by O. Henry
He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being unarmed and sharply surprised. But the keen mountaineer’s eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out.
There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by, and the sound of Sam’s voice crying:
“Howdy, Cal! I’m durned glad to see ye.”
And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands.
The city had achieved in one day what a whole State had been powerless to do in forty years. It had done the impossible: it had squared the circle. No mere description could set New York forth as does this story. We have here to do not with the form of a great city but with its function.
Let us return to Raggles once more. The story is “ The Making of a New Yorker.” Raggles was a tramp.
His specialty was cities. But New York was impenetrable.
Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with answer rebuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary.
The greetings of the other cities he had known — their homespun kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friend y curses, garrulous curiosity, and easily estimated credulity or indifference. This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him. Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets. Never an eye was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him. His heart yearned for the clap of Pittsburg’s sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago’s menacing but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through the Bostonian eyeglass — even for the precipitate but unmalicious boot-toe of Louisville or St. Louis.
Three types of character seem to Raggles about all that New York has: the elderly rich gentleman; the beautiful, steel-engraving woman; the swaggering, grim, threateningly sedate fellow; but all are heartless, frigid, unconcerned. He hates them and the city that produces them. A roar, a hiss, a crash — and Raggles has been struck by an automobile. The three impersonal types are at his side in a moment. They bend over him, put silks and furs under his head, and the threateningly sedate fellow brings a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested infinite things to the fractured Raggles. A reporter, a surgeon, and an ambulance take him in tow.
In three days they let him leave his cot for the convalescent ward in the hospital. He had been in there an hour when the attendants hear sounds of conflict. Upon investigation they found that Raggles had assaulted and damaged a brother convalescent — a glowering transient whom a freight train collision had sent in to be patched up.
“What’s all this about?” inquired the head nurse.
“He was runnin’ down me town,” said Raggles.
“What town?” asked the nurse.
“Noo York,” said Raggles.
Is not that a gaze into the very heart of the city? On the surface, cold, hard, oblivious, greedy; but beneath the surface, kindly, cooperative, organized for every need, efficient for instant help, human to the core.
Read again “The Duel” in which O. Henry declares his theme to be the one particular in which “New York stands unique among the cities of the world.” Turn once more to the volume called “The Voice of the City,” and weigh it as an answer to the query propounded in the story from which it takes its name. Beneath the humour of stories like these, beneath the cleverness of phrase and the fitness of epithet, there is a solid substratum of thought, a determined attempt to body forth the thing as it really is, a saturation with a central idea, unequalled, we believe, by any other writer who has tried to find adequate predicates for city subjects.
But before O. Henry had seen New York, he was busy with another theme that was to occupy much of his thought in later years. Some one said to him shortly before the end: “Your heart is in your Western stories.” “My heart is in heaven,” he replied. Had he committed himself I think he would have said: “My heart just now is neither in my Western nor my Northern nor my Southern stories. It is in the stories that are not exclusively any one of the three. I mean the stories that try to contrast the South with the North or the North with the West and to indicate what is separate and characteristic in each.” Here again both notebooks bear testimony to the tenacity with which this subject laid hold upon O. Henry’s thinking. The Columbus notebook contains the entry:
Duplicity of Hargraves
Munsey 8/16
The New York notebook reads:
Old darkey — difference between Yankee and Southerner — N. Y.
That there is a difference every lover of his country ought to be glad to admit. Time was when we called these differences sectional. A better term is regional.
Sectional implies not only difference but antagonism; it recalls oratory, war, and politics. Regional differences suggest neither actual nor potential conflict. Such differences are allies of literature. They make for variety in unity and unity in variety. Sectional differences mean “We dislike one another.” Regional differences mean “We are unlike one another.” Nowhere does O. Henry’s insight into human nature, his breadth and depth, his pervasive humour, or his essential Americanism show more clearly than in such stories as “The Duplicity of Hargraves,” “The Champion of the Weather,” “New York by Campfire Light,” “The Pride of the Cities,” “From Each According to His Ability,” “The Rose of Dixie,” “The Discounters of Money,” “Thimble, Thimble,” and “Best-Seller.” In each of these he stages a contrast between the North and the South or the North and the West.
The task was not an original one but he did it in an original way. Since 1870 American literature has abounded in short stories, novels, and plays that are geographical not only in locale but in spirit and content. “If the reader,” writes Mr. Howells, “will try to think what the state of polite literature (as they used to call it in the eighteenth century) would now be among us, if each of our authors had studied to ignore, as they have each studied to recognize, the value of the character and tradition nearest about them, I believe he will agree with me that we owe everything that we now are in literature to their instinct of vicinage.” But the “instinct of vicinage” usually confines the author to a single place or a single section. His work attempts to portray Western life or Southern life or New England life, but one at a time. The actual contrasting is done by the reader, who compares author with author or story with story and passes judgment accordingly.
A notable exception is “ The Great Divide.” William Vaughn Moody has here in a single brief play not only represented the West in Stephen Ghent and New England in Ruth Jordan but himself outlined the contrast in their blended careers. “If Massachusetts and Arizona ever get in a mix-up in there,” says Mrs. Jordan, pointing toward Ruth’s heart, “woe be!” They do get in a mix-up in there and every American is the gainer. Our very Americanism and sense of national solidarity are quickened and clarified as we watch the struggle between these two characters. Their union at last seems to assure the worth of our constituent parts and to prophesy a nationalism that will endure.
A somewhat similar contest is fought out in Owen Wister’s novel, “The Virginian.” Molly Wood, of Bennington, Vermont, and the Virginian, of Wyoming, have more than a purely individual interest. They stand for two kinds of regional fidelity that have gone into the very fibre of American life. Mr. Wister even makes the Virginian himself essay a distinction between the East and the West:
Now back East you cau be middling and get along. But if you go to try a thing on in this Western country, you’ve got to do it well. You’ve got to deal cyards well; you’ve got to steal well; and if you claim to be quick with your gun you must be quick, for you’re a public temptation, and some man will not resist trying to prove he is the quicker. You must break all the Commandments well in this Western country, and Shorty should have stayed in Brooklyn, for he will be a novice his live
long days.
And over Shorty’s dead body the Virginian remarks: “There was no natural harm in him, but you must do a thing well in this country,” meaning in Wryoming.
Before the advent of O. Henry, however, short story writers had fought shy of essaying such a contrast within the narrow limits of a single story, a contrast for which the drama and the novel seemed better fitted. Bret Harte and Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett and Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, and a score of others had proved that the short story could be made to represent as large a territory as the novel. But as an instructed delegate each short story preferred to speak for only one constituency. When it tried to represent two at the same time, there was apt to be a glorification of the one and a caricature of the other.
It is one of O. Henry’s distinctions that he is fair to both. The Nation called attention a few months be fore his death to his “genial and equal-handed satire of the confronted Northern and Southern foibles.” Western foibles might also have been included. O. Henry is “genial and equal-handed” not only in the characteristics selected but in the way he pits characteristic against characteristic, foible against foible, an excess against a defect, then again a defect against an excess. Art and heart are so blended in these contrasts, wide and liberal observation is so allied to shrewd but kindly insight, that the reader hardly realizes the breadth of the theme or the sureness of the author’s footing.
O. Henry was not a propagandist, but one cannot reread these stories without feeling that here as elsewhere the story teller is much more than a mere entertainer. He has suggested a nationalism in which North, West, and South are to play their necessary parts. It is not a question of surrender or abdication; it is a question rather of give and take. We may laugh as we please at Major Pendleton Talbot of “the old, old South” in “The Duplicity of Hargraves.” He erred no more on one side than did Hargraves on the other. That Hargraves should not have known that he was wounding the Major’s feelings shows a want of tact as onesided on his part as was the Major’s excess of pride on his.
“I am truly sorry you took offence,” said Hargraves regretfully. “Up here we don’t look at things just as you people do. I know men who would buy out half the house to have their personality put on the stage so the public would recognize it.”
“They are not from Alabama, sir,” said the Major haughtily.
And every reader applauds. But the applause at the end, where Hargraves shows a tact and nobleness beyond what we had thought possible, is still more prompt and generous. The keynote of the story is not sectionalism but reciprocity.
There is the same absence of mere caricature in “The Rose of Dixie.” In his New York notebook O. Henry made the entry: “Southern Magazine. All contributors relatives of Southern distinguished men.” But the story as it shaped itself in his mind became not merely a burlesque of the hopelessly provincial magazine but a contrast between authorship by ancestry and publication by push. Is not the laugh genially distributed between Colonel Aquila Telfair, of Toombs City, Georgia, and T. T. Thacker, of New York?
Perhaps in “The Pride of the Cities” the reader will be inclined to think that the man from Topaz City, Arizona, overplays the Westernism of his part. Perhaps he does. But his provocation was great. The conversation, you remember, had opened as follows:
“Been in the city long?” inquired the New Yorker, getting ready the exact tip against the waiter’s coming with large change from the bill.
“Me?” said the man from Topaz City. “Four days. Never in Topaz City was you?”
“I’” said the New Yorker. “I was never farther west than Eighth Avenue. I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at Eighth. There was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker mentioned the incident to avoid mistake. I cannot say that I am familiar with the West.”
But each theme that has been mentioned is but an illustration of that larger quest in which all of O. Henry’s stories find their common meeting-place — the search for those common traits and common impulses which together form a sort of common denominator of our common humanity. Many of his two hundred and fifty stories are impossible; none, rightly considered, are improbable. They are so rooted in the common soil of our common nature that even when dogs or monuments do the talking we do the thinking. The theme divisions that we have attempted to make are, after all, only sub-divisions. The ultimate theme is your nature and mine.
It is too soon to attempt to assign O. Henry a comparative rank among his predecessors. We may attempt, however, to place him if not to weigh him. It was Washington Irving who first gave the American short story a standing at home and abroad. There is a calm upon Irving’s pages, an easy quiet grace in his sentences, an absence of restlessness and hurry, that give him an unquestioned primacy among our masters of an elder day. He was more meditative and less intellectual than Scott but, like Scott, he was essentially retrospective. He used the short story to rescue and rc-launch the small craft of legend and tradition which had already upon their sails the rime of eld. He leg- endized the short story.
Poe’s genius was first and last constructive. It was the build of the short story rather than its historical or intellectual content that gripped his interest. Poe’s art, unlike that of Irving, is identified with no particular time or place. He was always stronger on moods than on tenses, and his geography curtsied more to sound than to Mercator or Maury. But in the mathematics of the short story, in the art of making it converge definitely and triumphantly to a pre-ordained end, in the mastery of all that is connoted by the word technique, Poe’s is the greatest name. The short story came from his hands a new art form, not charged with a new content but effectively equipped for a new service. In his equal exercise of executive, legislative, and judicial authority, Poe standardized the short story.
Hawthorne made the short story a vehicle of symbolism. Time and place were only starting-points with him. He saw double, and the short story was made to see double, too. Puritan New England, New England of the past, was his locale; but his theme was spiritual truth, a theme that has always had an affinity for symbols and symbolism. Hawthorne allegorized the short story.
With Bret Harte the short story entered a new era. He was the first of our short story writers to preempt a definite and narrowly circumscribed time and placc and to lift both into literature. Dialect became for the first time an effective ally of the American short story, and local colour was raised to an art. Though Bret Harte’s appeal is not and has never been confined to any one section or to any one country, it is none the less true that he first successfully localized the American short story.
A glance through O. Henry’s pages shows that his familiarity with the different sections of the United States was greater than that of any predecessor named. He had lived in every part of the country that may be called distinctive except New England, but he has not preempted any locality. His stories take place in Latin America, in the South, in the West, and in the North. He always protested against having his stories interpreted as mere studies in localism. There was not one of his New York stories, he said, in which the place was essential to the underlying truth or to the human interest back of it. Nor was his technique distinctive. It is essentially the technique of Poe which became later the technique of De Maupassant but was modified by O. Henry to meet new needs and to subserve diverse purposes. O. Henry has humanized the short story.
CHAPTER NINE
LAST DAYS
“I CANNOT help remarking,” wrote Alexander Pope to a Mr. Blount, “that sickness, which often destroys both wit and wisdom, yet seldom has power to remove that talent which we call humour.” In O. Henry’s case sickness affected neither his wit nor his humour but it made creative work hard and irksome. There is as much wit and humour in his last complete story, “Let Me Feel YTour Pulse,” or “Adventures in Neurasthenia,” as in any story that he wrote, but the ending of no other story was so difficult to him. Plans for a novel and a
play were also much in his mind at this time but no progress was made in actual construction.
In fact, O. Henry had been a very sick man for more than a year before his death. “He had not been well for a long time,” writes Mrs. Porter, referring to the time of their marriage, “and had got behind with his work.” He did not complain but sought creative invigoration in frequent changes of environment. Early in 1909, however, his letters begin to show that writer’s cramp was with him only another name for failing health. From his workshop in the Caledonia, he writes to Mr. Henry W. Lanier, who was then secretary to Doubleday, Page & Company:
February 13, 1909.
My Dear Mr. Lanier:
I’ve been ailing for a month or so — can’t sleep, etc.; and haven’t turned out a piece of work in that time. Consequently there is a hiatus in the small change pocket. I hope to be in shape Monday so that I can go to Atlantic City, immure myself in a quiet hotel, and begin to get the “great novel” in shape.
March 16, 1909.
It seems that the goddess Hygiene and I have been strangers for years; and now Science must step in and repair the damage. My doctor is a miracle worker and promises that in a few weeks he will doable my working capacity, which sounds very good both for me and for him, when the payment of the bill is considered.
April 6, 1909.
I hope to get the novel in good enough shape to make an “exhibit” of it to you soon. I’ve been feeling so rocky for so long that I haven’t been able to produce much. In fact, I’ve noticed now and then some suspicious tracks outside the door that closely resembled those made by Lupus Americanus. Has anything accrued around the office in the royalty line that you could put your finger on to-day?