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| Vintage Classics/Random House UK, 2008 |
You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman's private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad new never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn't that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself.
The Novel: The small Pennsylvania coal-mining community of Gibbsville during the Christmas season of 1930 seems an unlikely setting for a grippingly constructed tale of wilful self-destruction. It's a town where everybody knows everybody else's business, where the classes rarely mix and the lines between the 'good' and 'bad' people appear to be clearly and permanently drawn. Friendship is everything and no one, it seems, dare defy the rigid if unspoken rules which serve to govern and define it.
But these rules don't necessarily apply to Julian English, popular owner of the local Cadillac dealership. Although English is considered to be 'good people' –– respected businessman, well-liked member of the country club, devoted husband to Caroline, a girl he's known and loved since childhood –– his conviviality is a sham, concealing a deep but secret hatred of his fellow townsmen, their hypocritical morality and, most damningly of all, himself.
It all comes to a head at a Christmas party where Julian rashly and inexplicably throws a drink in the face of his neighbor Harry Reilly –– another of the 'good people' who recently loaned him money to prevent his struggling business from sliding into bankruptcy. This seemingly trivial act, committed in a moment of drunken recklessness, is enough to gradually alter the town's perceptions of him, turning friends into enemies and revealing the bitter and sometimes long-submerged animosity he inspires in the hearts of many of Gibbsville's most prominent citizens. The general consensus is that Julian is a bit of a jerk –– smug, opinionated, a shirker who should have fought in World War One but somehow managed to worm his way out of doing his patriotic duty, a bit too confident of his ability to charm and hoodwink everyone he knows, particularly when the person being hoodwinked happens to be female. Although he tries to apologize to Reilly twice, this doesn't prevent him from becoming the town pariah, a sort of walking scapegoat for everything that's wrong with it and with those who, voluntarily or not, are obliged to call it home.
The most surprising change of all, however, occurs in Julian's wife Caroline. While she loves her husband and still gains a lot of pleasure from their very active sex life, she can neither understand nor condone his behavior, blaming it, as she has so often in the past, on his irritating habit of drinking too much at parties. At first she is sympathetic to what he's done, agreeing that Reilly's a fool but begging Julian to apologize to him for the sake of rescuing his business. Little by little, however, her forgiving view of her husband's ill-considered rudeness changes, leading her to spurn his sexual advances at the moment when he finds himself most in need of her love and affection. Angered by this rejection and the increasing hostility of his neighbors, Julian ceases to care what happens to him and takes refuge in the arms of local torch singer, Helene Holman –– another self-destructive decision that succeeds in completely alienating him from his wife even as it threatens to arouse the ire of Helene's boyfriend, local bootlegger Ed Charney. But now the line has been crossed it appears there's no way to uncross it. Caroline walks out on him and Julian, realizing at last the terrible trick he's played upon himself, is left to face his future, or lack of one, alone.
It's the inevitability of Julian's decisions that makes them fascinating, a relentless compulsion to destroy which makes it impossible to stop reading the book and shows why O'Hara was also a successful playwright who worked for a time, albeit unhappily, as a Hollywood screenwriter. His ability to capture modern North American speech patterns was nothing short of extraordinary, as was his ability to reveal what he saw as being the quintessentially sexual nature of women –– a radical idea which had never been explored in the literature of his native land before he began to do so with astonishing and sometimes confronting insight. The critic Harold Bloom was right to nominate Appointment in Samarra as one of the '100 Best Modern Novels.' As a snapshot of its time and a glimpse into the heart of a troubled, self-hating individual and the hypocritical community which triggers and then becomes a willing participant in his downfall it is, in the truest sense of the term, a masterpiece.
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| JOHN O'HARA, c 1960 |
The Writer: John O'Hara enjoys the rare distinction of being one of the few authors in the world who got to compose his own epitaph. 'Better than anyone else,' he wrote of himself, 'he wrote the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.' Brendan Gill, a journalist colleague of O'Hara's at The New Yorker during the 1930s and 1940s, called this 'an astonishing claim' but in one sense, at least, it's difficult to refute. O'Hara's early work –– the two hundred short stories he published in The New Yorker and other magazines, as well as his first two novels Appointment in Samarra (1934) and BUtterfield 8 (1935) –– contain some of the most devastatingly honest insights into the North American psyche ever published in the twentieth century. If O'Hara's literary reputation is not quite all it should be these days, then that's perhaps due more to his belligerent, difficult, social-climbing personality than it is to the outstanding quality of his important early work.
O'Hara was born on 31 January 1905 in the Pennsylvania coal mining town of Pottsville –– a community that would serve as the model for the town of Gibbsville in which so much of his later fiction would be set. His father was a surgeon who belonged to the local country club and made a good life for his wife and eight children, owning at one time five automobiles, a show farm and a stable full of horses. Yet O'Hara grew up feeling that he didn't belong in this world, that his family's lower class Irish-Catholic heritage prevented it from being truly embraced and accepted by Pottsville's ruling Protestant elite. He was a man who, throughout his life, had the desire to be acclaimed and belong but simultaneously did everything in his power –– drinking, fighting, bullying and verbally abusing those who came into contact with him –– to guarantee he would remain the perpetually snubbed outsider.
Tragedy struck in 1925 when his father died without leaving a will, reducing his family to penury overnight and robbing the twenty year old O'Hara of his long-cherished dream of attending Yale University –– a blow from which his ego, according to those who knew him, never fully recovered. Instead of going to Yale, he was forced to take a series of menial jobs –– waiter on an ocean liner, nightclerk in a hotel, public relations man –– before finding his niche as a newspaper reporter, first in his native Pennsylvania and then in New York City. Some critics believe that it was his work as a reporter, with its emphasis on sticking to the facts and describing events as clearly and succinctly as possible, that formed his writing style, which has been described, and not inaccurately or disparagingly, as 'no style at all.'
During these years O'Hara also began to drink –– a habit which made him violent and obnoxious and cost him more than one close friendship. (He once threatened to punch a midget at '21,' a famous New York nightclub, until another midget allegedly knocked him flat on his drunken ass.) In 1928 he sold his first sketch to The New Yorker and soon became, along with Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, one of the genuinely admired 'stars' of that culturally significant magazine. This was in spite of the fact that he was personally loathed by its managing editor, Harold Ross, and developed a reputation for being difficult to work with because he steadfastly refused to change a single line of his work once it had been submitted for publication. The quality and popularity of his stories were enough to guarantee that Ross went ahead and published them anyway.
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| ERNEST HEMINGWAY [l] and JOHN O'HARA [r] c 1935 |
In 1934 O'Hara published his first novel, of which Ernest Hemingway said, 'If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read "Appointment in Samarra".' One year later he published BUtterfield 8, a novel inspired by a news story about a beautiful girl whose dead body had mysteriously washed ashore on a Long Island beach. The book is his imaginative recreation of the events preceding her death and became another bestseller, confirming his status as a major new literary talent. He would go on to publish another fifteen novels, the fourth of which, Pal Joey, was later adapted as a musical and turned into a successful 1957 film starring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak.
Unfortunately, the acclaim O'Hara received for his first two novels proved to be the exception rather than the rule throughout the rest of his career. The combination of hard drinking, his difficult personality and what critics began to deride as the unnecessary tawdriness and prolixity of later novels including Ten North Frederick (1956) and The Lockwood Concern (1965) saw his reputation, if not his sales, suffer a dramatic downturn. His reputation was further tainted by his work as a magazine and newspaper columnist, in which he was outspoken in his support for the Republican Party and criticized the decision made by the Nobel Prize committee to award the 1964 Peace Prize to black civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King. This was ironic, given that O'Hara himself had always dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and believed –– mistakenly as it turned out –– that he was guaranteed to do so following the death of Hemingway. When John Steinbeck won the award in 1962, O'Hara wrote to congratulate him, adding that there was 'only one other author I'd rather see get it.'
O'Hara died in 1970 without having won the Nobel Prize or living to see the campaign, led by fellow novelists like John Updike and EL Doctorow, to reevaluate his literary legacy and ensure his best work found its way back into print. He was survived by his daughter Wylie and his third wife Katherine Barnes Bryan, his second wife Belle having died of congestive heart disease in 1954.
The most recent biography of JOHN O'HARA –– John O'Hara: The Art of Burning Bridges by novelist GEOFFREY WOLFF –– was published by Knopf in 2003.
You might also enjoy:
Babbitt by SINCLAIR LEWIS (1922)
Come Back To Sorrento by DAWN POWELL (1932)
Of Time and the River by THOMAS WOLFE (1935)
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