This book is about, roughly, eastern Pennsylvania, drinking, country clubs, roadhouses, railroads, cars, state highways, social class, lust/sloppy encounters, fading college memories, and the 1930s. That is, much of what I know, or knew, and think of as normal life. It is one of those snappy books of that era, and it also happened to be set on Christmas Day and the 3 or 4 days afterwards (in 1930), which dates coincided with the time when I was reading it (in 2016), in my old house with my icy windows and crusty snow in the yard. So I got a good deal of pleasure out of it, though how much anyone without as much personal identification with the material would, especially nowadays, I can't say.
This is the only O'Hara book to make the IWE list, even though he was still highly regarded, as well as alive, at the time it was published. The blurb for Appointment in Samarra begins "John O'Hara's qualifications as a novelist are rated higher and higher as the years pass but as to one of them there has never been any doubt". It goes on to praise his ear for American conversation and Appointment's readability and character portrayals, "especially that of Caroline English". It also makes that claim that the town of Gibbsville, where this and many of O'Hara's stories are set, is modeled on Harrisburg, which is a pretty major error, I am almost certain that O'Hara's hometown of Pottsville is what was meant. Characters in the book talk about going to Harrisburg, and especially Reading, which is a dump now, but was evidently prosperous and lively ninety years ago.
In spite of his comparatively high level of success as a writer, which he had already attained by the age of thirty, O'Hara was notorious even in his own lifetime for being cloyingly open about his various social and professional insecurities, such as not having been able to attend Yale (or any other college, for that matter), not being awarded literary prizes, not being considered on the level of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the other major writers of that generation that preceded him by ten to fifteen years. The preface that he wrote for the Modern Library edition, which came out in the early 1950s, is full of name-dropping as well being surprisingly candid and unironic about his influences, most of whom (Lewis, Galsworthy, Tarkington) were not much in vogue among the edgier writers even then. The whole thing would get anyone who submitted it laughed out of any respectable literary magazine today.
All of the characters in the country club set are introduced with the names of their colleges. Lafayette and Lehigh are as well represented as the Ivy League. There was even a writer for the local newspaper who had graduated from the University of Missouri.
Now it is time for everybody's favorite section of these reports, when I copy my favorite quotations from the books:
p. 17 "She was known on the stag line as a girl who would give you a dance; she was at Smith, and was a good student. She had a lovely figure, especially her breasts, and she was a passionate little thing who wasn't homely but plain and, if she only knew it, didn't look well without her glasses. She was so eager to please that when a young man would cut in on her, he got the full benefit of her breasts and the rest of her body." Oh yes, it's that kind of book. Where were all the eager to please girls (for me) when I was young? Of course, I know where they were, they were elsewhere, eager to please other people. It's a let off steam kind of question. It's still a few years before I'll have time or extra money to try to hash this out with a psychiatric professional.
p.50 "She felt sorry for prostitutes on all occasions; she thought milk for babies ought to be pure; she thought Germany was not altogether responsible for the World War; she did not believe in Prohibition (It does not prohibit," she often said). She smoked cigarettes one right after the other, and did not care who knew it..." Defining characteristics of people in other ages.
p. 125 "That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States..." Is this true? Maybe it was, though I don't think of it as an especially bad or boring year.
Chapter 6 is a very good rendering of a very inebriated but nominally functioning man's thought process, conversation, behavior, etc. Or at least it is very similar to what I have experienced in the same state.
p. 187, English remembering his childhood. "There was a game called Run, Sharpie, Run, and sometimes the gang would play Ku-Klux Klan, after having seen "The Birth of a Nation." I feel like I have some duty to acknowledge this stuff when it turns up in these books, though as with Tarkington the casualness of the references to these things and obliviousness to any sense of moral culpability do give the books an air of authenticity. I understood by this that they played this game among themselves at least and did not go around tormenting actual black people, though perhaps they did. There is quite a bit of very casual anti-Semitism in the book as well, of the sort that could not be unironically published today by any reputable outfit. I don't know that I would call O'Hara an aggressive Jew-hater (doubtless others will have no problem doing so, but I am of a mild disposition, and feel no need to castigate people unless they avow extreme positions) --even in the 30s, 40s and 50s I have to think that would have been an issue in both the New York publishing world and in Hollywood, which frequently adapted his novels at that time--but he certainly seems to regard the Jewish community as a distinct entity that has some characteristics that he finds distasteful and that is also set to some extent in implacable, if not mortal, opposition to his own,
I went to Pottsville, the nominal setting of this story, one day back in September or October of 1989. This was on a hitchhiking trip/adventure I undertook to see America following a trail marked by the birth-cities of the writers on the IWE list. Since I started out from Philadelphia, I made it to Pottsville within the first four or five days of the trip (after, if I remember correctly, Philadelphia, Germantown (in Philadelphia), Burlington, New Jersey and Wilmington, Delaware). I did not even have the wherewithal to seek out monuments or sites related to the authors themselves, but figured the cities had spawned important literary figures, and something in the location must have something stimulating for me to contemplate. Pottsville is about 2 hours northwest of Philadelphia, in mountainous coal country. It was foggy and wet the day I was there, leaves all along the roads leading into town, upon which I walked much of the way from the highway (I-78 I think) near the exit off which I had spent the previous night in a cornfield. These roads, most of the time, ran along the bases of very steep, wet, tree-covered hills with the occasional dilapidated old house clinging to the edge of them. Not much was happening in Pottsville, though the main street was still there at least, had not been converted into strip malls and such, and I hung out at the library for a while, and got something to eat at a diner that was still open. But the population of the town was mostly old people and the single mother/unsocialized young men types that you can probably imagine, and the atmosphere was gloomy, so I decided not to stick around for the night and started on the way to Scranton, which was the next stop on the list. I didn't make it (this was the night some people found a $20 a night motel for me, which I once wrote about on my other blog), but I did get to Scranton the next day, and I enjoyed it there (nice old public buildings to idle in) and I stayed ovenight there in a sheltered basement stairwell of a church. (It's a good thing I am not doing this now though, since Scranton apparently arrests more people per capita for nonsense than anywhere else in the country).
Within a span of about ten pages O'Hara, through his characters, manages to pay homage/suck up to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were the rock stars of American literature and about 10 years older (or less) than him when he was a young man breaking in to the business. Hemingway did throw him a bone by praising Appointment when it came out, which O'Hara did not neglect to mention in the preface (and elsewhere, one suspects).
p.158 I was shaken by Al Grecco's fucking of Franny Snyder. "...she wanted a cigarette and accepted a drink and was easily persuaded to go for a short ride. The short ride was short enough: half a mile off the main road between Gibbsville and Collieryville to a boathouse on the Colliery Dam...she must have felt the same way, because if there was ever an easy lay she was it--that day. But she said on the way home: 'If you ever tell anybody this I'll kill you.'" I get shaken by these things of course because nothing of this sort ever happened with me, and I know that other people, the people I have nothing to do in life but dream about being, or having been now...You see, I need to record this and tell it to the psychiatrist when I go. You go there and you can't say exactly what is giving you so much pain and discontent. Of course they can't do anything for you, or make you feel that it should have happened to you, and that you deserved it, and were robbed of experiences that you should have had, or make you feel that you don't need to have them, but I would still feel better if I could talk to someone about the jealousy and rage that has, I won't say ruined my life, but hindered my development.
During the Christmas season I happened to go to my local independent bookstore, which is really pretty good, and on a lark I took a look to see if they had any O'Hara books in stock, which I wasn't expecting they would, because I think of him as being very out of fashion, but actually they had 5 titles by him. There was a special Penguin edition of Appointment in Samarra (as noted above, I read the Modern Library edition, which I already had, as I have collected that series for many years), and three other Penguin paperbacks, for Butterfield 8, Ten North Frederick (National Book Award winner for 1955), and an edition of New York Stories, with a stylish cover illustration featuring a tumbler of whiskey on a windowsill with a nighttime view of the Manhattan skyline, somewhat reminiscent of The Lost Weekend. They also had the Library of America volume of his stories, these being considered it seems the most valuable part of his oeuvre now.
Even among the country club set, the aggressive assertions of manliness and especially the amount of physical fighting among the men is shocking to read about in these wussified times of ours.
p.241 "...he did not like to see men driving hatless in closed cars; it was too much like the Jews in New York who ride in their town cars with the dome lights lit." Both of these abominations were lost on me, I am sad to say.
p. 240 In a rundown of one of the characters' humdrum everyday sights, he notes "the trees with the bark knawed away by horses." This is a lost thing now, though apparently it was still a familiar sight in 1930.
p.287 The main character's father was a doctor, and one of those eminently respectable but shallow and emotionally cold pillar of the community types who loomed so large over the literary small towns in 1880-1940 America. He has a professional adversary in town who is Jewish, referred to by Dr English in his own mind (though I don't think publicly) as "the little kike quack". There is tension between them because "Dr English had given a dinner to the County Medical Society and failed to invite Moskowitz. Dr English thought he had good reason: the dinner was at the country club, and Jews were not admitted to the club, so Dr English could not see why he should violate the spirit of the club rule by having a Jew there as his guest." The tension between Wasps (especially--I suppose there must be Catholic country clubs,* but they don't seem to get a lot of attention) and Jews over not allowing the latter into country clubs is famously well documented. I don't know whether this is still an issue or not. My sense is that country clubs in general are in decline anyway because few younger people (younger being under age 55 or so) can afford them, and those who can are not willing or able to devote as much time to golf and drinking as past generations were. I remember in my youth some arguments put forth in, if not defense, justification of these discriminatory policies, not by anyone who actually belonged to such a club (one guy might have been the bartender at one), the main one being that members joined the club to have a place to go and relax, and in those days at least, the presence of Jews apparently made this sought after relaxation more elusive than the members cared for. And yes, I know that by relax is meant, be able to get comfortably drunk and feel at ease to speak the terrible thoughts one has about all of the out-groups of the club. I knew it then, really.
As noted above, this is widely considered O'Hara's best novel now, with his stories still being held in some regard as well. This is a good first novel by a twenty-nine year old, with a lot that is interesting in it, but it is hardly a masterpiece, and if he never improved upon it--and he had a long career--I would have to consider his development to have been a disappointment.
*The club in the book actually has a strong Catholic contingent (O'Hara himself was a Catholic, by origin), which is the source of much of the tension in the book's plot.
The Challenge
1. Dan Brown--Angels and Demons................................................................3,452
2. Stephen King--The Gunslinger....................................................................1,975
3. Raging Bull (movie).......................................................................................494
4. The Red Shoes (movie)...................................................................................252
5. Annie Proulx--Close Range............................................................................226
6. Denis Johnson--Jesus's Son............................................................................221
7. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (movie).......................................204
8. Bob Dylan--The Times They Are A-Changin' (music)....................................151
9. R.K. Lilley--Breaking Her..............................................................................146
10. John Marsden--A Killing Frost.......................................................................75
11. George Weigel--The Cube and the Cathedral................................................55
12. Caro Diario (movie).......................................................................................42
13. California Solo (movie)..................................................................................37
14. Amelia Gray--Gutshot....................................................................................28
15. Krys Lee--Drifting House...............................................................................22
16. John O'Hara--Gibbsville, Pa: The Classic Stories..........................................17
A much better challenge this time, I think, though the numbers of movies is a little higher than I would like, three being my preferred maximum. But I take what I get.
The Sweet Sixteen
#16 O'Hara over #1 Brown
A no-brainer, especially with O'Hara not slated to appear again on the set list.
#15 Lee over #2 King
Besides being shorter, the Lee looks as though it may be a literary book.
#14 Gray ovr #3 Raging Bull
#4 The Red Shoes over #13 California Solo
An easy call for the Powell/Pressburger classic.
#5 Proulx over #12 Caro Diario
#6 Johnson over #11 Weigel
Both are short, both look somewhat interesting, neither is available at my library. Weigel is another book about God/religion (albeit the absence of it in this instance), and having read two of those recently I am weary of the subject.
#10 Marsden over #7 Fantastic Beasts, etc
#8 Dylan over #9 Lilley
Normally a book would win over a record, but who is the Nobel Prize winner in this tournament anyway? Not O'Hara, (ironically, given that he openly coveted it despite never being considered a legitimate contender). And against a genre novel?
Elite Eight
#16 O'Hara over #4 Red Shoes
O'Hara marches on
#15 Lee over #5 Proulx
I was sorely tempted to take Proulx, who even graduated from the same high school as I did, and has the stronger reputation as an author, I think. It was very close, and I decided it based on the slightly shorter length of the Lee book. I hope this person is a good writer!
#6 Johnson over #14 Gray
These are both short story books. I am sticking with the Johnson.
#8 Dylan over #10 Marsden
I'll give Dylan another win over a genre book.
Final Four
#6 Johnson over #16 O'Hara
O'Hara goes down in the semis because this collection is a whopping 864 pages.
#15 Lee over #8 Dylan
I believe in Lee.
Championship
#6 Johnson over #15 Lee
In the end I went with Johnson because he is supposed to be a good writer, and ultimately his book is the shortest of the group (133 pages! Hey, he did study under Raymond Carver), and I had no upsets to consider.
