Every year around the holidays, I try to fill in one of the gaps in my knowledge of the canon. When you’re revisiting classics, I’ve found, it’s always good to seek out the ones that people hated when they were first published—so I took up O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, which Sinclair Lewis called “nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.” And what visions they are! Sex and class are O’Hara’s great subjects, and in Appointment—wherein a rich, high-society guy ruins himself for no good reason, really, except that the straitjacket of Depression-era life demands it—he treats them with a candor that most novelists still can’t muster eighty years later. He’s known, rightly, for his dialogue, but there’s a kind of O’Hara sentence, precise but faintly ostentatious, that sounds utterly American to me. “The festive board now groaned under the Baked Alaska,” for instance. Or: “Frank Gorman, Georgetown, and Dwight Ross, Yale, had fought, cried, and kissed after an argument about what the team Gorman had not made would have done to the team Ross was substitute halfback on.” —Dan Piepenbring
THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY celebrates the life and works of John O'Hara, Pennsylvania's pre-eminent contemporary author and America's greatest short-story writer. The JOHS studies, publishes, and diffuses works by and about the author. Membership is free. For details, contact the JOHS's Corresponding Secretary, Richard Carreño, via Philabooks@yahoo.com. © MMXXV John O'Hara Society.
Showing posts with label Appointment in Samarra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Appointment in Samarra. Show all posts
'Erotic Visions'
From The Paris Review
Every year around the holidays, I try to fill in one of the gaps in my knowledge of the canon. When you’re revisiting classics, I’ve found, it’s always good to seek out the ones that people hated when they were first published—so I took up O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, which Sinclair Lewis called “nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.” And what visions they are! Sex and class are O’Hara’s great subjects, and in Appointment—wherein a rich, high-society guy ruins himself for no good reason, really, except that the straitjacket of Depression-era life demands it—he treats them with a candor that most novelists still can’t muster eighty years later. He’s known, rightly, for his dialogue, but there’s a kind of O’Hara sentence, precise but faintly ostentatious, that sounds utterly American to me. “The festive board now groaned under the Baked Alaska,” for instance. Or: “Frank Gorman, Georgetown, and Dwight Ross, Yale, had fought, cried, and kissed after an argument about what the team Gorman had not made would have done to the team Ross was substitute halfback on.” —Dan Piepenbring
Every year around the holidays, I try to fill in one of the gaps in my knowledge of the canon. When you’re revisiting classics, I’ve found, it’s always good to seek out the ones that people hated when they were first published—so I took up O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, which Sinclair Lewis called “nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.” And what visions they are! Sex and class are O’Hara’s great subjects, and in Appointment—wherein a rich, high-society guy ruins himself for no good reason, really, except that the straitjacket of Depression-era life demands it—he treats them with a candor that most novelists still can’t muster eighty years later. He’s known, rightly, for his dialogue, but there’s a kind of O’Hara sentence, precise but faintly ostentatious, that sounds utterly American to me. “The festive board now groaned under the Baked Alaska,” for instance. Or: “Frank Gorman, Georgetown, and Dwight Ross, Yale, had fought, cried, and kissed after an argument about what the team Gorman had not made would have done to the team Ross was substitute halfback on.” —Dan Piepenbring
John O'Hara: Strange Characters
O'HARA'S NOVELS RE-EXAMINEDThe Baffler
Books Discussed
John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, 2013; first published 1934).
John O’Hara, BUtterfield 8 (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1935).
John O’Hara, Ten North Frederick (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014; first published 1955).
John O’Hara, The New York Stories (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013; first published 1932–1966).
John O’Hara’s themes are alcoholism, infidelity, rape, perversion, child molestation, the yearning for power and financial security (many who knew the author believed this to be his own basic preoccupation), the instability of love and passion, the effects of economic substructures on the superstructures of private life (in method, if certainly not in ideology, he resembles a Marxist), boardroom and statehouse politics, and the secret corruptions of families.
O'Hara and Capote
Strange Bedfellows
By Charles McGrath
The New York Times | May 16, 2014
It would be hard to think of two writers less alike — stylistically and, for that matter, personally — than Truman Capote and John O’Hara, yet they shared many preoccupations. Both were fascinated by society high and low, by how people climbed or toppled from one rank to the other, and by how sex and money underpinned the entire system. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Capote’s charming 1958 novella about a self-invented cafe society girl and the admiring writer who lives upstairs, is set during World War II. Most of the stories assembled in the recent Penguin anthology of O’Hara’s New York stories were written in either the ’30s or the ’60s, but some are set decades earlier. And yet in the newly released audio recordings of the two books, maybe even more than on the page, the versions of New York that are evoked seem virtually interchangeable: It’s a city of people on the make or else clinging to their former reputations, where everyone drinks too much, and where you can easily wake up in bed next to someone you barely remember meeting.
Listening to Capote and O’Hara back to back, in fact, you have to concentrate to keep the characters in one recording from wandering into your recollections of the other, and from picturing Capote’s Holly Golightly, for example — who once had a future in the movies and now pays the rent by accepting financial favors from men — showing up at “21” on the arm of one of O’Hara’s fast-talking Hollywood producers. And that young couple who make a living from hosting creepy sex parties — it may take a moment to recall that they turn up not at one of Golightly’s parties but in the deeply strange O’Hara story “A Phase of Life.”
O’Hara is now somewhat neglected and underappreciated, and the print version of the New York anthology, edited by Steven Goldleaf, with a foreword by E. L. Doctorow, is part of a welcome Penguin effort to reissue his work in paperback. (I wrote the introduction to the new edition of O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in Samarra.”) But even readers familiar with O’Hara may be surprised by how many of these stories involve not his Park Avenue types but people in show business: agents, producers, writers, actors, many of them alcoholic has-beens. This is a world O’Hara knew well from his early days as a press agent, and like much of his best work, the stories have the tang of genuine observation and reporting.
John O'Hara Remembered
Norman Mailer almost killed one of his wives. John O'Hara, when besotted by drink, was no gentleman. But in today's lit'ry circles, Mailer often gets a pass. O'Hara never does. Get to meet 'the Master of the Fancied Slight,' as O'Hara was known, in the following brilliant new dissection of the author's life by Charles F. McElwee III.
Touchy, Touchy
By Charles F. McElwee III
John O'Hara wanted acceptance, but acceptance required penance. The author's acerbic, self-destructive personality limited the accolades and tributes he demanded. O'Hara had too many enemies, and he added many in his exhausting life. An Olympian grudge holder, O'Hara routinely blacklisted friends for no particular reason.
He was a brawler, a boozer and a blowhard - the holy trinity of a jerk. Bars were O'Hara's boxing rings, and he slugged and rumbled at negligible or imagined provocations. He threw fists at a dwarf in New York's "21" Club, only to be knocked down by another dwarf who joined the fight. He even smacked a woman for a tardy lunch arrival. The high society O'Hara craved loathed him for his alcohol-soaked brutality. Everyone knew him as "a master of the fancied slight."
Old John O'Hara Haunt
 |
| Pottsville Club Gets Blackballed by Bank |
BY STEPHEN J. PYTAK
[STAFF WRITER/POTTSVILLE REPUBLICAN HERALD]
POTTSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA
If author John O'Hara were alive today, he might be disheartened to hear the Pottsville Club is slated to close, according to one of the fans of his fiction, Mantura M. Gallagher, Pottsville.
"John O'Hara, I believe, would be sad to see what impact the demise of such a long-standing institution as the Pottsville Club might have on his Gibbsville. O'Hara was a member of the Pottsville Club and enjoyed being part of the upper crust of Pottsville society until his father, Dr. O'Hara, passed away," Gallagher, former Schuylkill County commissioners chairperson, said Monday.
But O'Hara, who was critical of social classes and institutions, may have had something else to say about changing times and the closing of a club he alluded to in his novels.
Vincent D. Balitas, Pottsville, who started "The O'Hara Journal," a literary magazine published locally between 1978 and 1982, did not want to speculate on O'Hara's views when called for comment Wednesday.
Appointment in Samarra - Reissue
THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY
In August Penguin Classics republished Appointment in Samarra, and, as I stated the other day, the introduction by The New York Times writer at large Charles McGrath is worth of the price of this paperback.
Here are two excerpts:
Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Though unfaithful to her, Julian can't stop loving Caroline, and after O'Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can't help falling a little in love with her too. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: "He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was."
....
O'Hara, who published hundreds of short stories and thirteen collections in his lifetime, was actually a better story writer than he was a novelist, most evidently at the end of his career when the novels had grown bulky and laden with sociological exposition. The stories, by contrast, were almost minimalist, turning on just a line of dialogue or even a passing observation that suggests something crucial has just changed. More Hemmingwayesque than Hemingway - more transparent and less mannered - these stories opened a path for such great American story writers as Salinger, Cheever, Updike, and Carver.
____
I do agree about falling in love with Caroline, but I don't recall that Julian was ever unfaithful to her.
I don't agree that John O'Hara was a better story writer than a novelist, but I do think that overall Charles McGrath's introduction here is a breath of fresh air and departure from all those generally unpleasant literary criticisms over the past several decades.
In August Penguin Classics republished Appointment in Samarra, and, as I stated the other day, the introduction by The New York Times writer at large Charles McGrath is worth of the price of this paperback.
Here are two excerpts:
Appointment is a genuine love story, charged with eros but stripped of sentimentality, and the relationship between the Englishes is more convincing and more satisfying than that of, say, Gatsby and Daisy in The Great Gatsby, or Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Though unfaithful to her, Julian can't stop loving Caroline, and after O'Hara devotes a whole chapter to her intimate thoughts and sexual explorations before marriage, the reader can't help falling a little in love with her too. Caroline, for her part, reflects at the end of the book: "He was drunk, but he was Julian, drunk or not, and that was more than anyone else was."
....
O'Hara, who published hundreds of short stories and thirteen collections in his lifetime, was actually a better story writer than he was a novelist, most evidently at the end of his career when the novels had grown bulky and laden with sociological exposition. The stories, by contrast, were almost minimalist, turning on just a line of dialogue or even a passing observation that suggests something crucial has just changed. More Hemmingwayesque than Hemingway - more transparent and less mannered - these stories opened a path for such great American story writers as Salinger, Cheever, Updike, and Carver.
____
I do agree about falling in love with Caroline, but I don't recall that Julian was ever unfaithful to her.
I don't agree that John O'Hara was a better story writer than a novelist, but I do think that overall Charles McGrath's introduction here is a breath of fresh air and departure from all those generally unpleasant literary criticisms over the past several decades.
End of 'Another' Era
Pottsville Club Will Close
Your friend philabooks@yahoo.comshared Pottsville Club to close Oct. 31 - News - Republican Herald with you. Just click on the link below:
http://republicanherald.com/news/pottsville-club-to-close-oct-31-1.1550280#.UkOHFBDWT50.email
Your friend philabooks@yahoo.comshared Pottsville Club to close Oct. 31 - News - Republican Herald with you. Just click on the link below:
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O'Hara at the Brooklyn Book Festival: September 16
Steven Goldleaf (O'Hara Society member and editor of O'Hara's New York Stories) will be moderating a panel on John O'Hara as part of the 2013 Brooklyn Book Festival. The panel will feature:
Monday September 16, 2013
7:00pm-9:00pm
THE POWERHOUSE ARENA [Dumbo]
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
For more information, or to RSVP, visit http://powerhousearena.com/events/brooklyn-book-festival-bookend-event-powerhouse-arena-penguin-classics-present-e-l-doctorow-lorin-stein-and-chip-mcgrath-on-john-ohara-moderated-by-steven-goldleaf/.
- Lawrence Block, author of the Matthew Scudder crime novels.
- Loren Stein, editor of The Paris Review and author of the introduction to the new edition of BUtterfield8.
- Charles McGrath, (writer-at-large at The New York Times and author of the introduction to the new edition of Appointment in Samarra.
Monday September 16, 2013
7:00pm-9:00pm
THE POWERHOUSE ARENA [Dumbo]
37 Main Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
For more information, or to RSVP, visit http://powerhousearena.com/events/brooklyn-book-festival-bookend-event-powerhouse-arena-penguin-classics-present-e-l-doctorow-lorin-stein-and-chip-mcgrath-on-john-ohara-moderated-by-steven-goldleaf/.
NY Summer Meeting Recap
On Saturday, July 13 members of the John O’Hara Society met
at Connolly’s restaurant in New York City for their summer meeting. In attendance were Steven Goldleaf, Robert
Knott, and Robert and Jenny Saliba.
Topics of discussion included the upcoming publication of
Steven Goldleaf’s collection of O’Hara’s New York stories, to be published by
Penguin Classics. New York Stories will arrive in bookstores and online retailers on
August 27th and Society members discussed how best to support its
publication. It was decided that future
blog posts will feature interviews with Steven Goldleaf about the book and
announcements of related events as they are scheduled. For example, a September event at a Brooklyn,
NY bookstore will be promoted on the blog as soon as more details become
available.
Over lunch members discussed a variety of O’Hara related
topics, including Robert Knott’s recent visit to Penn State to visit the O’Hara
study and review their holdings of O’Hara papers. Robert Saliba, who has visited Penn State in
the past, shared his memories of a similar trip and the thrill of reviewing the
original manuscript of Appointment in
Samarra. The possibility of
scheduling a Society field trip to Penn State was raised (as it has been in the
past) although nothing has been scheduled at this time.
Members will reconvene in January at a location still to be
determined. Suggestions for topics or
locations for the January meeting are gladly accepted in the comments section
below.
Happy Holidays
'
Twas the night before Christmas, 1930, the first year of the Great Depression. Julian English sat at the "Whit Hofman-crowd's table" in the smoking room at the Lantenengo Country Club in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, listening to Harry Reilly tell his dirty stories in an Irish brogue.
The stag line was scattered over the floor by the time the band was working on the second chorus of the tune, and when Johnny Dibble suddenly appeared breathless, at the place where his cronies customarily stood, there were only two young men for him to address. "Jeez," he said. "Jeezozz H. Kee-rist. You hear about what just happened?"
Robert Saliba
Julian English sat there watching him, through eyes that he permitted to appear sleepier than they felt. Why, he wondered, did he hate Harry Reilly? Why couldn't he stand him? What was there about Reilly that caused him to say to himself: "If he starts one more of those moth-eaten stories I'll throw this drink in his face." But he knew he would not throw this drink or any other drink in Harry Reilly's face. Still, it was fun to think about it.
............
The band was playing Something to Remember You By.
The stag line was scattered over the floor by the time the band was working on the second chorus of the tune, and when Johnny Dibble suddenly appeared breathless, at the place where his cronies customarily stood, there were only two young men for him to address. "Jeez," he said. "Jeezozz H. Kee-rist. You hear about what just happened?"
"No. No," they said.
"You didn't? About Julian English?"
"No. No. What was it?"
"Julian English. He just threw a highball in Harry Reilly's face. Jeest!"
______
Robert Saliba
Morristown, NJ
Evening in Samarra at Yale
The Show Will Go On
Hi Richard
Sorry I won't be seeing you at Yale this weekend. If any of the Society members are able to make the trip, the details for the show: Saturday Oct 15th, Sudler Hall 7:30.
I'll be staying over at the Quinnipiac Club so perhaps that could be a spot for drinks after the performance. Any questions, my cell# 416 875 0405.
Thanks so much for posting!
Best,
Jonathan Higgins
Hi Richard
Sorry I won't be seeing you at Yale this weekend. If any of the Society members are able to make the trip, the details for the show: Saturday Oct 15th, Sudler Hall 7:30.
I'll be staying over at the Quinnipiac Club so perhaps that could be a spot for drinks after the performance. Any questions, my cell# 416 875 0405.
Thanks so much for posting!
Best,
Jonathan Higgins
NYC Summer Field Trip
 |
| At Connelly's, from left, Robert Knott, Steven Goldleaf, Richard Carreno, Jackie Atkins, Brian Maxwell, Jessica Rettig, Robert Saliba, Jenny Saliba, Joan T. Kane, KC Rice, and Peter Frishauf |
at New York Summer Meeting
About a dozen Society members (see photo above) shared lunch, comradrie, and hoisting a toast to the Master during our annual summer meeting in New York.
 |
| Robert Montgomery: Looking sober |
We retreated to a pub -- aptly named Butterfield 8 -- for drinks, coffee, and dessert.
$5,500 Gets You an 'Appointment'
Bauman Rare Books of Philadelphia is offering a first 1934 edition of APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA for $5,500. This 'in scarce orginal dust jacket.' Condition isn't cited. For more information, contact Bauman at 800.972.2862.
Finally, O'Hara Gets Yale's Love!
John O'Hara finally is getting some respect at Yale.
He couldn't get admitted. He couldn't get an honorary degree. He never got tapped as a Yale Club member.
But thanks to Jonathan Higgins, a Bostonian and an MFA graduate from Temple University, a new play that he created highlighting the Master and his masterpiece, An Appointment in Samarra, will top Yale's theatre offerings this autumn.
An Evening in Samarra: An Appointment with John O'Hara, will be held in New Haven on Saturday, 15 October, in Sudler Hall, with a tentative start time of 8 p.m.
The play, developed by The Actors Imagaination Studio in Toronto, is part of the university's Elizabethan Club centenary line-up, according to Pal Jonathan. It's directed by Michael Hanrahan. Music was arranged and will be performed
by James Scott.
The play's action takes place at the Elizabethan Club, circa 1957, and in New York City, circa 1933, Jonathan said.
As previously announced, the Society has scheduled attendance at the play as a special event. Everyone will be on their own for overnight digs. But I'll be planning pre-theatre/post-theatre activities (drinks, dinner?), hopefully with Jonathan, as the time approaches.
Still no idea about ticket prices. Look updates here!
--RDC
John O'Hara finally is getting some respect at Yale.
He couldn't get admitted. He couldn't get an honorary degree. He never got tapped as a Yale Club member.
But thanks to Jonathan Higgins, a Bostonian and an MFA graduate from Temple University, a new play that he created highlighting the Master and his masterpiece, An Appointment in Samarra, will top Yale's theatre offerings this autumn.
An Evening in Samarra: An Appointment with John O'Hara, will be held in New Haven on Saturday, 15 October, in Sudler Hall, with a tentative start time of 8 p.m.
The play, developed by The Actors Imagaination Studio in Toronto, is part of the university's Elizabethan Club centenary line-up, according to Pal Jonathan. It's directed by Michael Hanrahan. Music was arranged and will be performed
by James Scott.
The play's action takes place at the Elizabethan Club, circa 1957, and in New York City, circa 1933, Jonathan said.
As previously announced, the Society has scheduled attendance at the play as a special event. Everyone will be on their own for overnight digs. But I'll be planning pre-theatre/post-theatre activities (drinks, dinner?), hopefully with Jonathan, as the time approaches.
Still no idea about ticket prices. Look updates here!
--RDC
This Month...
...With O'Hara: April
By Robert Saliba
April 9: Completes Appointment in Samarra.
April 11: Dies at Linebrook.
April 14: Publishes My Turn.
April 29: Birth of Grace Brock Caldwell (Tate) in A Rage to Live.
I think A Rage to Live was a turning point in his career, where he elevated to a higher level in the quality of his writing and stayed on that leverl (with a few exceptions) until his death. A Rage to Live is one of my favorite novels, and I think the critics never did it justice.
By Robert Saliba
April 9: Completes Appointment in Samarra.
April 11: Dies at Linebrook.
April 14: Publishes My Turn.
April 29: Birth of Grace Brock Caldwell (Tate) in A Rage to Live.
I think A Rage to Live was a turning point in his career, where he elevated to a higher level in the quality of his writing and stayed on that leverl (with a few exceptions) until his death. A Rage to Live is one of my favorite novels, and I think the critics never did it justice.
Samarra Companion Guide Gets Page
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Samarra Companion Page
The Companion Guide to Appointment in Samarra by Robert G. Saliba is a 32 page alphabetical glossary of the people, places, and things in John O'Hara's 1934 novel. What emerges from this exercise is a vivid description of 1930 America.
It is amazing how the young John O'Hara, in his late twenties when he wrote this masterpiece, was able to cram so much into a relatively short book.
The Guide is available as a free download or for $5 to cover the cost of printing and mailing a hard copy.
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