41 Stories (2 page)

He rapidly became famous, and he began to earn large sums of money. The
World
paid him $100 a week, a sum probably equal to ten times that amount today. He lived well but almost as anonymously as the way he hid himself behind his literary name. He was deathly afraid of meeting someone from the penitentiary, of being found out, of being exposed as William Sydney Porter, bank embezzler and convict.
Cabbages and Kings,
his first collection, came out in 1904, and was well received. The Four
Million
(i.e., the four million residents of New York City at that time), published in 1906, made him famous. From that day to this, his works have never been out of print. Book after book rolled into print; even after his death in 1910, there were stories enough for four more volumes, plus, in 1920 and then in 1936, still further gleanings, largely of very early material.

It was a literally killing pace, and O.Henry had begun to feel the effects and to slow down by about 1907. He had also managed to marry for a second time, to a childhood sweetheart and spinster who was close to forty and temperamentally about as unsuited to him as he was unsuited to marriage itself. His daughter lived with them briefly, but the marriage fell apart: by 1909 the second Mrs. Porter had gone home to mother, the young Miss Porter had been sent off to school, and O.Henry, weary, as always in debt, was desperately trying to recoup. As always he wrote, and he schemed; fortune beckoned, and he looked the other way while plunging still further into debt and imminent physical collapse, drinking too much, living too high, and yet perpetually hopeful, perpetually dreaming, planning, scrambling. He took money for a novel that was never written and wrote a failed musical comedy instead. He took $500 for the dramatic rights to “A Retrieved Reformation,” instead of writing the play himself, as the producer had wanted. Alias Jimmy Valentine was a tremendous hit, earning more than $100,000 in royalties by the time its first run ended. He drank more and more, wrote less and less, unwilling to admit that the tuberculosis that had killed his mother and his first wife, and which three decades earlier had threatened him, had now caught up to him and was eating his life away. He died sordidly, suffering simultaneously from tuberculosis, diabetes, and an advanced stage of cirrhosis of the liver.

 

It would be hard to put it better than Jesse F. Knight has done in a little-known journal,
The Romantist:

The realists of his time, Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, tried in their differing ways to confront their world. O.Henry had no great interest in confrontation: what he primarily wanted, and what he created in his fiction, was escape. And yet as Mr. Knight suggests, it is not so simple and straightforward, for one could write a good part of a social history of New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century from his stories alone. Poverty is everywhere, and misery, and death, too. The heroine of “The Furnished Room” has killed herself in poverty and desperation. The hero kills himself, too, once he learns what has happened to her. The hero of “Brickdust Row” discovers, to his horror, what the city can do to young women and then discovers that without having known it, he is what we would today call a slumlord. “It's too late, I tell you,” he exclaims at the end, realizing that the girl he would like to love has been too badly affected. “It's too late. It's too late. It's too late.” At the end of “An Unfinished Story” not here reprinted, the narrator dreams himself in heaven, being interrogated by an angelic policeman. Is he one of the prosperous lot standing nearby?

That deft, wry combination of pain and humor is a special and rare accomplishment. To quote Mr. Knight again, the “pain he undoubtedly felt became one of his greatest assets as he projected it through his fiction. He often poked good-natured fun at human follies, but it is a gentle irony born out of affection, out of love for the human race. His humor ... is not corrosive.... [Overall] there is about his fiction a sense of gaiety and lightness, comparable to a Viennese waltz.” He cannot keep himself from seeing, somehow, that evil exists, and often triumphs—and not only in cities. “The Caballaro's Way” is powerful evidence that O.Henry did not unduly romanticize human nature wherever he found it. But one of the major tools he wielded, in fashioning the many forms of escape that he wove so artfully, was humor. He poked fun; he made puns, some of them as outrageous as any execrable pun ever concocted. In “Masters of Arts,” not here reprinted, a con man reproaches an unwilling artist partner. “ ‘Now, sonny,' he said with gentle grimness, ‘you and me will have an Art to Art talk.' ” In “Springtime à la Carte,” the story mentioned earlier as having been spun out of a glance at a restaurant menu, a novel by Charles Reade that O.Henry liked is referred to as “the best non-selling book of the month.” In “Seats of the Haughty,” not here reprinted, a con man “hustles away with a kind of Swiss movement toward a jewelry store.” He can get almost as verbally playful as James Joyce, though in a very different cause. “ ‘It's part of my business,' ” says a character in “The Man Higher Up,” not here reprinted; “ ‘to play up to the ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. 'Tis loves that makes the bit go ‘round' ”—referring, in this last atrocious pun, to the bit with which the burglar bores his way into his chosen victim's premises.

This kind of wordplay, to be sure, is the farthest thing from the hack work of which O.Henry is so freely accused. It is true that he wrote a great deal and that he never, so far as is known, revised. He also wrote with great art and with immense zest, which are not qualities associated with hack work. There is sentimentality in much of O.Henry (as there is, it must be noted, in much of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and even Stephen Crane), but there is far more artistic discipline and vivid love of craft than some of his critics are prepared to admit. “The club of realism,” a marvelously apt phrase from “The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock,” ought not to be wielded against O.Henry: He was trying to do something very different, and doing it, much of the time, superlatively well.

Nor is O.Henry the flighty, fundamentally unserious writer he is sometimes made out to be. (No more are Strauss waltzes flighty. They are neither Bach-like nor Brahms-like, but they do not purport to be. Do we reproach a beautiful dog for not being a beautiful horse, or a handsome boy for not being a dashing man?) There is intense seriousness in his stories, even intense seriousness about the craft he practiced so secretively. “The art of narrative,” declares the narrator in “The Phonograph and the Graft,” not here reprinted, “consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favorite opinions on topics foreign to the subject. A good story is like a bitter pill with the sugar coating inside of it.” In “Springtime à la Carte,” again, he begins with a short, one-sentence paragraph, “It was a day in March,” and then goes on, brilliantly:

This is the art which, proclaiming artlessness, neatly conceals art. We are all no more than common men together, O.Henry keeps insisting, but what common man could have written phrases like “Women are the natural enemies of clocks,” “We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs,” or “Women do not read the love stories in the magazines.... The love stories are read by fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls”? What common man could say of a commemorative statue standing in New York City traffic that “the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid transit gloria mundi”? Or could gloriously destroy one of the most famous schoolboy phrases in all of Latin literature and then redeem the farce with as deft a bit of social comment as could possibly be written?

What common man could dispose of female do-gooders one minute, saying of a cabman's horse “that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him,” and then, the next minute, declare that a character “found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him?”

O.Henry, at his best, is both brilliant and wise, both serious and funny. He mixes and he pours, and his concoctions, though brewed according to formula, are nevertheless daz zlingly potent at their best, for the formula is unique, it is his alone, and it is framed out of materials as true as much of what goes into the heaviest, most ponderous tomes. Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real. O.Henry is many things, and like all good artists, he is sometimes a contradictory, complex mixture of many different things, but he is almost never boring—and certainly not in any of the stories here spread out for your enlightenment, instruction, and entertainment.

—BURTON RAFFEL

The Social Triangle

At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose. Ikey was a tailor's apprentice. Are there tailors' apprentices nowadays?

At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let shine.

It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie, and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.

For each of us, when our day's work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweatshops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.

Ikey's legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment known as the Café Maginnis—famous because it was the rendezvous of Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought, that the world had ever produced.

Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots.

Ikey slunk along the bar and gazed, breath-quickened, at his idol.

How magnificent was Billy McMahan, with his great, smooth, laughing face; his gray eye, shrewd as a chicken hawk's; his diamond ring, his voice like a bugle call, his prince's air, his plump and active roll of money, his clarion call to friend and comrade—oh, what a king of men he was! How he obscured his lieutenants, though they themselves loomed large and serious, blue of chin and important of mien, with hands buried deep in the pockets of their short overcoats! But Billy—oh, what small avail are words to paint for you his glory as seen by Ikey Snigglefritz!

The Café Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan's hand. And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz an audacious, thrilling impulse.

He stepped forward into the little cleared space in which majesty moved, and held out his hand.

Billy McMahan grasped it unhesitatingly, shook it and smiled.

Made mad now by the gods who were about to destroy him, Ikey threw away his scabbard and charged upon Olympus.

“Have a drink with me, Billy,” he said familiarly, “you and your friends?”

“Don't mind if I do, old man,” said the great leader, “just to keep the ball rolling.”

The last spark of Ikey's reason fled.

“Wine,” he called to the bartender, waving a trembling hand.

The corks of three bottles were drawn; the champagne bubbled in the long row of glasses set upon the bar. Billy McMahan took his and nodded, with his beaming smile at Ikey. The lieutenants and satellites took theirs and growled “Here's to you.” Ikey took his nectar in delirium. All drank.