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 McGRATH
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.
1
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?”