John O’Hara
Appointment in Samarra
DELUXE EDITIONJOHN O’HARA (1905–1970) was one of the most prominent American writers of the twentieth century. Championed by Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker, he wrote seventeen novels, including Appointment in Samarra, his first; BUtterfield 8, which was made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor; and Ten North Frederick, which won the National Book Award. He has had more stories published in The New Yorker than anyone in the history of the magazine. Born in Pottsfield, Pennsylvania, he lived for many years in New York and in Princeton, New Jersey, where he died.
CHARLES McGRATH is the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and former deputy editor of The New Yorker. He is currently a writer at large for The New York Times.
JOHN O’HARA
Appointment in Samarra
Introduction by
CHARLES McGRATH
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com
First published in the United States of America by Harcourt, Brace and Company 1934
This edition with an introduction by Charles McGrath published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright John O’Hara, 1934
Copyright renewed John O’Hara, 1961
Introduction copyright © Charles McGrath, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
The quotation on page 3 is from Sheppey, a play by W. Somerset Maugham (Copyright 1933 by W. Somerset Maugham), published in 1933 by William Heinemann Ltd, London.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Hara, John, 1905–1970
Appointment in Samarra / John O’hara; introduction by Charles Mcgrath.—
Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition.
pages cm
“Originally published in 1934”—Introduction.
ISBN 978-1-101-60295-9
1. self-destructive behavior—Fiction. 2. Ethnic relations—Fiction. 3. Suicide victims—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction. 5. Young men—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3529.H29A8 2013
813’.52—DC23
2012049156
Introduction
Originally published in 1934, Appointment in Samarra is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple—Luther and Irma Fliegler—having sex and on Christmas morning, no less. Later in the book, another married couple—Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, and his wife, Caroline—make love in the middle of Christmas afternoon. Julian has been dispatched on a disagreeable errand, and Caroline rewards him by waiting in their bedroom in a black lace negligee she calls her “whoring gown.” About their lovemaking, the novel says, “she was as passionate and as curious, as experimental and joyful as ever he was.”
That women are sexual creatures every bit as much as men is hardly news, but in 1934 it was news in fiction, and some readers found the sexual frankness of Appointment offensive. (“Nothing but infantilism,” the critic Henry Seidel Canby wrote in the Saturday Review, calling the book “the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.”) Before O’Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren’t known to enjoy it. The sexual needs of women, apart from pleasing their husbands or their lovers, went on to become one of O’Hara’s great themes, and in later novels, like A Rage to Live and Lovey Childs, he rode it like a hobbyhorse. But in Appointment there is a bracing tenderness and freshness in the way he describes the private lives of the Flieglers and the Englishes, and even decades later the novel’s explicitness may have emboldened O’Hara’s fellow Pennsylvanian John Updike in his own descriptions of marital (and extramarital) sex. Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Though unfaithful to her, Julian can’t stop loving Caroline, and after O’Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can’t help falling a little in love with her, too. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: “He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was.”
O’Hara first thought of calling the novel “The Infernal Grove,” a title almost as unpromising as “Trimalchio in West Egg,” Fitzgerald’s first choice for The Great Gatsby. In a letter to his brother Tom he wrote:
The plot of the novel, which is quite slight, is rather hard to tell, but it concerns a young man and his wife, members of the club set, and how the young man starts off the Christmas 1930 holidays by throwing a drink in the face of a man who has aided him financially. From then on I show how fear of retribution and the kind of life the young man has led and many other things contribute to his demise. There are quite a few other characters, some drawn from life, others imaginary, who figure in the novel, but the story is essentially the story of a young married couple in the first year of the depression. I have no illusion about its being the great or the second-great American novel, but it’s my first. And my second will be better.
As it turned out, his second novel, BUtterfield 8, was almost as good but not quite, and though O’Hara went on to write sixteen more novels, most of them big bestsellers, he could never top Appointment. Along with The Scarlet Letter, The Sun Also Rises, The Moviegoer, and Catch-22, it is one of the handful of American novels that represent both the author’s first published effort and his best. O’Hara, who published hundreds of short stories and thirteen collections in his lifetime, was actually a better story writer than he was a novelist, most evidently at the end of his career when the novels had grown bulky and laden with sociological exposition. The stories, by contrast, were almost minimalist, turning on just a line of dialogue or even a passing observation that suggests something crucial has just changed. More Hemingwayesque than Hemingway—more transparent and less mannered—these stories opened a path for such great American story writers as Salinger, Cheever, Updike, and Carver.
Appointment in Samarra probably grew out of some Pennsylvania stories O’Hara had been working on. In 1932 he mentioned to a friend that he was thinking of a story about a figure much like Al Grecco, the bootlegger’s henchman in the noveclass="underline" a Schuylkill County gangster who is a hanger-on at a roadhouse frequented by the country club set. And though Appointment takes in much more than Al Grecco, who is only a minor character in the novel, it retains some of the terseness and quickness of a story. It’s a novel in a hurry.