It so appears that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet.
R. FRIDERICI.
Westchester, N. Y., April 22, 1910
Mark Twain would have loved that coincidence. In fact, he had once predicted it himself: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” The comet was visible from Earth when he died, the final triumph of an inimitable showman.
He was Federal Prisoner 30664
Chapter 6
O. Henry & WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER
If you are now reading or have recently read a short story by O. Henry, you are most likely a middle-school student. He was the greatest short story writer of his generation, but O. Henry—who died at forty-seven with twenty-three cents in his pocket—isn’t read much these days, except as homework.
His stories are known for their irony, aphorisms, plot twists, and moral lessons, and the surprise endings he called “snappers.” They were formulaic, but the formula worked. “[H]e never told his story in the first paragraph but invariably began with patter and palaver; like a conjurer at a fair, it was the art of the anecdote that hooked the public,” wrote the critic Francis Hackett. “He planned, first of all, to make his theme straight and clear, as a preacher does who gives the text. Then he established his people with bold, brilliant strokes, like a great cartoonist. But the barb was always a surprise, adroitly prepared, craftily planted, and to catch him at it is an exercise for a detective.”
William Sydney Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862. His middle name was originally spelled “Sidney,” but he changed it; later in life he would drop “William” and be known as Sydney Porter.
By the time he was three years old, his mother was dead of tuberculosis. Along with his father, Dr. Algernon Sidney Porter, William moved into a boardinghouse run by his grandmother. Algernon—a heavy drinker, just as William would become—was also an aspiring inventor with plans for a flying machine and a horseless carriage driven by steam.
The year 1865 brought the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. William began attending a one-room schoolhouse run by his aunt, who served as a surrogate mother and whom he later credited with inspiring his love of art and literature. As a boy he had a talent for drawing, thanks to his aunt’s attentive instruction; and he devoured Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and others. “I did more reading between my thirteenth and my nineteenth years than I have done in all the years since, and my taste was much better then,” he once told a reporter.
Although he loved learning, college was for the rich, which meant that for him it was out of the question. At fifteen, William was sent to work in his uncle’s pharmacy, and at nineteen he became a licensed pharmacist. “The grind in the drugstore was an agony to me,” he later admitted. Had he not received an invitation in 1882 to join a family friend in Texas, doing ranch work, William Porter might have lived and died a pharmacist rather than become the prolific writer O. Henry.
La Salle County, Texas, was not destined to be his last stop, but it was at least an escape from his tedious life at home. He was always reading poetry, especially Tennyson, and while herding sheep, he carried around a copy of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. He wrote stories, too, but after reading them aloud to a family friend, he’d rip them up and throw them away.
Next he made his way to Austin, where, supposedly, he first used his future pen name: he had a habit of calling “Oh, Henry!” to a girlfriend’s cat, said to respond only to that greeting. (True or not, the phrase has no connection to the candy bar of that name, launched in 1924.) He signed his girlfriend’s autograph album as “O. Henry,” and composed a poem, “A Soliloquy by the Cat,” using this name. When he proposed marriage to his girlfriend, she rejected him; she came from a wealthy family, and he was a nobody with a dead-end job. Although he lost the girl, he’d found his pen name. Or so one version of the story goes; there are many. Porter was a good liar who enjoyed spinning fabrications about himself.
He had a series of drab jobs, finally working as a draftsman at the Texas Land Office, where he earned a hundred dollars a month. He wasn’t thrilled by the work, but had no trouble finding friends. He played cards, charmed rapt listeners with his storytelling, and joined local singing and theater groups. He became a popular local figure and was known for always being impeccably dressed.
In 1888, following a speedy courtship, Porter eloped with seventeen-year-old Athol Estes. They had a son who died the day he was born. A year later, the couple had a daughter, Margaret. Porter, feeling settled and happy, was ready to pursue his true ambition: writing. After sending a journalism piece to the Detroit Free Press, he received an encouraging reply: “Am sorry it is not longer,” the editor wrote. “Check will be sent in a few days. Can you not send more matter—a good big installment every week?” Porter began selling freelance articles, mostly humor pieces, to newspapers and journals around the country.
In 1891, he took a job as a teller at the First National Bank of Austin, a position that seemed ideal at first—it was mindless, and would allow him to write in the evenings—but would later turn out to have damaging and long-lasting consequences. After working at the bank for three years, he resigned when an audit revealed shortages in his till. Though he was charged with embezzlement, the case was dismissed for lack of evidence. Porter decided to focus on his writing, and he turned entrepreneurial, buying a used printing press and publishing an eight-page weekly satirical magazine called The Rolling Stone, for which he served as writer, illustrator, typesetter, and printer. “It rolled on for about a year,” he said later, “and then showed unmistakable signs of getting mossy.” He shut it down but had no regrets; the experience had boosted his confidence. His family moved to Houston, where he worked as a reporter, cartoonist, and columnist for the Houston Post, a job he loved.
Unfortunately, his falling-out with the Austin bank came back to haunt him just six months later. The embezzlement case had been reopened by federal auditors, and he was arrested. Although he insisted that bank executives regularly “borrowed” money without keeping records of their transactions (and that they rarely repaid what they’d withdrawn), he had no proof. Whether Porter was a fall guy or a criminal, no one will ever know, but he couldn’t face the thought of imprisonment. After being released on a $2,000 bond posted by his wealthy father-in-law, Porter hopped on a night train to New Orleans, and, a few weeks later, boarded a freighter bound for Honduras. It was a frightening experience at the time, but would prove excellent fodder for fiction. (Life as a South American fugitive was chronicled in his 1904 debut story collection, Cabbages and Kings.) When asked once why he did not read more fiction written by others, he replied, “It is all tame, as compared with the romance of my own life.”
Porter regretted his evasion of justice, but he argued until the end of his life that he was an innocent man who had no choice other than to flee. “I am like [Conrad’s] Lord Jim,” he told a friend, “because we both made one fateful mistake at the supreme crisis of our lives, a mistake from which we could not recover.” Honduras was a smart choice—it had no extradition treaty with the United States—and he had some vague plan for his wife and daughter to join him in exile. It never happened. When Porter found out that Athol was dying of tuberculosis, he rushed back home.
A year later, after a three-day trial in Austin, Porter—now a grieving widower with a ten-year-old daughter—pleaded not guilty. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in a Columbus, Ohio, penitentiary. “I care not so much for the opinion of the general public,” he wrote in a letter to his mother-in-law, “but I would have a few of my friends still believe that there is some good in me.”
Becoming Federal Prisoner 30664 would launch his writing career and
complete his transformation into O. Henry. Despite a painful separation from Margaret, with whom he was close, prison was the ultimate writing colony. The three years he spent there proved to be his MFA program, his refuge from the demands of the outside world.
He wrote stories during his night shifts in the prison infirmary, a plum job he had obtained because of his background as a licensed pharmacist. After saving the life of a warden who’d overdosed on arsenic, Porter gained additional privileges with minimal supervision, including sleeping at the infirmary and being able to roam the grounds more freely than other prisoners. Still, the inhumane conditions were difficult to witness, and the experience of being in prison left him shattered. Even after his early release for “good behavior,” he was never quite the same. Imprisonment left him ashamed, ended relationships, exacerbated his mercurial temper, and turned a gregarious, easygoing man into a solitary hard drinker (often consuming two quarts of whiskey a day)—a habit that would kill him in the end.
But in prison, Porter was disciplined and productive in his writing, making the best of grim circumstances. A guard recalled his routine: “After most of his work was finished and we had eaten our midnight supper, he would begin to write. . . . He seemed oblivious to the world of sleeping convicts about him, hearing not even the occasional sigh or groan from the beds which were stretched before him in the hospital ward, or the tramp of the passing guards. After he had written for perhaps two hours he would rise, make a round of the hospital, and then come back to his work again.”
He was already a published author; his first short story, “Miracle of Lava Canyon,” appeared the year his wife died. He didn’t use a pseudonym, exactly, but he did sign the story as the eminent-sounding “W. S. Porter.” For other stories, he’d toyed with various pen names: Sydney Porter, James L. Bliss, T. B. Dowd, Howard Clark, S. H. Peters, and Olivier Henry. Even in his personal correspondence, he sampled all sorts of names, signing letters as Panhandle Pete, S. P., Hiram Q. Smith, and so on. Later, working with the young editor Witter Bynner (who would become a poet and scholar), Porter almost never called him by his actual name. Instead, he addressed Bynner affectionately as Honored Sir, Doubleyou B, Mr. Man, Pal, My Dear Person, Willie, Witt, B. Binny, and Mr. Bitterwinter, among other appellations.
From prison, Porter published more than a dozen stories, signing them “O. Henry,” the name with which he became the most widely read author of his time. He kept a small notebook in which he recorded the names of his stories and where they had been submitted. The first story he published as O. Henry was “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking,” which appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1899. Because he used an intermediary in New Orleans to submit his stories to editors, no one knew they were written by a convicted felon. His friend would place each story in a different envelope and then mail them from his own address.
In 1901, Porter was a free man. He’d made sure that Margaret had no idea where her father had been during his absence; she knew only that he was away on “business.” He’d written letters to her regularly from prison:
July 8, 1898. MY DEAR MARGARET: You don’t know how glad I was to get your nice little letter to-day. I am so sorry I couldn’t come to tell you good-bye when I left Austin. You know I would have done so if I could have. Well, I think it’s a shame some men folks have to go away from home to work and stay away so long don’t you? But I tell you what’s a fact. When I come home next time I’m going to stay there. . . . Now, Margaret, don’t you worry any about me, for I’m well and fat as a pig and I’ll have to be away from home a while yet and while I’m away you can just run up to Nashville and see the folks there. And not long after you come back home I’ll be ready to come. And I won’t ever have to leave again. . . . Look out pretty soon for another letter from me. I think about you every day and wonder what you are doing. Well, I will see you again before very long. Your loving PAPA.
Porter was a changed man. He’d cut off several friendships rather than reveal the fact of his imprisonment. He had no wish to explain himself, and he hoped that no one would ever learn how he’d spent the past thirty-nine months of his life. He was determined to keep his secret and start anew.
The first step toward reinvention was no surprise: he shut down the name William Sydney Porter. Having adopted O. Henry in prison (and with no one able to trace it to an actual person), he made the transition easily. As William Porter, he was merely a journalist; as O. Henry, he was an author.
In 1902 he moved to New York City. The geographic change brought him closer to the center of the publishing industry and provided distance from his former self. In New York, where he had no friends or acquaintances, he was more prolific than ever, writing and publishing hundreds of stories. His popularity soared.
From 1903 to 1907, Porter lived in Manhattan’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, which had been created in 1831 by the developer Samuel Ruggles. The area was just as Ruggles had envisioned it: “a bastion of civility and serenity.” Over the years, Gramercy Park became known for its literary figures—among them, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and the impoverished Stephen Crane, who lived with three aspiring artists in a tiny studio apartment. Melville, a customs inspector by day, was a resident for nearly thirty years, suffering there through the tepid reception of each of his novels, including Moby-Dick. Yet Porter—or O. Henry—is perhaps the author most closely identified with the neighborhood. He lived at 55 Irving Place in a first-floor brownstone apartment, and for the first time in his life, he was financially comfortable, having been given a contract by the New York World to write a weekly story, at the rate of a hundred dollars each.
Despite the financial incentive, he often missed deadlines—perhaps owing to his drunkenness. His editor refused to pay him until they arranged a compromise. For the first half of the story he delivered, he’d receive an advance; after submitting the other half, he’d be paid the remainder of his fee. Critics have noted that some of the beginnings and endings of O. Henry’s stories seem disconnected, almost like Mad Libs. His quirky payment system might have had something to do with that.
Later, as his fame grew, various stories were released about the origins of his pen name. Porter told the New York Times that he came across the surname “Henry” in the society pages of a New Orleans newspaper, and that he wanted something short for a first name. A friend suggested using a plain initial. “O is about the easiest letter written,” Porter decided, “and O it is.”
There was yet another version. After having dabbled in a number of pseudonyms, Porter took his name from Orrin Henry, a guard at the Columbus prison. Some said that the pseudonym came from the French pharmacist Etienne-Ossian Henry. Others said that the author had used “O. Henry” as an expletive so often that someone suggested it as his pen name.
The scholar Guy Davenport had his own rather dubious theory about the name, arguing that it was an assemblage from the first two letters of “Ohio” and the second and last two of “penitentiary.”
So, take your pick.
In 1904, Porter got a shock when he was asked to meet with an editor at the Critic, a monthly literary magazine. The editor said, “You are O. Henry, are you not?” Caught off-guard, Porter didn’t deny it, but he did claim that there was no real mystery about writing under a different name. He hoped that a mundane story would defuse any desire by the editor to publish an exposé, and to dig into his past. He spoke as if confiding in the editor, saying that he was simply shy and averse to publicity, and that his lack of confidence had led him to use pen name. He then changed the subject, and hoped that the matter would go no further.
But a few weeks later, he picked up the new issue of the Critic and saw that the editor had proceeded with his scoop anyway. The article noted that the public was delighted by “certain fantastic and ingenious tales” bearing “the strange device O. Henry as a signature.” It went on: “No one seemed to know the author’s real name, and immedi
ately vague and weird rumors began to be afloat and the nom de guerre was soon invested with as much curiosity as surrounds an author after his decease.” Fortunately for Porter, the editor had simply published what he’d been told—so now it would be known, at least to some, that Porter was O. Henry, but no one had connected him back to the bank teller who’d been arrested and convicted. “[L]ike most mysteries, when it was probed there was no mystery,” the article said of the unmasking. “O. Henry’s real name is Mr. Sydney Porter, a gentleman from Texas, who, having seen a great deal of the world with the naked eye, happened to find himself in New York.” Porter’s real secrets remained safe. Still, he fretted over how the Critic had found the story in the first place, who had tipped off the editor, and how the magazine had gotten hold of an old photograph of him to accompany the story. Luckily, the fact of Porter’s pseudonym did not spread to the rest of the country right away. He could relax for a while, though he lived in fear that at any time he’d be found out and ruined. He decided that even if some people knew that he was O. Henry, he would at least minimize how much information was known about William Porter.
After the publication of O. Henry’s well-received Cabbages and Kings came The Four Million, in 1906, spreading his fame even further. The book included what would become his most celebrated story, “The Gift of the Magi,” with its famous opening:
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
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