by O. Henry
In the second stage of an O. Henry story the lines begin suddenly to dip toward a plot or plan. Still water becomes running water. It is the stage of the first guess. Background and character, dialogue and incident, sparkle and sly thrust, aspiration and adventure, seem to be spelling out something definite and resultant. You cannot guess the end but you cannot help trying. In terms of his life this was O. Henry’s second or Texas period. Had he died at the age of twenty, before leaving Greensboro, he would have left a local memory and a local cult, but they would have remained local. A few would have said that with wider opportunities he would have been heard from in a national way. But when letters began to come from Texas telling of his life on the ranch and later of his adventures in local journalism, and when “W. S. Porter” signed to a joke or skit or squib in Truth or Up to Date or the Detroit Free Press became more and more a certificate of the worth while, those of us who remained in the home town began to prophesy with some assurance that he would soon join the staff of some great metropolitan newspaper or magazine and win national fame as a cartoonist or travelling correspondent.
The third stage of an O. Henry story is reached when you find that your first forecast is wrong. This is the stage of the first surprise. Something has happened that could not or would not have happened if the story was to end as you at first thought. You must give up the role of prophet or at least readjust your prophecy to the demands of an ending wholly different from that at first conjectured. This stage in the life was reached in 1898, when misfortune, swift, pitiless, and seemingly irretrievable, overtook him. His life had hitherto developed uniformly, like the advance of a rolling ball. It had permitted and even invited some sort of conjecture as to his ultimate place in the work of the world. But now his destiny seemed as incalculable as the blind movements of a log in the welter of the sea.
The fourth and last stage in an O. Henry story, the stage of the second surprise, is marked by light out of darkness. Lines of character and characterization, of hap or mishap, converge to a triumphant conclusion.
We are surprised, happily surprised, and then surprised again that we should have been surprised at first. Says Nicholas Vachel Lindsay:
He always worked a triple-hinged surprise
To end the scene and make one rub his eyes.
The end was inherent in the beginning, however, though we did not see it. But the greatest surprise and the happiest surprise is found in the last stage of O. Henry’s life. This was his New York period, the culmination of tendencies and impulses that we now know had stirred mightily within him from the beginning. Eight years had passed, however, years of constant and constantly deepening development, and not a word had drifted back to the home town from him or about him since 1898. His pencil sketches were still affectionately cherished and had grown in historic value as well as in personal significance as the years had passed. They furnished a bond of common memory and happy association wherever Greensboro men foregathered, though the fun and admiration that they occasioned were mellowed by the thought of what might have been. Now came the discovery, through a photograph published in a New York magazine, that O. Henry, variously styled “the American Kipling,” “the American de Maupassant,” “the American Gogol,” “our Fielding a la mode,” “the Bret Harte of the city,” “the Y. M. C. A. Boccaccio,” “the Homer of the Tenderloin,” “the 20th century Haroun Al-Raschid,” “the discoverer and interpreter of the romance of New Yrork,” “the greatest living master of the short story,” was Will Porter of Greensboro. No story that he has written quite equals this in reserved surprise or in real and permanent achievement.
The technique of the story, however, is the technique of the life. But the life is more appealing than the story.
CHAPTER TWO
VOGUE
WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER, better known as O. Henry, was born in Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina, September 11, 1802. He died in New York City, June 5, 1910. Before the Porter family Bible was found, his birth year varied from 1807 to 1804, from “about the close of the war” to a question mark. There is no doubt that O. Henry used the author’s traditional right to mystify his readers in regard to his age and to the unessential facts of his life. An admirer once wrote to him begging to know by return mail whether he was a man or a woman. But the stamped envelope enclosed for reply remains still unused. “If you have any applications from publishers for photos of myself,” he wrote to Mr. Witter Bynner, “or ‘slush’ about the identity of O. Henry, please refuse. Nobody but a concentrated idiot would write over a pen-name and then tack on a lot of twaddle about himself. I say this because I am getting some letters from reviewers and magazines wanting pictures, etc., and I am positively declining in every case.”
There has thus grown up a sort of O. Henry myth.
“It threatens to attain,” said the New York Sun five years after his death, “the proportions of the Stevenson myth, which was so ill-naturedly punctured by Henley. It appears to be inevitably the fate of ‘the writers’ writer’ — and O. Henry comes under this heading notwithstanding his work’s universal appeal — to disintegrate into a sort of grotesque myth after his death. As a matter of fact Sydney Porter was, in a sort of a way, a good deal of a myth before he died. He was so inaccessible that a good many otherwise reasonable people who unsuccessfully sought to penetrate his cordon and to force their way into his cloister drew bountifully upon their imaginations to save their faces and to mask their failure.”
But however mythical his personality, O. Henry’s work remains the most solid fact to be reckoned with in the history of twentieth-century American literature. “More than any author who ever wrote in the United States,” says Mr. Stephen Leacock, “O. Henry is an American writer. And the time is coming, let us hope, when the whole English-speaking world will recognize in him one of the great masters of modern literature.” If variety and range of appeal be an indication, O. Henry would seem to be approaching the time thus prophesied. He has won the three classes of readers, those who work with their brains, those who work with their hands, and those who mingle the two in varying but incalculable proportions. The ultra-conservatives and the ultra-radicals, the critical and the uncritical, the bookmen and the business men, the women who serve and those who only stand and wait, all have enlisted under his banner. “The men and women whom I have in mind,” writes Mr. W. J. Ghent, author of “Socialism and Success,” “are social reformers, socialists, radicals, and progressives of various schools, practical and theoretical workers in the fields of social and political science. Some of these persons read Marx; most of them read H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy; but all of them are much more likely to read bluebooks and the Survey than the current fiction which contains no ‘message.’ Yet it was just among these persons, so far as my individual acquaintance goes, that O. Henry established himself as a writer almost at the beginning of his career.”
“When I was a freshman in Harvard College,” writes Mr. John S. Reed in the American Magazine, “I stood one day looking into the window of a bookstore on Harvard Square at a new volume of O. Henry. A quietly dressed, unimpressive man with a sparse, dark beard came up and stood beside me. Said he, suddenly: ‘Have you read the new one?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Neither have I. I’ve read all the others, though.’
‘He’s great, don’t you think?’ ‘Bully,” replied the quietly dressed man; ‘let’s go in and buy this one.’” The quietly dressed man was William James.
A writer is not often called a classic until at least a half century has set its seal upon his best work. But Mr. Edward Garnett, the English author, reviewer, and critic, admits to “the shelf of my prized American classics” seven authors. They are Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Stephen Crane, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Mr. W. D. Ho wells, and O. Henry, though O. Henry published his first book in 1904. Professor Henry Seidel Canby, author of “The Short Story in English,” thinks that the technique of the short story has undergone marked changes in recent years, “especially since O. Henry took the
place of Kipling as a literary master.” Mr. James Lane Allen believes that the golden age of the American short story closed about 1895. “The best of the American short stories,” he says, “written during that period [1870-1895], outweigh in value those that have been written later — with the exception of those of one man . . . the one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period as a world within himself, as much apart from any one else as are Hawthorne and Poe.”
Mr. Henry James Forman, author of “In the Foot prints of Heine,” finds also that, with one exception, there has been a decline in the short story as a distinct genre. “Publishers still look upon it somewhat askance,’’ he writes, “as on one under a cloud, and authors, worldly-wise, still cling to the novel as the unquestioned leader. But here and there a writer now boldly brings forth a book of short tales, and the publisher does his part. The stigma of the genre is wearing off, and for the rehabilitation one man is chiefly responsible. Mr. Sydney Porter, the gentleman who, in the language of some of his characters, is ‘denounced’ by the euphonious pen-name of O. Henry, has breathed new life into the short story.” After a tentative comparison with Frangois Villon, Dickens, and Maupassant, Mr. Forman concludes: “It is idle to compare O. Henry with anybody. No talent could be more original or more delightful. The combination of technical excellence with whimsical sparkling wit, abundant humour, and a fertile invention is so rare that the reader is content without comparisons.” The Nation, after indicating the qualities that seem to differentiate him from Kipling and Mark Twain, summarizes in a single sentence: “O. Henry is actually that rare bird of which we so often hear false reports — a born story teller.”
Professor William Lyon Phelps in “The Advance of the English Novel” puts O. Henry among the five greatest American short story writers. “No writer of distinction,” he continues, “has, I think, been more closely identified with the short story in English than O. Henry. Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Stevenson, Kipling attained fame in other fields; but although Porter had his mind fully made up to launch what he hoped would be the great American novel, the veto of death intervened, and the many volumes of his ‘complete works’ are made up of brevities. The essential truthfulness of his art is what gave his work immediate recognition, and accounts for his rise from journalism to literature. There is poignancy in his pathos; desolation in his tragedy; and his extraordinary humour is full of those sudden surprises that give us delight. Uncritical readers have never been so deeply impressed with O. Henry as have the professional, jaded critics, weary of the old trick a thousand times repeated, who found in his writings a freshness and originality amounting to genius.”
There is no doubt that the jaded critics extended a warm welcome to O. Henry, but that they were more hospitable than the uncritical admits of question. For several years I have made it a practice in all sorts of un- academic places, where talk was abundant, to lead the conversation if possible to O. Henry. The result has been a conviction that O. Henry is to-day not less “the writers’ writer” but still more the people’s writer.
Travelling a few years ago through a Middle Western State, during an intolerable drought, I fell into conversation with a man the burden of whose speech was “I’ve made my pile and now I’m going away to live.” He was plainly an unlettered man but by no means ignorant. He talked interestingly, because genuinely, until he put the usual question: “What line of goods do you carry?” When I had to admit my unappealing profession his manner of speech became at once formal and distant. “Professor,” he said, after a painful pause, “Emerson is a very elegant writer, don’t you think so?” I agreed and also agreed, after another longer and more painful pause, that Prescott was a very elegant writer. These two names plus “elegant” seemed to exhaust his available supply of literary allusion. “Did you ever read O. Henry?” I asked. At the mention of the name his manner changed instantly and his eyes moistened. Leaning far over he said: “Professor, that’s literature, that’s literature, that’s real literature.” He was himself again now. The mask of affectation had fallen away, and the appreciation and knowledge of O. Henry’s work that he displayed, the affection for the man that he expressed, the grateful indebtedness that he was proud to acknowledge for a kindlier and more intelligent sympathy with his fellowmen showed plainly that O. Henry was the only writer who had ever revealed the man’s better nature to himself.
The incident is typical. The jaded critics and the short story writers read O. Henry and admire him: they find in him what they want. Those who do not criticise and do not write read him and love him: they find in him what they need — a range of fancy, an exuberance of humour, a sympathy, an understanding, a knowledge of the raw material of life, an ability to interpret the passing in terms of the permanent, an insight into individual and institutional character, a resolute and pervasive desire to help those in need of help, in a word a constant and essential democracy that they find in no other short story writer. But the deeper currents in O. Henry’s work can be traced only through a wider knowledge of O. Henry the man.
CHAPTER THREE
ANCESTRY
THE O. Henry myth could not forever withstand the curiosity and inquiry begotten by the increasing acclaim that the stories were beginning to receive. O. Henry himself must have recognized the futility of attempting a further mystification, for there is evident in his later years a willingness and even a desire to throw off the mask of the assumed name and thus to link his achievement with the name and fortunes of his family. He had sought freedom and self-expression through his writings rather than fame. In fact, he shunned publicity with the timidity of a child. “What used to strike me most forcibly in O. Henry,” writes Mr. John H. Barry, who knew him from the beginning of his career in New York, “was his distinction of character. To those he knew and liked he revealed himself as a man of singular refinement. He had beautiful, simple manners, a low voice, and a most charming air of self-effacement. For the glory of being famous he cared little. He had a dislike of being lionized. Lion-hunting women filled him with alarm. In fact, he was afraid of nearly all women.”
But fame had come and with it came a vein of ancestral reminiscence and a return in imagination to the days of childhood. His marriage, in 1907, to the sweetheart and the only sweetheart of the Greensboro years, his visits to Mrs. Porter’s home in Asheville, and his affectionate allusions to his father and mother show plainly a tendency to relax the cordon about him and to re-knit the ties and associations of youth. O. Henry was becoming Will Porter again. Even the great American novel, of which Professor Phelps speaks, was to be in the nature of an autobiography. “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” the last complete story that he wrote, was also the most autobiographical. “It was written,” says Dr. Pinkney Herbert, of Asheville, “with the aid of my medical books. Sometimes he would take them to his office and again he would sit in my outer office.” It was heralded by the magazine announcement, “If you want to get well, read this story.” But O. Henry was dead before the story was published. In it he speaks of his ancestors who blended the blood of North and South :
“It’s the haemoglobin test,” he [the doctor] explained. “The color of your blood is wrong.” “Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so”
His forebears were again in his mind when, wrenched with pain but not bowed, he went to the hospital in New York from which he knew he would not return alive. Will Irwin describes the scene as follows :*
Then as he stepped from the elevator to the ward, a kind of miracle came over him. Shy, sensitive, guarding the bare nerve- ends of his soul with an affectation of flippancy, his gait had always been furtive, his manner shrinking. Now he walked nobly, his head up, his chest out, his feet firm — walked as earls walked to the scaffold. Underneath all that democracy of life and love of the raw human heart which made him reject the prosperous and love the chatter of car-conducto
rs and shop-girls — that quality which made Sydney Porter “O. Henry” — lay pride in his good Southern blood. It was as though he summoned all this pride of blood to help him fight the last battle like a man and a Sydney.
Thus
After Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched.
William Sydney Porter was named after his mother’s father, William Swaim, and his father’s father, Sidney Porter.f He was always called Will Porter in the early days except by his grandmother on his father’s side who occasionally called him Sydney. He never saw either of his grandfathers, both dying long before he was born. But William Swaim, his mother’s father, who died in 1835, left his impress upon the State and was, so far as can be learned, the only journalist or writer among O. Henry’s ancestors. The ink in O. Henry’s blood came from this Quaker grandparent, *”O. Henry, Man and Writer” (in the Cosmopolitan, September, 1910).
tO.Henry changed thespellingofhis middle name fromSidney to Sydney in 1898. See page 169l whose ancestor, also William Swaim, emigrated from Holland about the year 1700 and is buried in Richmond, Staten Island, his descendants having moved to North Carolina at least ten years before the Revolutionary War. William Swaim, O. Henry’s grandfather, did not found the Greensboro Patriot, of which he became editor in 1827, but he had the good sense to change its name from the ponderous Patriot a?id Greensboro Palladium to the simpler title that it has since borne. He does not seem to me to have been as able or as well balanced a man as Lyndon Swaim who, strangely enough, though not ascertainably related, was soon to succeed William Swaim both as editor and as husband and thus to become the only father that O. Henry’s mother knew.