Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [103]
I know, she said. If only daytime were a time for kissing she would kiss him now. All this, the furniture, the house, the kids, herself all this was what Lute was worrying about. She was almost crying, so she smiled. Come here, he said. Oh, Lute, she said. She knelt down beside him and cried a little and then kissed him. I feel so sorry for Caroline. You, I
Don t worry, he said. I still get my check from the government, and I can get lots of jobs he cleared his throat in fact, that s my trouble. I was saying to Alfred P. Sloan the other day. He called me up. I meant to tell you, but it didn’t seem important. So I said to Al
Who s Alfred P. Sloan?
My God. Here I been selling he s president of General Motors.
Oh. So what did you say to him? said Irma. THE END. Afterword Appointment in Samarra is John O Hara s best novel, and that is something very good indeed. O Hara is probably tired of hearing it described in this way; no writer likes hearing all his life that his first book is his best. Scott Fitzgerald once threatened to slug a fellow writer if be ever mentioned This Side of Paradise again, and O Hara is even more the slugging type of writer than Fitzgerald was. Like Hemingway, who has influenced O Hara and who thought of himself as slowly becoming wise and skilled enough to fight Stendhal to a draw, O Hara likes to think of himself as steadily improving. I m fifty-three years old, he told an interviewer when From the Terrace was published in 1958, and I think I ve gained the wisdom needed to handle a really big novel about a big subject. In the past, critics of my work have started with Appointment in Samarra and worked forward. Now, I think they ll start with From the Terrace and look back. This belief, if mistaken, is surely very natural, and readers are bound to sympathize with it, though O Hara does sometimes seem almost as sensitive as Hemingway was about criticism of his latest work, as if he were not so confident as he appears. O Hara once stopped writing short stories for The New Yorker which he does brilliantly because the magazine published an unfavorable review of one of his novels; he is supposed to have told the editor that unless The New Yorker got rid of that reviewer it would get no more O Hara short stories, and he was as good as his word for several years. Twenty years ago, Edmund Wilson defined the kind of excellence that makes Appointment in Samarra the fine book it is: O Hara, he said, is ... a social commentator; and in this field of social habit and manners ... he has done work that is original and interesting. & His grasp of what lies underneath it is not, however, so sure. We need to see what this distinction really means if we are to do full justice to Appointment in Samarra. If we concentrate on the story of Julian English, on his inner life and the inner lives of the other characters, we are likely to find the novel merely competent. These elements in the book are handled intelligently enough for its purpose, but that purpose is something else, and if we do not see what it is, we are likely to miss the book s real achievement. What, as Mr. Wilson asks, is the relevance to the story ... of the newspaper woman (pp. 38-39) ... whose career is described on such a scale? The account of her beginnings is amusing, but the part she plays in the drama doesn’t seem to warrant this full-length introduction. That is certainly true if we insist that the real subject of Appointment in Samarra is the drama of Julian English s life and death. But if we insist on that, then the whole story of Al Grecco, of which the account of this newspaperwoman is a part, is equally irrelevant, though it occupies nearly a fifth of the novel and has an independent narrative life of its own. By this standard, too, the flashback about Caroline English s growing up is much longer than it needs to be; the story of Irma and Luther Fliegler, with which the novel begins and ends, is only superficially relevant; and the book s conclusion especially its wonderful glimpse of Caroline English s old beau, Ross