It was with surprise and pleasure that I discovered there is a Cengage Learning-brand student guide to John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Samarra. Surprise and pleasure because I didn’t think anyone taught O’Hara anymore.
Sophomores and juniors at high schools across the country will soon be working their way through what is perhaps the most universally taught standard in the American literary canon, The Great Gatsby. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, is one of the few serious writers the average teen is likely to know.
By contrast, Fitzgerald’s friend (and friendly rival) O’Hara is virtually unknown on campus. Even that one study guide for Appointment in Samarra is buried under the mountain of CliffsNotes and SparkNotes and other shortcuts that help high schoolers skip their assigned Gatsby reading.
I’ve been on a personal quest to remedy that. Every English teacher I meet I ask, “Aren’t you tired of teaching Gatsby?”
No doubt there are differences: Fitzgerald is a tragedian; O’Hara is more of a social anthropologist. Fitzgerald is more of a stylist; O’Hara doesn’t draw attention to the technique he deftly uses to “control,” as he put it, the reader.
I even think that O’Hara rivals Fitzgerald as the voice of the Jazz Age. Just look at how both handle the phenomenon of jazz itself. At one point in Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, he describes an orchestra as “playing yellow cocktail music,” which is rather good. At one party, “the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the Beale Street Blues.”
In scenes at a dance, O’Hara always describes the orchestra as performing something specific. Songs cited include Something to Remember You By and Three Little Words and Can This Be Love. Those reading the book when it was first published would have known all those songs, making for a literary effect not unlike the use of music in a Tarantino flick.
O’Hara uses jazz records as a device, a metaphor for the liquor-fueled cracking-up of Julian English, the protagonist of Samarra: “He laid a lot of records out on the floor without looking at their titles. He spun a spoon around, and when it stopped he would play the record to which it pointed. He played only three records in this way,” O’Hara writes, among them Paul Whiteman’s Stairway to Paradise and Jean Goldkette’s Sunny Disposish. But English has to stop “because he was pounding his feet, keeping time, and he broke one of his most favorite, Whiteman’s Lady of the Evening, valuable because it has the fanciest trick ending ever put on a record. He wanted to cry but he could not.”
It’s not just record-breaking. It’s heartbreaking too.
Trying to find a place on campus for O’Hara is not without its challenges. There is the rampant anti-Semitism of the country-clubbers O’Hara draws. There is drinking. There are scenes of a sexual nature. There is drinking. There are more ethnic slurs. There is drinking. None of these is presented as admirable, but rather as illustrations of casual cruelty and self-destruction. The novel offended right-thinkers who didn’t recognize its moral message. In 1941, Appointment in Samarra was ruled too obscene to send through the mail, a judgment that had been pushed by the charmingly named New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. It’s a testament to the novel’s energy and swagger that the Bowdler bunch didn’t recognize it for the morality play that it was.
It may be easier to replace, not Gatsby, but one or another of the Fitzgerald short stories still assigned to students. Sure, Fitzgerald penned no mean number of fine short stories, many for the Saturday Evening Post. But O’Hara pioneered the classic New Yorker short story. Fitzgerald was a master painter of life in Hollywood. O’Hara even more so. If you’ve never read it, try the caustically funny O’Hara story about the movie biz, “The Industry and the Professor,” which ran in the New Yorker in July 1949. I’d rather read that than “The Ice Castle” any semester of the year.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
