Appointment in Samarra

by John O'Hara

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A Portrait of the Disintegration of Marriage

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Appointment in Samarra has been viewed in many different ways. John Updike called it a “social panorama,” while Ernest Hemingway dubbed it “a Christmas story.” O’Hara himself, however, in a letter to his brother Tom prior to the novel’s publication, referred to it as “essentially the story of a young married couple and their breakdown in the first year of the depression.” Despite themes of fate and inevitability and the failure of parental love, then, Appointment in Samarra may be seen as an intimate look at the failings of a young union. Many of the truths evident in O’Hara’s work hold A flapper defies prohibition at a speakeasy in the 1920s. The novel reflects the spirit of the “Roaring 20s.”

Rather cleverly, O’Hara does not first present Caroline Walker English and Julian English; rather, he sets up their introduction by framing their relationship and the story itself within the solid bookends that are Lute and Irma Fliegler’s marriage. Lute and his wife share a rather practical union, far less glamorous than that of Caroline and Julian. Their kindness and mutual respect and understanding of one another, however, is evident from page one. Lute awakens in the early morning desiring his wife but, realizing that she is probably too tired to be intimate with him, he decides to allow her to sleep, conceding that “Irma can say no when she is tired.” He does caress her lovingly, though, and Irma wakes with a start but acquiesces to his amorous overtures and “for a little while Gibbsville knew no happier people than Luther Fliegler and his wife, Irma.” After their romantic coupling, Irma rises from bed to commence with her holiday preparations. While doing so, she ponders Lantenengo Street, on which they live, and its inhabitants and the state of her and Lute’s life together. They are not as well-off as Caroline and Julian; after all, Lute works under Julian at the Cadillac dealership. Irma and Lute are not yet members of the exclusive and expensive Lantenengo Country Club, although Irma is anxious to be. Still, she respects her husband’s philosophy about such things; Lute believes that they should join when it is within their reach financially. Unfortunately, though, this means that they are missing out on the big Christmas Eve party being held at the club. Despite this, Irma is quite aware of the good man she has found in Lute: “Lute was all right. Dependable and honest as the day is long, and never looked at another woman, even in fun.” This realization quells her momentary envy as she ponders the goings- on at the club and she reminds herself that “she wouldn’t trade her life for that of Caroline English, not if you paid her.”

It is then that the reader is thrust into the glamorous world of the country-club set that includes Caroline and Julian English. Against this backdrop of parties and privilege, O’Hara lays out the relationship of the golden couple. Almost immediately it is clear that Julian does not truly have a grasp on who his wife is as a person. He completely misses the mark in estimating what her reaction to his throwing a drink in Harry Reilly’s face would be, guessing wrongly that she would simply exclaim, “Julian!” Despite this, when he realizes the growing gravity of the situation the morning after and is loathe to face the consequences of his actions, his affection for his wife is clear. He tells himself he’d be all right, “if I could just stay here for the rest of my life and never see another soul. Except...

(This entire section contains 2277 words.)

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Caroline. I’d have to have Caroline.” This sentiment is sharply contrasted with Caroline’s ominous response to Julian’s impetuous act and her chilly behavior toward him for the remainder of the novel.

While each has a certain understanding of the mannerisms and preferences of the other, the premise of their very relationship appears to be rather shallow. Caroline is aware of Julian’s idiosyncrasies, such as the precise manner in which he prefers his monogram. Julian, for his part, can pre- dict some of Caroline’s responses. Yet, there is an entire character living just under the surface that each possesses but of which the other is ignorant. When O’Hara reveals the history of Caroline’s love life, it seems implausible that Julian is aware of any of the details of her past heartbreaks. Caroline, for her part, possessed a naiveté about the depth of Julian’s feelings for Mary Manners, the Polish girl with whom he shared a doomed romance. Even when Julian was seeing both women at the same time, Caroline was “sure he loved Caroline the most.” As evidenced by Julian’s thoughts of Mary toward the end of his life, he actually loved Mary the most.

Although wed for nearly five years, Julian and Caroline are childless, having adhered to their initial five-year plan, which one can assume included purposefully not reproducing. Over the course of the story, this point is presented as a minor issue between the two, with Caroline impulsively deciding en route to the Christmas dinner at the club that they shall embark on building a family that very night. When Julian asks if she means it, she tells him insistently, “I never meant anything so much in my life.” The fact remains, though, that Caroline never truly seems to be certain of anything. When she first recalls her and Julian’s relationship, she says that she didn’t fall in love with him until 1926. However, this is contradicted when Caroline, in her ire over Julian’s escapade with Helene Holman at the Stage Coach, wishing him dead, refers to a time “when I knew [him] in an Eton collar and a Windsor tie, and I loved [him] then.” Of course, Julian wouldn’t have worn an Eton collar and a Windsor tie as an adult but rather as a young boy. In her reverie, she also proclaims that Julian has “killed something mighty fine” in her; however, when she’d phoned him at his dealership earlier that morning, she merely chastised him for being cross with their housekeeper, concealing her true feelings about his supposed infidelity and public humiliation. It appears implausible that two people can truly love each other and have a successful marriage when neither is certain of his or her own feelings nor does either make an effort to convey their anger and outrage at the other.

The supposed depth of Julian’s feelings, which he conveys with his “need” for Caroline, also are contrasted with his true understanding of Caroline as a person; perhaps, though, lack of understanding might best be the way to view Julian’s perception of Caroline. On Christmas evening, as he dances at the club with Caroline’s much-younger cousin Constance, her dissimilarities to Caroline bring him to a startling realization about Caroline of which he’d not been previously aware, despite the fact that they’d been married for several years and had known each other their entire lives. In contrasting Caroline with Constance, Julian realizes, “Caroline was an educated girl whose education was behind her and for all time would be part of her background.” Excited over this new theory, Julian wishes to “tell Caroline about it, to try it out on her and see if she agreed with it.” While he realizes that her reaction will be one of affirmation and she will point out that she’s been “telling him that for years,” this incident points to the fact that even though he is aware of her reactions, he hasn’t much knowledge about who Caroline really is as an individual.

Another sticking point in their marriage is the tensions that surround their romantic couplings. Julian spends a good deal of time angling for “dates” with his wife, something for which she appears to have little desire. Although the book spans only three days, Julian asks Caroline to have relations with him several times and his request is indulged only once. When Julian returns from Reilly’s house after trying unsuccessfully to apologize for throwing a drink in the man’s face, Caroline comforts him physically and Julian refers to the experience as “the greatest single act of their married life. . . . It was the time she did not fail him.” The latter part, which refers to Caroline’s acquiescence to his needs, denotes that it was “the time”—in other words, the only time. This, of course, implies that Caroline has failed him on countless other occasions.

Much of the tension that surrounds their sexual relationship may be due to Julian’s inflated sense of his physical appeal and his bravado in terms of his ability to physically satisfy a woman. While he may, in fact, satisfy Caroline on a physical level—after all, it is implied that she hadn’t ever strayed physically from the marriage—he hasn’t the first idea how to fulfill her emotionally. Compounding Julian’s shortcomings is Caroline’s skewed view of sexuality. When O’Hara details her past experiences, it is clear that she attached a degree of shame to sexuality and possessed a good amount of fear over it even when she was in her mid-twenties; she was embarrassed when suitor Joe Montgomery glimpsed her in her undergarments when they went swimming at the beach. She tells Montgomery later that she wishes to engage in a steamy physical affair and marry in a whirlwind; however, she never makes good on her desire. Further compounding her troubled perception of her own sexuality is the fact that she had been molested by a student while teaching when she was just out of college; and, following her failed fling with Montgomery, she was taken to a live-sex show in Paris and is left frightened by the entire incident. On top of all of these events, Caroline’s mother cannot bring herself to speak of anything sexual with her daughter when Caroline comes to her mother for help. She tells Caroline, “I told you when you were married, I told you to take a firm stand on certain things.” Caroline replies, “You never told me what things though.” All of these things lead Caroline to be so out of touch with her own sexuality that she admits that she wants Julian most when she is not well more “than any other time.” This impulse conflicts with the viability of their pairing, and her supposed desire for something when she knows she cannot have it can be taken as proof that while the desire is there, she is afraid of indulging it.

Before the book’s end, Caroline fails Julian once again, on another, more crucial level. After his final faux pas at the country club in which he fights with several other members, Julian begs Caroline, “Listen, will you go away with me? Now? This minute? Will you? Will you go away with me?” Caroline refuses his desperate request and remains at her mother’s home, effectively sealing the fate of their marriage and Julian’s fate as an individual. As they trade parting barbs outside Caroline’s mother’s home and discuss how to handle the cancellation of that evening’s party, Caroline suggests that she tell the invitees that the party is cancelled because Julian or she broke a leg. Julian tells her, “But it’s nicer for us to be agreeable and sort of phony about it. You know what I mean?” His words are apropos of not only the situation but of their entire marriage.

After Julian’s death, Caroline mourns not for Julian but rather for herself, for her loss, “because he had left her.” While she insisted repeatedly throughout the tale that she loved Julian, she likened her love for him to having a cancer, a metaphor that is not likely used by truly happily married people. Certainly, there were moments of tenderness between the pair and an amicability that allowed them to live out their days together in a content state. Unfortunately, though, the pair held each other at arm’s length, just as each did to their friends and family around them, swallowing their true feelings until they practically choked on them, withholding genuine affection and understanding until it was impossible to summon any sort of compassion.

At the novel’s close, O’Hara affords his readers one last brief glimpse into the happily married lives of the Flieglers. While Lute frets about his financial obligations and their shaky future due to Julian’s demise, Irma looks at him with genuine affection and wishes “daytime were a time for kissing [for] she would kiss him now.” Their ability to come together in the face of adversity stands in direct opposition to Caroline and Julian who were so easily driven apart by the smallest adversity—a drink being thrown in the face of a tipsy club member.

Appointment in Samarra stands as an example of a marriage whose internal workings fly in the face of the external perceptions of it. The situation was both plausible and true-to-life in 1934 and cements the truth that lies in the old adage, “Times change but people do not.” Almost seventy years after its publication, the world is undoubtedly full of married couples having relationships that parallel that of Caroline and Julian’s.

Source: Caroline M. Levchuck, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Caroline M. Levchuck, a writer and editor, has published articles on literature along with nonfiction essays and children’s books.

Love, Failure and Death in the O’Hara Country

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The tragedies of our time are very likely to be what Arthur Miller has called the tragedy of the common man. These are the tragedies of the mundane, the ordinary, the familiar: tragedies of men worn down by the everyday pressures of life or by their own inner pressures; pressures of earning bread; finding and maintaining an identity; of doing useful work; of keeping the love of one’s wife, children, neighbors; of expressing one’s simple human dignity; of remaining decent in the concrete jungle, the social jungle, the factory jungle, or the army jungle. So the tragedy of Julian English, of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, who expires in his own garage during the evening of the day after Christmas, 1930, is a tragedy of the common man, a tragedy of the surrender to these attritive forces. It is, indeed, doubly a tragedy of the common man; for Julian’s motivation for suicide derives partly from the belated discovery of his own commonness, of the terrifying recognition of his own susceptibility to the failures, pains, and defeats others had earlier confronted. The trials and disappointments which early come to ordinary men presented themselves to Julian during three packed days of a Christmas holiday; and he was not capable of absorbing the lesson. A few hours before Julian kills himself, he falls into a drunken sleep “wishing he knew more things,” but it is too late for him to learn.

Appointment in Samarra thus seems to chronicle the unhappy history of a man wholly victimized by Forces, especially Fate and Society. Fate appears to operate through the compulsion which drives Julian to throw a drink into Harry Reilly’s face, the event which begins the protagonist’s swift slide to doom. Fate is presumably the theme of the novel’s epigraph, which retells the ancient tale of man who seeks to flee death only to find that in his very flight he keeps his destined appointment with it. Fate is also suggested in Caroline English’s agonized reflection after her husband’s death that “It was time for him to die.”

Society, too, takes a significant part in Julian’s history. As one recent commentator has interpreted the novel, “ . . . place is agency, and the tragedy, depends upon the disguised impetus of the sociological forces.” Another critic states: “What makes Appointment in Samarra remarkable . . . is not the story of Julian English; it is the story of Gibbsville. All the characters, even Julian English, are here for not their own sakes but because they represent significant social elements in Gibbsville.”

Certainly these observations are pertinent, and no understanding of the novel would be complete without the recognition of the influence of Fate and Society upon the book’s characters and action. Social status occupies an especially prominent position in the minds of O’Hara’s fictional people; accordingly, much detail is given to family background, wealth, clothing—even to the social meaning of such seeming trivialities as the price of the various entrées on the country club’s dinner menu. True, there exists in Gibbsville a delicate relationship between the various classes, religions, and ethnic groups. True, there is much snobbery both petty and vicious, notably the prejudices against Jews and Catholics. True, in Gibbsville one begins at birth with particular advantages and disadvantages. True, finally, O’Hara depicts all this with such convincing thoroughness and admirable subtlety that Appointment in Samarra would be a far weaker book without it.

But to his cognizance of these forces the sensitive reader must add a third element, one I believe to be crucial: free will. As I interpret the novel, Julian’s tragedy derives less from fate, less from social pressure, than from a series of wrong choices, bungled acts, and misinterpretations which reflect his immaturity and defective character. He behaves as he is—a man who does not know himself. If a fatalism does operate, it is neither an occult power nor an exterior force but a fatalism in the way men are, of human nature. The tragedy, therefore, depends not so much upon circumstance but upon the failure of love, nerve, will. Or, to put it in another way, the tragedy could have been averted at almost any stage by the exercise of love, nerve, will. Even Julian’s apparently uncontrollable impulse to attack Harry Reilly can be seen, like his other compulsions, as the outlet for an accumulation of past emotions. His impulses are, in fact, but one aspect of a destructiveness symptomatic of a life deficient in love, trust, and moral value. By the same token, as I will later argue, Julian’s tragedy amounts to something more than a treatise about an individual who violates group protocols or an illustration of the rigidity of class structure in a small Pennsylvania city.

What, then, is the emotional history of Julian English; upon what foundations does his character at thirty stand? Most important—and this is a dominant and recurrent theme in O’Hara’s fiction—is the failure of love between parents and children and, more specifically, between father and son. Because of one boyhood mistake, some petty larceny performed partly as a boyish prank and partly as a means for Julian to assert his place in the gang, Dr. English comes to think of his son as a thief and a weakling. The father’s judgment, reinforced by his undemonstrative nature and by his stern, unbending righteousness, forever bends the twig of Julian’s personality. To protect his own ego, already threatened by his own father’s reputation as an embezzler and a suicide, Dr. English dissociates himself from his son at exactly the moment when Julian most needs assurance of his love. The father of another boy involved in the same escapade handles the matter with greater compassion. He severely punishes his son but continues to favor him. In contrast, by detaching himself from his son and his son’s mistakes Dr. English cuts Julian adrift in a world without god, a world without authority, meaning, and hope of redemption; for to a boy god is manifested in his father.

This crucial rejection has several results, some of them ambivalent, as they often are in people. For one, Julian reacts against his father and all his father represents: a profession, an ordered life, respectability, restraint, politeness. Only to Father Creedon, Julian’s father-surrogate, can he admit that he should have become a doctor. In his rebellion he releases his pent-up anger, the need to hit back and hurt and destroy, wishing subconsciously that he will be caught and punished. At the same time Julian wants to be liked, admired, accepted: to have from others what he cannot have from his father. He develops a charm which is enhanced by his good looks and supported by the family’s prosperity, charm which he can exercise on those higher social levels of Gibbsville automatically open to him through the English name, money, and Aryan background. Accordingly, Julian becomes a “personality,” but one without an identity; for in O’Hara’s world the boy also first learns his identity from his father. Julian’s mother might have compensated for the father’s failure, as the mother sometimes does in O’Hara’s fiction, but we are told nothing about her except that she is a sweet, adoring woman, obviously without the strength or influence to fill the role of both parents.

Because Julian never fully assumes a stable identity, he can never grow up. He can never perform the adult function of understanding himself in relation to others; his own emotions remain of prime importance to him. All these sins of omission and commission return to torment him in the frantic days before his death. He has made few loyal friends to stand by him in his crisis. Rather, his country-club associates step back to see how well he can sail out the tempest he has himself blown up. Instead of appealing for help to the one person who could have been his salvation, his wife Caroline, he alienates her by making her the target for his anger and frustration. For a time a saving rapport is almost established, but at the club dance on the night following the Reilly episode—a dance they have come to in a mood of intimacy—he ignores her a little too long and violates her tender feeling. Then, rebuked, like the child he is, he takes revenge by humiliating her in public for what he has suffered in private.

Later, on the afternoon of the day culminating in his suicide, he says to Caroline: “This is a pretty good time for you to stick by me . . . Blind, without knowing, you could stick by me. That’s what you’d do if you were a real wife . . . ” As much as Julian needs such unquestioning loyalty and love— as much as he needed it from his father and, failing to get it there, goes on needing it from everyone else—Julian does not deserve what he demands. Even if given it, he would probably not repay it. And the final choice remains his. To gain Caroline’s support, he has only to remain with her and tell her what troubles him; but arrogantly and pettishly he refuses, flaunting her warning: “Julian, if you leave now it’s for good. Forever.” Thus the second support for Julian’s life, his beautiful wife in whom he takes pride, is lost, this time largely by his own action.

Yet another of the pillars shoring up his existence is demolished when Froggy Ogden tells Julian he has never liked him, a crucial admission to a man who had needed to think of himself as popular and well-liked because inwardly he had feared the contrary. And at this phase in the discussion of the protagonist, one must take into account the social realities of Gibbsville as they impinge upon character and behavior.

Of first importance is the fact that Gibbsville society is not a steel trap which, once sprung, relentlessly holds its victim. Rather, it is a shifting, fluid society, a society in transition in which old and rigid lines are being dissolved under the multiple impact of emergent elements in the town’s population and the exigencies of the Depression. To note but two examples of this change, there is the upward mobility of Harry Reilly, the Irish Catholic with his crude manners and smutty stories, who pushes his way toward the top because he is tough, clever, and strong. Similarly, the lawyers of Polish background who are Julian’s antagonists at the Gibbsville Club have made their way into this once-exclusive establishment because they are now too able and prominent to be suppressed. Even the Jews at the bottom of the Gibbsville scale have begun to climb, first to residence on Latenengo Street, and soon, one infers, to club membership—just as the Poles and the Irish have already made it.

Nor does Julian’s conduct immediately cost him his social place. When Julian loses control with Reilly, his friends back away warily, but they neither turn upon him nor against him. He is not suspended from the club, not reprimanded, not even cold-shouldered; their final attitude and conduct toward him will depend upon his future behavior, just as other club members have acted foolishly in the past without suffering drastic punishment. Further, Julian’s behavior looms much more horrendously in his own mind than in anyone else’s. As O’Hara shows us at the end of the novel, Harry Reilly continues to think of Julian as a gentleman and to be proud that Julian likes him—despite Julian’s humiliation of him. Froggy Ogden, despite his avowed dislike for Julian and his insults, takes his side against the Polish lawyers in the fist-fight (completely confounding Julian’s antagonists). Father Creedon, spokesman for the Catholic community, offers him comfort. Lute Fliegler, representative of the middle class and of the strong Pennsylvania-Dutch element, continues to be Julian’s friend and advisor. Ed Charney and Al Grecco, the bootleggers O’Hara uses to represent Gibbsville’s lower class and demimonde, do not condemn Julian for the episode with the roadhouseentertainer; time and an apology would have squared Julian with them also.

Of course, Julian’s outrageous behavior will have social consequences. But in Appointment in Samarra society is neither the god nor the unknowable, juggernaut force that the plurality of critics have described. It has its stupidities, its cruelties, its excrescences; but it depends largely upon basic human needs and upon the observation of fundamental decencies. It sets forth only one strong rule that a violator breaks at his great hazard; one must not publicly offend the dignity of others, and even when this does occur, the transgressor can find ways to restore himself to good standing. Thus it is less a problem of “society” than of the verifies of human nature, of the ego. Some of Gibbsville’s citizens may have an exaggerated sense of what that dignity means; but, although these may be the “best people,” they are rarely the most admirable human beings. Dr. English is perhaps the prime example of this self-assumed superiority, and his snobbery is a function of his own inadequacies and anxieties.

Having remarked these social realities, we may return now to complete the inquiry into the novel’s central character. Two final aspects of Julian’s emotional history remain to be explored: the influences of sex and money, powerful determinants in O’Hara’s work.

Learning that Froggy Ogden and perhaps others have always disliked him is the second great discovery in Julian’s life. Had he lived, this discovery might have brought about a change in him toward the better—toward humility. His first great discovery, however, had been that of his own sexual power: his ability to control his physical passion so as to be able to give his sexual partner prolonged pleasure. (Doubtless it was O’Hara’s daring in broaching such facts of human behavior which offended the early critics and which has continued to offend others.) While O’Hara does not explore all the ramifications of the subject, the reader arrives at the sure conclusion that Julian’s discovery of his special ability had been essential to his jauntiness and self-assurance. With that power over women, he could think himself very much a man, at least in one basic sense; and the conviction of his own masculinity had produced the peculiar charm and insouciance which springs from a man’s total self-confidence with women. It had attuned him to women as sexual creatures, leading him to the belief that he could have anyone he wanted and keep her as long as he wanted. Nor does O’Hara minimize this factor. As his work demonstrates again and again, his men and women are sexual creatures; and the men are especially subject to the urges of their sexual needs.

To O’Hara’s credit, he does not let the issue drop just there; he has more respect for humans than to portray them as laboratory specimens re- acting only to physical stimuli. As Julian learns to his chagrin—both with his own wife and then, just before his death, with the reporter Alice Cartwright—a self-respecting woman has her values and her times of strength which make her proof against the most accomplished lover. She insists upon recognition as a person, as an entity. Julian begins to realize this fact during the final three days of his life when he reflects that his physical intimacy with his wife has not also given him possession of her soul. Unfortunately, Julian fails to act upon this realization; nor is there evidence that he tries. He has too long depended upon charm and his body to begin to treat his wife, or any attractive woman, with full human decency. Ultimately, Julian’s sexual power turns against him. It has given him one kind of perception at the expense of another, more important kind. His blindness costs him the only two women he ever loves: the Polish girl, Mary, who Julian realizes sometime during the drunken haze of the last few hours of his life, had also loved him; and the other, the fatal loss, his wife.

Just as the shallowness of Julian’s sexual values assist in his crucial self-deception, so does his inability to manage money, to take it seriously, to understand its meaning (the same character flaw in another manifestation) mark a further milestone on the way to his collapse. Product of a boom time and a wealthy home, graduate of a college but possessor of no durable knowledge, skill, or talent, and without the maturing experience of combat in war, he slides along as owner of a Cadillac agency (presumably his father’s gift), getting by, as he always has, on charm and luck. It had gone well enough in the prosperous years of the late 1920’s, but it is 1930 and things are changing. He had needed $10,000 but had exploited his charm and oncesuperior class position to borrow $20,000 from Harry Reilly, indebting himself to precisely the wrong man.

Now Julian needs more. He will always need more. Despite his sexual self-confidence, he conceives a completely irrational fear of Reilly as a rival for Caroline’s affections because, in Julian’s fevered imagination, Reilly’s money has invested him with a potency which his own looks, background, and manners cannot match. His ineptitude with money becomes increasingly one of his major fears and an irritant to his latent anger, and money in O’Hara’s fictional world is power. Upon money depends respectability and social acceptance; its possession and wise use also testify to the virtue of its possessor. To Julian insolvency becomes more than a mistake, it seems a sin—one more added to the overwhelming burden of guilt and self disgust he already bears. We see, then, that his suicide springs from no sudden compulsion, no quirk, no command of the gods. His fate flows, as it does in the creations of most serious novelists, from the wellsprings of his character.

With all these faults, what makes Julian important? Why is his end tragic, or at the very least poignant? We note something of its significance in the way Caroline thinks of him after his death: as a young officer who had died in the war, with his own inimitable gallantry of attitude, manner, and gesture. Moreover, he is considered a true gentleman by the two men in Gibbsville least likely to romanticize about people, Al Grecco and Ed Charney, who trade in other men’s vices, as well as by such other tough, experienced men as Harry Reilly, Father Creedon, and Lute Fliegler.

In other words, there is an indefinable winningness about Julian, a finer substance underneath the glitter. One might almost say that he has an aura of beauty about him, or of the potentially beautiful: a zest, a joy in living, a sense of the comic, a spontaneity. He reminds us in part of Fitzgerald’s people, of Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night; like him, he has the gift of stimulating others by his very presence, of bringing them an illusion of happiness. Like him, too, his grace is curiously emphasized by his very flaws. For Gibbsville, Julian represents the glamor, the noblesse oblige, the easy carelessness of the high aristocratic life; and his spark glows all the more brightly against the grey Gibbsville backdrop overcast by the lengthening shadows of Depression. His tragedy, and by implication man’s, is that he lacks the self-knowledge, the nobility of character, the moral stamina to sustain the surface beauty.

Just as the themes and events of Appointment in Samarra operate on several different levels, so does O’Hara’s narrative method work toward the effect of simultaneity and felt life. We find in O’Hara’s first novel one of his fundamental techniques: that of the concurrent use of varying points of view, or what will hereafter be called the shifting perspective. An analysis of the book’s opening chapter will seek to describe this technique and to demonstrate how it interacts with other elements of the work.

The novel’s first three words are: “Our story begins . . . ” That is, the reader hears a narrator’s voice and is guided by an impartial observer’s cues. It is the familiar, traditional mode of the editorial omniscient. However, O’Hara quickly removes his own obvious presence and melts into the selective omniscient; first briefly entering the mind of Lute Fliegler and then that of his wife Irma. Irma’s thoughts become the narrative projection for the remainder of the scene. This technique resembles stream-of-consciousness but differs from it in that the reader does not directly confront the inchoate outpouring of Irma’s thoughts and emotions, as he does with Joyce’s Molly Bloom; instead, he hears them as they are first filtered through the mind of a nearly invisible neutral observer. Through Irma the reader gets the middle-class attitude of the notyet- rich but socially ambitious family, replete with its prejudices and snobberies. Further, through Irma one is convinced of the quality of her husband, Lute, as a strong, loyal, sensible, stable man. Since Julian later measures himself against men like Lute, one must know what he represents. Finally, the spontaneous and affectionate sexuality which the Flieglers enjoy symptomizes the security and harmony of their marriage, conjugal love as well as desire—yet another contrast to the Englishes. Scene I of Chapter One closes with Irma thinking about the country club dance and wondering whether Julian and Caroline English are fighting again.

Scene II shifts to the dance, rendered by means of a dual point of view: an unobtrusively editorialomniscient depiction of the people at the dance and the introduction of Harry Reilly telling an off-color joke downstairs in the smoking room, followed by the shift into the mind of Julian English at the very instant it entertains the notion of throwing a drink into Reilly’s face. O’Hara then momentarily returns to the dance upstairs, creating a brief but telling interval of suspense, before the reader learns that Julian has indeed surrendered to his absurd impulse.

Scene III shifts to Al Grecco, the young hoodlum who works for the local bootlegger and crimeboss, Ed Charney. From the mental processes of Grecco, the reader is apprised that Julian enjoys the liking and the respect of the Charney-Grecco element in Gibbsville. He is further apprised of the town’s power-structure, and that every “respectable” man can be either bought or silenced if he dares oppose Charney. Through Al Grecco’s eyes, the aftermath of Julian’s disastrous act at the club is first presented. Grecco has always respected Julian for his expert handling of an automobile; now, on his way home, Julian wheels his car recklessly and abusively (a foreshadowing of his more general loss of control, already under way), while his wife sits furiously silent beside him. As Al drives down Latenengo Street, his greeting to the darkened houses of the prosperous fully represents his worm’s-eye vantage point and serves as a fittingly ironic ending for the chapter: “Merry Christmas, you stuck-up bastards!”

Thus in Chapter One O’Hara has offered a representation of the novel’s milieu, a synopsis of its situation, a foreshadowing of its outcome, and an insight into some of its characters and conflicts. The reader also knows through O’Hara’s astonishing dexterity in his handling of point-of-view that he is in the hands of a craftsman. Certainly the placing of the crisis of the novel at its very start is a bold and effective gambit. The remainder of the novel continues to build one’s admiration for O’Hara’s skill; for, with the use of varying scenes and the shifting perspective, O’Hara employs yet other techniques.

For example, in Chapter Five O’Hara slows the action to insert a flashback summarizing the life, especially the romantic life, of Caroline, Julian’s wife. Not only does this chapter serve the im- mediate purpose of exposition, of illuminating certain aspects of Caroline’s character and of her marriage, but in the structure of the entire novel it also serves a vital esthetic function. In the first four chapters O’Hara has set down a series of swiftrunning episodes which build to an almost excruciating sense of gathering doom. Such rapid movement and cumulative tension could not be maintained, nor should they be, if the novel is to hold its reader to the end. Therefore, in the more leisurely told chapter recounting Caroline’s past, a chapter shrewdly placed at exactly the halfway mark in the novel, O’Hara achieves stasis by changing the mood and pace and by pulling the reader away from the “now” of the action.

The same effect, the alternation of action and inaction, of dramatic scene with narration and description, of violence and stasis, is also maintained throughout the novel by O’Hara’s strategic insertion of little anecdotes about the characters or items of local history. At times, in fact, Appointment in Samarra has something of the construction of the pattern or tapestry novel in which characters and events are at first presented individually, seemingly without the least relationship to one another, only later to be woven together into a whole, large, variegated fabric.

Finally, to O’Hara’s accomplishment of a multi-layered rendition of reality, must be added his success in individual scenes, notably those in which he produces a completely convincing sense of lived experience: the sensation of hangover which seems to saturate the entire novel; the absurd wisdom of drunkenness; the almost Surrealistic scene of the events at the Stage Coach Inn; the tactile response to putting a gun in one’s mouth; the flow of thoughts in the mind of a bereaved woman; and, most unforgettable of all, the montage of fear and self-disgust in Julian’s whiskeystimulated imagination just before his suicide, as he visualizes himself going down, down. One notes the adroitness with which O’Hara moves from external observation to interior monologue, altering the reader’s stance from that of observer to participant. We begin by listening to O’Hara approximate Julian’s thoughts about himself, but before we finish the passage we have witnessed Julian’s conjuration of all the damning, humiliating whispers and rebuffs he fancies as his future:

He didn’t want to go back and make a more definite break with Caroline. He didn’t want to go back to anything, and he went from that to wondering what he wanted to go to. Thirty years old. “She’s only twenty, and he’s thirty. She’s only twenty-two, and he’s thirty. She’s only eighteen, and he’s thirty and been married once, you know. You wouldn’t call him young. He’s at least thirty. No, let’s not have him. He’s one of the older guys. Wish Julian English would act his age. He’s always cutting in. His own crowd won’t have him. I should think he’d resign from the club. Listen, if you don’t tell him you want him to stop dancing with you, then I will. No thanks, Julian, I’d rather walk. No thanks, Mr. English, I haven’t much farther to go. Listen, English, I want you to get this straight. Julian, I’ve been a friend of your family’s for a good many years. Julian, I wish you wouldn’t call me so much. My father gets furious. You better leave me out at the comer, becuss if my old man. Listen, you leave my sister alone. Oh, hello, sweetie, you want to wait for Ann she’s busy now be down in a little while. No liquor, no meat, no coffee, drink plenty of water, stay off your feet as much as possible, and we’ll have you in good shape in a year’s time, maybe less.”

Source: Sheldon Norman Grebstein, “Love, Failure and Death in the O’Hara Country,” in John O’Hara, Twayne Publishers, 1966, pp. 34–45.

The Theme of Social Snobbery

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Appointment in Samarra constitutes O’Hara’s object lesson in the cruel side of social snobbery. Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, affronts a social climber at a dance. In turn, English himself is made the subject of ridicule for this error in taste. Two days later English commits suicide in despair.

Two varieties of social snobbery exist here. One is that of the “smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club” and the other is the kind of censure exerted upon English by the middle class populace of Gibbsville who “collectively . . . presented a solid front of sound Pennsylvania Dutch and all that it implied. . . What a pity it was that this business wasn’t in the hands of one of their own men instead of being driven into the ground by a Lantenengo Street . . . wastrel.”

It is the snobbery of the Gibbsville crème de crème which displays first how the snobbery of Julian English’s social milieu is turned back, ironically speaking, upon himself. Thus, English must suffer the same limitation as any person from another social group. He is reduced to humility by the censure of his clique. Whereas previously he might have relied upon his own social position in the “upper crust,” he now becomes, like Harry Reilly (the Irish social sycophant whom English insults), equally despised. O’Hara’s intention, morally, is to render the anguish of the socially snubbed. Julian English is the spokesman for most of us who at one time or another have been subject to the scorn of the haute monde—those of us who are excluded from the membership in the “better” college fraternity or the intimate circle of the Long Island garden party.

O’Hara’s treatment of the finer points of class stratification appears meticulous, refined and precise in the expository part of his narrative. This is how O’Hara does it:

Any member of the club could come to the dance, but not everyone who came to the dance was really welcome in the smoking room. The smoking crowd always started out with a small number, always the same people. The Whit Hoffmans, the Julian Englishes, the Froggy Ogdens, and so on. They were the spenders and the socially secure, who could thumb their noses and not have to answer to anyone except their own families. There were about twenty persons in this group, and your standing in the younger set of Gibbsville could be judged by the assurance with which you joined the nucleus of the smoking room crowd.

In like fashion, O’Hara depicts the wrath of Julian English against Harry Reilly, who is not a member of “the smoking room crowd.”

Reilly, had gone pretty far in his social climbing by being a “good fellow” and by “being himself,” and by sheer force of the money which everyone knew the Reillys had. Reilly was on the greens committee and the entertainment committee, because as a golfer he got things done; he paid for entire new greens out of his own pocket, and he could keep a dance going till six o’clock by giving the orchestra leader a big tip. But he was not yet an officer in the Gibbsville Assembly.

In passages like these, O’Hara never falters in noting exactest gradations upon the social ladder.

Two days after insulting Reilly, English becomes subject to the same variety of malice and petty hatred which he has seen fit to exercise upon the Irishman. A fellow club member says to him, “I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but by Jesus if I ever sunk so low that I had to throw ice in a man’s face and give him a black eye.” The man’s violence suggests a little ludicrously that English has committed an error in taste unbecoming to a member of the Gibbsville aristocracy.

That evening Julian English goes to a roadhouse with his wife. He becomes drunk and makes an attempt to sexually overcome Helene Hoffman, a singer there. By this time, he has done more than behave in bad taste, as with Reilly. He has attempted a major moral infraction. The chain of events is now speeding blindly toward the novel’s fatal conclusion. When he appears at the Gibbsville Club for lunch the next day, he is insulted once more, and a quarrel ensues. Julian attempts a gentlemanly exit, but open violence follows:

Froggy swung on him and Julian put up his open hand and the punch made a slight sound on his wrist, and hurt his wrist.

“Gentlemen!”

“Don’t be a God damn fool,” said Julian.

“Well, then. Come on outside.”

“Gentlemen! You know the club rules.” It was [the steward]. He stood in front of Froggy, with his back toward Froggy, facing Julian.

A lawyer then insults English, who insults him in return by calling him a “Polack war veteran and whoremaster.”

“Hey, you!” said the lawyer.

“Aw,” said Julian, finally too tired and disgusted with himself and everyone else. He took a step backwards and got into position, and then he let the lawyer have it, full in the mouth.

Julian attacks both the lawyer and Froggy. Infuriated, he hurls a carafe at still another man and runs for his car. His doom has been sealed. As he drives away, he suddenly realizes that Whit Hoffman, another friend, has detested him just as Froggy had—for a long time, quietly. This last experience has cost Julian any chance to make amends for his bad behavior, and his reputation in the town of Gibbsville is now at an ebb.

English arrives home to discover that his wife has deserted him. His final act of status derangement occurs during an attempt to seduce Alice Cartwright, a visiting journalist. Julian knows that he has by this time committed the local unpardonable sin of marital disloyalty. Sooner or later, he must face the enmity of all Gibbsville for his several moral infractions: The drink thrown into Harry Reilly’s face, the Stage Coach Bar misadventure, the fight with Froggy and the lawyer, and the attempted seduction. Finally Julian English climbs into his car and dies of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Morally speaking, Appointment in Samarra attempts to display the psychological effect upon an individual of rejection by an in-group coterie. The didactic function of this novel is thus to warn the reader of the iniquity of pressing class distinctions to so extreme an issue. While John O’Hara may be a snob in his own right “as sensitive to social distinctions as any arriviste ever was,” to quote from Delmore Schwartz. O’Hara nevertheless takes time to display the person on the receiving end of class bigotry based upon a knowledge of “upper crust” ways. While one may detect in O’Hara’s own motivation— at least as Delmore Schwartz sees it—an attempt to play vicariously the snob by writing about snobs themselves—Appointment in Samarra possesses a sympathy for English, and poses the question of just why such a calamity was necessary.

The novel of social criticism concerned with class mobility is no unusual phenomenon in American fiction. It has existed from Henry James through J. P. Marquand, as well as in the writers who constitute the chief influences upon O’Hara in this novel. “As for influences, here they are: Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Galsworthy, Tarkington, Owen Johnson, but chiefly Fitzgerald and Lewis.” Yet, in none of these authors exists so stringent an emphasis upon the suffering endured by the snubbed, except possibly in Fitzgerald’s characterization of Gatsby. O’Hara, as Delmore Schwartz shows in Partisan Review: . . . has a rich gift for social observation, for knowing how people are, what they are because of their background, and he has an acute, accurate ear which makes it possible for his characters to possess reality when they converse. But best of all, O’Hara is a snob; he is as sensitive to social distinctions as any arriviste ever was, and his snob-sensitivity provides him with inexhaustible energy for the transformation of observation into fiction. It was neither accident nor invention which made him call the scapegoat hero of his first novel, Julian English; for English is an Anglo-Saxon, he resents the Irish, he belongs to what is supposed to be the upper classes, and the tragic action which leads to his suicide is his throwing a drink in the face of a man with the choice name of Harry Reilly. It might just as well have been Murphy, O’Mara, or Parnell.

Merely to pinpoint O’Hara as a social commentator, however, or chronicler of the ways of the haute monde is to fall short of the mark. Edmund Wilson, writing in 1941 in The Boys in the Back Room, says this about O’Hara, but also considerably more. While maintaining that “to read O’Hara on a fashionable bar or the Gibbsville Country Club is to be shown on the screen of a fluoroscope gradations of social prestige of which one had not before been aware,” Wilson also says, by way of certifying O’Hara’s perception of class distinctions:

[There is] no longer any hierarchy here, either of cultivation or wealth; the people are all being shuffled about, hardly knowing what they are or where they are headed, but each is clutching some family tradition, some membership in a selective organization, some personal association with the famous, which will supply him with some special self respect . . . eventually, they all go under. They are snubbed, they are humiliated, they fail.

O’Hara’s characters cling to their illusions of superiority, their unvarying lot in the Gibbsville milieu, knowing only too well their own impotence and despair. Out of a hostility for this weakness and emotional apathy they will snub others and practice their kind of life before a mirror. Although O’Hara writes of “the cruel side of social snobbery” he does so from an even greater pessimism. It is a pessimism about the Very Rich, who perceive life only on the most sensate level possible, from one moment of indulgence to the next. As models for moral conduct, only a few of O’Hara’s characters from the world of Julian English would suffice for most of us. It is a world which O’Hara describes with precision and insight. Because of O’Hara’s restricting himself to describing only the visually real, the moral element in his novels becomes a thing of mundane but democratic necessity.

Source: Edward Russell Carson, “The Novels,” in The Fiction of John O’Hara, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961, pp. 9–14.

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