Litterbury

So the economy is bad right now; perhaps, it might even be getting worse.

All economic professors and professionals claim that the very worst is behind us, and that while the recession is over, it will continue to feel like one as things improve over a prolonged period of time.

I am not reassured.

There are signs that things are starting to go a little bit haywire as people get increasingly desperate, as now one in eight Americans are on food stamps; one in fifty count their entire household income from food stamps alone.  In my own apartment building, people who could typically make rent so far are starting to have trouble making it work, and a family friend just recently told of a story involving a neighbor, in her very upscale country club residence, who was so distraught for cash that he was set to lose his business and his multi-million dollar home.  He committed suicide.

I’m finding that people who have jobs quietly nod with a tough smirk saying how things will get better soon.  People who don’t have jobs all say that they can’t even remember when it’s been this bad before and they think that it’s only going to get worse.

This is in addition to the concept of ‘recession gardens,’ which, in itself, are a nod to the ‘victory gardens’ of past wartime eras, which took hold this past Summer even at the White House.  Talk of homegrown organic food seemed to be the epitome of the fussy and liberal Bay Area’s progressive streak, and now everyone is starting to take a thoughtful eye to backyards and window boxes with visions of green.

And I noticed something else when I went to Trader Joe’s this past week: my sales receipt didn’t include any sales-tax added on.  The subtotal and total were one and the same, and while a slight relief, it makes one leery to think even the government is lacking enough knowledge on the matter to do little more than offer minor discounts on the basics for life.  It was embarrassing, too, that I was almost giddy and gleeful with pleasure at discovering the result.

My memory was jogged of this past Summer, when both my mom and I had run-up short at the bank and we only had a few bucks to buy food for a holiday weekend until our respective checks cleared days later.  She held up a loaf of bread in either hand and, first, tried to figure out which looked the biggest, and then, second, tried to figure out which was the heaviest and I had said, “So, do you want to weigh it, or what?”

We are, in fact, distinctly middle-class (or were), too poor to cover all the expenses like monthly credit card minimums and to make sure the fridge is fully stocked on a take-it-for-granted basis, and yet too unbelievably wealthy (ha!) to take a further slide into the banana split of poverty’s embrace.  It’s very uncomfortable being stuck, but that’s exactly what it feels like.  Stuck with little to do, and caught out unexpectedly spinning your wheels.

When I look at the small thousands I somehow loaded up with on credit card debt, I’m shocked and unnerved to try and find even an ounce of anything really great to show for it.  That isn’t just my story, mind you, but it’s funnily enough the story of all those boys and girls on Wall Street, too.  It seems that the profits and the progress from a whole decade’s worth of trades has been eroded and lost, and we’re no better off now than we were roughly ten years ago.  The American Dream was apparently unfulfilling and it cost a whole lot, too.  Keeping up with the Jones’ never seemed so silly as it does now.

It’s all got me in the mood for Depression-era books, however, and much of that school of thought happens to be right up my alley: roman noirs and hardboiled writers who wrote with a tough-but-tender sentiment that would define a literary landscape for a bygone time; a time which is now stoically familiar.  John O’Hara published one of the great American novels in 1934 with Appointment In Samarra, and it would prove to be a major addition to that period and cycle.

The novel’s title is actually a reference to a play, Sheppy, by W. Somerset Maugham, and is included as a sort of epigraph or frontpiece in my volume, though I’m not clear if it appeared in editions that were originally sanctioned by the author or published during his lifetime.

* * *

Death Speaks:

There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.  She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate.  I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.  The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.  Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise.  I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.

- W. Somerset Maugham

* * *

Taking place in December of 1930, the book starts a little more than a year after the great stock market crash of 1929, which incidentally happened October 29th, just in time for Halloween.  O’Hara described the premise of the novel, in a letter to his brother, as “essentially the story of a young married couple and their breakdown in the first year of the depression.”  One half of that couple is a Mr. Julian English, who in a matter of days, is consumed with the nagging unease and desperate fears that would plague and define his generation.  Small town life proves suffocating and stifling, and it all begins to reel when everyone becomes casually observant to the fact that they’re just a bit on the brink.

The back of the book says that ‘in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction,’ but that’s only a partial take on the narrative itself.  It’s a novel set in 1930 around a thirty-something set, as the birthright and promise to the twentieth-century wouldn’t quite go as anyone imagined, but then it never does.

The Roaring Twenties gave way to a severe reality check that many didn’t see coming, and early life in the new century would be bookended by major world wars.  The story is a youthful one, and brash in it’s sexuality (censored before and after it’s publication), but it also has a masterful ability to be fondly reminiscent when the book’s own status and the lives of it’s characters could barely yet be qualified into existence.

(Portrait of the author, credited to C. J. Pujol, referenced to be courtesy of Pennsylvania State University.)

Perhaps that’s why I find the book so provocative and obviously timely.  To find a great American novel at a time when the great American dream is being questioned as to it’s basis and fact, is somehow less than comforting, but reassuring in it’s own melancholy.

Make no mistake about it here: life is a hell of a lot more complicated now than it was back in the nineteen-thirties.  To just even get a sense of how ridiculous American life has become, take a look at healthcare, or try to cut through all the red-tape of just securing a job nowadays even when faced with ‘now hiring’ signs.  Credit cards proved to be a disastrous exercise, too, and could wind up being the next shoe to drop in an ongoing financial mess.

You see, I like the book, not because it’s so immersed in a timely topic of national strife, but in spite of the fact, as it’s going back to a time that was definitely troubled, but one that also made do with a whole lot less.  It’s the simplicity of reexamining what defined the promise of a modern America, not by a lot of simpering flag-waving or ego-centric cries, but by embracing a proud legacy of keeping your chin up in the worst of lows and letting your own pride be exemplified by that sense of the Incomparable You.

John O’Hara was sure one hell of a good writer, and this, his first novel, could probably never find an equal, though he would try with a prolific literary career.  His writing is tough and sweet, funny and sarcastic, but there’s no getting around the fact that the story is a little missive to break one’s heart.

Julian English is just trying to traverse the American Dream as best as he knows how, and he just wants a highball to send it off right; don’t even get me started on how Samarra is a place in Iraq and that this is being written circa January, 2010.

* * *

Appointment In Samarra, by John O’ Hara, copyright 1934

Vintage Books edition published July 2003, 269 pages,

featuring an introduction by John Updike