Odd Jobs (41 page)

It was Dorothy Parker, evidently, who encouraged the young Pennsylvanian, back in New York after abruptly quitting the Pittsburgh editorship, to concentrate his energy on a full-scale novel about Pottsville. His home town had increasingly figured in O’Hara’s fiction, and among his intended projects was a book of three long stories about it; he had already written “The Doctor’s Son,” based upon his childhood as the oldest son of the dedicated, pugnacious Dr. Patrick O’Hara, and “The Hoffman Estate,” a tale of country-club types hastily written in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Scribner’s Prize Novel award. He planned to add to these a third story about, he wrote his friend Robert Simonds in December of 1932, a “Schuylkill County gangster … a sort of hanger-on at a roadhouse which was occasionally visited by the Pottsville country club set.” Instead, a year later, living in a small eight-dollar-a-week room at the Pickwick Arms Club Residence on East 51st Street near the Third Avenue el, scraping by on occasional free-lance sales, he began a novel with a working title that Parker had given him, having discarded it for a collection of her short stories—
The Infernal Grove
, after a poem by Blake. By February 12, 1934, he was able to write a synopsis to his brother Tom:

Two months later, on April 9, O’Hara wrote Tom that he had finished the novel: “I’m afraid I’ve muffed the story, but I can’t do anything about it now. Oh, I know there’ll be more work. I know it because I haven’t got the sense of relief that I thought I’d have on finishing it. I’ve been working on it since December, and doing nothing else, and now I have to bat out some
New Yorker
stuff.”

It is hard to believe he ever got to do much more work—“to edit and to polish off etc.”—for
Appointment in Samarra
was published with what seems, today, lightninglike speed. Submitted in April, it was out by August and went through three printings. Harcourt, Brace, the publisher, had asked for some cuts reducing sexual explicitness, but even so the novel was attacked for obscenity by Henry Seidel Canby and Sinclair Lewis (“nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn”). However, the book was praised by Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in
Esquire
, “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well, read
Appointment in Samarra
by John O’Hara.” Dorothy Parker’s praise was more epigrammatic and judicious: “Mr. O’Hara’s eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy.”

The “slight” novel, the “muffed” product of less than four months, has lasted. Though O’Hara wrote many more novels and produced amazing quantities of short stories, he never surpassed the artistic effect achieved by
Appointment in Samarra
. He belongs, with Hawthorne and
Hemingway, to the distinguished company of American novelists whose first published novel is generally felt to be their best. Rereading
Appointment
, I was struck by the extent to which even it displays O’Hara’s besetting weaknesses as a novelist—his garrulity and his indifference to structure. All sorts of irrelevancies stick up, almost like bookmarks, out of this saga of the fall of Julian English. The subplot involving Al Grecco and Ed Charney, for instance, seems a leftover from the earlier three-part intention, the unwritten “Schuylkill County gangster” story; it truly meshes with the rest only momentarily, in the scene at the Stage Coach, and not significantly, since Ed Charney’s revenge upon Julian, like Harry Reilly’s, never has time to arrive, and we don’t know if there would have been any. Though Luther and Irma Fliegler open and close the novel, they virtually disappear in the middle and seem rather inertly to represent the conventional Lutheran middle class that lies in the social scale just below the high-living Englishes. A certain hurry toward the end nips off a number of threads: Harry Reilly, so thoroughly introduced, melts away as a character, and Al Grecco’s provocative early premonition that Caroline English “might be a cheater” comes to nothing. On the other hand, at a number of spots the authorial voice suddenly decides to tell us more than we ask to know about how to drive from Philadelphia to Gibbsville, how a small-city bootlegger works, how the anthracite strike of 1925 affected the coal-region economy, what memberships Dr. William English holds, what Mrs. Waldo Wallace Walker wears, and who all does belong to the Gibbsville Club.

Yet none of this gratuitous detail is really deadening, for the complete social portrait of Gibbsville helps explain why Julian English, caught in this narrow world, so feebly resists destruction. Though O’Hara works up some details as to how to run a garage and car agency, Julian seems miscast as a Cadillac dealer, and indeed tells Monsignor Creedon, in the book’s odd moment of Catholic confession, “I never was meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer.” The priest’s shrewd suggestion that Julian might be a “frustrated literary man” is brushed aside, as it would bring Julian too close to his creator, who wants to see Gibbsville from afar, objectifying into sociological detail the frustrations and rage he experienced in Pottsville.

Appointment in Samarra
is, among other things, an Irishman’s revenge on the Protestants who had snubbed him, a book in which O’Hara had taken his own advice to his fellow Pottsville scribe Walter Farquhar: “If you’re going to get out of that God awful town, for God’s sake write
something that will
make
you get out of it. Write something that automatically will sever your connection with the town, that will help you get rid of the bitterness you must have stored up against all those patronizing cheap bastards.” Julian is named English and he throws a drink into Harry Reilly’s “stupid Irish face” after hearing him tell one too many humorous Irish stories; since Julian is O’Hara’s hero and a “high class guy,” the Irish author restrains his animus
^‖
and gives English the benefit of his own sensitivity, observational powers, and (less attractively) impulsive bellicosity. In the treatment of Julian’s father, Dr. William English, a regional aristocrat and the lord of local medicine, O’Hara’s animus is unrestrained: the senior English is described as, beneath his veneer of correct memberships and public decorum, murderously incompetent. He loves performing surgery on the men injured in mine accidents, yet can safely do it only under the direction of his inferior at the hospital, Dr. Malloy—the name O’Hara gave his own father in the autobiographical “The Doctor’s Son.” Dr. English gets a nurse fired after he overhears her say, “Trephine this afternoon. I hope to God Malloy’s around if English is going to try it.” Though this firing alienates Dr. Malloy, Dr. English, we are dryly told, “continued to do surgery, year after year, and several of the men he trephined lived.” Not only are many hospital deaths on his head, but when his only son commits suicide, Caroline, Julian’s wife, with a brutality just barely in character, accuses him to his face, “You did it.… You made him do it.” Dr. English’s sin seems to consist of offering Julian a role model of small-city propriety and expressing regret—just like Dr. Malloy in “The Doctor’s Son” and O’Hara’s father in real life—that his son refused to follow him into medicine.

To the powerful stew of ethnic awareness and filial tension that simmered within O’Hara he added the distress of his brief marriage (1931–33) to Helen Petit, called “Pet.” She came from a well-to-do Episcopalian family in Brooklyn; her mother had not approved of her liaison with this brawling, hard-drinking Irish-Catholic journalist, and indeed his drinking helped undo them. In 1932 he wrote Robert Simonds, “I wish I could take a vacation from myself. I have, of course,
taken quite a number of overnight vacations; getting so cockeyed drunk that twenty hours elapse before I recover.” Also, in these first years of the Depression, his writing career was faring little better than Julian English’s Cadillac agency; he gave Julian his own quixotic chip on the shoulder and compulsion to offend those he should court. Yet before Caroline is finally alienated in one last shouting match of sarcasms and masked pleas, she shares Julian’s terrible sudden slide, and a number of intimate touches show the tenderness that is being squandered:

So subtle a language of footsteps, with the elliptic conversation and the lovemaking that follow, could have been described only by a man with a marriage on his mind, and a real woman haunting it. The best passage of sociology in the book, which infuses its knowing with feeling and a remarkable empathy into female experience, is Chapter 5, telling of Caroline’s life before marrying Julian; it seems unfortunate that later in the novel O’Hara chose to foist off upon her some relatively unpersuasive Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Nonetheless, the Englishes have a heterosexual relationship beside which those in
The Great Gatsby
and
A Farewell to Arms
are romantic and insubstantial. The repeated offense O’Hara gave to Mrs. Grundy lay mostly, I think, in his insistence on crediting his female characters with sexual appetites—with sturdy and even sweaty bodily and psychological existences independent of male desires.

For all its excellence as a social panorama and a sketch of a marriage, it is as a picture of a man destroyed by drink and pride that
Appointment in Samarra
lives frighteningly in the mind. Julian’s disintegration, within this society whose many parts are so zealously particularized, takes place in three days—a kind of Calvary, whose stations progress from the tossed drink that we do not see (though we experience it as a vision in Julian’s mind and then as a burst of aghast gossip in the country-club ballroom) to the almost comic drunken whirl and babble in which he spirits Helene Holman out to the Stage Coach parking lot and on to the unforgettable freak of the mammoth highball he mixes in a flower vase during his
last earthly hour. When I first read this novel, as a teen-ager (because, I suppose, the scandal of it in Pottsville had stirred waves still felt in Reading, forty miles away, fifteen years later), this monstrous mad drink, and Julian’s sodden retreat to the interior of his Cadillac, seemed overwhelmingly dreadful—a liquid vortex opening a hole in the workaday Pennsylvania world about me. How surprisingly brief, on rereading, the sentences are! Dorothy Parker correctly spoke of the book’s “almost unbelievable pace.”

Julian’s choice of an automobile as his instrument of death is a brilliant stroke. In this intensely American novel, the ubiquitous automobile serves as status symbol, as love nest, as contemplation cell, as communal signal. Throughout, on these Gibbsville streets, people hear and see each other come and go in their cars. In the beginning Irma Fliegler hears the Newtons return, and at the end Julian hears Alice Cartwright leave, a sound Herbert Harley also hears. As the engines purr and the broken chain links clatter against fenders, an entire web of motion calls out to those in bed, bidding them to be out and doing, warning them not to fall behind, to miss out.

O’Hara was back in Pottsville for the Christmas of 1930, and we assume that the snowy weather is as authentic as the Ralph Barton cover on
The New Yorker
that Caroline is reading.
^a
Authenticity of this small factual kind became the byword for his fiction, and something of a fetish for him; factuality was O’Hara’s gruff way of telling the world he loved it. But authenticity of a larger sort takes this novel almost, as it were, unawares:
Appointment in Samarra
is faithful to the way our fates sneak up on us and occur within a scattered social context that widens out to absolute indifference. In its centrifugal fashion the book is about Luther Fliegler’s promotion (it seems likely, but is not nailed down), and Mary Manners’s metamorphosis from a coal-region beauty to a New York floozy, and Al Grecco’s career as Ed Charney’s henchman, which appears to survive his failure to protect Ed’s mistress from Julian English, though Al may be henceforth more treacherous. Most events don’t come to anything
much, but there is an accretion that can suddenly crush a life. O’Hara’s short stories in their drifting motion catch a moment in this almost unnoticeable process, this transformation of what we do into what we are. And what we are is seldom what we think we deserve.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, according to Thoreau. John O’Hara, as a doctor’s son, and as a newspaperman, and as a roisterer and the holder of many part-time jobs, saw exceptionally much of the seamy, disappointed side of American life, and part of his veracity was not to melodramatize it, or to forget that the human will gleams in even the dingiest folds of the social fabric. A curious cheerful toughness enlivens a loser like Pal Joey, and
Appointment in Samarra
does not leave us with the tragic sense of a rigorous destruction that, say,
Madame Bovary
does. Julian keeps a kind of jaunty, willful dignity. Caroline thinks, “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not.” He goes out jokingly, with a last clock-smashing gesture for “the bastards.” Like his jut-jawed creator, he gave as good as he got.