PicoBlog

Appointment in Samarra remains, to this day, my favorite ever experience of reading a novel. I read it for pleasure over a long and wild intersession weekend in sophomore year of college.  The title derives from W. Somerset Maugham’s translation of an ancient Mesopotamian story, which goes like this, in full, and which may well be familiar to you: 

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threating gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?  That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

O’Hara’s novel, taking place in twentieth century Pennsylvania, has nothing to do with the tale of Death in Baghdad, but it was inspired by it, insofar as the death of the protagonist is meant to come across as almost certainly inevitable. It all begins when a fellow tosses a drink in another man’s face. He is then ostracized and loses his social advantage. Death follows. The memory of Appointment in Samarra — of the reading experience I had, or of the feeling it evokes, even if my actual recall of the book itself is not pristine — is so excellent that I have never allowed myself to read it again. Including this time, when I picked up the Library of America volume of O’Hara’s work, ably edited by a fellow named Steven Goldleaf who seems to be something of a brilliant eccentric with interests from O’Hara to baseball to the visual arts.

This volume of course also includes Butterfield 8, O’Hara’s best known work, probably because of the movie version made a quarter century after its publication starring Elizabeth Taylor, whom you almost certainly remember, and Laurence Harvey, whom you almost certainly do not (though you might love him at least a little, as I do, perhaps in some small part because he was a Lithuanian Jew who changed his name, immigrated to the UK, and became a cinema leading man portraying Classically English figures). The movie has little to do with the book, except its title, which is a reference to the time when New York City phone exchanges began with two letters, as in BUtterfield 8, which would have implied a seven-digit number starting with 288. In some microscopic corners of Manhattan, the 288 prefix, which signals a dollop of the Upper East Side’s Silk Stocking, still resonates. In O’Hara’s time, it was quite the business.

In a perhaps funny human moment of accountability and score-keeping, I think I used to think that I had read Butterfield 8 long ago, but I realized while reading it now that I never had. I am glad I did, as it was high time, though it irrevocably depressed my opinion of O’Hara. I don’t think I had thought a lot about him, per se, before, and I think I rarely find myself developing a conception of an author as a moral or ethical figure when reading novels. I can’t think of the last time I did, in fact. But in reading Butterfield 8, I did so and my assessment of him was, finally, unflattering. 

A long time ago, I read an essay about O’Hara that said he had been a pretentious, desperate social climber, famously so. I had discounted this at the time as a kind of ridiculous character assassination, I guess now chiefly on the basis of my recall of Appointment in Samarra and my light familiarity with his history as a journalist. I thought of him as a wise old hack made good.

I figured that O’Hara had been a kind of chronicler, perhaps sending up the mores of classism, not unlike many other American writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Mark Twain among them). But I was struck when reading Butterfield 8 — it fairly bounces out of the pages, almost right away — at how grubby and frantic the social ambition of this author must have been. It did not feel to me like what was coming across was the disposition of a particular literary character or even of the milieu or even of a persona adopted by the writer to reveal a tale of truth and woe. Instead, the hot fever of status obsession appeared as the lens and yardstick by which all of the book’s activity — and the author’s interest level — was drawn, seen, and measured. It felt like I was reading the work of a squinting card-shark shadow of his contemporary better, Fitzgerald.

Even the insertion of the character James “Jimmy” Mallow, who was O’Hara’s literary alter ego, and his various real-life anecdotes (an article on houseboats in the New Yorker, written by both his character and him, is an example) into the narrative does not come across as playful but as shabbily self-aggrandizing and tuft-hunting. I am sorry to have learned it. There is a kind of “slice of life” benefit to all of this, but it is, finally, dreary. Even when I was rooting for O’Hara, I reached the same conclusion.

There appear in Butterfield 8 a number of long occasional essays about contemporary social life and the in-crowd. I love the occasional interruptive essay, from some other octave or tenor of the writer’s voice — Melville did it to huge advantage — and I wish there was sometimes a little more of it in novels, though it does not seem widely tolerated. O’Hara also offers, in the pages, many “Honoré Lachaille” write ups of this or that visible person, which is a tradition at least as old as Dante and, far older, Virgil.

But when O’Hara does it in these books it feels like “Talk of the Town” or some other set of New Yorker or Tatler snippets dosed with casual moralizing or, really, “I was there, too, dear Reader, your faithful Beadle was on the scene and part of the furniture.” 

It was hard not to despise him.

Hope of Heaven (1938), another one in the collection, starts out like a Cracker Jack. My excitement in O’Hara’s writing was rapidly renewed. But, just as fast, Hope sputters. Some will say the book is a kind of noir. It isn’t. I have made noir a subject of personal interest, and this book doesn’t qualify. That doesn’t matter.  It is largely plotless — uninterestingly so — and mostly a rambling, self-indulgent and self-celebrating story of how Jimmy Malloy, that literary alter ego of O’Hara’s ego, was a great lover, wit, writer, spendthrift, friend, bon vivant, holder of his booze, detective, dangerous character, trustworthy soul, and man about town. Even the occasional asides, addressed to the reader (which make more sense here than they do in Butterfield 8) are sloppy. They are inconsistent in voice and lead one to believe he was careless in how he wrote it. In spurts. Maybe drunk. 

We learn from the editor Greenleaf, who rescued this book from obscurity (and for that we should thank him, as it does give more insight into O’Hara the writer), that this book was one of the author’s favorites. My conclusion, after reading it, was something like “no kidding.”  It’s a literary mirror to O’Hara’s self-conception. It is a fitting book for a man who wrote his own epitaph, as follows: “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.” You can’t make this stuff up.

Pal Joey is as breezy as it is disposable, and it is an object lesson in how perfectly nailing a slang, a voice, a patois is just not enough to make a novel. But it musta been a hoot to read it periodically in the New Yorker when it was published in its original pieces.

I am very glad I did not re-read Appointment in Samarra. Because I did not, that experience shall remain, like so many ladies in O’Hara’s books remain in the minds of his protagonists, a great treasure of my memory and time. If I had read it again now, I am afraid I would have disliked it nearly as much as I found myself disliking the man who wrote it. O’Hara is an American writer whose work is best read some hazy time long ago in your life, on a grand adventure of a post-adolescent weekend, or even, finally, read only in your imagination.

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