by O. Henry
From conversations with people who have lived there and who have read “Cabbages and Kings,” which I have in my library and which, by the way, is in constant demand, I understand that it is recognized and admitted to be true to life as conditions then existed in that section.
Dr. B. E. Washburn, of the International Health Commission, writes from Port of Spain, Trinidad, August 26, 1915:
During a recent journey through the West Indies and the Guianas I visited the booksellers and made inquiries as to which American authors were popular in each country. At St. Thomas, a Danish possession (where English is the language used, however), I found the works of Longfellow and Foe for sale. At Dominica only Poe was represented in the small stock of books. The visit to the bookseller in Barbados was much more encouraging for here I found not only Poe and Longfellow, but also Bret Harte, Hawthorne, Mary Johnston, and O. Henry. At Georgetown, in British Guiana, I also found O. Henry, as well as many of the modern American novelists, especially Mark Twain, Booth Tark- ington, Opie Read, James Lane Allen, and Anna Katharine Green. At New Amsterdam, a city of 10,000 people in the far off province of Berbice, in Guiana, I found only Poe. When I asked the bookseller and “critique,” as he termed himself, about the works of O. Henry, he drew a long breath and said, “They are finished,” meaning he had sold out.
This particular “critique” had reviewed “Cabbages of ze King,” but “with ze failure to recognize an interest.” It was too literal, too much a bare recital of things as they are. “Senor O. Henry is no storie escritor,” he continued. “Anybody can see things happen an’ write ‘em down. You exclaim to me zat he is popular in ze America. Excuse me, an’ a t’ousan’ pardons ef I offend, but ze Americanos can be no judge of ze traits of ze imaginaccion. No matter ef ze Americanos, ze Ingles, or ze whole world entire like ze Senor Henry, he is no storie escritor. But ze books of him do sell!”
The London Spectator noted in “ Cabbages and Kings”
“not only an individual point of view but a remarkable gift of literary expression.” In fact, almost every characteristic that O. Henry was later to develop may here be found in embryo. There is the apparent turning aside from the main narrative to indulge in a little philosophy, a sort of hide-and-seek played by the short story and its ancestor, the essay: see the passage on pages 53-54 about the “quaint old theory that man may have two souls — a peripheral one which serves ordinarily, and a central one which is stirred only at certain times, but then with activity and vigour.”
There is the portrayal of character by a few significant details:
The fact that he did not know ten words of Spanish was no obstacle; a pulse could be felt and a fee collected without one being a linguist. Add to the description the facts that the doctor had a story to tell concerning the operation of trepanning which no listener had ever allowed him to conclude, and that he believed in brandy as a prophylactic; and the special points of interest possessed by Dr. Gregg will have become exhausted.
There is a beauty of style here and there, a tropic exuberance of colour, a wealth of leisurely description, that he never again equalled. Could a Honduran sunset be better photographed than in these words? —
The mountains reachcd up their bulky shoulders to receive the level gallop of Apollo’s homing steeds, the day died in the lagoons and in the shadowed banana groves and in the mangrove swamps, where the great blue crabs were beginning to crawl to land for their nightly ramble. And it died, at last, upon the highest peaks. Then the brief twilight, ephemeral as the flight of a moth, came and went; the Southern Cross peeped with its topmost eye above a row of palms, and the fire-flies heralded with their torches the approach of soft-footed night.
There is the trick of the diverted and diverting quotation:
“Then,” says I, “we’ll export canned music to the Latins; but I’m mindful of Mr. Julius Ctesar’s account of ‘em where he says: ‘Onmis Gallia in tres partes divisa est’; which is the same as to say, ‘We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.’ “
There is the pitting of city against city:
“Yes, I judge that town was considerably on the quiet. I judge that after Gabriel quits blowing his horn, and the car starts, with Philadelphia swinging to the last strap, and Pine Gully, Arkansas, hanging onto the rear step, this town of Solitas will wake up and ask if anybody spoke.
There is the art of hitting the target by seeming to aim above it, a sort of calculated exaggeration:
“Twice before,” says the consul, “I have cabled our government for a couple of gunboats to protect American citizens. The first time the Department sent me a pair of gum boots. The other time was when a man named Pease was going to be executed here. They referred that appeal to the Secretary of Agriculture.”
And there is the love of street scenes in New York which was to grow with him to his last moment:
I get homesick sometimes, and I’d swap the entire perquisites of office for just one hour to have a stein and a caviare sandwich somewhere on Thirty-fourth Street, and stand and watch the street cars go by, and smell the peanut roaster at old Giuseppe’s fruit stand.
But with all these divertissements and many more, “Cabbages and Kings” was, comparatively, a failure. It is not equal to the sum total of its seventeen constituent parts. It has unity, but it is the unity of a sustained cleverness carried to an extreme. Suspense is preserved but interest is sacrificed. Chapters XII and XIII, called respectively “Shoes” and “Ships,” will illustrate. These two stories had not been previously published. They were fashioned and put in after the author had decided to amplify his title by giving prominence to the stanza —
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things;
Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax,
And cabbages and kings.”
Sealing-wax had been already incidentally mentioned in “The Lotus and the Bottle” which was published in January, 1902, and which forms the second chapter of “Cabbages and Kings.” But “shoes and ships” must be accounted for, though the natives of Coralio went barefooted. So five hundred pounds of stiff, dry cockleburrs are shipped from Alabama and sprinkled by night along the narrow sidewalks of Coralio. Shoes become a necessity and ships bring them, along with more cockleburrs. But, in the meanwhile, the two central characters of the novel, Goodwin and his wife, are dropped from the story. They must wait till the exactions of line three of our prefatory stanza are met and resolved. But, more disconcerting still, Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin are presented as charlatans and thieves. It is not till the seventeenth chapter is reached that we find we have been deceived. Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin are neither charlatans nor thieves. They are honest, clever, and likable. We must reread the whole story to reinstate them. Clever? Too clever.
By the time “Cabbages and Kings” was published, New York life had gripped O. Henry and he had entered upon his most prolific period. During 1904, if we omit the stories published in “Cabbages and Kings” and count only those that have since appeared in book form, the total is sixty-five; the total for 1905 is fifty. No other years of his life approximated such an output. Of these hundred and fifteen stories all but twenty-one appeared in the columns of the New York World and all but sixteen deal directly or indirectly with New York City. O. Henry’s contract with the World called for a story a week, the payment for each being one hundred dollars. They would bring now at the lowest estimate, writes a New York editor, between a thousand and fifteen hundred dollars each. IVlien we consider not only the number of these stories but their differences of mood and manner, their equal mastery of humour and pathos, their sheer originality of conception and execution, and their steadily increasing appeal in book form to every grade of reader, it becomes evident that a new chapter has been added to the annals of narrative genius in this country. The short story in 1904 and 1905 developed a new flexibility, established new means of communication between literature and life, and, as a mirror of certain aspects of American
society, attained a fidelity and an adequacy never before achieved.
In 1906, O. Henry’s second book appeared, “The Four Million.” It stamped the author as the foremost American short story writer of his time and furnished also in its famous prefatory note a clue to his activities and interests during 1904-1905:
Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only “Four Hundred” people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen — the census taker — and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the “Four Million.”
Each succeeding year until 1911 was to be marked by the publication of two collections of his stories: “The Trimmed Lamp” and “Heart of the West” in 1907, “The Voice of the City” and “The Gentle Grafter” in 1908, “Roads of Destiny” and “Options” in 1909, “Strictly Business” and “Whirligigs” in 1910. A year after his death “Sixes and Sevens” appeared, and in 1913 “Rolling Stones,” the latter being chiefly a collection of early material with an Introduction by the lamented Harry Peyton Steger.
“The Trimmed Lamp,” “The Voice of the City,” and “Strictly Business” are “more stories of the four million” and were written for the most part in 19041905. “Heart of the West” is the fruit of the years spent in Texas, most of the stories having appeared before 1905. “The Gentle Grafter” found its inspiration in the stories told to O. Henry from 1898 to 1901. The first eleven stories in this book had not before been published. They probably belong, as do some of the stories in “Cabbages and Kings,” to the accumulation of manuscript mentioned by O. Henry in his letter to Mrs. Roach (see page 160), though they could hardly have been made ready for publication before 1908.
“The Gentle Grafter” is not a novel. It is a kind of “mulct’em in parvo,” a string of “Autolycan adventures” told by one whose vocabulary consisted chiefly of “contraband sophistries” and whose life conformed to “the gilded rule.” “I never skin a sucker,” says Jeff, in an autobiographic confession, “without admiring the prismatic beauty of his scales. I never sell a little auriferous trifle to the man with the hoe without noticing the beautiful harmony there is between gold and green.” The stories take place in the South, in the West, and in New York. In each of the succeeding collections, “Roads of Destiny,” “Options,” “Strictly Business,” “Whirligigs,” and “Sixes and Sevens,” O. Henry mingles Latin America, the South, the West, and New York. The titles, however, are arbitrary and are not intended as keynotes to the contents.
But the real life of O. Henry in New York is to be sought in the ideas out of which the stories grew rather than in the succession of incidents that happened to him or in the names of the books that he published. A re-reading of the stories in the order in which they were written seems to show that from first to last he moved from theme to theme. Character, plot, and setting were ancillary to the central conception — were but the concrete expressions of the changing ideas that he had in mind. Only a few of these will be traced, enough to indicate, however, that his real biography, the biography of his mind, is to be found in his work.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FAVOURITE THEMES
EVERY one who has heard O. Henry’s stories talked about or has talked about them himself will recall or admit the frequent recurrence of some such expression as, “I can’t remember the name of the story but the point is this.” Then will follow the special bit of philosophy, the striking trait of human nature, the new aspect of an old truth, the novel revelation of character, the wider meaning given to a current saying, or whatever else it may be that constitutes the point or underlying theme of the story. Of no other stories is it said or could it be said so frequently, “The point is this,” because no other writer of stories has, I think, touched upon such an array of interesting themes.
Most of those who have commented upon O. Henry’s work have singled out his technique, especially his unexpected endings, as his distinctive contribution to the American short story. “I cannot drop this topic,” says Professor Walter B. Pitkin, author of “The Art and the Business of Story Writing,” “without urging the student to study carefully the maturer stories of O. Henry, who surpasses all writers, past and present, in his mastery of the direct denouement.”
The unexpected ending, however, is not, even technically, the main point in the structural excellence of a short story. Skill here marks only the convergence and culmination of structural excellencies that have stamped the story from the beginning. The crack of the whip at the end is a mechanical feat as compared with the skilful manipulation that made it possible. Walter Pater speaks somewhere — and O. Henry’s best stories are perfect illustrations — of “that architectural conception of the work which perceives the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first.” In fact, it is not the surprise at the end that reveals the technical .mastery of O. Henry or of Poe or of De Maupassant. It is rather the instantly succeeding second surprise that there should have been a first surprise: it is the clash of the unexpected but inevitable.
It is not technique, however, that has given O. Henry his wide and widening vogue. Technique starts no after-tones. It flashes and is gone. It makes no pathways for reflection. If a story leaves a residuum, it is a residuum of theme, bared and vivified by technique but not created by it. It is O. Henry’s distinction that he has enlarged the area of the American short story by enriching and diversifying its social themes. In his hands the short story has become the organ of a social consciousness more varied and multiform than it had ever expressed before. Old Sir John Davies once said of the soul that it was:
Much like a subtle spider which doth sit
In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide;
If aught do touch the utmost thread of it,
She feels it instantly on every side.
So was O. Henry. Whether in North Carolina or Texas or Latin America or New York an instant responsiveness to the humour or the pathos or the mere human interest of men and women playing their part in the drama of life was always his- distinguishing characteristic. It was not merely that he observed closely. Beneath the power to observe and the skill to reproduce lay a passionate interest in social phenomena which with him no other interest ever equalled or ever threatened to replace.
Man in solitude made little appeal to O. Henry, though he had seen much of solitude himself. But man in society, his “humours” in the old sense, his whims and vagaries, his tragedies and comedies and tragi-comedies, his conflicts with individual and institutional forces, his complex motives, the good underlying the evil, the ideal lurking potent but unsuspected within — whatever entered as an essential factor into the social life of men and women wrought a sort of spell upon O. Henry and found increasing expression in his art. It was not startling plots that he sought: it was human nature themes, themes beckoning to him from the life about him but not yet wrought into short story form.
Take the theme that O. Henry calls “turning the tables on Haroun al Raschid.” It emerges first in “While the Auto Waits,” published in May, 1903, a month after “A Retrieved Reformation.” As if afraid that his pen-name was becoming unduly prominent, O. Henry signs the story James L. Bliss. “We do not know who James Bliss is,” wrote the critic of the New York Times. “The name is a new one to us. But we defy any one to produce a French short story writer of the present day who is capable of producing anything finer than ‘While the Auto Waits.’” O. Henry had discovered a little unexploited corner of human nature which he was further to develop and diversify in “The Caliph and the Cad,” “The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock,” “Lost on Dress Parade,” and “Transients in Arcadia.”
The psychology is sound. Shakespeare would have sanctioned it.
Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie the way thou go’st, not whence
thou comest.
Browning’s Pippa would have approved.
For am I not, this day,
Whate’er I please? What shall I please to-day?
My morn, noon, eve and night — how spend my day?
To-morrow I must be Pippa who winds silk,
The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk:
But, this one day, I have leave to go,
And play out my fancy’s fullest games.
If Haroun al Rasehid found it diverting to wander incognito among his poor subjects, why should not “the humble and poverty-stricken” of this more modern and self-expressive age play the ultra-rich once in a while? They do, but they had lacked a spokesman till O. Henry appeared for them. He, by the way, goes with them in spirit and they all return to their tasks happy and refreshed. They have given their imagination a surf bath.
Habit is another favourite theme. A man believes that he has conquered a certain deeply rooted habit, or hopes he has. By a decisive act or experience he puts a certain stage of his life, as he thinks, behind him. O. Henry is not greatly interested in how he does this: he may change from a drifting tramp to a daring desperado; he may marry; he may undergo an emotional reformation which seems to run a line of cleavage between the old life and the new; a woman may bid farewell to her position as cashier in a downtown restaurant and enter the ranks of the most exclusive society.
But, however the break with the past comes about, O. Henry is profoundly interested in the possibilities of relapse. Such stories, to mention them in the order of their writing, as “The Passing of Black Eagle,” “A Comedy in Rubber,” “From the Cabby’s Seat,” “The Pendulum,” “The Romance of a Busy Broker,” “The Ferry of Unfulfilment,” “The Girl and the Habit,” and “The Harbinger” would form an interesting pendant to William James’s epochal essay on habit. Indeed I have often wondered whether the great psychologist’s fondness for O. Henry was not due, in part at least, to the freshness and variety of the story teller’s illustrations of mental traits and mental whimsies. No one, at any rate, can read the stories mentioned without concluding that O. Henry had at least one conviction about habit. It is that when the old environment comes back the old habit is pretty sure to come with it.