Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [105]
do, O Hara characteristically remarked not long ago. I know every important person in this country, or I know someone close to each of them. O Hara would probably be eager to offer you evidence if you challenged this fantastic claim, but it would be evidence of what drives him rather than evidence of what makes him a good writer, even if it were true. It is not O Hara s merely factual knowledge but his imaginative grasp of American life that makes Appointment in Samarra a remarkable book. This marvelous imaginative grasp of what it feels like for each social group to live in Gibbsville is the real subject of the book; the story of Julian English merely provides the plot. The long flashbacks about Al Grecco and Caroline English, the concluding account of Gibbsville s various class reactions to Julian s death, and all the other details not related in any significant way to Julian s life itself represent significant parts of Gibbsville s life. Moreover, to describe all this as social comment is not nearly good enough; it does not begin to suggest the quality of O Hara s insight or the sharpness of his observation. It may be that we do not know the personal motives of any of the characters do not, as Mr. Wilson says, really know why Julian English committed suicide and that O Hara s grasp of these aspects of life is not very sure. He does seem to depend for his explanation of the inner lives of his characters on some unanalyzed assumptions about men s natures, some habits, perhaps, of his own consciousness. Excessive melancholy and sensitivity, especially self-pity, combined with an extreme nastiness of manner, regularly characterize his heroes and more than once drive them to suicide. As Mr. Wilson says, heel for heel, Pal Joey is a comedown after Julian English, and though Julian sometimes knows he is a son of a bitch-at one point he says he is-it is uncertain that either he or O Hara knows he is a first-class heel. There is some evidence, in fact, that Julian is meant to be the true American gentleman, refined, aware, instinctively gallant, whose bad behavior is a result of his sensitive nature s being driven beyond restraint by the crudeness of the people around him. On the rare occasions when we are told about his deepest feelings, he is very sensitive; when he remembered the morning after that he had thrown a drink in Harry Reilly s face, for instance, the knowledge returned to him ... as though in a terrible, vibrating sound; like standing too near a big bell and having it suddenly struck without warning. We are told very early that Ed Charney, a shrewd judge of people, thinks highly of Julian ( That English, he s my boy. For my money I will take that English. He s a right guy. ), and we are regularly informed of Julian s charm, his grace as a dancer, his skill with women. He has all O Hara s passionate respect for the expensive appurtenances of life ( It s like playing golf with cheap clubs, or playing tennis with a dollar racket, or bad food. It s like anything cheap, he says). For Caroline, Julian had that gallantry that ... was attitude and manner; a gesture with a cigarette in his hand, his whistling, his humming while he played solitaire. & In the strict privacy of the country club s porch, he and Monsignor Creedon exchange what seem to be intended as the opinions of men civilized beyond the understanding of anyone else in Gibbsville. But what we are to think of the other aspect of Julian s character, it is difficult to say. He treats Caroline without consideration for her feelings, humiliates her publicly, and speaks to her in an unforgivable way because he is so intent on expressing his own hurt feelings that be never thinks of what she is feeling. Having done so, be insists that Caroline is behaving unforgivably if she fails him in the slightest way. Blind, without knowing, you could stick by me, he says to her. That s what you d do if you were a real wife, but, what the hell. He is filled with egotism and self-pity in a way he seems only rarely to suspect. The question is whether the reader is intended to see