Tag Archives: Time’s Best Novels

Appointment in Samarra – John O’Hara

15 Jan

Thanks to the elasticity of cultural opinion, works of art are constantly changing in popularity. Occasionally you’re in, occasionally out. Appointment in Samarra, the debut novel from John O’Hara, was quickly venerated after publication in 1934. As time wore on, and the author revelled in chilidish antics, opinions wavered. So, will Appointment in Samarra pass our test?

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Appointment in Samarra centers around the coal mining town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. There we find Julian English, his wife Caroline English, and their all too close-knit community. Though they belong to the ‘Latenengo Street’ country club, own a successful Cadillac dealership, and carry college education, life is far from perfect in the English household. Like all lit firecrackers, one is waiting for an explosion.

One evening at country club, Julian, after drowning himself in drinks, decides to chuck his glass at Harry Reid, an important client. Like in all small towns, word travels fast and an uproar soon fell upon Julian. The next morning, the understandably upset Caroline instructed Julian to make amends with Reid, fearing his influence throughout Gibbsville. Though he knows the right path, Julian cannot diverge from the slippery slope he’s on – and everyone feels the consequence.

Though the purpose of this blog is focused on the relevancy of celebrated works, historical context is as important as prose. Published in 1930, Samarra predates the pulp novels so popular in later years. O’Hara continually used upper class life and Gibbsville – a thinly veiled construction of his own hometime, Pottsfeild – in over 30 novels. “If only through his social documentation, O’Hara firmly suits his readers to his world, conjuring up details and thought processes unti you can’t tell where reality ends and O’Hara begins.”  It’s what O’Hara is saying and how he is saying it:

“Ed had said he wouldn’t be down till around four o’clock. He had to spend Christmas with the wife and kid, God knows why. Al did not like to think of Annie Charney. The kid was swell; si years old and fat and healthy-looking. He wasn’t like Ed, but for the present more like Annie. She was fat and healthy-looking and blonde, like most Polacks. Ed didn’t care for her any more. Al knew that. Ed cared for Helene Holman, who was a torch singer like Libby Holman and sang at the Stage Coach. Ed really cared for Helene. He played around a little, but Al knew Helene was the only one he really cared for, and Helene really cared for him. With her it was slightly different, because nobody else would even look cockeyed at Helene as long as Ed cared for her, but even taking that into consideration Al knew Helene really cared for Ed. And she was good for him. You could tell when Ed and Helene were getting along. Ed was easier to get along with then. Tonight, or this after’, when Ed showed up at the Apollo, he probably would be in bad humor. That was the way Annie affected him. Whereas if he had spent the day with Helene he would have been in a good humor. But Al knew that Ed wouldn’t think of spending Christmas with Helene. Ed was a family man, first and last, and that was the only day in the year he would spend with the kid, at home.“

Though O’Hara has been compared to Fitzgerald – citing This Side of Paradise as a “sort of textbook” - the comparison seems stretched. Sherwood Anderson’s ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ is more akin to many faceted lives within Samarra. While the former author leaves the reader ambigious to personal views on small town life, O’Hara condemns it with a sharp knife. There is no doubt the author of ‘Paradise’ and ‘Gatsby’ didn’t reveal amongst the noveau-riche. Furthermore, ‘Samarra’ bothers little with discretion while Fitzgerald’s strength is spontaneous outburst of bourgeois melodrama. Lastly, O’Hara certainly wrote his debut during the “Hangover Years”, rather than the evening prior:

“He got out of bed, not caring to wait for warmth and luxury. His feet hit the cold hardwood floor and he stuck his toes in bedroom slippers and made for the bathroom. He had felt physically worse many times, but this was a pretty good hangover. It is a pretty good hangover when you can look at yourself in the mirror and  see nothing above the bridge of your nose. You do not see your eyes, nor the condition of your hair. You see your beard, almost hair by hair; and the hair on your chest and the bones that stick up at the base of your neck. You see your pajamas and the lines in your neck, and the stuff on your lower lip that look s as though it might be blood but never is. You first brush your teeth which is an improvement but leaves something to be desired. Then you try Lavoris and then an Eno’s. By the time you get out of the bathroom you are ready for another cigarette and in urgent need of coffee or a drink, and you wish to God you could afford to have a valet to tie your shoes. You have a hard time getting your feet into your trousers, but you finally make it, having taken just any pair of trousers, the first your hands touched the closet. But you consider a long, long time before selecting a tie. You stare at the ties; stare and stare at them, and you look down at thighs to see what color suit you are going to be wearing. Dark gray. Practically any tie will go with a dark grey suit.” 

After the death of O’Hara’s father, the family fortune had been squandered and without the means for an ivy-league education. This troubled the author throughout his life. In a short-lived (and hilariously sour) column for Newsday, O’Hara would comment on inner politics within Harvard and Princeton, despite having never attended. He even went so far as to “demand“ an Honorary Degree from Yale while denying several other awards. Like his column, O’Hara’s thin veil of resentment is just as obvious in his debut:

“‘That’s all right,’ said Bobby. ‘When there was a war, I was in it. I wore a uniform. I wasn’t one of these God damn slackers playing soldier boy at some college. Lafayette or Lehigh or whatever it was. S.A.T.C. Saturday Afternoon Tea Club. Yes, sir. When old Uncle Sam needed me, I heeded the call and made the world safe for democracy, and when the war was over Istopped fighting. I didn’t do like some people that put on a uniform back in 1917 and then did their fighting by throwing drinks around in the prescence of respectiable people at a country club, thirteen or fourteen years after the war was over. Nineteen-thirty. That’s what some people are. Veterens of 1930. The Battle of the Lantenengo Country Club Smoking Room. Surprise attack.’” 

 Understandable that O’Hara is most notable for his short stories. The author has a knack for the paragraph, despite now dated narratives. After the success of Appointment in Samarra, the author would have difficulty galvanizing lasting literary success, despite a slew of sex ridden bestsellers and ‘Ten North Frederick’ winning the National Book Award in 1956.

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(O’Hara, far right, with Hemingway, far left)

O’Hara’s contemporary success has been denigrated to a spot on the Time and Modern Library literary totem, despite protests. It is not the critic’s job to defy the words of others, but when the label “disdain(er) of white male authors” – amongst other sour monikers - is used as personal description, one suffers from predictability. Though O’Hara may be a well known “lout“,  we should all hope to remembered for our achievements rather than misgivings – especially when primary sources prove otherwise. While ‘Appointment in Samarra’ may not pass the test of time, it is much more than “middlebrow”.

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Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry

12 Jan

I had been meaning to read Under the Volcano earlier this fall, but was continually distracted by other reads. Thankfully, over the holidays I was finally able to sit down and crack open the novel.  Though warning of Under the Volcano‘s  intricate struture came from biblioklept’s review, I was completely unaware of the masterpiece that was coming to me.

In Under the Volcano we follow the alcoholic, ex-British consulate Geoffrey Firmin (aptly known as “The Consul”), his estranged wife Yvonne, and his half-brother Hugh, the man behind their separation. Set in Quantehetec (the Aztec name for Cuernavaca), the three are stuck in a love triangle over the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Bent on saving her marriage and rescuing the Consul from his alcoholism, Yvonne returns to Quantehetec that morning. Finding the Consul finishing off the previous evening in a local bar, Yvonne does her best to forget the past and win back her husband’s affection. Though when Hugh arrives, the tension weighs on Geoffrey stronger than any drink and disrupts the reunion. To distract himself from dwelling in past, the Consul drunkenly guides Hugh and Yvonne through local villages.

As the day pours on, the Consul’s thoughts become increasingly seized by drink- most of stops happen to be cantinas. A war between life and death wages in the Consul’s soul of returning to his wife or contenting himself with alcohol. While Yvonne wishes to help her husband with his struggle, Hugh’s hatred of living in his brother’s shadow leaves him indifferent. In fact, if the Consul were out the picture, Yvonne may turn to him.

So the question stands: Will the Consul be able to save himself from the alcohol?

This is the most basic plot of Under the Volcano I can sum up. The novel is composed of an immense amount of literary allusion, non-linear timeline, vivid South American imagery, comedy, the character of M. Laurelle, and Modernist poetry that would be a diservice to condense into summery. We can see here, from a description of Hugh’s rebellious upbringing when he exiled himself from his home to work on a sea boat, what Lowry is made of:

“He shuddered again, for he might not have gone after all, he might have been forcibly prevented by certain husky forgotten relatives, never before reckoned with, who’d come as if springing out of the ground to his aunt’s aid, had it not been, of all people, for Geoff, who wired back sportingly from Rabat to their father’s sister: Nonsense. Consider Hugh’s proposed trip best possible thing for him. Strongly urge you give him every freedom.- A potent point, one considered: since now his trip had been deprived neatly not only of its heroic aspect but of any possible flavour of rebellion as wel. For in spite of the fact that he now receiving every assistance from the very people he mysteriously imagined himself running away from, even after broadcasting his plans to the world, he still could not bear for one moment to think he was not ‘running away to sea’. And for this Hugh had never wholly forgiven the Consul.”

Written in 1940, published ’47, Under the Volcano is certainly a thoughtfully dense peer into the life of the enigmatic author. Lowry convolutes the novel’s timeline by shifting character’s and events each chapter. (It’s as tedious as it sounds.) Marked by a literary rock-and-roll lifestyle, Lowry was truly a mess. Known only to be sober for “1 to 2 hours of the day”, the author’s dire state certainly seeped into Under the Volcano.

Chasing his first wife Jan Gabriel to Mexico, Lowry found inspiration for his novel. When Gabriel eventually disappeared, Lowry gradually began to drink himself to death until his family forced him to a Los Angeles hotel. There he would meet his second wife and the reason Under the Volcano exist, Margie Bonner. Bonner would bring Lowry’s left behind manuscript from Los Angeles to Vancouver, where the couple moved. She edited and assisted Lowry in finishing the novel.

“Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method”, T.S. Eliot writes in his 1923 essay to The Dial concerning Joyce’s Modernist style in Ulysses. As you can tell from the exerpts in this review,  Lowry certainly embraces this mythical principle to the highest in the acclaimed novel. Though,  the author’s lack of “simplicity” certainly becomes more comprehensible after immersing yourself in his rhythm. We can see here, in one of the first conversations Yvonne and the Consul have after her return, the grandiose of Lowry’s Modernist style, as well as his sing-song prose:

“‘-She might have said yes for once,’a voice said in the Consul’s ear at this moment with incredible rapidity, ‘for now of course poor old chap you want horribly to get drunk all over again don’t you the whole trouble being as we see it that Yvonne’s long-dreamed-of coming alas but put away the anguish my boy there’s nothing in it’, the voice gabbled on, ‘has in itself created the most important situation in your life save one namely the far more important situation it in turn creates of your having to have five hundred drinks in order to deal with it’, the voice he recognized of a pleasant and impertinent familiar , perhaps horned, prodigal of disguise, a specialist in casuistry, and who added severely, ‘but are you the man to weaken and have a drink at this critical hour Geoffrey Firmin you are not you will fight it have already fought down this temptation have you not you have not then I must remind you did you not last night refuse drink after drink and finally after a nice little sleep even sober up altogether you didn’t you did you didn’t you did we know afterwards you did you were only drinking enough to correct your tremor a masterly self-controlled she does not and cannot appreciate” 

“I’d not want to read that novel without knowing the man”, says Lowry’s first publisher in the Academy Award nominated documentary about the author. (The documentary is excessively dark, but informational.) Nevertheless, Lowry’s publisher is correct. Whether it be recognition of beauty, mental fights against or in support of alcohol,  or long diatribes on the horrors of Fascism, Lowry makes no illusion that he is part of his characters.

Under the Volcano is most rewarding for the effort you exert on it. It’s charm comes from it’s limitless interpretations.  It is by far the most difficult novel I’ve read. I encourage reading Malcolm Lowry’s fantastic novel, but strongly suggest refraining looking up anymore on Lowry than mentioned above. It will definitely add a bit more suspense to the novel.

Even though I may have only scratched the service of Under the Volcano, it has certainly encouraged me to crack the binding again sooner or later:

“Constables: one could see oneself, or pretend to, as a small lone figure carrying the burden of those ancestors, their weakness and wildness (which could be invented where it was lacking) in one’s blood, a victim of dark forces-everybody was, it was inescapable!-misunderstood and tragic, yet at least with a will of your own! But what was the use of a will if you had no faith? This indeed, was also Yvonne Griffaton’s problem. This was what was she too was seeking, and had been all the time, in the face of everything, for some faith-as if one could find it like a new hat or a house for rent!-yes, even what she was now on the point of finding, and losing, a faith in a cause, was better than none.”

*Taken from the documentary

**Also, I recently reviewed John Huston’s 1984 film adaption of the novel. You can see it here.

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A Clockwork Orange -Anthony Burgess

1 Jul

“Iniative comes to thems that wait.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently on a Kubrick kick this week, I’ve decided to review Anthony Burgess’s infamous novel, though he shrugs it off as one of his lesser works, A Clockwork Orange. I remember picking up the novel in eighth grade, after seeing the cinematic adaptation, and printing out a Nadsat dictionary. After twenty pages of looking up “devotchka” and “vellocet drencrom” I abandoned the guide and let my vocabulary double with Slovak slang.

A Clockwork Orange centers on dystopian London and it’s young inhabitant, Alex DeLarge. Teenage Alex and his friend’s traverse around the now destructed city committing random acts of “ultra-violence” for recreation. All is “swelly-welly” until Alex attempts a bid of leadership amongst his “droogs” only to be double-crossed and arrested during a robbery. When the authorities find out that Alex has killed a woman during the gang’s B & E, he is put in jail.

After beating an inmate to death , Alex is sent to aversion therapy for the new “crime-ending” Ludovico technique. Our protagonist is infected with medicine that sickens him when exposed to any sort of violence. Eager to try out the procedure, high society  releases the “cured” Alex into the world.

I won’t ruin the ending for those who have not read the novella or seen the movie, but Burgess does raise any interesting question. Do we accept human aggression as part of human life or erradicate the human condition completely? A moral subject that Burgess examines in many of his books, A Clockwork Orange tends to have a sleeker message than his other writings of the time(with the exception of Honey for the Bears.)

So how does the 1962 novel hold up in 2011? Though first few chapters of the book are quite difficult to grasp, the slang eventually becomes common place and quite enjoyable. Burgess’s message is one that isn’t necessarily outdated, but rather, like most of his works, too subtle. The book does not suffer from this occasional lack of thesis, but rather benefits from the outrageous narrative. I highly suggest the book to fans of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World, as well as enthusiast of Kubrick’s adaptation.

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