Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [104]
Campbell, and Julian s Polish girl, Mary is anticlimactic. What makes Appointment in Samarra remarkable, however, is not the story of Julian English; it is the story of Gibbsville. All the characters, even Julian English, are here not for their own sakes, but because they represent significant social elements in Gibbsville; and Gibbsville is here because it is a microcosm of American life as it was actually lived at the end of the 1920 s (the events of the novel occur at Christmastime, 1930). When Appointment in Samarra was first published, everyone who lived in an American town anywhere near the size of Gibbsville was certain O Hara had been a close observer of his town. If Al Grecco and Ed Charney are irrelevant to the drama of Julian English, they are an important part of the drama of Gibbsville, and so is Lydia Faunce Browne, the newspaperwoman, who seems to Mr. Wilson a mistake. Lydia Faunce Browne became a newspaperwoman when her husband deserted her; we know the Brownes were a part of the Lantenengo Street crowd because the absconding Mr. Browne left large bills at the Lantenengo Country Club and at the Gibbsville Club. When Mrs. Browne goes to the fights, she represents Lantenengo Street; and when she describes a fighter named Tony Morascho by saying, Beauty! Do you know El Grecco, the celebrated Spanish artist? Surely you do. Well, there was El Grecco, to the life, the whole pattern of relations that connect the genteel, nominally cultured world of Lantenengo Street with the world of Ed Charney s Stage Coach Inn is established for us. The long flashback of Caroline Walker s girlhood contributes an equally important element to our understanding of Gibbsville; the life of Irma and Lute Fliegler shows us how the respectable domesticity of what we would call if we admitted we have classes the middle class contrasts with the upper-class life of the Englishes. The Flieglers live on Lantenengo Street, and Irma feels they very much belong there: is she not a Doane, and did not Grandfather Doane win a Congressional Medal of Honor in the Mexican War? But the Flieglers are conservative in a strictly middle-class way. They have several children (Caroline and Julian English deliberately plan to have no children for five years, because neither wants Caroline to become absolutely a married woman. A married woman with a child and false teeth and a husband who is running around with that girl from Kresge s ). The Flieglers will not join the country club until they can afford it (the upper-class characters get themselves posted regularly at the clubs for failure to pay their bills and are all in debt to Whit Hofman or Harry Reilly). There is a wonderfully subtle depiction of the class differences between these two groups when they meet at the Stage Coach Inn Christmas night. One might say that O Hara comes by his knowledge of Gibbsville naturally, except that if knowledge like this did not take a rare talent, everyone born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, around 1905, as John O Hara was, would have it. O Hara was the eldest of eight children born to a doctor a good deal like the Dr. Malloy who appears briefly in Appointment in Samarra and at greater length elsewhere in O Hara for instance, in the fine short story called The Doctor s Son, where Dr. Malloy s son, Jim, also appears, as he does as a writer around New York in Butterfield 8 and as the Hollywood scriptwriter and narrator of Hope of Heaven. Just as John O Hara, after getting fired from two prep schools, was graduated from Niagara Prep and had passed his entrance examinations for Yale, Dr. O Hara died, and there was no money to send John to Yale. It is hard to avoid feeling that this disappointment helped to fix in O Hara a combination of envy and dislike of the people who did become Yale or Princeton or even Lafayette gentlemen ( Merry Christmas, you stuck-up bastards! as Al Grecco says to Lantenengo Street) that seems to be the driving force behind his insatiable curiosity about the life of the American upper classes. There are few people who know this country better than I