John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), originally published 1934.
It must be a near-universal adult fantasy, at least in places proximate to an open road, to imagine one day simply refusing to answer the phone or email, getting behind the wheel, disappearing and leaving the responsibility of one's life behind, and basically becoming an inebriated self-destructive wreck. As Karl Ove Knausgaard described it in a recent book, he would sometimes picture himself pursuing this itinerary in the following form: "Take the ferry to Poland and drive down through Europe, stay in cheap hotels in ever-changing towns, drink, drink, drink." (Burkey trans.) It is not necessary to ever come close to living out such a scenario—or even to have a taste for alcohol—to cherish it as an escapist fantasy; indeed, perhaps it is the greatest homebodies who are most likely to nurse it in their hearts.
One turns to O'Hara's classic novel, Appointment in Samarra, on the assumption that it will offer one the vicarious pleasure of the kind of fantasy Knausgaard is describing. It is, by repute, the great novel of the "bender"—an account of the gratuitous self-destruction of an apparently successful adult male who decides one Christmas to shred his ties to human society through an escalating series of anti-social acts. And indeed, this is in summary roughly the plot of the novel. But the feel of the book's content is not quite in keeping with its subject matter. The story, the title of O'Hara's classic, and the Somerset Maugham fable from which it is derived—all lead one to expect an atmosphere of overhanging, inexorable fate. Instead, it skates along the surface of things.
It is true that our protagonist, Julian English, will be dead at his own hands by the book's end. His reasons for taking his life, however, fall short of the full anguish of existential dread. We do not peer deep into his or anyone's soul. Instead, there is a long series of seeming narrative dead-ends. A plot involving a low-level rum-runner for the mob briefly intersects with Julian's cycle toward destruction; but ultimately, it goes nowhere. Julian's decision to throw a drink in the face of a town loud-mouth sets his spiral toward pointless self-annihilation in motion, but other than that has little pay-off. There is an Irish priest who says some interesting things early in the book and seems destined to become a significant character, only to be dropped and never heard from again.
The result is a book strangely at odds with one's expectations—but by no means a bad one for that. It does, to be sure, not quite fulfill one's desire to vicariously flee the social responsibilities of life (a program which remains, at last, only a fantasy in Julian's mind as much as it is in ours—for, after briefly imagining a future in which he leaves town and keeps driving, downsizing his car as he goes until he runs out of money, Julian eventually turns around and drives home, saying to himself "You don't really get away from whatever it was he was going back to"). However, Appointment in Samarra achieves many other things one hadn't been told to expect. It tells you a great deal about the life of its author, for one thing—and like most books that are very-nearly autobiographies, it burns with authentic and therefore interesting resentments.
If there's any academic superstition that deserves to be banished from civilized thought forever, it is the "New Criticism" notion that a work of art can and must be separated from the biography of its creator. Such a dogma can only be maintained in defiance of all evidence. I can think of only one very plausible reason, after all—and feel the need to look for no other—why John O'Hara wrote a compelling first novel about an ill-tempered young man in his late-twenties, staring down the specter of the dreaded Thirtieth Birthday, who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania coal country as the son of a successful doctor and wished he could have gone to Yale. That is because O'Hara was at the time precisely such a person—even down to the bit about Yale.
Nor is this in any way a truth to be resisted. The fact that O'Hara's book is based so clearly and directly on his own life is what allows him to say so many interesting things about its subject. O'Hara knows these people, and this life. His long pages of dialogue capture the often inane and sense-adjacent flow of actual human conversation. He is not above talking to the reader about a host of local "Gibbsville" celebrities on the assumption that they are already known to us, and that we share the town's fascination with their doings. He is able to supply us with enlightening facts only a local could know, and which one will never afterward forget, such as the distinction between anthracite and bituminous coal country and the differing roles unionization has played in the history of both.
Robert Lowell once again said it best: "Why not say what happened?" Indeed, there is no reason for any author to deprive themselves of the richest veins of their own experience, and by reputation none of O'Hara's later books ever reached the same level of vividness and honesty as this, his first novel. The reason probably lies in the fact that his later works hew less closely to his own experience.
Of course, we cannot read Julian English as a straightforward representation of his creator. He is more of a comment upon the author's self. He is the man O'Hara might have been had his father lived and kept his money, and had he stayed in small-town Pennsylvania. And read in this light, the suicide at the novel's end makes more psychological sense. It is the author's adolescent revenge fantasy against the father who disappointed him (indeed, Dr. English in the novel comes across very poorly—a self-satisfied anti-semite to whom his son is ever-faintly a disappointment. As an intimidatingly successful patriarch he is worthy of taking his place among the other great frightening doctor-fathers of letters—Gustave Flaubert's, for instance, or the father in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day).
If one can free oneself of the idea that there is something impure about a work of art being influenced by the experience of its creator, it becomes possible to appreciate O'Hara's book as accomplishing the best of what any novel may achieve: the representation of a singular and irreducible view of human life that achieves its uniqueness precisely because it is built upon one person's unrepeatable journey through the world.
What follows is my usual collection of typos and marginal comments:
p. 23 "she add" [sic]
p. 69 "although he know [sic] who it was"
p. 76 "on a party[....]" It is interesting to observe that this is always the construction of the phrase (as opposed to "at a party," as we would now say) in Hemingway, Fitzgerald, apparently in O'Hara too, and other books of the early-to-mid twentieth century. At some point, I suppose the "party" came to be understood to refer not to the group of people who were attending (something like a "hunting-party") but as the location or event they were going to.
p. 101 "Jones's Beach [sic]" No apostrophe needed.
p. 123 "Zigenfusses" The name is spelt Ziegenfuss elsewhere. In fairness though, it's not clear if this is the author's typo or a representation of a character's mispronunciation.
p. 134 "for Christ sake." Should be "Christ's."
p. 138 "when you got big, what girl you were going to marry"—should be a semicolon in context.
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