Penguins on Parade: Appointment in Samarra!

Some Penguin Classics – the vast majority of them, in fact – make their appearance too late to console their authors. Our case-in-point today involves an author who needed more consoling than most: the novelist and short story writer John O’Hara, who flourished in the 1930s and ‘40s, in the heady first heyday of The New Yorker, for which he wrote such an endless stream of short stories. O’Hara’s literary reputation has languished in the basement for decades, consigned there in large part by the comic, utterly damning evisceration the author received at the well-manicured hands of Brendan Gill in his classic Here at the New Yorker. It hardly matters that Gill praises O’Hara’s writing ability; the portrait he paints forever fixes O’Hara in the public imagination as a crass, sour buffoon.

It shouldn’t matter that he wasn’t, but the portrait stuck, and O’Hara’s stock declined to such a flea-market and church-sale low point that you’d never have guessed he was once famous and extremely well-paid. So extra kudos to Penguin for bringing out his best works, starting with Appointment in Samarra, the 1934 debut whose smash success shot its author, not yet 30, to the height of literary renown.

The novel tells the story of the inexplicable, seemingly unavoidable (hence the title) downward spiral of small-town Cadillac salesman Julian English who, in the course of only three days, manages to drink himself into a stupor several times and alienate virtually everybody he knows personally and professionally. O’Hara knew a great deal about the kind of career yearning that can lead a man to the comforts of nightly drinking, and he knew a great deal about how pointless those comforts feel, and he knew a great deal about their miserable aftermaths. And it’s all here in this easily-underestimated novel: Julian English has no genuine reason to first destroy and then end his own life – he’s goaded by persecutions that remain dark to the reader. But his uncomprehending, self-destructive, flailing anguish along the way feel as real as any drunk-scenes ever written.

Even the critics who hated O’Hara agreed that he had a knack for eavesdropping on the everyday speech of his characters, and a fresh re-reading of Appointment in Samarra confirms it: the dialog here, even between two comparatively minor characters, is as vivid and unassuming as anything in John Cheever:

“I’m going upstairs now and make the beds. I’ll see if the pants of your Tux need pressing.”

“Oh God. That’s right. Do I have to wear that?”

“Now, now, don’t try and bluff me. You look nice in it and you know it. You like to wear it and don’t pretend you don’t.”

“Oh, I don’t mind wearing it,” he said. “I was just thinking about you. You’ll be so jealous when all the other girls see me in my Tux and start trying to take me outside. I just didn’t want to spoil your evening, that’s all.”

“Applesauce,” said Irma.

“Why don’t you say what you mean? You don’t mean applesauce.”

“Never mind, now, Mister Dirty Mouth.” She left.

What a girl, he thought, and resumed reading his paper; Hoover was receiving the newsboys for Christmas …

O’Hara went on from his stunning debut to write an entire bookcase of novels and short story collections, plus a good deal of occasional prose and a vast heap of letters. We can’t expect Penguin to get to all of that verbiage, but we can fantasize that O’Hara’s restless ghost is grudgingly pleased with some of his fiction is now being honored as Penguin Classic reprints. And the fact that Brendan Gill’s own superb short story collection, 1974’s Ways of Loving, is currently nowhere to be found? Well, that’s just extra.