Baroness Blixen’s time in Africa—1914 to 1931—has been much written about, most splendidly by her. Her main memoir, Out of Africa, published in 1937, has been called the greatest pastoral romance of modern times; it is a severely smoothed account of seventeen bumpy years, her prime as a woman, spent coping with a recalcitrant and ill-conceived coffee plantation, with her rich Danish relations as they reluctantly financed this losing venture, with an errant and often absent big-game-hunting husband and then a lover (also a big-game hunter) even more elusive, and with a painful and persistent case of syphilis contracted from Bror in the first year of their marriage. From the standpoint of her writing, two crucial developments might be noted. In British East Africa, English became her daily language; and in the person of her handsome, Etonian, Oxonian lover, Denys Finch Hatton, she for the first time encountered a fully involving intellectual partner, a brilliant and playful stimulant to her own intelligence and story-teller’s gift. “When I was expecting Denys,” she wrote, “and heard his car coming up the drive, I heard at the same time, the things of the farm all telling what they really were.… When he came back to the farm it gave out what was in it; it spoke.” She liked to think of herself as Scheherazade, and in Denys she met her Sultan. In the Kenyan Highlands she encountered two societies, the African and the white settlers’, colorfully imbued with the notions of honor, fatalism, and daring that had always attracted her. Many of the nineteenth-century exotics of Gothic Tales are based, in fact, upon originals met in the semifeudal colonial society, simultaneously raffish and posh, rough and luxurious, around Nairobi.
Her situation, when at the age of forty-six she was at last compelled to return to Denmark, might be described as ignominious. Her marriage long ended, her farm bankrupt and sold to a real-estate developer, her lover recently dead in the crash of his airplane, her body tormented by the complications of Tabes dorsalis, she was received into her mother’s household as a prodigal daughter, a middle-aged adolescent. Setting up shop in her father’s old office, she picked up notebooks and ideas she had been toying with for ten years, while in Africa. Her method of writing was one of accretion, of retellings and fresh inspirations flowing one into the other. She wrote in English and placed her tales in the previous century for the same reason, she said, that she took a pseudonym: “Because … only in that way did I become perfectly free.” The manuscript of Seven Gothic Tales was ready by the spring of 1933 but, rich and strange and free as it was, met difficulty getting into print. Several English publishers rejected it; Thomas Dinesen, however, had befriended an American writer, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and sent his sister’s manuscript to her in Vermont. Miss Canfield was impressed, and urged the book in turn upon her neighbor, Robert Haas, a publisher whose firm later merged with Random House. He published the book in January of 1934, with an introduction by Miss Canfield that memorably begins, “The person who has set his teeth into a kind of fruit new to him, is usually as eager as he is unable to tell you how it tastes.”‡ The new fruit met critical acclaim and, unexpectedly, commercial success as well. The Book-of-the-Month Club printed fifty thousand copies, and was to select books by her five times in the future. This Danish woman who had lived among the English had her breakthrough in the United States, and a special warmth continued to exist between Isak Dinesen and her American audience. Not only were her American royalties much the most munificent, but the reviewers treated her without the note of cavil and suspicion often heard in England and Denmark. When at last the wraithlike author visited the United States in 1959, she told a Danish reporter, “When I compare the American and Danish reviews of my first book I cannot help but think how much better I have been understood and accepted in America than in Denmark.”
That same year, she spoke to another interviewer with what he reported as embarrassment of Seven Gothic Tales. It was “too elaborate,” she said, and had “too much of the author in it.” Now Pauline Kael has taken the occasion of the Meryl Streep movie to tell us, with her customary verve and firmness, that Isak Dinesen’s “baroque stories are lacquered words and phrases with no insides. Some seem meant to be morality tales, but you never get the moral. And the supernatural effects in them aren’t connected to any spirituality—they’re a display of literary armature, of skill. As author, she’s the teller of the tale; nothing is presented more passionately than anything else—she seems to refuse to draw from her own experience.… ‘Seven Gothic Tales’ are a form of distraction; they read as if she had devised them in the fevered atmosphere of all-night debauches.” This verdict echoes the prim censoriousness of the young Danish reviewer Frederick Schyberg, who wrote when the book was new, “There are no normal human beings in Seven Gothic Tales. The erotic life which unfolds in the tales is of the most highly peculiar kind.… There is nothing, the reviewer finds … behind [the author’s] veil, once it is lifted.”
Well, as Dorothy Canfield Fisher advised fifty years ago, “Take a taste, yourself.” Enter a deliciously described world of sharply painted, dramatically costumed heroes and heroines posing, with many a spectacular gesture and eloquent aria, in magnificent landscapes maintained as a kind of huge stage set. This operatic Europe, like opera itself, would call us into largeness. One character is “hurt and disappointed because the world wasn’t a much greater place than it is,” and another says of himself at a moment of crisis, “Too small I have been, too small for the ways of God.” Although Isak Dinesen’s leisurely and ornate anecdotes, which she furnishes with just enough historical touches to make the stage solid, have something in them of the visionary and the artificial, they are not escapist. From the sweeping flood of the first story to the casual and savage murder of the last, they face pain and loss with the brisk familiarity of one who has amply known both, and force us to face them, too. Far from hollow and devoid of a moral, the tales insistently strive to inculcate a moral stance; in this, her fiction suggests that of Hemingway, who thought well enough of her to interrupt his Nobel Prize speech with a regret that she had not received it. Both authors urge upon us a certain style of courage, courage whose stoic acceptances are plumed with what the old Cardinal, in the first Gothic Tale, calls “divine swank.” Dinesen even called this quality “chic,” ascribing it to the costumed Masai warriors who, “daring, and wildly fantastical as they seem,… are unswervingly true to their own nature, and to an immanent ideal.” She also admired, in Africa, the Muslims, whose “moral code consists of hygiene and ideas of honor—for instance they put discretion among their first commandments.”
This admiration of the warrior’s code surprises us in a woman. She was a feminist who included within her ideal of the energizing sexual transaction what is heedless and even hostile in the male half of the sexual dichotomy.§ The three men she most loved—her father, her husband, her lover—all conspicuously failed to shelter her; and she took their desertions as a call to her own largeness. This call, which reverberates throughout her tales in all their abrupt and sternly mysterious turnings, was, it would appear, more easily heard and understood in the land of Emerson and Whitman than in cozily inhabited England and Denmark. America played the role of Africa for an older Europe: a place of dangerous freedom, of natural largeness and of chic, discreet natives. The discretion in Dinesen’s writing, the serene and artful self-concealment even in her memoirs, is an aspect of the personal gallantry which, in the social realm, masked her frightful bouts of pain and debility with the glamorous, heavily made-up, in the end sibylline persona who sought to be entertaining.
The teller of tales would ennoble our emotions and our encounters with a divine fatality. Isak Dinesen wrote that we must take “pride … in the idea God had, when he made us.” She was a theist of a kind (and was much twitted about this by her brother Thomas, a sensible Danish atheist). For there to be “divine swank,” after all, there must be a divinity. She placed these Gothic Tales in the Romantic era, when God, no longer housed in churches and sacred institutions, was thought to be outdoors, in the mountains and sunsets. But e
ven this evaporated divinity appears in the twentieth century too benign to be credible, too bland a guarantor of our inner sense of honor. In “The Dreamers,” the storyteller Mira Jama asserts of God, “To love him truly you must love change, and you must love a joke, these being the true inclinations of his own heart.” Such a deity feels pre-Christian—a vitality at the dark heart of things. One of the many magical atmospheric sentences in “The Poet” runs, “The stillness and silence of the night was filled with a deep life, as if within a moment the universe would give up its secret.” The brand of stoicism which these tales invite us to share is not dispassionately Roman or of the pleasure-denying Protestant variety; it has Viking intoxication and battle-frenzy in it. Intoxication figures frequently in Isak Dinesen’s work, and mercilessness was part of the story-teller’s art as she construed it: the story must pursue its end without undue compassion for its characters. Combat lies closer than compassion to the secret of Seven Gothic Tales, and its exhilaration is their contagious mood.
To Appointment in Samarra,
by John O’Hara
WHEN HE BEGAN TO WRITE THIS NOVEL in mid-December of 1933, John O’Hara was a twenty-eight-year-old, recently divorced journalist distinguished chiefly by the lateness of the hours he kept, the amount of liquor he could absorb, and the number of jobs he had been fired from. He had held and lost jobs with the Pottsville Journal, the Tamaqua Courier, the New York Herald Tribune, Time magazine, The New Yorker, Editor and Publisher, the New York Daily Mirror, the Morning Telegraph, the publicity department of Warner Brothers, the public-relations firm of Benjamin Sonnenberg, and a fledgling Pittsburgh magazine called the Bulletin-Index, of which he was editor for four months. In all of his positions O’Hara showed ability, but some combination of his irregular hours and innate abrasiveness produced an early departure. At The New Yorker, according to the “Talk of the Town” head, B. A. Bergman, O’Hara submitted “some excellent pieces—tightly written, graceful, revealing [but] for reasons I never discovered, Ross took a dislike to O’Hara from the day he was hired and rejected every O’Hara piece I turned in.” The “Talk of the Town” job lasted one month. The New Yorker, however, was O’Hara’s one area of sustained success, as a free-lance contributor; the editors had taken his first piece in 1928 and, thanks in part to Katharine Angell’s fondness for his work, over a hundred pieces thereafter. In early January of 1934 O’Hara wrote Ross, with typical semi-ingratiating cockiness, “I think it would be nice if you were to have a medal struck, or did something else in the way of commemorating what I believe to be a fact: that in the period beginning 1928 I have contributed more pieces to The New Yorker than any other non-staff man.” But The New Yorker’s rates were not enough for anyone, let alone a man of O’Hara’s bibulous and increasingly expensive tastes, to live on: he received fifteen dollars for his first contribution and the going rate was ten cents a word, which amounted to a few hundred dollars a year.
It was Dorothy Parker, evidently, who encouraged the young Pennsylvanian, back in New York after abruptly quitting the Pittsburgh editorship, to concentrate his energy on a full-scale novel about Pottsville. His home town had increasingly figured in O’Hara’s fiction, and among his intended projects was a book of three long stories about it; he had already written “The Doctor’s Son,” based upon his childhood as the oldest son of the dedicated, pugnacious Dr. Patrick O’Hara, and “The Hoffman Estate,” a tale of country-club types hastily written in an unsuccessful attempt to win the Scribner’s Prize Novel award. He planned to add to these a third story about, he wrote his friend Robert Simonds in December of 1932, a “Schuylkill County gangster … a sort of hanger-on at a roadhouse which was occasionally visited by the Pottsville country club set.” Instead, a year later, living in a small eight-dollar-a-week room at the Pickwick Arms Club Residence on East 51st Street near the Third Avenue el, scraping by on occasional free-lance sales, he began a novel with a working title that Parker had given him, having discarded it for a collection of her short stories—The Infernal Grove, after a poem by Blake. By February 12, 1934, he was able to write a synopsis to his brother Tom:
The plot of the novel, which is quite slight, is rather hard to tell, but it concerns a young man and his wife, members of the club set, and how the young man starts off the Christmas 1930 holidays by throwing a drink in the face of a man who has aided him financially. From then on I show how fear of retribution and the kind of life the young man has led and other things contribute to his demise. There are quite a few other characters, some drawn from life, others imaginary, who figure in the novel, but the story is essentially the story of a young married couple and their breakdown in the first year of the depression. I have no illusions about its being the great or the second-great American novel, but it’s my first. And my second will be better. All I care about now is getting it finished, written. I’ll be able to edit and to polish off etc. after I’ve done the labor of setting down what I have to tell. I have done no rewriting up to now and very little editing.
Two months later, on April 9, O’Hara wrote Tom that he had finished the novel: “I’m afraid I’ve muffed the story, but I can’t do anything about it now. Oh, I know there’ll be more work. I know it because I haven’t got the sense of relief that I thought I’d have on finishing it. I’ve been working on it since December, and doing nothing else, and now I have to bat out some New Yorker stuff.”
It is hard to believe he ever got to do much more work—“to edit and to polish off etc.”—for Appointment in Samarra was published with what seems, today, lightninglike speed. Submitted in April, it was out by August and went through three printings. Harcourt, Brace, the publisher, had asked for some cuts reducing sexual explicitness, but even so the novel was attacked for obscenity by Henry Seidel Canby and Sinclair Lewis (“nothing but infantilism—the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn”). However, the book was praised by Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in Esquire, “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvellously well, read Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.” Dorothy Parker’s praise was more epigrammatic and judicious: “Mr. O’Hara’s eyes and ears have been spared nothing, but he has kept in his heart a curious and bitter mercy.”
The “slight” novel, the “muffed” product of less than four months, has lasted. Though O’Hara wrote many more novels and produced amazing quantities of short stories, he never surpassed the artistic effect achieved by Appointment in Samarra. He belongs, with Hawthorne and Hemingway, to the distinguished company of American novelists whose first published novel is generally felt to be their best. Rereading Appointment, I was struck by the extent to which even it displays O’Hara’s besetting weaknesses as a novelist—his garrulity and his indifference to structure. All sorts of irrelevancies stick up, almost like bookmarks, out of this saga of the fall of Julian English. The subplot involving Al Grecco and Ed Charney, for instance, seems a leftover from the earlier three-part intention, the unwritten “Schuylkill County gangster” story; it truly meshes with the rest only momentarily, in the scene at the Stage Coach, and not significantly, since Ed Charney’s revenge upon Julian, like Harry Reilly’s, never has time to arrive, and we don’t know if there would have been any. Though Luther and Irma Fliegler open and close the novel, they virtually disappear in the middle and seem rather inertly to represent the conventional Lutheran middle class that lies in the social scale just below the high-living Englishes. A certain hurry toward the end nips off a number of threads: Harry Reilly, so thoroughly introduced, melts away as a character, and Al Grecco’s provocative early premonition that Caroline English “might be a cheater” comes to nothing. On the other hand, at a number of spots the authorial voice suddenly decides to tell us more than we ask to know about how to drive from Philadelphia to Gibbsville, how a small-city bootlegger works, how the anthracite strike of 1925 affected the coal-region economy, what memberships Dr. William English holds, what Mrs. Waldo Wallace Walke
r wears, and who all does belong to the Gibbsville Club.
Yet none of this gratuitous detail is really deadening, for the complete social portrait of Gibbsville helps explain why Julian English, caught in this narrow world, so feebly resists destruction. Though O’Hara works up some details as to how to run a garage and car agency, Julian seems miscast as a Cadillac dealer, and indeed tells Monsignor Creedon, in the book’s odd moment of Catholic confession, “I never was meant to be a Cadillac dealer or any other kind of dealer.” The priest’s shrewd suggestion that Julian might be a “frustrated literary man” is brushed aside, as it would bring Julian too close to his creator, who wants to see Gibbsville from afar, objectifying into sociological detail the frustrations and rage he experienced in Pottsville.
Appointment in Samarra is, among other things, an Irishman’s revenge on the Protestants who had snubbed him, a book in which O’Hara had taken his own advice to his fellow Pottsville scribe Walter Farquhar: “If you’re going to get out of that God awful town, for God’s sake write something that will make you get out of it. Write something that automatically will sever your connection with the town, that will help you get rid of the bitterness you must have stored up against all those patronizing cheap bastards.” Julian is named English and he throws a drink into Harry Reilly’s “stupid Irish face” after hearing him tell one too many humorous Irish stories; since Julian is O’Hara’s hero and a “high class guy,” the Irish author restrains his animus‖ and gives English the benefit of his own sensitivity, observational powers, and (less attractively) impulsive bellicosity. In the treatment of Julian’s father, Dr. William English, a regional aristocrat and the lord of local medicine, O’Hara’s animus is unrestrained: the senior English is described as, beneath his veneer of correct memberships and public decorum, murderously incompetent. He loves performing surgery on the men injured in mine accidents, yet can safely do it only under the direction of his inferior at the hospital, Dr. Malloy—the name O’Hara gave his own father in the autobiographical “The Doctor’s Son.” Dr. English gets a nurse fired after he overhears her say, “Trephine this afternoon. I hope to God Malloy’s around if English is going to try it.” Though this firing alienates Dr. Malloy, Dr. English, we are dryly told, “continued to do surgery, year after year, and several of the men he trephined lived.” Not only are many hospital deaths on his head, but when his only son commits suicide, Caroline, Julian’s wife, with a brutality just barely in character, accuses him to his face, “You did it.… You made him do it.” Dr. English’s sin seems to consist of offering Julian a role model of small-city propriety and expressing regret—just like Dr. Malloy in “The Doctor’s Son” and O’Hara’s father in real life—that his son refused to follow him into medicine.