John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra

 

Somebody's due for a great fall, and Humpty is just glad it isn't him...

In the epigraph to his debut novel Appointment in Samarra, John O'Hara quotes Somerset Maugham's version of an old story involving Death. Death runs into a servant in the morning market at Baghdad; the servant recognizes Death, and begs assistance of his master to flee as far he can, and his master gives him money and a horse. When Death is asked that afternoon, Why did you frighten the servant if you didn't mean to take him? Death answers, I didn't intend to frighten him. I was just surprised to see him in Baghdad, since he and I have an appointment in Samarra tonight. (127 km according to Google Maps.)

An appointment in Samarra. So you suspect from the start it's not going to end well for somebody, and it doesn't. 

Based on the epigraph, this is not very, but a bit, spoilerish...

That somebody is Julian English. 

The story takes place in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a stand-in for John O'Hara's hometown of Pottsville. (Anthracite coal country northwest of Philadelphia.) Julian is the son of the local society doctor, and ought to be well enough off, but his car dealership's sales are a little soft. It's Christmas, Hoover's the president, and the Great Depression has started. He's married to Caroline, whom he's known since they were children, and it seems a good marriage; certainly she's in love with him, though she can see his flaws.

What are those flaws? The root of them is the excess consumption of alcohol. 

Too much alcohol--or is it something more fundamental?--leads Julian to do three bad things during the course of the novel. He throws a drink in Harry Reilly's face; he has a sexual rendezvous with Helene Holman; he gets into a fistfight with Froggy Ogden. He owes Reilly money and is worried Reilly may sleeping with his wife; Holman, a local torch singer, is the mistress of the town's gangster/bootlegger; Ogden is a vet who lost one arm in the Great War and can hardly fight back. In the end? Julian has that appointment in Samarra.

The novel was famous for its scandalousness when it came out. Husbands and wives have sex, and sometimes enjoy it, even the wives. Well, that may have been news in fiction in 1934, but less so now.

There's a self-destructive streak in Julian that's not explained. Is Julian's alcoholism cause or result of that self-destructive streak? I'm not certain, and not certain that we're meant to know. But while Julian is the main focus, the novel doesn't limit itself to him; it's a short novel (225 pages in my edition) and yet it presents a substantial cross-section of Gibbsville society. Which is both impressive and also good: I found Julian's company a bit of a cross to bear.

So I'm not entirely sure what I thought. Self-destructive alcoholics are hard to take, in fiction as in life. Comparing this to Malcolm Lowry's Under The Volcano, I'd say Geoffrey Firmin is the more convincing drunk. Firmin is further along the road to dissolution than Julian; Firmin's state of confused mind is presented in more convincing detail; everything Julian does seems contingent, it seems like he could as easily have done something else, so why did he have to die? We see occasional hints of engagement with the world in Geoffrey Firmin, of the man he once was, but his thoughts in the present mostly revolve around how to find that next drink. Firmin's story had the inevitability of tragedy; Julian's was more like an accident.

The other curious comparison is to Updike. The edition I got from the library has an introduction by Charles McGrath, who is at pains to tell us that Updike valued O'Hara very highly. In an introduction this is supposed to make you more enthused to read the coming book than you were before, but I'm afraid the fact that Updike (the 'penis with a thesaurus'*) liked it had the opposite effect on me. I still liked the O'Hara, though, despite that... 😉  and not just because the prose was un-Updikean. But it's clear that Updike had read this novel: at one point Julian thinks about escaping his situation, hops in a car and drives off only to return to town. Was that Julian English or Rabbit Angstrom? Rabbit, too, is a unsuccessful salesman, living in a smallish Pennsylvania town, who decides he can't take it any more and drives off only to return. Rabbit drives further than Julian, but otherwise... 

The novel is on that hundred-best list of Modern Library 20th century novels, problematic as that list was. I'm glad to have read it, even if I'm not entirely convinced by Julian English at the center of it. DolceBelezza and WutheringExpectations were or are also currently reading it. 

*David Foster Wallace is responsible for labeling Updike the 'penis with a thesaurus.' It comes from his review of one of Updike's lesser novels Towards the End of Time, and he attributes the comment to an unnamed female reader of literary fiction under the age of 40. If she exists, she's become very famous, anonymously. Perhaps it's not entirely deserved, but I know I'm not the only one who can't now think of Updike without thinking of that characterization.

Manhattan Transfer (#20BooksOfSummer)

"I think that this city is full of people wanting inconceivable things...look at it."

'This city' is New York, and the novel, like the city, is full of people wanting things. And maybe those things are inconceivable, but more likely just un-gettable.

The novel starts in 1896 when the law is passed that unites what are now the five boroughs of New York into one city. It continues on until the early 20s (the novel appears in 1925) and has maybe a dozen major characters. That's Ellen Thatcher quoted above. She's born in 1896 to George and Susan Thatcher; he's a reasonably successful accountant; she never really recovers from the pregnancy and dies when Ellen is still young.

There's also Jimmy Herf, aged five or so when his single mother returns with him from Europe to New York. There's Jimmy's uncle, Joe Harland, the Wizard of Wall Street, until he ruins himself with drink. George Baldwin is a young lawyer who has just opened an office when he hears about a milkman injured by a train; getting that milkman compensation is his first case and makes his name.

That milkman is Gus McNeil, who goes on to be a labor organizer; while McNeil is still laid up, Baldwin has an affair with Ellie McNeil, Gus' wife, which is the start of Baldwin's other notable career, as a philanderer. There's Stanwood Emery, a Harvard graduate and maybe going to be a poet? But also too fond of the bottle. There are two French sailors--Emile and Congo Jake--who pitch up in New York; Anna Cohen, a Jewish seamstress; Bud Korpenning, from Cooperstown; Cassie Wilson, who weeps; Ruth Prynne, who doesn't; Tony Hunter, who weeps because he can't have Jimmy; Frances, the flapper bandit, and her partner Dutch; and still others. Jimmy and Ellen get the most space, but we see into the head of all of the above characters at one time or another.

The novel is powerfully influenced by Joyce's Ulysses and makes effective use of stream of consciousness. Here's Gus McNiel daydreaming just before that accident with the train:

The morning has grown bleak. Leaden clouds have settled down over the city. "Git up old skin and bones," shouts Gus jerking at the gelding's head. Eleventh Avenue is full of icy dust, of grinding rattle of wheels and scrape of hoofs on the cobblestones. Down the railroad tracks comes the clang of a locomotive bell and the clatter of shunting freightcars. Gus is in bed with his wife talking gently to her: Look here Nellie, you wouldn't moind movin West would yez? I've filed application for free farmin land in the state of North Dakota, black soil land where we can make a pile o money in wheat; some fellers git rich in foive good crops....Healthier for the kids anyway..."Hello Moike!" There's poor old Moike still on his beat. Cold work bein a cop. Better be a wheatfarmer an have a big farmhouse an barns an pigs an horses an cows an chickens...Pretty curlyheaded Nellie feedin the chickens at the kitchen door...

The influence of Joyce shows up in 'freightcars', 'wheatfarmer', and 'curlyheaded' as well. Newspaper headlines, bits of song float through people's heads. Stan Emery recites Swinburne to himself at one point. Ellen, a successful actress during of the most of novel, has one scene where she's memorizing lines while half-heartedly carrying on a conversation.

Mostly I was pretty amazed by the novel. It's 350 pages in my edition. Not especially easy pages, but not too terribly difficult either. Dos Passos juggles his dozen major characters, moves their stories along, and gives a broad picture of life in New York over the course of twenty-five years. Several of the characters have real depth. That's a lot to pull off successfully. There may be one too many drunks. I had to double-check at one point which drunk was which.

He's pleasantly (and a bit surprisingly) sympathetic to the difficulty of being homosexual at that time.

It's a dark vision of New York, though. A lot of people fail, fall by the wayside, poverty, jail, accidents, suicide. The few who succeed feel morally compromised or empty. Ellen is a successful actress, what she wanted to be, but it doesn't make her happier. The novel ends with Jimmy, leaving town:

"Say will you give me a lift?" he asks the redhaired man at the wheel.
"How fur you goin?"
"I dunno...Pretty far."

The novel is sometimes simply considered a first crack at the broad-picture style he developed further in the USA trilogy of later in the 20s. That is kind of true. Though this is still awfully good, the USA trilogy is better, I think: it gives a more rounded picture of society; its characters go a bit deeper. It's also three times the length... Not what I did, but if you're curious about Dos Passos, you may want to start here and see what you think.

One other curious fact I noticed. 1896, the year the novel starts, is the year Dos Passos was born. Jimmy Herf pretty clearly owes a lot (though not all) of his details to Dos Passos' own biography.

If you have read it, what did you think?

I slotted this in because Fanda and Laurie were hosting Jazz Age June:

I had it in my head more of this novel took place in the Jazz Age than is in fact the case; we're already two-thirds through by the time World War I is over. Still there are bootleggers:

"Of course what you kids dont realize is that the difficulty under prohibition is keeping sober."

Thanks to Laurie and Fanda for hosting!

Under the Volcano

Under The Volcano is--famously--a novel about a drunk. It's often taken as a simple roman á clef about Malcolm Lowry's life, and Lowry was a drunk, and so...maybe it's little more than autobiography, a sort of addiction memoir, of the sort we see all the time.

I've set up that straw man to push back at it: not to push back against Lowry being a drunk; I don't know, but the evidence seems strong; but rather against it being simple, against it being a roman á clef, against it being unmediated portrait of the day-to-day existence of Malcolm Lowry.

The story goes something like this: Geoffrey Firmin, the (ex-)British consul in the Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, is drinking himself to death. The majority of the novel takes place on the Day of the Dead, November 2nd, 1938, though the first chapter takes place a year later and in it, we learn that Firmin is dead. In the second chapter, Firmin wakes up hungover after a party the night before, and he's in search of (and in need of) the hair of (some, many) dogs. His half-brother Hugh is due back that same day; Geoffrey Firmin's ex-wife Yvonne, estranged because of his excessive drinking, also arrives, unexpectedly, with the idea that maybe things can still be patched up. How he gets through that day (and then doesn't) is the story.

Yvonne seems serious in her wish to patch up things with Geoffrey, but she's also clearly attracted to Geoffrey's younger half-brother. She and Hugh may have had an affair in the past. She's certainly had an affair with Laruelle, Geoffrey's best friend, a French filmmaker, but that occurs only after she's given up on Geoffrey because of his drinking.

Not a lot happens that day. Hugh and Yvonne go horseback riding. The main trio run into Laruelle. Early that evening Geoffrey, Hugh, and Yvonne go to a bull-riding event that's a bust because the bull doesn't buck enough. And then Geoffrey's final end. That's pretty much it. Most of the pages of the novel are devoted to unwinding how we got here.

One thing that's not resolved is why Geoffrey's a drunk. It's sometimes implied that Geoffrey's a drunk because Yvonne has had an affair, maybe more than one, but we learn Geoffrey was a drunk before that; maybe he's a drunk because of the trauma he went through as a naval officer in World War I, but we know he was drinking earlier; maybe it's due to the complications of his Anglo-Indian childhood and orphanhood? But he had opportunities after that; he developed a close relationship with his foster father. Geoffrey writes, and is working on a book--contributing to that feeling of a roman á clef--and could it be the stress of a creative career that sends him to the bottle? Well, in the end, we're not told, and it sort of doesn't matter: by the time of main events, Geoffrey Firmin is already a lost person.

It's the unwinding, the revelation of the backstory, I found fairly sophisticated and interesting. It's where the drama in the book is. The chapters are generally from the point of view of one character, largely rotating among those main three: Geoffrey, Hugh, and Yvonne. At some point in each chapter, the character enters into fugue state, half remembrance, half fantasy. So, during the boring part of the bull-riding, Yvonne's mind drifts off and we learn about her acting career, a successful enough star of second-tier Westerns as a teenager, a withdrawal from Hollywood, then ending with a hope and dream of returning that doesn't pan out. Elsewhere she also dreams of leaving Mexico with Geoffrey and going to Canada with him sober and working on his book.

In other chapters we learn about Hugh's career as a reporter, and his dream of being the hero of the saved Spanish Republic, just as (in 1938) Franco's forces are about to win conclusively.

But it's Geoffrey's memories and fantasies that are the most problematic, the most confused. And this, very subtly, is how we learn that Geoffrey really is lost. In person, people like him: Yvonne wants to reconcile; he has friends still, despite his compulsive drinking, who care about him; they think him capable of reform. But in his fantasy life, his thoughts are substantially past-directed; few of his thoughts touch upon that work he might write, and those confused; a few upon the renewed life he might build with Yvonne; but mostly they revolve around where that next drink is coming from. Hopes and fantasies may be unrealistic, but without them you're dead.

It's a bleak novel to be sure. But there's hope in it, too, just not much for Geoffrey Firmin.

The good news is Malcolm Lowry was at least partly Hugh, and not entirely Geoffrey: he was Hugh's age, not Geoffrey's; he did escape to Canada with the woman he loved; he doesn't seem to have ever escaped his alcohol problem, but he did write a novel that shows up on the Modern Library list of great 20th Century novels as well as other lists of great novels.

The edition I read is shown above and has an introduction by Stephen Spender. I thought Spender's essay was pretty good--he compares and contrasts Under the Volcano with works of high modernism like Ulysses or The Waste Land, which this book both is and isn't--but it should have been an afterword. He gives too much away. We know from almost the start that Geoffrey Firmin dies, but there's a bit of a mystery about the details, and those should have been left mysterious. If you read this edition, save his introduction until after.

Anyway, this one does multiple duty for me: it's on my Classics Club list, my #20BooksOfSummer list, my Back to the Classics list, and counts for my Canadian Book Challenge. Whew!

Martin Amis' Money

Ouch. That was a slog.

I don't usually give up on novels--I probably should do it a little more--but this one was so very close. They say it's funny, but I can't say it worked for me.

The story is this: John Self has been a successful director of commercials for a London advertising firm; he's about to make his first commercial feature-length film with mostly American actors. Those actors, the producer, various film financiers appear. There's also the complications of his love life. Self is a large man of large appetites, booze, food, sex. He's got a mistress, but still spends a lot of time with prostitutes, has to audition actresses (we all know what that means, post-Weinstein) and lusts after friends' wives. Does the film get made? Does he marry his mistress? Such are the questions of the novel, though I can't say I particularly cared.

Which is kind of too bad. When I was halfway through the novel, the reason I picked it off my TBR pile in the first place, Martin Amis gave a talk at the library here and I went. He's a funny guy in person with amusing riffs about James Joyce (Amis doesn't like him) and insightful ones about Vladimir Nabokov (whom Amis does like.)

And the fact that Amis was funny in person got me to finish the novel but as I said, it was a slog.

So I was wondering why Amis was so highly regarded?--since it couldn't be my taste was at fault. It's possible that he's a funny guy in person distracted. Amis started off famous--he was notorious in England both for his lifestyle and for the fact that his father was a famous novelist. (Kingsley Amis for Lucky Jim among others.) And maybe that meant people paid more attention to him, knew his droll persona, reading his novels as if they were Martin Amis talking in person.

But Amis is a very literary writer, I'd say. More so than his father, who just lashes out, one of the original Angry Young Men. Martin wears his forebears on his sleeve: Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow. Criticism of his literary forebears is the topic of his latest book, The Rub Of Time, which I haven't read, but what he mostly talked about. Money reminded me a little of Nabokov; Martin Amis the character shows up in the novel to watch a fellow national destroy himself in America, much as Vladimir Nabokov does in Pnin. Pnin is a much more human book, though, the most human I find of Nabokov's; Money is simply savage satire, of mostly too obvious targets.

But Money is much more homage to Saul Bellow than Vladimir Nabokov. It's a long first person novel, and it's Bellow's spiky narrative style that informs the way John Self speaks to the reader, but it's just not Bellow. I have a troubled relationship, let's say, with Bellow; his handling of female characters is problematic. But as an "American, Chicago born," The Adventures of Augie March meant a lot to me at one point. But whatever one might think of Bellow, Amis' prose is not there. The opening of Money only points up Amis' relative weakness.

Then there's the book cover. I led with the one above that I found on the Internet. That looks like a book one might want to read. I can't really say why I bought my copy, which has the cover shown below, and which I couldn't find anywhere so the photo is my own. The Internet couldn't be bothered to preserve that. Penguin, what were you thinking?

Anyway, one less book on the TBR pile. I can't say much more.