Appointment in Samarra

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1. self-destructive behavior—Fiction.    2. Ethnic relations—Fiction.    3. Suicide victims—Fiction. 4. Married people—Fiction.    5. Young men—Fiction.    I. Title.

  PS3529.H29A8 2013

  813’.52—DC23

  2012049156

Originally published in 1934, Appointment in Samarra is still the only American novel I know that begins with a scene of a married couple—Luther and Irma Fliegler—having sex and on Christmas morning, no less. Later in the book, another married couple—Julian English, the novel’s protagonist, and his wife, Caroline—make love in the middle of Christmas afternoon. Julian has been dispatched on a disagreeable errand, and Caroline rewards him by waiting in their bedroom in a black lace negligee she calls her “whoring gown.” About their lovemaking, the novel says, “she was as passionate and as curious, as experimental and joyful as ever he was.”

That women are sexual creatures every bit as much as men is hardly news, but in 1934 it was news in fiction, and some readers found the sexual frankness of Appointment offensive. (“Nothing but infantilism,” the critic Henry Seidel Canby wrote in the Saturday Review, calling the book “the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.”) Before O’Hara, sex in American novels—polite novels, anyway—was mostly adulterous, not something that proper married women engaged in, or if they did, they weren’t known to enjoy it. The sexual needs of women, apart from pleasing their husbands or their lovers, went on to become one of O’Hara’s great themes, and in later novels, like A Rage to Live and Lovey Childs, he rode it like a hobbyhorse.

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