Appointment in Samarra

by John O'Hara

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Places Discussed

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Gibbsville

Gibbsville. Pennsylvania town that John O’Hara invented for this novel and to which he repeatedly returned in his later books. Here, the central character is hard-drinking car dealer Julian English. O’Hara always valued getting his details precisely correct, so he tells readers that Gibbsville’s population in 1930 is 24,032. A minor character in the novel has occasion to think that Gibbsville is exactly 94.5 miles from Philadelphia. O’Hara knows these details well because his fictional Gibbsville, in his fictional Lantenengo County corresponds closely with the real town of Pottsville in Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill County—the heart of the eastern part of the state’s Pennsylvania Dutch and anthracite coal regions. The son of a respected Irish doctor, O’Hara grew up in Pottsville, and although he moved away as a young man, his imagination continually drew back to the region. Like his contemporary, William Faulkner, who also wrote with a great deal of historical, topographical, and sociological accuracy about his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, scarcely veiling the town’s identity by giving it a fictional name, O’Hara makes no attempt to obscure the real identity of Gibbsville.

Although O’Hara’s own life in Pottsville was reasonably secure and happy, he does not sentimentalize Gibbsville, especially in the rather dark Appointment in Samarra. At one point, Julian English thinks of Gibbsville as a small room. He has a point. Living in the shadow of New York, Philadelphia, and even Reading, Pennsylvania, Gibbsville’s residents, especially members of its social elite, like Julian, have deep insecurities that often cause them to become small-minded and narrow. Both magnanimous and petty characters inhabit all social levels in O’Hara’s world, but strains begin to show among Gibbsville’s wealthy because of their dependence on the waning anthracite coal industry and their times, on the verge of a Great Depression. The pressures Julian faces, brought on by financial uncertainly, a shifting social order, and changing sexual mores, eventually lead him to suicide. The tragedy, however, is not only Julian’s, but is meant in part to symbolize the coming breakdown of his entire social class.

Gibbsville is a place unto itself, but it also represents small-town America. Yet even though O’Hara understands that small-town American life has its stultifying aspects, he does not wholly condemn or satirize it. Gibbsville’s attractions are strong and real. The residents’ sense of shared history, their occasional flashes of moral decency, and the town and countryside’s physical beauty are genuinely appealing. Many Gibbsvillers—Julian’s employee Lute Fliegler and his wife Irma are examples—live fulfilling lives, even if these lives are marred by prejudice and shortsightedness.

Lantenengo Country Club

Lantenengo Country Club. Social club named after the county, to which Julian and his wife belong. The elaborate caste structure of Gibbsville can be seen in microcosm at this club, to which only members of Gibbsville’s upper class belong. Subtle hierarchies within that class mirror those of society at large. For example, everybody understands that there are differences between the club dinner-party hostesses who opt for the dollar-fifty roast chicken dinner, the two-dollar roast turkey dinner, or the two-fifty filet mignon dinner. The notion of admitting African Americans to the club has not even been considered, and although Jews have recently moved to Gibbsville’s prestigious Lantenengo Street, they are an unwelcome presence and are still not admitted to the club.

An incident that ultimately leads to Julian’s unraveling takes place at the club, late in the evening of December 24, 1930, when he throws a drink into the face of a fellow club member, Harry Reilly. A powerful businessman who has lent money to Julian’s Cadillac dealership, Reilly is a reasonably well-liked...

(This entire section contains 829 words.)

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locker-room tenor and joke-teller. He is also Irish and nouveau riche, in contrast to Julian, whose Anglo-Saxon ancestors were among Gibbsville’s early settlers and whose family has been wealthy for generations. The extent to which Julian consciously realizes that the principal reason he hates Harry so deeply is that Harry represents the dissolution of the old Anglo-Saxon hierarchy, including its manners and morals, that is so much a part of his own identity is debatable. What is certain, however, is that Julian’s inability to understand the changing social order leaves him vulnerable to his tragic fate.

*Samarra

*Samarra. Iraqi city, located about sixty miles from Baghdad. Samarra appears only in the novel’s title and foreword, not in the story itself. O’Hara borrows the phrase “appointment in Samarra” from a play, Sheppy (1933), by W. Somerset Maugham, whose allusion is to an ancient Arabic fable in which a merchant’s servant desperately attempts to avoid death by traveling to Samarra. The point of the fable is that the servant’s fate, death, is inescapable; the relevance to Julian English is clear. Julian, like the servant in the fable, dies without ever understanding that his own fate is controlled by forces beyond his control or understanding.

Historical Context

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World War I

World War I began in 1914 because of a series of events triggered by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the presumed heir to the Austrian and Hungarian thrones, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serb nationalist. This single event may have prompted the war; however, tensions had long been building between several European countries. A strong feeling of nationalism existed in Europe, a feeling that spurred the desire for people who spoke the same language and shared the same culture to exist in independent states. This, of course, flew in the face of the imperialist activities taking place around the globe. European powers were clashing over colonial interests, specifically in Africa.

On top of this, two very powerful strategic alliances were formed, each of which had amassed enormous military power. First, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy was formed. Great Britain, France, and Russia then bonded together to create the Triple Entente. When Ferdinand was killed, then, the Austrian-Hungary government viewed it as a hostile act from the Greater Serbian movement (which was a movement to take control of areas of Austria-Hungary inhabited mostly by Slavic peoples). Russia and Great Britain intervened and persuaded Serbia to attempt to pacify Austria-Hungary; however, when Serbia agreed to only eight of Austria-Hungary’s ten demands, Austria threatened to march on Serbia. The Russian government then said it would take up arms against Austria if it did so.

On July 28, 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia. Russia quickly made good on its promise; however, the Russian response prompted Germany to threaten war on Russia if it did not demobilize immediately. When Russia refused, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914. France then mobilized against Germany, and on August 3, Germany declared war on France. When the government of Belgium, which was a neutral country, balked at Germany’s plan to march through Belgium to get to France, Great Britain showed its support by demanding that it honor Belgium’s request. The Germans ignored the request, and Great Britain declared war on Germany on August 4. Italy broke its affiliation with the Triple Alliance several months later and entered the fray on May 23, 1915. Ultimately, then, France, Great Britain, Russia, and Italy were joined by Japan and the United States, the last nation to become involved on April 6, 1917. Turkey, long allied with Germany, had entered the war on Germany’s side in late 1914.

World War I was a war fought on several fronts, using submarines, trench warfare, and fighter planes. It devastated Europe on many levels, directly claiming the lives of 37 million people, including many American soldiers. While Russia withdrew in 1917 (it was undergoing civil problems of its own that led to the toppling of the czar and the institution of communism), Germany was eventually defeated. Ordered to pay war reparations to the allied forces amounting to $186 billion, Germany’s economy was ravaged and would never fully recover, a factor which led to the rise in power of Adolf Hitler and World War II.

The Great Depression

The Great Depression was a period of intense the early 1940s. While the depression began in the United States with the crash of the stock market, its effects were felt worldwide and soon most of the world’s industrial nations were adversely affected.

While its onset may appear to have been sudden, conditions existed for years that led to the sudden collapse of the economy. First, in the United States, there was an imbalance in the distribution of income. The wealthiest 0.1 percent of American families had a combined income equal to that of the bottom 42 percent of American families. At the same time as this situation was building up, manufacturers of goods were producing products for consumers at an all-time high rate. To encourage people to buy these new products, such as household appliances and radios, advertising strategies that had been employed to get people to support the Allies’ efforts in World War I were used to urge lower-income people that they needed these things. If people didn’t have the money to purchase things, which most didn’t, credit was extended to them, credit that allowed people to buy now and pay later.

At the same time that these things were occurring, the United States government was placing high tariffs on foreign-produced goods to encourage the sale of American-made goods. Unfortunately, though, many foreign economies had been weakened by World War I, especially Germany and France (whose male workforce was all but decimated in the war). The United States wound up being creditor to those countries and when the countries balked at the high tariffs, they lost product sales—and income—on goods that might have been sold in the United States. Decreased income meant that these countries began having difficulty paying their debt to the United States.

All of these situations were compounded when stock market investors began buying stock “on margin,” which is similar to buying goods on credit. A small part of the stock’s initial price is paid and the rest is borrowed against future profits the investors believe they will make when they sell the stock at a higher price—if they can sell the stock at a higher price. When confidence that the stock market prices would continue to rise waned, the stock market began to plummet as many investors began selling off their stock. On October 29, 1928, known as Black Tuesday, stocks lost from $10 to $15 billion of their worth; by mid-November there were losses of $30 billion. Entire fortunes were wiped out over the course of two weeks.

The stock market crash and its negative effects on the economy, coupled with all of the other negative economic conditions that existed, left people with little money to spend on disposable goods; further, many could not make good on the credit that had been extended to them for goods previously purchased. Manufacturers could not sell enough product and jobs were significantly cut. Banks closed as people began to attempt to withdraw all of their money; many people were unable to get to their savings before the closings and people were left bankrupt.

Unemployment rates skyrocketed to nearly twenty-five percent; almost fifteen millions Americans were jobless. Conditions worsened until the election of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932; Roosevelt implemented the New Deal, a variety of programs to assist the public and boost the economy. While some gains were made, however, the economy was not fully restored until government spending increased dramatically with the United States’ preparation for entry into World War II, the groundwork for which began to be laid in 1939.

The Great Depression affected the level of government involvement in many aspects of daily American life. Banks began to be regulated closely and the Social Security Act of 1935 was passed. Furthermore, union activity, which had long been viewed as controversial and had many opponents, became protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. This gave rise to the powerful labor unions that still exist in the United States today.

Literary Style

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Point of View

Appointment in Samarra features an omniscient narrator who tells the story from the points of view of several key characters intermittently. These characters include Luther Fliegler, Irma Fliegler, Julian English, Al Grecco, Dr. English, Caroline English, Mrs. Walker, Mr. Harley, Alice Cartwright, Harry Reilly, and Mary Manners and Ross Campbell. This technique allows O’Hara the ability to present characters through the perception of the other characters.

Setting

Appointment in Samarra is set in the fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, in 1930. Gibbsville, according to the novel, is part of the anthracite coal region of the United States. As such, it is “a stronghold of union labor.”

The story unfolds in different places around Gibbsville, including the Lantenengo Country Club, Julian’s Cadillac dealership, and the homes of various characters. Another place where a great deal of action occurs is in or around the automobile. Cars, in general, play a large role in the story. In the beginning of the novel, Irma Fliegler listens to the comings and goings of her neighbors on Lantenengo Street while lying in bed, knowing each person by the specific sound of each family’s automobile. Al Grecco’s character is first introduced while driving and spends a good deal of time thinking about driving in general. Caroline and Julian have several rows, depicted or inferred, in their Cadillac; additionally, Julian’s infamous indiscretion takes place inside a car.

As important as the region is to the story, Gibbsville’s social structure drives the plot and provides the impetus for much of the novel’s action. Inasmuch as Appointment in Samarra is the story of a man’s self-destruction, it is also a study of the social hierarchy of a small-yet-affluent town in 1930 America. Race, religion, and wealth dictate position in the order; however, it seems that each tier of society has an equal interest in maintaining the social order as each seems to have a good amount of disdain for the other. The Protestants do not care for the Catholics; the Catholics bond together against the Protestants; and the solid, respectable, Pennsylvania Dutch, Lutheran middle class serves to act as a barometer of sorts for the self-indulgent behavior of the privileged Protestants.

Structure

The novel is told in the present tense from varying viewpoints; however, flashbacks play a large part of the tale in relating character histories, especially those of Caroline and Julian.

Literary Techniques

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Although O'Hara is not commonly regarded as an experimentalist in fiction, the uses of time, narrative perspective, and style in Appointment in Samarra demonstrate his awareness of experimental techniques and set him apart from the more conventional storytellers of his era, including Lewis. The foreground story covers the last three days in Julian English's life, but sections of flashback provide the history of the region, his family, and his marriage to Caroline Walker. O'Hara is particularly concerned with the ways that the past influences the present, and he is careful to detail the manner in which one person's action has inevitable reverberations in the lives of others. As he puts it at the beginning of chapter 10, just after Julian's death, "Our story never ends." In the frame narrative, Luther and Irma Fliegler comment from their middle-class perspective on Julian English; other views are offered at various points in the novel — notably those of Al Greeco and Caroline English — and portions of the story are told from Julian's point of view. The result is a multifaceted portrayal of the central character as well as a cross section of the town of Gibbsville. This sense of the complexity of the immediate moment is further developed by O'Hara's abrupt shifts in point of view, such as in chapter 7, when the narrative moves from Julian's attempts to impress Mary Klein to the almost stream-of-consciousness musings of Caroline English.

Social Concerns

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Set in the coal-mining region of Eastern Pennsylvania in which O'Hara grew up, Appointment in Samarra focuses on the issues of social class, power, and money that were to be enduring concerns in O'Hara's fiction. The novel takes place in 1930, and the Depression and Prohibition are significant forces in the lives of the characters. Julian English, the major character, is the owner of a Cadillac dealership and a member of the country club, but social prestige cannot protect him from his own demons: the novel details the three days before he commits suicide — the "appointment" with his own death to which the title refers. The novel begins and ends with the observations of Luther and Irma Fliegler, a middle-class couple whose aspirations to country-club status have been thwarted by the Depression, but whose solid respectability and loving relationship contrasts sharply with the weakness and manipulation of the far wealthier Julian and Caroline English. O'Hara's point is not simply that wealth can be a corrupting force; rather, the novel posits that people at all social levels, from bootleggers to Cadillac dealers, are affected by complex social interaction which, in combination with personal characteristics, determines their fate. Julian's suicide is caused not by financial ruin, as was the case with many men during this period, but by his own inability to regain self-respect following a social gaffe.

Compare and Contrast

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1900: The divorce rate for America at the turn of the twentieth century per 1,000 people is 0.7. Out of 76,212,168 people living in the United States at the time, only 55,751 couples are divorced.

Today: The divorce rate in 1996 hovers at 4.3 per 1,000 people. Of a population sized at 265,283,783 people, 1,150,000 couples are divorced. In the last hundred years the population has increased at a rate of 250 percent, while the divorce rate has increased by more than 600 percent.

1930s: The United States is in the midst of the Prohibition era, which began in 1920 and will last through 1933. Prohibition is the legal ban on the making and/or selling of alcoholic beverages.

Today: Since the end of Prohibition in 1933, the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States has been legal; however, public concerns about overindulgence in alcohol have led to the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), a fellowship of people who follow a twelve-step program and support one another in their quest to abstain from drinking. Also, an increase in drunk-driving accidents and deaths resulting from those accidents led to the formation of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980. MADD helps increase laws against and penalties for drunk driving.

Literary Precedents

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To the extent that Appointment in Samarra can be considered a novel of manners, detailing the social interaction of people in a specific locale, it has precedents as far back as Jane Austen's novels. Its more immediate American predecessors, however, are F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, both published in 1925. In his introduction to the Modern Library edition of Appointment in Samarra, O'Hara names these two authors as influences, noting that he could see "countless instances of the effect of my reading Fitzgerald and Lewis." He shares with Fitzgerald a concern for the corrupting influence of wealth and social prestige, and with Lewis an interest in the social complexity of the American small town. Like a number of American writers, O'Hara has fictionalized a place he knew well and made it a microcosm of human characteristics; Gibbsville has taken its place along with Sarah Orne Jewett's Deephaven, Faulkner's Jefferson, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, as an imaginative recreation of an American community.

Bibliography and Further Reading

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Sources

Jefferson, Margo, “Books of the Times; Reissues of 2 Novels by O’Hara,” in The New York Times, January 18, 1995.

Schwarz, Benjamin and Christina, “John O’Hara’s Protectorate,” in The Atlantic Monthly, March 2000, p. 108.

Updike, John, “Reconsideration: Appointment in Samarra— O’Hara’s Messy Masterpiece,” in The New Republic, Vol. 198, No. 18, May 2, 1988, p. 38.

For Further Study

Bruccoli, Matthew J., The O’Hara Concern: A Biography of John O’Hara, Random House, 1975. Offers a detailed look at the author’s life and works, including analysis and criticism.

Eppard, Philip B., ed., Critical Essays on John O’Hara, G. K. Hall, 1994. Early reviews and modern scholarship on John O’Hara can be found in this collection of articles and reviews by writers such as John Cheever and Malcolm Cowley.

Bibliography

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Bier, Jesse. “O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra: His First and Only Real Novel.” College English 25, no. 2 (November, 1963): 135-141. Compares O’Hara’s first novel favorably with Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), but questions the importance of the rest of O’Hara’s work.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. The O’Hara Concern: A Biography of John O’Hara. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. A slightly expanded edition of the most complete biography of O’Hara, first published in 1975 and written with the cooperation of O’Hara’s widow. Discusses the sources and background of Appointment in Samarra and argues that O’Hara is a major writer. Good bibliography.

Donaldson, Scott. “Appointment with the Dentist: O’Hara’s Naturalistic Novel.” Modern Fiction Studies 14, no. 4 (Winter, 1968-1969): 435-442. Argues that O’Hara was writing a naturalistic, as opposed to a didactic, novel and that this accounts for the novel’s lukewarm acceptance.

Eppard, Philip B. Critical Essays on John O’Hara. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Includes reprints of the essays by Bier and Donaldson described here and provides further material on Appointment in Samarra.

Grebstein, Sheldon N. John O’Hara. New York: Twayne, 1966. The earliest and one of the most balanced book-length assessments of O’Hara’s controversial career. Identifies the forces at work in Appointment in Samarra as fate, society, free will, self-knowledge, sex, and money.

Long, Robert Emmet. John O’Hara. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983. A useful short study. Concludes that O’Hara is not a major writer, but calls Appointment in Samarra his “most nearly perfect novel.”

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