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.

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth

There have been a lot of wonderful posts about The House of Mirth (thank you, Cleo, Fanda, Marian, --that I know of!) as well as discussion at Cleo's site. Reading the novel and the discussion got me to wonder about tragedy, so that's going to be my organizing principle...

I had always planned on reading it as a tragedy; I put it on my list for Karen's Back to the Classics challenge as this year's tragedy, and I knew (without knowing much about it) it didn't end well. And it doesn't. But is it tragedy? I say yes, but I do think it's a bit tricky and unexpected in that regard.

Lily Bart, our tragic heroine, doesn't always make good choices; often she can't seem to decide what it is she wants; and sometimes she makes outright poor choices. Now if bad things happen to a person who makes bad choices, does that count as tragedy? Or is it simply just desserts?

Think about some of the classics of tragedy: when we first meet Oedipus, he's determined to find out what's causing the plague in Thebes, no matter the cost, no matter who's the guilty party. (Plagues generally had a guilty party back then, not a guilty bacterium.) It's his determination--a good quality--and his history that bring about his downfall. Or Pentheus, of The Bacchae, who declares that running around, naked and drunk, on a hillside at night is not a good thing. Reasonable, right? Well, no, as it turns out.

Also these men are significant figures--both kings--and most tragedies concern themselves with significant figures. Even women in classical tragedies are princesses or queens: such as Antigone or Phaedra.

But Hamlet is largely a tragedy of someone who can't make up his mind: if he'd just gone off and killed his stepfather at the start--that stepfather who was guilty of murder--wouldn't everything have turned out much better for him? But he can't make up his mind to do it. And Lily Bart can't make up her mind whom to marry, but she really needs to marry somebody.

OK, a quick plot summary: (skip if you prefer not to know.)

**Plot summary**

Lily Bart is in her late 20s at the start of the novel, and when we first see her she's considering marrying Percy Gryce. She's orphaned and is dependent financially on the dubious kindness of relations. She goes to visit her old friend, Lawrence Selden, whom she pumps for a few salient facts about Americana, Percy Gryce's hobby. She and Selden have a somewhat flirtatious conversation so we know there's something more than friendship there. As she's leaving Selden's bachelor apartment (a no no!) she's seen by Simon Rosedale, a rising Jewish businessman.

But when she meets Percy Gryce at a friend's country estate, she sabotages her chances to marry him by associating with Selden and ignoring Gryce. (She doesn't go to church! The horror!) She gambles, out of boredom, and ends up owing money, word of which gets back to Gryce. She blows her chance by not concentrating.

After her gambling debts and other expenses she needs money, which she accepts from Guy Trenor, a wealthy married man. Ostensibly this is coming out of investments he makes for her, which Trenor is able to put into a 'sure thing,' but we suspect he's just giving her the money.

In subsequent conversations with Lawrence Selden, we learn he might marry her, but his freedom is important to him and he wants to know that she's willing to live on what he makes--he's a lawyer, and presumably middle class, but certainly not rich--and she pushes him off. She can't commit to a life, as she sees it, of impoverishment.

She discovers Guy Trenor wants more than just a handshake in return for the 'investments' he made for her. She also discovers that everyone else assumes that the idea of 'investment' is just a fig-leaf covering up that he's giving her money. She decides she has to pay him back.

Rosedale proposes marriage. He's certainly rich enough, and in some ways he seems a pretty kindly man. Lily sees him with children, and he's good with them. But she can't get past her feeling that he's outside her circle, that he's crude. But she's feeling particularly pinched by the money she needs to return to Trenor, and so she almost says yes, but can't decide to.

At just this moment, her friend, and I use that word advisedly, Bertha Dorset invites Lily to go sailing in the Mediterranean. Bertha is bringing along both her husband George and her lover Ned. Lily is there as a distraction, though she may not entirely recognize this. In a shocking scene, when things are at their worst between the Dorsets, Bertha, to cover up her own sins, effectively accuses Lily of having an affair with her husband. Society buys Bertha's version, and Lily is ostracized.

The Dorset marriage is clearly on the rocks, and friends suggest Lily could snag George. George is drawn to Lily, and he's wealthy, but he's also a bit pathetic, and can Lily really marry the divorced husband of her 'friend'? (Though Bertha is no friend to her.) She can't make up her mind to do it.

Rosedale is still willing to marry her, but now she would need to silence Bertha Dorset because Rosedale is determined to break into society. She has the means, letters suitable for blackmailing Bertha, but does she have the will? No, it would seem.

There were two other possibilities than marriage presented for Lily, though Lily certainly sees her life as leading to marriage. Her cousin Gertie Farish lives modestly on a small inheritance and spends her time in good works. Lily fleetingly helps Gertie with this, but I wasn't convinced this was more than a momentary pleasure for Lily, that it was something she really wanted. In any case the inheritance she might have expected was lost when her aunt got (partially incorrect) word of Lily's bad behavior.

Also Lily could work, and she does a bit at the end, but really has no skills; she wasn't raised to it. She can manage a little light decorative sewing, but when it comes to toiling in a sweatshop, she can't keep up.

She realizes she's falling out of life, and has bad dreams, and takes chloral hydrate to sleep. A pharmacist warns her it's easy to accidentally overdose, and well...you did know it was going to end badly, didn't you?

**End of plot summary**

So Lily has four marriage possibilities within the frame of the novel, and it's implied there were others earlier. Percy? Boring and a prude. Lawrence? Insufficiently rich and too committed to his own freedom. George? Pathetic, a divorcé, and you should never marry somebody on the rebound. Simon? A social outsider too stuck on breaking in. All are flawed, though maybe not impossibly, but she can't commit to either of her non-marrying prospects--working or a quiet poverty--either.

So is it a tragedy? Well, what are our characteristics? She's not a queen or a princess. But her great beauty gives her significance sufficient for tragedy. When she's run off to Gertie's apartment in despair and falls asleep there, we see Gerty's thoughts in looking on her: "To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily,..." (Book I, Chapter 14.) This comes partly from Gerty's own despair, but it is also the general feeling about Lily. Rosedale says something similar: (Book II, Chapter 11)

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. 'I don't know why I should regard myself as an exception--' she began. 

'Because you are; that's why;...'

There is something special about Lily. And so, when something bad happens to her, it's at least potentially tragic.

Lily's great beauty gives her fate the necessary magnitude, I'd say. What then of her own actions? Are they simply self-destructive? Well, as I mentioned, Hamlet's is also a tragedy of somebody who can't make up his mind. Hamlet's doubts are more intellectual--he needs proof, definitive proof, in order to act--while Lily's are moral, born partly, it's true, out of a certain fastidiousness. But twice she makes a definite moral choice (to pay back Trenor, and to finally burn Bertha's letters) and both are admirable; both also materially hasten her decline. She doesn't dither quite as much as Hamlet. She hasn't got Oedipus' or Antigone's stubborn determination, but when she has a good choice to make, she can make it and does, even if those choices bring her closer to the end.

And what other choices did she really have? We discussed whom she should have married, but really were any of them satisfactory? For myself I felt Selden was the best of the lot, but Lily made the decision not to marry Selden because she knew herself and knew she could not live on his income; that was admirable in its way; Undine Spragg made the opposite choice vis-a-vis Ralph Marvell in The Custom of the Country, and that was the destruction of Marvell. Moreover, Selden all too readily jumps to the wrong conclusion about Lily when he sees her with Trenor; how well did he really know Lily as a person? Or was she just a thing (albeit a thing of beauty) to him?

The other marriage choices seem even more doubtful. Rosedale seemed possible for a bit, but his insistence that Lily use Bertha's letters to silence Bertha made him considerably less sympathetic to me.

Could she have become like Gertie Farish? That seems the most admirable path, but Gertie was pining for Selden, and doesn't seem completely happy herself.

Lily's exasperating: but tragic heroes can be exasperating; Ismene tells her sister Antigone as much in Sophocles' play. The real question is, given who she was, could she have done something different? Are the choices she made the only right and possible ones? I think Wharton has constructed this cleverly so that we do feel a sort of tragic horror as Lily's options are compressed from few to none, and that those choices she does make, when she does realize what's happening, are both right and also deadly.

Anyhoo, in the end I talked myself into this. But sometimes I just wanted to take Lily and shake her and say, Look, you're being stupid! What happens to you is no tragedy! But in the end I really did feel the pity and the horror.

Thoughts?

Thanks to Cleo for organizing the readalong. It's been great fun reading everyone's posts.

This was on my Classics Club list, and is the tragic novel I'd always been planning for Karen's Back to the Classics challenge. Even if at moments I doubted it's tragic-ness.

And I wasn't expecting this, but the big scene--in some ways the novel's most important moment--when Bertha Dorset subtly accuses Lily of sleeping with her husband--takes place in Monaco, which means it's a Monaco novel for the European Reading Challenge hosted by Gilion. If you'd asked me would Monaco be on my list for two years running, I'd have laughed. But first there was Rebecca. And now The House of Mirth. Rich people hang out in Monaco, I guess.  I may have to read a biography of Grace Kelly next year just to keep up the streak.

C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves

Cleo at Classical Carousel organized a readalong of C. S. Lewis' The Four Loves, which, even though I knew my June was going to be a bit discombobulated, I was excited to join. Cleo has written a series of lovely, thoughtful, and informative posts that were a great help.

And, though I suspect this comes a little late, and I only found it three-quarters through my reading, I found these annotations (by searching for the quote that turned out to be Masefield) to be helpful.

So, having just given you those far more useful and informative posts, I have nothing left to say, right? Actually, kind of...You're better off with those posts than me. But I'll squeeze in a few words around the margins anyway...because a blogger can hardly be usefully silent...

I was dimly aware--I was a Classics major--about the distinction in the Greek language between types of love (storgé, philia, eros, agapé) that we, in English, lump together under the one word Love. Lewis is quite lucid about this, and in particular, I found Lewis' distinction between Need-love and Gift-Love (not concepts that necessarily occurred to the Greeks) insightful. Need-love is that form of Love where we expect something--a child needs nourishment from its mother, and the child loves mother for it; Gift-love is that more purely beneficent form of love that just gives--a mother nourishing that child. (Though more on that later.)

Now Lewis, a Christian, sees a sort of progression in the four types of love: Storgé (Affection) is a more mechanical form than its successor, Philia (Friendship). In turn, Philia isn't as strong a force as Eros (Erotic love,) and the summit is Agapé, sometimes translated as Charity (Caritas in Latin,) though I'd say a bit more complicated than that. (And Lewis would agree.) Lewis didn't express himself this way, but I rather wonder if his un-Greek, but useful terms Need-love and Gift-love could helpfully express the progression. The more advanced forms of love have a smaller portion of Need-Love and more Gift-love. In fact, I might say that any type of love expressed by actual humans has an admixture of Need-love and Gift-love; only divine love is purely Gift-love. Lewis doesn't say that, but I think he'd agree. Human loves, even the largely Gift-love forms of human love, such as charity or the love of a parent for a child, have some Need-love in them: my name will be glorified if I donate the money that leads to a cure for cancer; if I look after Junior now, Junior will help me when I am old and decrepit. Lewis by no means condemns those, but neither are those purely divine forms of love.

Now that I've speculated about what Lewis might have said (but didn't)...😉...I thought I'd also make an observation about the sort of thing he did say. Because he does see that all of his forms of love have both good and bad forms, he tries to distinguish what's good and what's bad. Mostly I would agree with his distinctions. For example one of his early forms of love (Love for the Sub-Human he categorizes it as) is patriotism. Now patriotism these days is a thing I'm particularly suspicious of--too often it seems to be "the last refuge of a scoundrel" and all that. Now Lewis is perfectly well aware there are bad manifestations of patriotism, and he identifies them pretty much as I would identify them, though I do think memorializing Waterloo may be a bit more ambiguous than Lewis seems to think. But where I do wonder is how can we tell the good forms apart from the bad forms? Now Lewis, as I said, mostly distinguishes them as I would, and (*naturally*) that marks him as sensible person. But if somebody should insist the proper form of patriotism involves liking only people of my ethnicity, how do I demonstrate that isn't a proper of patriotism? Unclear.

Later he discusses what are sometimes characterized as 'neurotic' forms of love, though he doesn't like that terminology. Fair enough. I'm not very fond of Freud myself. Freud was more highly rated in 1960, the year Lewis' book came out, than today, though, and it's quite easy now to see Freud as less helpful. Lewis says he might sort through some of the more difficult issues with his spiritual adviser, but that also strikes me as a not very satisfactory answer; spiritual advisers come in all stripes, and he doesn't seem to me to give any guidelines as to how to distinguish the good from the bad in spiritual advisers as well as in manifestations of love.

Well, Lewis doesn't have to answer all the questions--it is a short book--and I certainly don't have the answers myself; only to note that there are still some questions, and, in any case, this post has taken me quite long enough (!) to write.

Thanks to Cleo for prodding me to read this fascinating book!