likes Christmas too, and on this one morning she might not mind the trouble, might be willing to take a chance. Luther Fliegler more actively stifled the little temptation and thought the hell with it, and then turned and put his hands around his wife’s waist and caressed the little rubber tire of flesh across her diaphragm. She began to stir and then she opened her eyes and said: “My God, Lute, what are you doing?”

“Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Don’t, will you please?” she said, but she smiled happily and put her arms around his big back. “God, you’re crazy,” she said. “Oh, but I love you.” And for a little while Gibbsville knew no happier people than Luther Fliegler and his wife,
Irma. Then Luther went to sleep, and Irma got up and then came back to the bedroom, stopping to look out the window before she got into bed again.

Lantenengo Street had a sort of cottony silence to it. The snow was piled high in the gutters, and the street was open only to the width of two cars. It was too dark for the street to look cottony, and there was an illusion even about the silence. Irma thought she could yell her loudest and not be heard, so puffily silent did it look, but she also knew that if she wanted to (which she didn’t) she could carry on a conversation with Mrs. Bromberg across the way, without either of them raising her voice. Irma chided herself for thinking this way about Mrs. Bromberg on Christmas morning, but immediately she defended herself: Jews do not observe Christmas, except to make more money out of Christians, so you do not have to treat Jews any different on Christmas than on any other day of the year. Besides, having the Brombergs on Lantenengo Street hurt real estate values. Everybody said so. The Brombergs, Lute had it on good authority, had paid thirty thousand for the Price property, which was twelve thousand five hundred more than Will Price had been asking; but if the Brombergs wanted to live on Lantenengo Street, they could pay for it. Irma wondered if it was true that Sylvia Bromberg’s sister and brother-in-law were dickering for the McAdams property next door. She wouldn’t be surprised. Pretty soon there would be a whole colony of Jews in the neighborhood, and the Fliegler children and all the other nice children in the neighborhood would grow up with Jewish accents.