Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  The much-anthologized story is required reading for most students, but the story behind it is not well known. The night that the piece was due, his editor, in desperation, sent an illustrator out to track down O. Henry and extract it in person. When the illustrator arrived at the writer’s apartment, he found that O. Henry had not even started. Supposedly, O. Henry then handed him a roughly drawn sketch and said, “Just draw a picture of a poorly furnished room. . . . On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side. They are talking about Christmas. The man has a watch fob in his hand. . . . The girl’s principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back. That’s all I can think of now, but the story is coming.” Then he finished a few hours later.

  As usual, the details of anything to do with William Porter are sketchy at best. According to another story about “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry wrote the entire story in a booth at Pete’s Tavern, near Gramercy Park—a bar established in 1864 whose tagline is “The Tavern That O. Henry Made Famous.” He is said to have gone to Pete’s every morning. When he was in the midst of writing, though, he would order a bottle of Scotch to be delivered to him.

  Gilman Hall was the magazine editor who’d given Porter his first writing contract, and they became friends. “I was sure that he had a past,” he once recalled, “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.”

  Porter did a fine job of keeping the most painful parts of his past a secret. In a wide-ranging interview he gave to the New York Times in the spring of 1909, the reporter George MacAdam commented that “so far as the public is concerned, all he will do is to materialize between the covers of magazine and book . . . while he himself remains invisible behind the pen name.”

  Noting that “for the past six or seven years O. Henry has been one of the most popular short-story writers in America,” MacAdam mentioned that even though “he has kept himself under a bushel,” his real name was now well known, having “leaked from a hundred and one different sources.”

  The Times was clearly proud of having obtained unprecedented access to its elusive subject. MacAdam showed a dash of smugness in pointing out, “Many are the interviewers who have sought him, but he has turned a deaf ear to their siren song.”

  Now Porter was talking, but he wasn’t necessarily telling the truth. “Let me see: I was born in 1867,” he told the reporter. (He wasn’t.) Taking out a pencil and a scrap of paper to calculate his age, he added, “That makes me 42, almost 43 years old, but put down 42.”

  He was asked what he had done after The Rolling Stone had ceased publication.

  “A friend of mine who had a little money . . . suggested that I join him on a trip to Central America,” he said, “whither he was going with the intention of going into the fruit business.” (Or, more accurately, whither Porter was going to avoid being sent to prison.) After that, instead of mentioning where he’d actually spent the next three years, he said that he moved to New Orleans and “took up literary work in earnest.” If by “New Orleans,” he meant “Columbus, Ohio,” then yes, he was telling the truth. There was no mention of his years in Austin, his years in prison, or even his marriage and daughter.

  His few straightforward responses in the interview came when he was asked to talk about his writing. On his advice to young writers: “I’ll give you the whole secret to short story writing,” he said. “Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.” And on the virtues of his work, he said, “People say I know New York well. Just change Twenty-Third Street in one of my New York stories to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building, and put in the Town Hall and the story will fit just as truly in any upstate town. At least, I hope this can be said of my stories. So long as a story is true to human nature all you need do is change the local color to make it fit in any town.”

  A woman who knew Porter socially in New York once spoke of how difficult it was to engage him in conversation, except superficially, because “he protected himself from the crude and rude touch of the world in a triple-plated armor of mirth and formality.” He bristled at personal questions (though he didn’t mind reminiscing about his early years in North Carolina), and felt most at ease in the role of raconteur. “His wit was urbane, sophisticated, individual; entirely free from tricks and the desire to secure effects,” the woman recalled. “It was never mordant nor corrosive; it did not eat or fester; it struck clean and swift and sure as a stroke of lightning.”

  It must have flattered him when, in his early days in New York, as his fame was growing and people began to speculate about his true identity, at least one impostor emerged. Gilman Hall recalled that only a few editors knew who O. Henry was and where he lived. An editor from a competing magazine boasted to Hall one day that he’d just learned that “the real O. Henry” was a college undergraduate who’d “admitted” that he was the author. Hearing this, Hall laughed and informed the editor that the real “real O. Henry” had in fact just left his office. When Hall related the amusing anecdote to Porter, he replied that so long as the paychecks were sent to the right man, he didn’t care how many other aspiring O. Henrys there were.

  Having established himself as an important writer was all the more reason to guard his privacy—particularly any unsavory aspects of his past that didn’t conform to his image as a man of letters. His rise to prominence was remarkable: one critic argued that O. Henry “took the place of Kipling as a literary master,” and said that on “the shelf of my prized American classics” were Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, W. D. Howells—and O. Henry.

  Another critic insisted that O. Henry should be considered a source of national pride: “More than any author who ever wrote in the United States, O. Henry is an American writer. And the time is coming, let us hope, when the whole English-speaking world will recognize in him one of the great masters of modern literature.”

  Porter’s personal life, too, had finally brought a measure of happiness—if short-lived, yet again. In 1905, after reading one of O. Henry’s short stories, a childhood friend from Greensboro, Sara Lindsey Coleman, wrote a letter to the author inviting him to visit her. She’d gained her own impressive reputation as a short story writer, albeit locally, in North Carolina. Her family was prominent, as her father had served as a colonel in the Confederate army. She was witty and gracious, and Porter corresponded with her for a while before inviting her to come visit him in New York. (A diehard southerner, she admitted to him that she loathed the city.) Upon seeing her again, on his forty-fifth birthday, Porter fell in love and proposed. He confessed the entire (true) story of what he said was his wrongful imprisonment, and his journey to becoming a writer. They were married on November 27, 1907, in Asheville, and Gilman Hall served as best man. But within two years, owing mostly to Porter’s alcoholism, the marriage deteriorated. They never divorced, however. His wife lived until the age of ninety-one; she died in North Carolina in 1959. She outlived even her husband’s daughter: Margaret died in California at the age of thirty-seven.

  But 1907 was a good year for the author: he was married and at the height of his fame. The third O. Henry story collection, The Heart of the West, was published, as well as a fourth, The Trimmed Lamp. He repeated the same feat for the next few years, issuing two story collections annually—but these were his final years. (He would die at the age of forty-seven.) Porter had begun to resent his success and admitted that he felt constrained by it. Everyone by now knew what an “O. Henry story” was, and even he had tired of his predictable story structure. He boasted that he would write a novel, but he never did.

  Although his fame was accompanied by a very comfortable income, Porter was perpetually in debt. He used his earnings to buy Scotch, wine, and beer; tipped wa
iters at restaurants in amounts that matched the check for his meal; gave money freely to panhandlers; and generously treated his friends. He was compulsive in his giving, always ending up flat broke himself. Some of his debt, apparently, could be traced to silencing blackmailers. One woman from Austin was prepared to reveal to the press that he was a convicted embezzler. For her silence she requested a thousand dollars, an astronomical sum at the time, and he caved in to her demands. Perhaps fearing that she could be arrested for blackmail, she left Porter alone and never approached the media with her story.

  Despite the agony he had suffered over his past and the memories that haunted him, he received adulation from the public. Fans wrote to him asking for autographs, inscribed books, and photographs (which he usually declined to provide).

  By 1909, his wife was living in North Carolina with her mother while Porter remained in New York. When he saw a doctor that summer, he was told that he had an enlarged heart, bad kidneys, and a severely compromised liver. During periods of relative recovery, he smoked and drank heavily, in denial that he was killing himself, and was more deeply in debt than ever.

  On June 3, 1910, his kidneys failed. He called for help, then passed out. When he arrived by taxi (at his insistence) at New York Polyclinic Hospital on East Thirty-fourth Street, he wanted to protect his privacy. He requested permission to register under an assumed name, and as if casually checking into a hotel, he signed in as “Will S. Parker.” Following an emergency operation, his condition stabilized, and his wife began to make her way up to New York by train from North Carolina. She arrived too late to see him alive again.

  At around midnight on June 5, Porter told a hospital nurse: “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” He was dead before seven o’clock in the morning.

  His career had been brief—just under a decade—but in that time he’d won international acclaim and his work was translated into a dozen languages. Two years after he died, Doubleday published a deluxe, limited edition of his collected stories, which included an original manuscript page with each copy. Only twelve were printed. Priced at $125, they sold out right away.

  In the obituary that ran in the New York Times, Porter was called “one of the best short story writers in America.” The article also noted that a year before his death, “O. Henry did something he was not in the habit of doing. He gave to the New York Times a story of his life, and it was the real story and not the invented narrative that went the rounds.” (He died having fooled the Times.)

  The “real” story came out only in 1916, in the first biography of O. Henry, which fully exposed the imprisonment of William Porter and the launching of O. Henry’s writing career. Additional volumes of O. Henry’s short stories were released posthumously, and continued to sell millions of copies. In 1918, the O. Henry Memorial Award Prizes were established, given each year to the best short stories published in the United States and Canada, and intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.” Doubleday published the first collection of prizewinning stories in 1919. Today, Porter is best known for this award, rather than his own work, but at the time it proved that his name, above all others, was synonymous with the short story.

  O. Henry was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina. In honor of those famous first six words of “The Gift of the Magi,” visitors have made a tradition of leaving $1.87 at his grave—money he would no doubt have spent if he could.

  He died a virgin

  Chapter 7

  Fernando Pessoa & HIS HETERONYMS

  You will never get to the bottom of Fernando Pessoa. There are too many of him.

  “After looking for him in the poems, we look for him in the prose,” wrote the scholar and translator Edwin Honig. Yet we find him nowhere. This was, after all, a poet whose maxim was, “To pretend is to know oneself.” Cyril Connolly noted that Pessoa “hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees.” He pretended relentlessly, employing more than seventy personae in his self-searching circus. They were not so much disguises as extensions and iterations of himself. “How idyllic life would be,” he once wrote, “if it were lived by another person.” When he looked in the mirror, he saw a crowd.

  For some authors, the task of writing is a descent into the self. Pessoa ventured in the opposite direction, using his heteronyms as a means of departure and claiming that within his mini-populace, he was the least “real” and compelling of the bunch. The others were constellations swirling around him. In the context of psychoanalysis, a split identity is seen as a wound that needs healing. But in Pessoa’s mind(s), there was nothing disorienting about it. “I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor,” he explained. “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.”

  Although the basic facts of his life are now known, attempting to create a “biography” of Pessoa is a slippery task indeed. “There never was a good biography of a good novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his journals. “There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”

  Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was very, very good.

  Some things about him can be said for sure. He was born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal, and spent his first seven years there. His surname, ironically, means “person” in Portuguese. He was five when his father, the music critic Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. Six months later, Fernando’s infant brother, Jorge, died. His paternal grandmother suffered from episodes of insanity and was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twelve years of her life. After his father died, his mother, Maria Madalena Nogueria Pessoa, remarried, and the family moved to South Africa, where the boy’s stepfather, João Miguel Rosa, served as the Portuguese consul of Durban, a British-governed town. By that time, the precocious Pessoa could read and write, thanks partly to his cultured, nurturing mother. He produced what is believed to be his first poem in the summer of 1895, when he was seven years old, in response to learning that the family would be moving to South Africa. The poem was called “To My Dear Mother”:

  Here I am in Portugal,

  In the lands where I was born.

  However much I love them,

  I love you even more.

  He attended a primary school run by French and Irish nuns and became fluent in French and English. Later, at Durban High School, he was a brilliant student. He won awards and shunned sports. A former classmate, Clifford Geerdts, recalled a boy who was morbid, as well as “meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.”

  Pessoa gained three younger half siblings from his mother’s second marriage: Henriqueta (with whom he was closest), Luís, and João. He read and loved Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and Byron. He began using false names to write: Charles Robert Anon, also known as C. R. Anon, and Alexander Search, for whom he printed calling cards. (Search once wrote a short story called “A Very Original Dinner,” in which the guests feast on human flesh.) Then there was Jean Seul, who wrote only in French. The shy boy created poems and stories, and even “edited” fake newspapers—not unlike an early-twentieth-century version of The Onion—with news, spoofs, editorials, riddles, and poems, all written by a staff of “journalists” who’d sprung from his imagination and whose biographies he’d made up. Later, in recalling his childhood, Pessoa wrote that “[a]ny nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed.” Nothing really mattered to him apart from his writing. Real life was beside the point. “I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be,” he once wrote, conceding his fixation on dreaming and escape. “All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it.”

  In 1905, at the age of seventeen, Pessoa returne
d to Lisbon to attend university. (He would never again leave the city.) Though he dropped out after two years, he got a fine education on his own by sequestering himself in the National Library to read literature, history, religion, and philosophy. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick,” as well as poems and essays, occasionally in Portuguese but more often in French and English.

  Pessoa, who had very poor vision and wore glasses, lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, reading, writing, and earning a modest salary as a translator for companies that conducted business abroad. Later he worked as a bookkeeper. He had few friends. “Since childhood I had the tendency to create around me a fictitious world, surrounding myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed,” he wrote later. (As a boy, he’d invented the Chevalier de Pas, a faithful “playmate” who sent letters to him.) In 1910, the twenty-two-year-old admitted that “[t]he whole constitution of my spirit is one of hesitancy and doubt. Nothing is or can be positive to me; all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself.” That his identity seemed so unstable was both distressing and consoling: “Am I happy or sad?” he asked in one poem. “My sadness consists in not knowing much about myself. But then my happiness consists in that too.”

  His heteronyms, too, were filled with contradictions. “In each of us there is a differingness and a manyness and a profusion of ourselves,” wrote one of his mental offspring. This notion of endless expansiveness offered tremendous freedom. “I suffer the delicacy of my feelings with disdainful attention,” Pessoa explained, “but the essential thing about my life, as about my soul, is never to be a protagonist. I’ve no idea of myself, not even one that consists of a nonidea of myself. I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness.” Put it like that, and you can’t help but envy him.