by O. Henry
He ripped open this envelope which attracted his eye. There was a note and a check for $1,000. The note asked him briefly for something from his pen — anything — with that word underscored — check for which was therewith enclosed. If the thousand dollars were not deemed sufficient, the note went on, he had only to name what sum he considered fair and the additional amount would be remitted to him.
Porter, who probably was the least vainglorious writer of equal fame that ever lived, smiled a sort of cherubic smile as he passed the note over to me. When I had finished reading it, without comment, he, saying never a word, addressed an envelope to the editor of the publication, slipped the check into the envelope, stamped the envelope and went out into the hall and deposited it in the drop. Not a word passed between us about the offer.
If O. Henry’s chief quest in New York was for “What’s around the corner,” his underlying purpose was to get first-hand material for short stories. Those who knew him most intimately believe that he never borrowed a plot. “Two things,” says Mr. Hall, “stirred his indignation: a salacious story and the proffer of a plot. ‘Don’t you know better,’ he would say, ‘than to offer me a plot?’” It was a necessity of his nature to manufacture his products from the raw material.
Hints he took and from all conceivable sources. “Once at a dinner,” says Mrs. Porter, “my brother told him of a man who hated the particular locality in which he lived so bitterly that he had gone far away, but at death his body had been brought back to the very spot he disliked for burial.” O. Henry was seen to jot down the idea on his cuff, but it does not reappear in any of his stories. Nor does an earlier incident of which he made at least a mental note at the time. A prisoner convicted of murder had been electrocuted in Columbus and his last words were, “a curse upon the warden and all of his.” Two weeks afterward the warden dropped dead. There was much talk and still more excitement about it among the prisoners. “As we were repeating this to Dr. Thomas,” writes Mr. J. Clarence Sullivan, a reporter in Columbus, “O. Henry remarked: ‘So you see a story to-day, do you?’ and then, as usual, went from the room.” It was the only time that the reporters in Columbus had heard him utter a word, for he avoided them sedulously. But no story that he wrote, so far as I recall, turns upon the fulfilment of a malediction. O. Henry found his usable material in things seen rather than in things heard, or, if heard, they were heard at first-hand.
The two incidents mentioned, moreover, illustrate human destiny rather than human character, and O. Henry’s quest was for character manifestations. These he sought in the mass rather than in rare or abnormal displays. “When I first came to New York,” he once said, “I spent a great deal of time knocking around the streets. I did things then that I wouldn’t think of doing now. I used to walk at all hours of the day and night along the river fronts, through Hell’s Kitchen, down the Bowery, dropping into all manner of places, and talking with any one who would hold converse with me. I never met any one but what I could learn something from him; he’s had some experience that I have not had; he sees the world from his own viewpoint. If you go at it in the right way, the chances are that you can extract something of value from him. But whatever else you do, don’t flash a pencil and notebook; either he will shut up or he will become a Hall Caine.”
There is evidently a rich vein of autobiography in the words with which he introduces “He Also Serves”:
If I could have a thousand years — just one little thousand years — more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.
Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread — deafness and writer’s cramp.
From what O. Henry himself said of his way of getting story material and from what those closest to him in New York have reported, it would seem that two kinds of the city’s population, two strata of its society, interested him most: those who were under a strain of some sort and those who were under a delusion. The first stirred his sympathy; the second furnished him unending entertainment. Both are abundantly represented in his stories, and both marked out trails that he followed eagerly to the end.
Of his efforts to know the life of the working girls of New Yrork before writing about them, no one ean speak more authoritatively than Miss Anne Partlan. “He told me,” she writes, “that the hand-to-mouth life that girls led in New York interested him and when he came to New York he looked me up. I used to have parties of my friends up to meet him and they never dreamed that this Mr. Porter, who fitted so well into our queer makeshift life, was a genius. He had absolutely no pose. ‘The Unfinished Story’ and ‘The Third Ingredient’ were taken straight from life. That is why there is never anything sordid in the little stories. We were poor enough in our dingy rooms but he saw the little pleasures and surprises that made life bearable to us.”
O. Henry’s general manner at such times is thus described by Miss Partlan :
There was nothing of the brilliant wit about the great story writer when in the atmosphere of the shop-girl, clerk, or salesman. Instead, there was a quiet, sympathetic attitude and, at times, a pre-occupied manner as if their remarks and chatter reminded him of his old days of bondage in the country drug store, and the perpetual pillmaking which he was wont to describe with an amusing gesture, indicating the process of forming the cure-all.
One evening a group of department store employees were having dinner with me. Among them were sales-girls, an associate buyer, and one of the office force. I asked O. Henry to join us so that he might catch the spirit of their daily life. He leavened their shop-talk with genial, simple expressions of mirth as they told their tales of petty intrigue and strife for place amid the antagonism and pressure which pervades the atmosphere of every big organization. On leaving, he remarked to me: “If Henry James had gone to work in one of those places, he would have turned out the great American novel.”
On another occasion, the conversation turned to feather curling, and he astonished me with his detailed knowledge of the craft. I asked him where he had learned so much about the work and he told me that in one of his first months in New York he was living in very humble lodgings and one evening found him without funds. He became so hungry that he could not finish the story on which he was working, and he walked up and down the landing between the rooms. The odor of cooking in one of the rooms increased his pangs, and he was beside himself when the door opened and a young girl said to him, “Have you had your supper? I’ve made hazlett stew and it’s too much for me. It won’t keep, so come and help me eat it.”
He was grateful for the invitation and partook of the stew which, she told him, was made from the liver, kidneys, and heart of a calf. The girl was a feather curler and, during the meal, she explained her work and showed him the peculiar kind of dull blade which was used in it. A few days later he rapped at her door to ask her to a more substantial dinner, but he found that she had gone and left no address.
Miss Partlan’s father, an expert mechanic and an inventor of blacksmith’s tools, asked O. Henry to accompany him to a meeting of master workmen. Miss Partlan continues:
Speeches were made by masters of their craft, filled with references to “side hill plows,” “bolt cutters,” and “dressing chisels for rock use.” The speeches referred to the most humane make of horse shoes, bar iron, toe calks, and hoof expanders. All of this fell on no more attentive ears than O. Henry’s. A Scotchman presently arose and spoke on coach building. He told of a wood filling which he once made of the dust gathered from forges, mixed with a peculiar sort of clay. His enunciation was not clear and more than once O. Henry turned to me to ask me if I had caught the indistinct word.
After the speeches came dancing of the Lancers and the Virginia Reel. O. Henry threw himself into the spirit like a boy. He danc
ed and whistled and called out numbers, laughing heartily when in the maze of a wrong turn. No one there dreamed he was other than a fellow-working man.
“Where do you keep shop, Mr. Porter?” asked the wife of a Missouri mechanic.
“Mr. Porter is an author,” I replied impulsively.
“Well, I can do other things,” he retorted with a note of defense as he continued, “I can rope cows, and I tried sheep raising once.”
But O. Henry’s favourite coign of vantage was the restaurant. From his seat here, as from his broad window in the Caledonia on West Twenty-sixth Street, he gazed at his peep-show with a zest and interpretative insight that never flagged. Henry James says somewhere: “It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look at you in a certain way.” O. Henry would have preferred that she sit down and order something. Restaurant tables mirrored better for him than centre tables. The more individual hotels, restaurants, and cabarets of New York were ticketed and classified in his mind as men classify bugs or books. Their patrons he divided into two classes: those who knew and those who thought they knew, the real thing and those who would be considered the real thing. If the “has-been’s” had free access to O. Henry’s pockets, the “ would-be’s” occupy almost an equal space in his pages; and among the “would-be’s” the would-be Bohemians come first.
“Thrice in a lifetime,” says O. Henry, “may woman walk upon the clouds — once when she trippeth to the altar, once when she first enters Bohemian halls, the last when she marches back across her first garden with the dead hen of her neighbour.” Miss Medora Martin had the Bohemian craze. She had come to New York from the village of Harmony, at the foot of the Green Mountains, Vermont. One rainy day Mr. Binkley, a fellow boarder, who was forty-nine and owned a fish- stall in a downtown market, had gone with her to “one of the most popular and widely patronized, jealously exclusive Bohemian resorts in the city.” This is what took place:*
Binkley had abandoned art and was prating of the unusual spring catch of shad. Miss Elise arranged the palette-and-maul- stick tie pin of Mr. Vandyke. A Philistine at some distant table was maundering volubly either about Jerome or Gerome. A famous actress was discoursing excitably about monogrammed hosiery. A hose clerk from a department store was loudly proclaiming his opinions of the drama. A writer was abusing Dickens.
A magazine editor and a photographer were drinking a dry brand at a reserved table. A 36-25-42 young lady was saying to an eminent sculptor: “Fudge for your Prax Italys! Bring one of your Venus Anno Dominis down to Cohen’s and see how quick she’d be turned down for a cloak model. Back to the quarries with your Greeks and Dagos!”
Thus went Bohemia.
Scenes of this sort were dear to O. Henry’s heart. Not as a satirist but as a genial and immensely amused spectator he would sit night after night amid these children of illusion and find a satisfaction and stimulation in their behaviour that real Bohemia was powerless to furnish. “He watched them,” writes an associate, “at their would-be Bohemian antics with his broad face creased with merriment, and I would that it had been possible to get phonographic records of his comments made in his extraordinarily low-pitched voice.”
Though O. Henry’s studies of New York life began as soon as he arrived in the city, it is not till 1904 that his stories are found to reflect in a marked degree his new environment. The intervening stories dealt with the West or Southwest and with Central or South America. One of these early Texas stories, “Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches,” deserves more than a passing notice. It is a satisfying love story, redolent of happiness, of genuineness, of green prairies, temperate winds, and blue heavens, with just enough “centipedes and privations” to bring together at last two lives that New York had put apart. It is mentioned here because it was to bring together two other lives that are of more concern to us just now than either Octavia Beau- pree or Teddy Westlake.
The story was published in the Smart Set for June, 1902. How many readers treasured it for the beauty of its simple plot and the balm of its wide and flowered spaces, I do not know. Among the letters written to O. Henry by admirers of his stories and preserved among his effects, there is none that mentions “Madame Bo-Peep.” But one letter at least was written, and through it this story was to link the past and the present of O. Henry’s life. It was to do more than any other one story to bridge the chasm between Will Porter of Greensboro and O. Henry of New York. It was ultimately to reveal to the friends of boyhood days that the youthful cartoonist of the “somnolent little Southern town” was now the short story interpreter of Bagdad- on-the-Subway.
Mrs. Thaddeus Coleman, of Asheville, North Carolina, the mother of Miss Sallie Coleman, for whom O. Henry at the age of six had looted the magnolias (see page 67), had been visiting in New York in the spring of 1905. There she learned that O. Henry was Will Porter. The news brought to Miss Coleman not only surprise but eager delight and a train of long-slumbering memories. “In my desk,” writes Mrs. Porter, “lay ‘Madame Bo-Peep’ and I loved her. I wrote O. Henry a note. ‘If you are not Will Porter, don’t bother to answer,’ I said. He answered but does not seem to have bothered. ‘Some day,’ he wrote, ‘when you are not real busy, won’t you sit down at your desk where you keep those antiquated stories and write to me? I’d be so pleased to hear something about what the years have done for you, and what you think about when the tree frogs begin to holler in the evening.
A little later, when Miss Coleman had mentioned her ambition to write, came a more urgent letter:
Now I’ll tell you what to do. Kick the mountains over and pack a kimono and a lead-pencil in a suit-case and hurry to New York. Get a little studio three stories up with mission furniture and portieres, a guitar and a chafing-dish and laugh at fate and the gods. There are lots of lovely women here leading beautiful and happy lives in the midst of the greatest things in this hemisphere of art and music and literature on tiny little incomes. You meet the big people in every branch of art, you drink deep of the Pierian spring, you get the benefit of earth’s best. —
They were married in Asheville on November 27, 1907.
Another one of these early Western stories, “A Retrieved Reformation,” has probably had a wider vogue and caused its author to be pointed out more frequently in the restaurants and theatres of New York than anything else that he wrote, though it can hardly be classed among his best. The suggestion of the leading character came, doubtless, as Dr. Williard says (see page 151), from Jimmy Connors of the Columbus prison, and O. Henry may have sketched the story before leaving Columbus. It first appeared, however, in the Cosmopolitan of April, 1903, and was republished as “Mr. Valentine’s New Profession” in the London Magazine of the following September. The phraseology is changed here and there in the English version and always for the worse, the plot and incidents remaining the same. On May 5, 1909, Curtis Brown and Massie, of London, wrote to O. Henry thanking him for “the [enclosed] authorization which we shall have pleasure in forwarding to the French translator.” The money received for the rights of French translation was donated by O. Henry to the Children’s Country Holiday Fund of England.
The French translator was Mr. A. Foulcher, a civil engineer now in the French army. This translation, says Mr. Foulcher, was, “without my knowledge or consent,” promptly adapted and put upon the Paris stage. “Some five or six years ago,” he writes,* “entering by chance the Vaudeville one fine evening, I had the pleasure of witnessing the performance of Mr. Valentine’s feats, in which of course I found neither glory nor profits. Mr. Valentine had once more changed his name, but he was the same man and played the same trick on the safe.” A French stage version, by the way, which, like Mr. Paul Armstrong’s American stage version, was called “Alias Jimmy Valentine,” was made by Mr. Maurice Tourneur, who later filmed the play for the United States. As both of these versions preserve the original name Valentine, it must have been still another French adaptation that Mr.Foulclier saw. In fact, the London stage version is
known as “Jimmy Samson” and it was probably a re-adaptation of this version that Mr. Foulcher saw played in Paris.
A Spanish translation of the English “Jimmy Samson” was made by Senor Alberti and acted at the Teatro Espanol in Madrid. O. Henry would hardly recognize his work in either its English or its Spanish form till the curtain goes up for the last time. “The author,” writes a Spanish critic, “has saved for this point his most effective stroke. A little girl has got shut up in the safe and is in peril of being asphyxiated. Samson, actuated by his good heart, hastens to open the safe and thus shows to the police who are following him that he really is the famous thief who is clever enough to open safes with a ‘twist of the wrist.’ The sacrifice might have cost him his happiness, since the daughter of the minister was in love with him, and also his liberty, since the police have at last discovered him; but the latter show themselves generous and the girl continues loving him in spite of all, and so all of us are satisfied.”
But Latin America had laid its spell on O. Henry, and when “A Retrieved Reformation” was published the author was better known as a writer of Central and South American tales than of those dealing with the West or with New York. “He is threatening the supremacy of Mr. Richard Harding Davis in a field in which for several years the more widely known writer has been absolutely alone,” wrote Mr. Stanhope Searles. O. Henry was urged to put his Latin American stories together, to add others, and to publish the whole as a novel. This was the origin of “Cabbages and Kings,” published late in 1904 and O. Henry’s first book. It shows on every page a first-hand acquaintance with coastal Latin America. Mr. John Ewing, Minister to Honduras, writes from Tegucigalpa, December 16, 1915: