posted on 20 Apr 2019

Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara

O’Hara is another example of an author whose identity and reputation has gradually slipped off the front page when it comes to experts and critics compiling lists of the best novelists of the 20th century. Born in 1905, O’Hara’s reputation was built on his accessible short stories that were (in)famous for their directness and sexual frankness and I suspect it was exactly this recipe that led to him being thought of as something of a ‘pulp’ writer and for his reputation becoming downgraded accordingly. However, plenty of his contemporaries and peers – including John Updike – thought very highly of his work.

Appointment in Samarra was his first novel published in 1934 and the title he chose for the novel was a cause of some conflict with his publisher who thought the decision a great mistake. O’Hara took his title and inspiration from a short tale recounted by W. Somerset Maugham:

 

“Death speaks: There was a merchant in Bagdad 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 Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

 

The book, set in the nouveau riche suburban in-crowd of small town America, tells the story of 30 year old Julian English who, when we join the story, has seemingly unaccountably reached a critical moment in his life. Without fully understanding why and over a period of a few short days over Christmas, he impulsively sets about destroying his career, his marriage and eventually his whole life. He heads, seemingly unstoppably towards his own demise as if he had his own appointment with death.

The book beautifully and richly conjures the last days of the bright young things in the age of alcohol prohibition – a law that seems to have had no prohibitive effect of any significance on drinking habits. In addition to following Julian’s urge to self-destruction we get superb portraits of the characters that inhabit the world he lives in – his wife, Caroline, who is sensual but ambivalent towards her husband and, best of all, Al Grecco, the up and coming gangster gofer. O’Hara uses a sort of omniscient narrator device to enable him to move in and out of the characters consciousness and, in this way, slow down or speed-up action as experienced by the protagonists.

He uses what seems to me a consciously non-literary style – direct and unadorned with a willingness to be open about sex and sexual desire which was controversial at the time of publication. The complexity of women’s sexual desire in particular is something O’Hara was especially keen on exploring without euphemism or unnecessary coyness.

It’s not really a spoiler to say that Julian’s binge of self-destruction ends in a suicide that is itself entirely ambiguous. Why did he kill himself? Was it because he had lost control of his life and had spiralled into a series of actions that were too socially humiliating to live with or was the suicide an expression of existential despair over the life he’d made for himself?

I like this observation made by O’Hara’s biographer, Frank MacShane:

 "The excessiveness of Julian's suicide is what makes Appointment in Samarra so much a part of its time. Julian doesn't belong to Fitzgerald's Jazz Age; he is ten years younger and belongs to what came to be called the hangover generation, the young people who grew up accustomed to the good life without having to earn it. This is the generation that had so little to defend itself with when the depression came in 1929."

I think this captures the essence of the book perfectly. It felt to me that Appointment in Samarra is in many ways the forerunner or even inspiration for books like Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, John Updike’s Rabbit Run or Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter and richly deserves to be as well-known and well-regarded as these subsequent novels.

Oh, and by the way, I’m on O’Hara’s side when it comes to the title…..

 

Terry Potter

April 2019