Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  There are men, says O. Henry, in one of his vivid characterizations, to whom life is “a reversible coat, seamy on both sides.” His had been seamy on only one side; the inner side was still intact. The dream and the vision had remained with him. He had suffered much, but the texture of life still seemed sound to him.

  There was no sense of disillusionment. No friend had failed him; no friend ever failed him. So far from losing interest in life, he was rather re-dedicated to it.

  Nothing so testifies to the innate nobleness of O. Henry’s nature as the utter absence of bitterness in his disposition after the three years in Columbus. These years had done their work, but it was constructive, not destructive. His charity was now as boundless as the air and his sympathy with suffering, especially when the sufferer was seemingly down and out, as prompt and instinctive as the glance of the eye. He was talking to a friend once on the streets of New York when a beggar approached and asked for help. O. Henry took a coin from his pocket, shielded it from the view of his friend, and slipped it into the beggar’s hand, saying, “Here’s a dollar. Don’t bother us any more.” The man walked a few steps away, examined the coin, and seemed uncertain what to do. Then he came slowly back. “Mister,” he said, “you were good to me and I don’t want to take advantage of you. You said this was a dollar. It’s a twenty-dollar gold piece.” O. Henry turned upon him indignantly: “Don’t you think I know what a dollar is? I told you not to come back. Get along!” He then continued his conversation, but was plainly mortified lest his friend should have detected his ruse. A woman whom he had helped over many rough places in New York said: “ His compassion for suffering was infinite. He used to say’ I know how it is.’ That was his gift. He had a genius for friendship.’’ The first step in putting the past irrevocably behind him was to write under an assumed name. The pen- name of O. Henry may have been thought of while he was in New Orleans; it may have been suggested by the names found in a New Orleans daily, the Times- Democrat or the Picayune. O. Henry, I believe, is reported to have said as much. But the evidence is that he did not adopt and use the name until he found himself in prison. When the S. S. McClure Company wrote to him about “The Miracle of Lava Canon” (see page 124), he had been out of New Orleans nearly a year and was never to see the city again, but he was addressed as W. S. Porter and the story was published as W. S. Porter’s. On April 25, 1898, the day on which he arrived in Columbus, the S. S. McClure Company wrote to him in Austin, addressing him as Sydney Porter. It was his first change of signature and was adopted in the month between his conviction and his commitment. It was also the name to be engraved upon his visiting cards in New York. But after reaching Columbus, not before, he took the pen-name O. Henry and kept it to the end.*

  * So far as I can discover, only three stories were signed Sydney Porter and these are not reproduced in O. Henry’s collected works. They were “The Cactus” and “Round the Circle,” both published in Everybody’s for October, 1902, and “Hearts and Hands,” published in Everybody’s for December of the same year. Other names occasionally signed were Olivier Henry, S. H. Peters, James L. Bliss (once), T. B. Dowd, and Howard Clark.

  One of the most interesting odds and ends found among O. Henry’s belongings is a small notebook used by him in prison. In it he jotted down the names of his stories and the magazines to which he sent them. It is not complete, the first date being October 1, 1900. It contains, therefore, no mention of “ Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking,” which appeared in McClures Magazine for December, 1899, or of “Georgia’s Ruling,” to which he alludes in the letter to Mrs. Roach (see page 162). Of the stories now grouped into books, these two were the first written. The stories listed in the prison notebook and now republished in book form are, in chronological order, “An Afternoon Miracle,”* “Money Maze,” “No Story,” “A Fog in Santone,” “A Blackjack Bargainer,” “The Enchanted Kiss,” “Hygeia at the Solito,” “Rouge et Noir,” “The Duplicity of Hargraves,” and “The Marionettes.”

  *This is a re-shaping of his first story, “The Miracle of Lava Canon.”

  These twelve stories, three of which were picked as among O. Henry’s best in the plebiscite held by the Bookman, June, 1914, show a range of imagination, a directness of style, and a deftness of craftsmanship to which little was to be added. In the silent watches of the night, when the only sound heard was “the occasional sigh or groan from the beds which were stretched before him in the hospital ward or the tramp of the passing guard,” O. Henry had come into his own. He had passed from journalism to literature. He had turned a stumbling-block into a stepping-stone. And his mother’s graduating essay, “The Influence of Misfortune on the Gifted,” written a half century before, had received its strangest and most striking fulfilment.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FINDING HIMSELF IN NEW YORK

  ON JULY 24, 1901, the day of his liberation, O. Henry went to Pittsburg where his daughter and her grandparents were then living. Mr. and Mrs. Roach had moved from Austin immediately after the trial. Mr. Roach was now the manager of the Iron Front Hotel in Pittsburg, and here O. Henry improvised an office in which he secluded himself and wrote almost continuously. The stories that had issued from the prison in Columbus had gone first to New Orleans and had been re-mailed there. Now the stories were sent direct from Pittsburg.

  The call or rather invitation to New York came in the spring of 1902. Mr. Gilinan Hall, associate editor of Everybody’s Magazine but at that time associate editor of Ainslee’s, had written an appreciative letter to O. Henry before the prison doors had opened. The letter was directed, of course, to New Orleans where the stories were thought to originate. “The stories that he submitted to Duffy and myself,” said Mr. Hall, “both from New Orleans and Pittsburg were so excellent that at least the first seven out of eight were immediately accepted. For these first stories we gave him probably seventy-five dollars each.” O. Henry did not go to New York under contract. He went because Mr. Hall, quick to discover merit and unhappy till he has extended a helping hand, urged him to come.

  New York needed him and he needed New York. How great the need was on both sides it is not likely that Mr. Hall or Mr. Duffy or O. Henry himself knew. During the eight years of his stay, however, O. Henry was to get closer to the inner life of the great city and to succeed better in giving it a voice than any one else had done. To O. Henry this last quest of “What’s around the corner,” confined now to a city that was a world within itself, was to be his supreme inspiration. Very soon he found that he could not work outside of New York. “I could look at these mountains a hundred years,” he said to Mrs. Porter in Asheville, “and never get an idea, but just one block downtown and I catch a sentence, see something in a face — and I’ve got my story.” If ever in American literature the place and the man met, they met when O. Henry strolled for the first time along the streets of New York.

  “Of the writing men and women of the newer generation,” says Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice,* “the men and women whose trails are the subject of these papers, there are many who have staked claims to certain New *See “The New York of the Novelists” (the Bookman, New York, October, 1915).

  York streets or quarters. There has been but one conqueror of Alexander-like ambitions, that is, of course, the late O. Henry, and Sydney Porter’s name will naturally appear again and again in these and in ensuing papers. To north, east, south, and west, stretch his trails; to north, east, south, and west, he wandered like a modern Haroun al Rascliid. And like a conqueror he rechristened the city to suit his whimsical humour. At one moment it is his ‘Little Old Bagdad- on-the-Subway’; at another, ‘The City of Too Many Caliphs’; at another, ‘Noisyville-on-the-Hudson’; or, ‘ Wolfville-on-the-Subway’; or, ‘The City of Chameleon Changes.’”

  The acceptance of the invitation to come to New York without a definite engagement is evidence that O. Henry had at last gained confidence in himself as a writer. This confidence was a fruit of the years spent in Columbus. Without faith i
n himself no power of persuasion could, I think, have induced him to launch himself in a city where he had not only no assured position but no friends or acquaintances. Like Childe Roland’s acceptance of the challenge on the occasion of his memorable first visit to the Dark Tower, O. Henry’s acceptance of the invitation to come to New York was in itself the pledge of ultimate victory. It is certain that he took with him to New York short story material not yet worked up, but that he had any definite plan of publication, any particular plots that could be more easily completed in the more favourable atmosphere of a great city, is not likely. It is more probable that the desire to get into the game and the consciousness that he could play it now or never, if given a chance, were the ruling forces in the decision. The passion for self-expression which began in his earliest youth had grown with every later experience, and there was now added the determination, come what might, to give his daughter the best education possible. The road lay through the short story with New York as his workshop.

  Nobody except the family trio in Pittsburg and the editors and publishers of Ainslees Magazine knew that O. Henry was going to New York. He had spent a day or two in the city before he called at Duane and William streets to make himself known. “As happens in these matters,” writes Mr. Richard Duffy,* “whatever mind picture Gilman Hall or I had formed of him from his letters, his handwriting, his stories, vanished before the impression of the actual man. To meet him for the first time you felt his most notable quality to be reticence, not a reticence of social timidity, but a reticence of deliberateness. If you also were observing, you would soon understand that his reticence proceeded from the fact that civilly yet masterfully he was taking in every item of the ‘y°u’ being presented to him to the accom * See the Bookman, New York, October, 1913.

  paniment of convention’s phrases and ideas, together with the ‘y°u’ behind this presentation. It was because he was able thus to assemble and sift all the multifarious elements of a personality with sleight-of-hand swiftness that you find him characterising a person or a neighbourhood in a sentence or two; and once I heard him characterise a list of editors he knew each in a phrase.”

  No one in New Y^ork came to know him better or felt a warmer affection for him than Mr. Gilman Hall. “I was sure,” said Mr. Hall, “that he had a past, though he did not tell me of it and I did not inquire into it. It was not till after his death that I learned of the years spent in Columbus. I used to notice, however, that whenever we entered a restaurant or other public place together he would glance quickly around him as if expecting an attack. This did not last long, however. I thought that he had perhaps killed some one in a ranch fight, for he told me that he had lived on a ranch in Texas. This inference was strengthened by finding that he was a crack shot with a pistol, being very fond of shooting-galleries as well as of bowling alleys. But when I found that he did not carry a pistol, I began to doubt the correctness of my theory.”

  Mr. Duffy relates that he found O. Henry a man with whom you could sit for a long time and feel no necessity for talking, though a passerby would often evoke from him a remark that later reappeared as the basis of a story. “Any one who endeavoured to question him about himself,” continues Mr. Duffy, “would learn very little, especially if he felt he was being examined as a4literary’ exhibit; although when he was in the humour he would give you glimpses of his life in Greensboro and on the ranch to which he had gone as a young man, because he had friends there and because he was said to be delicate in the chest. He would never, however, tell you ‘the story of his life’ as the saying is, but merely let you see some one or some happening in those days gone by that might fit in well with the present moment, for always he lived emphatically in the present, not looking back to yesterday, not very far ahead toward to-morrow. For instance, I first heard of a doctor in Greensboro, who was his uncle, I believe, and something of a character to O. Henry at least, when I inquired about a story he was writing, — how it was coming along. Then he told me of the doctor who, when asked about any of his patients, how they, Mr. Soandso or Mrs. Soandso, were getting along, would invariably reply with omniscience: ‘Oh, Mrs. Soandso is progressing!’ But as O. Henry said: ‘He never explained which way the patient was progressing, toward better or worse.’ It was here in Greensboro naturally that he began to have an interest in books, and I recall among those he used to mention as having read at the time, that one night he spoke to me of a copybook of poems written by his mother. He spoke with shy reverence about the poems, which he no doubt remembered, but he did not speak of them particularly. They were merely poems, written by her in her own hand, and as a young man they had come to him.”

  O. Henry could not be prevailed upon to meet a man simply because the man was a celebrity nor, when he himself became a celebrity, would he permit himself to be visited as such if he could help it. There was never a moment of his stay in New York when the four million were not more interesting to him than the four hundred. One self-protective device that stood him in good stead was a sort of pan-American dialect which he adopted on such occasions and which served as a deterrent to future offenders. Thus a woman who had written to him about his stories and who insisted on bringing a friend to meet the great man said to him afterward: “You mortified me nearly to death, you talked so ungrammatical.” Another method of evasion was to drop into a perfectly serious vein of Artemus Ward rusticity. There was fun in it to those who understood, but it was meant for those who did not and could not understand and it had the desired effect.

  But with a congenial companion, O. Henry was more interesting than his stories. Almost all, however, who have written about him mention his barrier of initial reserve. Till this was penetrated — and he had to penetrate it himself by sensing a potential friend in the casual acquaintance — there was no flow. “My first impression of O. Henry,” writes Mrs. Wilson Woodrow, “andan impression which lasted during half the evening at least, was one of disappointment. This wonderful story teller struck me as stolid and imperturbable in appearance and so unresponsive and reserved in manner that I had a miserable feeling that I was a failure as a guest, and nothing hurts a writer’s vanity, a woman writer’s anyway, so much as to have her work considered more interesting and attractive than herself. But presently Mr. Porter began to sparkle. He was unquestionably a great raconteur. I am sure that if his table-talk had ever been taken down in shorthand, it would have sounded very much like his written dialogue, only it was not circumscribed and curbed by the limits of the story and the necessity of keeping the narrative uppermost.

  “His wit was urban, sophisticated, individual; entirely free from tricks and the desire to secure effects. It was never mordant nor corrosive; it did not eat nor fester; it struck clean and swift and sure as a stroke of lightning. It was packed with world-knowledge, designed to delight the woman of thirty, not of twenty, and yet I never heard him tell a story even faintly risque. He was the most delightful of companions, thoughtful to a degree of one’s comfort and enjoyment, and his wit never flagged; quite effortless, it bubbled up from an inexhaustible spring. Most brilliant talkers are quite conscious of their gift; they put it through all its paces, and you are expected to award the blue ribbon of appreciation. Not so O. Henry. He treated it as carelessly and casually as an extravagant and forgetful woman does her jewels. He was absolutely free from any pose, and he would tolerate none. He gave and he exacted always the most punctilious courtesy. But more, I think that his was one of the proudest spirits, so sensitive, too, that he protected himself from the crude and rude touch of the world in a triple-plated armour of mirth and formality.”

  O. Henry’s friends soon found that money went through his hands like water through a sieve. He simply could not keep it. His tips were often twice the amount of the bill. The view has been expressed more than once in print that O. Henry was the victim while in New York of some sort of blackmail, that on no other theory could his constant pennilessness be accounted for. Those who knew him best, however, not only discredit th
e theory but find no reason to invoke it. Money was not squeezed from him — he gave it away, willingly, bounteously, gladly. “He would share his last dollar,” writes Mrs. Porter, “with a fellow who came to him with a hard-luck story. He would give away the clothes he needed himself to a man poorer than himself.” He not only gave freely to any beggar or street waif or hobo that called upon him, says Mr. Hall, but as he showed them to the door he would ask them to call again.

  As penniless as he usually was, however, and as eager as he always was to know the feel of money in his pocket, you could not move him a hair’s-breadth by dangling money before him. When publishers and periodicals that had turned a deaf ear to him in his struggling days sought to capitalize his fame by patronizing him he assumed their former rule. He did the declining. Mr. Clarence L. Cullen narrates the following incident: (The New York Sun, January 10, 1915)

  I was with him at the Twenty-sixth Street place one afternoon when a batch of mail was brought to him. One of the envelopes caught his eye. On the envelope was printed the name of one of the leading fiction publications in all the world, if not indeed the most important of them all. Many times during the years when he had been struggling for a foothold as a writer of short stories he had submitted his tales, including the best of them, to the editor of this publication. Always had they come back with the conventional printed slip. When he reached the topmost rung of the ladder he meticulously refrained from submitting anything to that particular publication, the writers for which comprised the leading “names” in the world of fiction.