We All Have an Appointment in Samarra

There’s more to Somerset Maugham’s classic fable than meets the eye.

Minister Abbey on the Isle of Sheppey, UK. Sheppey never makes it back to his birthplace, as he has a call with Death. Colin Park/CC BY-SA 2.0

For much of his long life, English author Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was wildly popular with the public. He first attracted attention with his plays, but it was his off-stage fiction—short stories like “Rain” and novels like “Of Human Bondage”—that won him worldwide acclaim and made him one of the most famous authors of the 20th century. Hollywood produced successful films of both these stories, as well as many others, which added to his renown. Even after his death, movies based on his work, like “The Painted Veil” and “The Razor’s Edge,” proved to be box office hits.

However, the scorn showered on Maugham by many critics during his lifetime, who judged his work as second-rate and lowbrow, have taken the shine off that popularity. Far fewer people read Maugham these days. Far fewer still have heard of Maugham’s last play, his 1933 “Sheppey.”

Yet within that satiric comedy is one of the most famous passages of 20th-century literature. Read this paragraph once, and you’re unlikely to forget it.

A portrait of Somerset Maugham, 1934, by Carl Van Vechten. Library of Congress. (Public Domain)  

Death Speaks

Joseph Miller, nicknamed “Sheppey” for his birthplace, the Isle of Sheppey, wins a small fortune in the lottery. From that point on, those who know him—his wife, his daughter, the owner of the salon where he works as a hairdresser, and others—want a piece of the action. Fearing that Sheppey is wasting the money on charity and on the possible purchase of a piece of land on the island, they find a psychiatrist who, after meeting with Sheppey, declares this witty, simple man mentally incompetent.

At the play’s end, before anyone can act on the psychiatrist’s diagnosis and have Sheppey committed, Death pays him a visit. She soon reveals that she has come to take him away. Sheppey first considers it a joke, then a mistake, and finally a relief. At one point, he says to Death, “I wish now I’d gone down to the Isle of Sheppey when the doctor advised it. You wouldn’t ‘ave thought of looking for me there,” to which Death replies:

“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 marketplace 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.”

The remains of the Virgin Palace in Samarra are still accessible to visitors to this city north of Baghdad, in what is now modern-day Iraq. Safa.daneshvar/CC BY-SA 4.0

A Master at Work

No one knows for certain where Maugham picked up this fable. Some attribute it to an old Arabic folk tale. In an article titled “The history of the epigraph from Appointment in Samarra,” an anonymous writer examines several possible sources. They range from the Babylonian “Talmud,” to a story told by the Persian poet Rumi, to Jean Cocteau’s 1923 novel “Le Grand Ecart.”

Whatever its origins, Maugham took this story and, craftsman of prose that he was, made it his own. With only seven sentences and few adjectives, he gives readers a masterpiece of brevity and concision. There are no extraneous clarifications, no explaining why only the servant and his master in the marketplace see Death, and no description of the relationship and distance between the cities of Samarra and Baghdad.

The thrice-repeated “threatening gesture,” initiated by the servant, comes naturally to the lips of both the merchant and Death. The prose is as clean and pure as the desert surrounding Samarra.

That last sentence of Death’s brief story, a tale I’ve paraphrased to a dozen friends and family members, lands like a fist to the gut. It takes the breath away. After hearing it, Sheppey himself “gives a little shudder” and says, “D’you mean there’s no escaping you?” Death’s answer is blunt: “No.”

Not Your Typical Fable

In their textbook “Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama,” editors X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia label Death’s words to Sheppey a fable, which they define as “a brief story that sets forth some pointed statement of truth.”

When we hear the word fable, most of us in the West likely think of Aesop and his short, punchy stories that end with a moral. A rabbit mocks a turtle for his slow pace, the turtle challenges the rabbit to a race, the overconfident rabbit lies down for a nap and wakes too late to catch the turtle before he reaches the finish line. The moral of the story: “The race is not always to the swift.”

Instructive and tidy. Aesop’s lesson is clear.

Illustration of “The Hare and the Tortoise” by E.J. Detmold. Public Domain

“The Appointment in Samarra,” however, is messy. It raises some profound questions. Is our death—its cause, its precise time and place—fixed in some celestial appointment calendar? That question can’t really be answered except by religious faith. Are we creatures of fate and destiny, or is the universe, which otherwise abides by so many physical laws, a willy-nilly contraption heedless of human kismet? Again, a question without an ironclad answer.

Under certain conditions, of course, many people believe and behave as if some invisible hand is at work in their lives. Soldiers in battle sometimes speak of the unavoidable bullet with their name on it. The man who escapes a terrible accident, like a car crash, will sometimes credit a higher power for his rescue, and his friends will say, “It just wasn’t his time.”

Like Maugham’s servant, most of us try to escape death if we can. Perceiving defeat, soldiers run for their lives from a battlefield, hoping to fight another day. A man afflicted with a brain tumor throws the dice and elects to undergo surgery and treatment with less than a 50 percent chance of success. Others retreat mentally and emotionally by thrusting all thoughts of death from the mind. Like Sheppey, they are surprised when she knocks on the door.

Acceptance

Of course, Maugham has no answers himself as to whether our appointment with Death is preordained, but he does offer a code of behavior for when Death does pay a call. Sheppey manufactures all sorts of excuses to avoid setting out on his journey with Death, ranging from complaints of fatigue to being unable to locate his boots. Yet at the end, he accepts his situation and even keeps his sense of humor.

When Death tells him that they’ll exit the house by the door, Sheppey replies: “That seems rather tame. I thought we’d fly out of the window or pop up the chimney. Something spectacular, you know.”

View of a Somerset Maugham mural on the side of Perry Law Solicitors on Oxford Street, Canterbury, England. Robert Lamb/CC BY-SA 2.0

The moral to Maugham’s fable? Before his 1946 championship match with Billy Conn, heavyweight boxer Joe Louis said, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” Put that pronoun in the second person, and we have our moral.

“The Appointment in Samarra” tells us we can’t hide from death when our time has come, but the play reveals another side to the story.  Sheppey calmly and matter-of-factly argues against going with Death, maintaining a light touch in their conversation. Of course, Sheppey loses this debate. As he leaves the house escorted by Death, he stops just inside the door and speaks his last words in the play: “I'll just put out the light. No point running up an electric light bill.”

An ordinary act by an ordinary man. And yet.

In the movie “Gladiator,” when facing his archenemy the Emperor Commodus, Gen. Maximus says of courage: “I knew a man who once said, ‘Death smiles at us all. All we can do is smile back.’”

Sheppey smiled back.

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