Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [106]
all this as forgivable (like the bad manners Hamlet displays in his antic moments) because Julian is sensitive in a superior way, or whether he is to find them unforgivable and think that Julian, heel for heel, leaves Pal Joey nowhere. The very fact that Mr. Wilson found Julian a heel on a heroic scale and that other critics have thought him a modern Hamlet suggests the novel s lack of clarity about the innermost lives of its characters. But no novelist can do everything, and the inner lives of the characters are not the main interest of Appointment in Samarra. What O Hara does see with marvelous exactness are the social motives of his characters; he knows exactly how they think and feel as members of their class and group. He knows what a man like Julian English carries in his pocket, what phonograph records he owns, what kind of car he drives, and how he drives it; he knows exactly how Frannie Snyder and Al Grecco can meet and how they will act together; he knows exactly how women first broke the taboo against their coming into the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club, who sits at what table there and why, what can be done and what not done when they do. Moreover, he knows these things not simply as facts but as experience. It was about two o clock, U. S. Naval Observatory Hourly By Western Union time, when Al Grecco appeared in the doorway of the Apollo Restaurant, and we can see, as Al has for years, that standard clock, inscribed with its typical American mixture of scientific boasting and advertising, that hung in the Apollo Restaurant as it hung in tens of thousands of public places all over America. In addition, we see these things through the eyes of characters we know well, through the eyes of Al Grecco, who loves Ed Charney and is as loyal to him and his organization as men are to well-loved families; through the eyes of Irma Fliegler, who nearly cries when she recognizes the courage of Lute s joking about Alfred P. Sloan when he is worried that he will lose his job after Julian s death; through the eyes of Harry Reilly, whose sister calls him anxiously in New York after Julian s death but remembers to ask him to buy Monsignor Creedon a new biretta. We know all these people well enough as social beings to follow what they are feeling and to experience with them what they experience. So we listen with Irma Fliegler to the clacking of a broken chain link in the quiet dawn of Christmas morning, or time with Al Grecco the familiar run from the Apollo to the Stage Coach Inn, or listen with Julian English to Paul Whiteman playing I ll Build a Stairway to Paradise on the Victrola. Through Julian s eyes we watch scornfully the lower class manners of Harry Reilly as he tells a story in the smoking room of the Lantenengo Country Club, or listen with Lute Fliegler to Pat Quilty, the Irish undertaker, refusing to buy a Cadillac, out of Catholic solidarity with Harry Reilly, whom Julian has insulted. Knowing the class and group feelings of all these characters, we can see and hear them behind the way Lute Fiegler talks to Julian English, or Caroline talks to her father-in-law, or Helene Holman to a drunken Julian, or even Al Grecco s way of speaking to Mrs. Grady, the Englishes cook. All these insights are pointed up for us by a story that is as tightly constructed as a well-made play. Appointment in Samarra even observes in its own way the unities of time and place and action. The story takes about three days, beginning slightly after midnight of Christmas Eve and ending about the same time two days later (the clock in Julian s Cadillac reads 10:41 when he smashes it with the whiskey bottle as he waits for the carbon monoxide to kill him). Except in the flashbacks, and seldom then, we never leave the environs of Gibbsville; and the stories of the various social groups in the novel are carefully connected to make the single story of Gibbsville. All this neatness would be ineffective, of course, if O Hara had not made the people and events of his story vividly true, as he has. The climax of the novel occurs Christmas