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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
This carefully crafted ebook: "The Complete Poetry of O. Henry (Including a Biography of the Author)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer. O. Henry's works are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and surprise endings. Table of Contents: A Contribution Chanson De Bohême Drop a Tear in This Slot Hard to Forget Nothing to Say Tamales The Lullaby Boy The Murderer The Old Farm The Pewee Two Portraits Vanity Sleeping Fancies Trusting Thoughts Thinking The Crucible Biography of O. Henry
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The Complete Poetry of O. Henry
(Including a Biography of the Author)
From the American writer, a master of short stories, known for The Gift of the Magi, Cabbages and Kings, The Cop and the Anthem, Options, Roads of Destiny, The Four Million…
Table of Contents
A Contribution
There came unto ye editor A poet, pale and wan, And at the table sate him down, A roll within his hand. Ye editor accepted it, And thanked his lucky fates; Ye poet had to yield it up
Chanson De Bohême
Lives of great men all remind us Rose is red and violet’s blue; Johnny’s got his gun behind us ‘Cause the lamb loved Mary too. — Robert Burns’ “Hocht Time in the aud Town.” I’d rather write this, as bad as it is Than be Will Shakespeare’s shade; I’d rather be known as an F. F. V. Than in Mount Vernon laid. I’d rather count ties from Denver to Troy Than to head Booth’s old programme; I’d rather be special for the New York World Than to lie with Abraham.For there’s stuff in the can, there’s Dolly and Fan, And a hundred things to choose; There’s a kiss in the ring, and every old thing That a real live man can use. I’d rather fight flies in a boarding house Than fill Napoleon’s grave, And snuggle up warm in my three slat bed Than be André the brave. I’d rather distribute a coat of red On the town with a wad of dough Just now, than to have my cognomen Spelled “Michael Angelo.”For a small live man, if he’s prompt on hand
Drop A Tear In This Slot
He who, when torrid Summer’s sickly glare Beat down upon the city’s parched walls, Sat him within a room scarce 8 by 9, And, with tongue hanging out and panting breath, Perspiring, pierced by pangs of prickly heat, Wrote variations of the seaside joke We all do know and always loved so well, And of cool breezes and sweet girls that lay In shady nooks, and pleasant windy coves Anon Will in that selfsame room, with tattered quilt Wrapped round him, and blue stiffening hands, All shivering, fireless, pinched by winter’s blasts, Will hale us forth upon the rounds once more, So that we may expect it not in vain, The joke of how with curses deep and coarse Papa puts up the pipe of parlor stove. So ye Who greet with tears this olden favorite,
Hard To Forget
I’m thinking tonight of the old farm, Ned, And my heart is heavy and sad As I think of the days that by have fled Since I was a little lad. There rises before me each spot I know Of the old home in the dell, The fields, and woods, and meadows below That memory holds so well. The city is pleasant and lively, Ned, But what to us is its charm? Tonight all my thoughts are fixed, instead, On our childhood’s old home farm. I know you are thinking the same, dear Ned, With your head bowed on your arm,
Nothing To Say
“You can tell your paper,” the great man said, “I refused an interview. I have nothing to say on the question, sir; Nothing to say to you.” And then he talked till the sun went down And the chickens went to roost; And he seized the collar of the poor young man, And never his hold he loosed. And the sun went down and the moon came up, And he talked till the dawn of day; Though he said, “On this subject mentioned by you, I have nothing whatever to say.” And down the reporter dropped to sleep And flat on the floor he lay;
Tamales
This is the Mexican Don José Calderon One of God’s countrymen. Land of the buzzard. Cheap silver dollar, and Cacti and murderers. Why has he left his land Land of the lazy man, Land of the pulque Land of the bull fight, Fleas and revolution. This is the reason, Hark to the wherefore; Listen and tremble. One of his ancestors, Ancient and garlicky, Probably grandfather, Died with his boots on. Killed by the Texans, Texans with big guns, At San Jacinto. Died without benefit Of priest or clergy; Died full of minie balls, Mescal and pepper. Don José Calderon Heard of the tragedy. Heard of it, thought of it, Vowed a deep vengeance; Vowed retribution On the Americans, Murderous gringos, Especially Texans. “Valga me Dios! que Ladrones, diablos, Matadores, mentidores, Caraccos y perros, Voy a matarles, Con solos mis manos, Toditas sin falta.” Thus swore the Hidalgo Don José Calderon. He hied him to Austin. Bought him a basket, A barrel of pepper, And another of garlic; Also a rope he bought. That was his stock in trade; Nothing else had he. Nor was he rated in Dun or in Bradstreet, Though he meant business, Don José Calderon, Champion of Mexico, Don José Calderon, Seeker of vengeance. With his stout lariat, Then he caught swiftly Tomcats and puppy dogs, Caught them and cooked them, Don José Calderon, Vower of vengeance. Now on the sidewalk Sits the avenger Selling Tamales to Innocent purchasers. Dire is thy vengeance, Oh, José Calderon, Pitiless Nemesis Fearful Redresser Of the wrongs done to thy Sainted grandfather. Now the doomed Texans, Rashly hilarious, Buy of the deadly wares, Buy and devour. Rounders at midnight, Citizens solid, Bankers and newsboys, Bootblacks and preachers, Rashly importunate, Courting destruction. Buy and devour. Beautiful maidens Buy and devour, Gentle society youths Buy and devour. Buy and devour This thing called Tamale; Made of rat terrier, Spitz dog and poodle. Maltese cat, boarding house Steak and red pepper. Garlic and tallow,
The Lullaby Boy
The lullaby boy to the same old tune Who abandons his drum and toys For the purpose of dying in early June Is the kind the public enjoys. But, just for a change, please sing us a song, Of the sore-toed boy that’s fly, And freckled and mean, and ugly, and bad,
The Murderer
“I push my boat among the reeds; I sit and stare about; Queer slimy things crawl through the weeds, Put to a sullen rout. I paddle under cypress trees; All fearfully I peer Through oozy channels when the breeze Comes rustling at my ear. “The long moss hangs perpetually; Gray scalps of buried years; Blue crabs steal out and stare at me, And seem to gauge my fears; I start to hear the eel swim by; I shudder when the crane Strikes at his prey; I turn to fly, At drops of sudden rain. “In every little cry of bird I hear a tracking shout; From every sodden leaf that’s stirred I see a face frown out; My soul shakes when the water rat Cowed by the blue snake flies; Black knots from tree holes glimmer at Me with accusive eyes. “Through all the murky silence rings A cry not born of earth; An endless, deep, unechoing thing That owns not human birth. I see no colors in the sky Save red, as blood is red; I pray to God to still that cry From pallid lips and dead. “One spot in all that stagnant waste I shun as moles shun light, And turn my prow to make all haste To fly before the night. A poisonous mound hid from the sun, Where crabs hold revelry; Where eels and fishes feed upon The Thing that once was He. “At night I steal along the shore; Within my hut I creep; But awful stars blink through the door, To hold me from my sleep. The river gurgles like his throat, In little choking coves, And loudly dins that phantom note From out the awful groves. “I shout with laughter through the night: I rage in greatest glee; My fears all vanish with the light Oh! splendid nights they be! I see her weep; she calls his name; He answers not, nor will; My soul with joy is all aflame; I laugh, and laugh, and thrill. “I count her teardrops as they fall;
The Old Farm
Just now when the whitening blossoms flare On the apple trees and the growing grass Creeps forth, and a balm is in the air; With my lighted pipe and well-filled glass Of the old farm I am dreaming, And softly smiling, seeming To see the bright sun beaming Upon the old home farm. And when I think how we milked the cows, And hauled the hay from the meadows low; And walked the furrows behind the plows, And chopped the cotton to make it grow I’d much rather be here dreaming And smiling, only seeming
The Pewee
In the hush of the drowsy afternoon, When the very wind on the breast of June Lies settled, and hot white tracery Of the shattered sunlight filters free Through the unstinted leaves to the pied cool sward; On a dead tree branch sings the saddest bard Of the birds that be; ’Tis the lone Pewee. Its note is a sob, and its note is pitched In a single key, like a soul bewitched To a mournful minstrelsy. “Pewee, Pewee,” doth it ever cry; A sad, sweet minor threnody That threads the aisles of the dim hot grove Like a tale of a wrong or a vanished love; And the fancy comes that the wee dun bird Perchance was a maid, and her heart was stirred By some lover’s rhyme In a golden time, And broke when the world turned false and cold; And her dreams grew dark and her faith grew cold In some fairy far-off clime. And her soul crept into the Pewee’s breast; And forever she cries with a strange unrest For something lost, in the afternoon; For something missed from the lavish June; For the heart that died in the long ago; For the livelong pain that pierceth so: Thus the Pewee cries, While the evening lies
Two Portraits
Wild hair flying, in a matted maze, Hand firm as iron, eyes all ablaze; Bystanders timidly, breathlessly gaze, As o’er the keno board boldly he plays. — That’s Texas Bill. Wild hair flying, in a matted maze, Hand firm as iron, eyes all ablaze; Bystanders timidly, breathlessly gaze,
Vanity
A Poet sang so wondrous sweet That toiling thousands paused and listened long; So lofty, strong and noble were his themes, It seemed that strength supernal swayed his song. He, god-like, chided poor, weak, weeping man, And bade him dry his foolish, shameful tears; Taught that each soul on its proud self should lean, And from that rampart scorn all earth-born fears. The Poet grovelled on a fresh heaped mound, Raised o’er the clay of one he’d fondly loved; And cursed the world, and drenched the sod with tears
Sleeping
Gangs
In suits of gray
Worked upon the highway
In a Southern State. Stones
Were their companions,
Coarse food
Their nourishment.
Cruelty
Met often with Greed
And Fear
Lived with Hatred,
When Love
Sought entrance
On a night
In June,
Trying
All the entrances
Unavailingly,
And tiring at last.
Kindness came
And whispering
In Love’s ear Said:
“Down the road
You will find open several houses.
Better go! I will watch here.”
Love
Gave thanks,
And with bounding steps
Went gayly to the Highway.
The sun
Was hot
And the stones were sharp,
But the time for rest was near,
And a little ripple
Was running along the highway, —
A tiny little wave
Of Joy.
Love
Seeing this,
Danced with glee
And began to sing:
“Come with me
Where the flowers bloom
And birds make music All the noon.
Sunshine Dances,
Girls give glances
To the moon.
Friends Take chances,
Gay their fancies, Come with me.”
Startled
Glances went down the line,
And Love swept on
To the end, Seeking
Entrance in each heart
And sending thrills
With delight,
Until
To each one
Passed the word
“Love is here!”
Backs
Grew straighter,
Faces brighter,
Down the line.
God
Crept nearer Saying:
“Come with me! Take
No chances
With the sleepers —
Come with me!”
And down
The highway
Swept the summons,
“Come with me!”
Gray garments
Changed
To gold,
And only
Hatred
And Fear
Were left uncalled
From their sleep.
Fancies
Birds go seeking
Mates,
All on a day made gay.
“Trees are blooming,
Branches waiting, —
Will you come?”
Shy the answer —
Swift surrender —
Roundelays are heard.
Time is flying,
Summer coming,
When the families
Say farewell.
In a pasture green
Fair flowers bloom;
Gay their faces —
Bright their dresses.
Swiftly seeking,
Whirling, wheeling,
Comes a flock
At noon.
“Here are daisies,
Sweetest grasses,
Buttercups and clover,
Let us linger, sip and treasure.”
Summer passes,
Grasses perish,
But in sweetness
Is Springtime cherished.
Daylight passes,
Night approaches,
Lights begin to gleam.
In the houses
One can fancy
Nestlings tucked to rest.
Good night, sea,
Good night world,
All my soul goes out
To thee.
Happy meeting,
Friendly greeting
Upon the milky way,
Trusting
Upon the ocean wide
Two little ships set sail.
Over an ocean blue
Two little birds sailed true.
Kneeling upon a nursery floor
Two little children fair.
Under a star-lit sky
A youth and a maiden, shy.
With sightless eyes and folded hands,
Old age murmurs,”
God knows best.”
Faith — trust — love — courage! That is all — God does the rest.
Thoughts
Thinking, thinking, thinking,
As the needle travels to and fro
Through sheerest linen — finest lace-
Weaving patterns — all unseen,
Upon its face.
Pictures vivid, pictures dim,
Pictures gay and with sadness grim,
Tiny feet — clinging hands —
All are in the fabric’s sheen.
Unseen tracery takes its place,
To weave again its mystic theme.
Thinking
The only value of thinking
Is thinking of things worth while,
Of thinking of what you want to be,
And thinking of things to do
For the folks — who know not the value
Of thinking of things worth while.
All that you are, or will be,
Is vested in thinking,
And it’s the thoughts worth while,
And the deeds well planned,
Which build your mansion here — and there,
So what are you thinking now — there?
Oh! the hours we spend,
And the days we spend,
In thinking no thoughts at all —
For the only thoughts — which really count —
Are the thoughts of love sent out to all,
For they are the thoughts worth while.
The Crucible
HARD ye may be in the tumult,
Red to your battle hilts,
Blow give for blow in the foray,
Cunningly ride in the tilts;
But when the roaring is ended,
Tenderly, unbeguiled,
Turn to a woman a woman’s
Heart, and a child’s to a child.
Test of the man, if his worth be
In accord with the ultimate plan,
That he be not, to his marring,
Always and utterly man;
That he bring out of the tumult,
Fitter and undefiled,
To a woman the heart of a woman,
To children the heart of a child.
Good when the bugles are ranting
It is to be iron and fire;
Good to be oak in the foray,
Ice to a guilty desire.
But when the battle is over
(Marvel and wonder the while)
Give to a woman a woman’s
Heart, and a child’s to a child.
Biography of O. Henry
CHAPTER ONE The Life And The Story
O. HENRY was once asked why he did not read more fiction. “It is all tame,” he replied, “as compared with the romance of my own life.” But nothing is more subtly suggestive in the study of this remarkable man than the strange, structural resemblance between the story and the life. Each story is a miniature autobiography, for each story seems to summarize the four successive stages in his own romantic career.
First, the reader notices in an O. Henry story the quiet but arrestive beginning. There is interest, a bit of suspense, and a touch of distinction in the first paragraph; but you cannot tell what lines of action are to be stressed, what complications of character and incident are to follow, or whether the end is to be tragic or comic, a defeat or a victory. So was the first stage of his life. The twenty years spent in Greensboro, North Carolina, were comparatively uneventful. There was little in them of prospect, though they loom large with significance in the retrospect. O. Henry was always unique. When as a freckle-faced boy, freckled even to the feet, he played his childish pranks on young and old and told his marvellous yarns of knightly adventure or Indian ambuscade, every father and mother and boy and girl felt that he was different from others of his kind. As he approached manhood, his “somnolent little Southern town” recognized in him its most skilful cartoonist of local character and its ablest interpreter of local incident. Moliere has been called “the composite smile of mankind.” O. Henry was the composite smile of Greensboro.
In the second stage of an O. Henry story the lines begin suddenly to dip toward a plot or plan. Still water becomes running water. It is the stage of the first guess. Background and character, dialogue and incident, sparkle and sly thrust, aspiration and adventure, seem to be spelling out something definite and resultant. You cannot guess the end but you cannot help trying. In terms of his life this was O. Henry’s second or Texas period. Had he died at the age of twenty, before leaving Greensboro, he would have left a local memory and a local cult, but they would have remained local. A few would have said that with wider opportunities he would have been heard from in a national way. But when letters began to come from Texas telling of his life on the ranch and later of his adventures in local journalism, and when “W. S. Porter” signed to a joke or skit or squib in Truth or Up to Date or the Detroit Free Press became more and more a certificate of the worth while, those of us who remained in the home town began to prophesy with some assurance that he would soon join the staff of some great metropolitan newspaper or magazine and win national fame as a cartoonist or travelling correspondent.
The third stage of an O. Henry story is reached when you find that your first forecast is wrong. This is the stage of the first surprise. Something has happened that could not or would not have happened if the story was to end as you at first thought. You must give up the role of prophet or at least readjust your prophecy to the demands of an ending wholly different from that at first conjectured. This stage in the life was reached in 1898, when misfortune, swift, pitiless, and seemingly irretrievable, overtook him. His life had hitherto developed uniformly, like the advance of a rolling ball. It had permitted and even invited some sort of conjecture as to his ultimate place in the work of the world. But now his destiny seemed as incalculable as the blind movements of a log in the welter of the sea.
The fourth and last stage in an O. Henry story, the stage of the second surprise, is marked by light out of darkness. Lines of character and characterization, of hap or mishap, converge to a triumphant conclusion.
We are surprised, happily surprised, and then surprised again that we should have been surprised at first. Says Nicholas Vachel Lindsay:
He always worked a triple-hinged surprise
To end the scene and make one rub his eyes.
The end was inherent in the beginning, however, though we did not see it. But the greatest surprise and the happiest surprise is found in the last stage of O. Henry’s life. This was his New York period, the culmination of tendencies and impulses that we now know had stirred mightily within him from the beginning. Eight years had passed, however, years of constant and constantly deepening development, and not a word had drifted back to the home town from him or about him since 1898. His pencil sketches were still affectionately cherished and had grown in historic value as well as in personal significance as the years had passed. They furnished a bond of common memory and happy association wherever Greensboro men foregathered, though the fun and admiration that they occasioned were mellowed by the thought of what might have been. Now came the discovery, through a photograph published in a New York magazine, that O. Henry, variously styled “the American Kipling,” “the American de Maupassant,” “the American Gogol,” “our Fielding a la mode,” “the Bret Harte of the city,” “the Y. M. C. A. Boccaccio,” “the Homer of the Tenderloin,” “the 20th century Haroun Al-Raschid,” “the discoverer and interpreter of the romance of New Yrork,” “the greatest living master of the short story,” was Will Porter of Greensboro. No story that he has written quite equals this in reserved surprise or in real and permanent achievement.
The technique of the story, however, is the technique of the life. But the life is more appealing than the story.
CHAPTER TWO Vogue
WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER, better known as O. Henry, was born in Greensboro, Guilford County, North Carolina, September 11, 1802. He died in New York City, June 5, 1910. Before the Porter family Bible was found, his birth year varied from 1807 to 1804, from “about the close of the war” to a question mark. There is no doubt that O. Henry used the author’s traditional right to mystify his readers in regard to his age and to the unessential facts of his life. An admirer once wrote to him begging to know by return mail whether he was a man or a woman. But the stamped envelope enclosed for reply remains still unused. “If you have any applications from publishers for photos of myself,” he wrote to Mr. Witter Bynner, “or ‘slush’ about the identity of O. Henry, please refuse. Nobody but a concentrated idiot would write over a pen-name and then tack on a lot of twaddle about himself. I say this because I am getting some letters from reviewers and magazines wanting pictures, etc., and I am positively declining in every case.”
There has thus grown up a sort of O. Henry myth.
“It threatens to attain,” said the New York Sun five years after his death, “the proportions of the Stevenson myth, which was so ill-naturedly punctured by Henley. It appears to be inevitably the fate of ‘the writers’ writer’ — and O. Henry comes under this heading notwithstanding his work’s universal appeal — to disintegrate into a sort of grotesque myth after his death. As a matter of fact Sydney Porter was, in a sort of a way, a good deal of a myth before he died. He was so inaccessible that a good many otherwise reasonable people who unsuccessfully sought to penetrate his cordon and to force their way into his cloister drew bountifully upon their imaginations to save their faces and to mask their failure.”
But however mythical his personality, O. Henry’s work remains the most solid fact to be reckoned with in the history of twentieth-century American literature. “More than any author who ever wrote in the United States,” says Mr. Stephen Leacock, “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.” If variety and range of appeal be an indication, O. Henry would seem to be approaching the time thus prophesied. He has won the three classes of readers, those who work with their brains, those who work with their hands, and those who mingle the two in varying but incalculable proportions. The ultra-conservatives and the ultra-radicals, the critical and the uncritical, the bookmen and the business men, the women who serve and those who only stand and wait, all have enlisted under his banner. “The men and women whom I have in mind,” writes Mr. W. J. Ghent, author of “Socialism and Success,” “are social reformers, socialists, radicals, and progressives of various schools, practical and theoretical workers in the fields of social and political science. Some of these persons read Marx; most of them read H. G. Wells and John Galsworthy; but all of them are much more likely to read bluebooks and the Survey than the current fiction which contains no ‘message.’ Yet it was just among these persons, so far as my individual acquaintance goes, that O. Henry established himself as a writer almost at the beginning of his career.”
“When I was a freshman in Harvard College,” writes Mr. John S. Reed in the American Magazine, “I stood one day looking into the window of a bookstore on Harvard Square at a new volume of O. Henry. A quietly dressed, unimpressive man with a sparse, dark beard came up and stood beside me. Said he, suddenly: ‘Have you read the new one?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Neither have I. I’ve read all the others, though.’
‘He’s great, don’t you think?’ ‘Bully,” replied the quietly dressed man; ‘let’s go in and buy this one.’” The quietly dressed man was William James.
A writer is not often called a classic until at least a half century has set its seal upon his best work. But Mr. Edward Garnett, the English author, reviewer, and critic, admits to “the shelf of my prized American classics” seven authors. They are Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Stephen Crane, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, Mr. W. D. Ho wells, and O. Henry, though O. Henry published his first book in 1904. Professor Henry Seidel Canby, author of “The Short Story in English,” thinks that the technique of the short story has undergone marked changes in recent years, “especially since O. Henry took the place of Kipling as a literary master.” Mr. James Lane Allen believes that the golden age of the American short story closed about 1895. “The best of the American short stories,” he says, “written during that period [1870-1895], outweigh in value those that have been written later — with the exception of those of one man … the one exception is O. Henry. He alone stands out in the later period as a world within himself, as much apart from any one else as are Hawthorne and Poe.”
Mr. Henry James Forman, author of “In the Foot prints of Heine,” finds also that, with one exception, there has been a decline in the short story as a distinct genre. “Publishers still look upon it somewhat askance,’’ he writes, “as on one under a cloud, and authors, worldly-wise, still cling to the novel as the unquestioned leader. But here and there a writer now boldly brings forth a book of short tales, and the publisher does his part. The stigma of the genre is wearing off, and for the rehabilitation one man is chiefly responsible. Mr. Sydney Porter, the gentleman who, in the language of some of his characters, is ‘denounced’ by the euphonious pen-name of O. Henry, has breathed new life into the short story.” After a tentative comparison with Frangois Villon, Dickens, and Maupassant, Mr. Forman concludes: “It is idle to compare O. Henry with anybody. No talent could be more original or more delightful. The combination of technical excellence with whimsical sparkling wit, abundant humour, and a fertile invention is so rare that the reader is content without comparisons.” The Nation, after indicating the qualities that seem to differentiate him from Kipling and Mark Twain, summarizes in a single sentence: “O. Henry is actually that rare bird of which we so often hear false reports — a born story teller.”
Professor William Lyon Phelps in “The Advance of the English Novel” puts O. Henry among the five greatest American short story writers. “No writer of distinction,” he continues, “has, I think, been more closely identified with the short story in English than O. Henry. Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Bret Harte, Stevenson, Kipling attained fame in other fields; but although Porter had his mind fully made up to launch what he hoped would be the great American novel, the veto of death intervened, and the many volumes of his ‘complete works’ are made up of brevities. The essential truthfulness of his art is what gave his work immediate recognition, and accounts for his rise from journalism to literature. There is poignancy in his pathos; desolation in his tragedy; and his extraordinary humour is full of those sudden surprises that give us delight. Uncritical readers have never been so deeply impressed with O. Henry as have the professional, jaded critics, weary of the old trick a thousand times repeated, who found in his writings a freshness and originality amounting to genius.”
There is no doubt that the jaded critics extended a warm welcome to O. Henry, but that they were more hospitable than the uncritical admits of question. For several years I have made it a practice in all sorts of unacademic places, where talk was abundant, to lead the conversation if possible to O. Henry. The result has been a conviction that O. Henry is to-day not less “the writers’ writer” but still more the people’s writer.
Travelling a few years ago through a Middle Western State, during an intolerable drought, I fell into conversation with a man the burden of whose speech was “I’ve made my pile and now I’m going away to live.” He was plainly an unlettered man but by no means ignorant. He talked interestingly, because genuinely, until he put the usual question: “What line of goods do you carry?” When I had to admit my unappealing profession his manner of speech became at once formal and distant. “Professor,” he said, after a painful pause, “Emerson is a very elegant writer, don’t you think so?” I agreed and also agreed, after another longer and more painful pause, that Prescott was a very elegant writer. These two names plus “elegant” seemed to exhaust his available supply of literary allusion. “Did you ever read O. Henry?” I asked. At the mention of the name his manner changed instantly and his eyes moistened. Leaning far over he said: “Professor, that’s literature, that’s literature, that’s real literature.” He was himself again now. The mask of affectation had fallen away, and the appreciation and knowledge of O. Henry’s work that he displayed, the affection for the man that he expressed, the grateful indebtedness that he was proud to acknowledge for a kindlier and more intelligent sympathy with his fellowmen showed plainly that O. Henry was the only writer who had ever revealed the man’s better nature to himself.
The incident is typical. The jaded critics and the short story writers read O. Henry and admire him: they find in him what they want. Those who do not criticise and do not write read him and love him: they find in him what they need — a range of fancy, an exuberance of humour, a sympathy, an understanding, a knowledge of the raw material of life, an ability to interpret the passing in terms of the permanent, an insight into individual and institutional character, a resolute and pervasive desire to help those in need of help, in a word a constant and essential democracy that they find in no other short story writer. But the deeper currents in O. Henry’s work can be traced only through a wider knowledge of O. Henry the man.
CHAPTER THREE Ancestry
The O. Henry myth could not forever withstand the curiosity and inquiry begotten by the increasing acclaim that the stories were beginning to receive. O. Henry himself must have recognized the futility of attempting a further mystification, for there is evident in his later years a willingness and even a desire to throw off the mask of the assumed name and thus to link his achievement with the name and fortunes of his family. He had sought freedom and self-expression through his writings rather than fame. In fact, he shunned publicity with the timidity of a child. “What used to strike me most forcibly in O. Henry,” writes Mr. John H. Barry, who knew him from the beginning of his career in New York, “was his distinction of character. To those he knew and liked he revealed himself as a man of singular refinement. He had beautiful, simple manners, a low voice, and a most charming air of self-effacement. For the glory of being famous he cared little. He had a dislike of being lionized. Lion-hunting women filled him with alarm. In fact, he was afraid of nearly all women.”
But fame had come and with it came a vein of ancestral reminiscence and a return in imagination to the days of childhood. His marriage, in 1907, to the sweetheart and the only sweetheart of the Greensboro years, his visits to Mrs. Porter’s home in Asheville, and his affectionate allusions to his father and mother show plainly a tendency to relax the cordon about him and to re-knit the ties and associations of youth. O. Henry was becoming Will Porter again. Even the great American novel, of which Professor Phelps speaks, was to be in the nature of an autobiography. “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” the last complete story that he wrote, was also the most autobiographical. “It was written,” says Dr. Pinkney Herbert, of Asheville, “with the aid of my medical books. Sometimes he would take them to his office and again he would sit in my outer office.” It was heralded by the magazine announcement, “If you want to get well, read this story.” But O. Henry was dead before the story was published. In it he speaks of his ancestors who blended the blood of North and South :
“It’s the haemoglobin test,” he [the doctor] explained. “The color of your blood is wrong.” “Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so”
His forebears were again in his mind when, wrenched with pain but not bowed, he went to the hospital in New York from which he knew he would not return alive. Will Irwin describes the scene as follows :*
Then as he stepped from the elevator to the ward, a kind of miracle came over him. Shy, sensitive, guarding the bare nerve-ends of his soul with an affectation of flippancy, his gait had always been furtive, his manner shrinking. Now he walked nobly, his head up, his chest out, his feet firm — walked as earls walked to the scaffold. Underneath all that democracy of life and love of the raw human heart which made him reject the prosperous and love the chatter of car-conductors and shopgirls — that quality which made Sydney Porter “O. Henry” — lay pride in his good Southern blood. It was as though he summoned all this pride of blood to help him fight the last battle like a man and a Sydney.
Thus
After Last returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched.
William Sydney Porter was named after his mother’s father, William Swaim, and his father’s father, Sidney Porter.f He was always called Will Porter in the early days except by his grandmother on his father’s side who occasionally called him Sydney. He never saw either of his grandfathers, both dying long before he was born. But William Swaim, his mother’s father, who died in 1835, left his impress upon the State and was, so far as can be learned, the only journalist or writer among O. Henry’s ancestors. The ink in O. Henry’s blood came from this Quaker grandparent, *”O. Henry, Man and Writer” (in the Cosmopolitan, September, 1910).
tO.Henry changed thespellingofhis middle name fromSidney to Sydney in 1898. See page 169l whose ancestor, also William Swaim, emigrated from Holland about the year 1700 and is buried in Richmond, Staten Island, his descendants having moved to North Carolina at least ten years before the Revolutionary War. William Swaim, O. Henry’s grandfather, did not found the Greensboro Patriot, of which he became editor in 1827, but he had the good sense to change its name from the ponderous Patriot a?id Greensboro Palladium to the simpler title that it has since borne. He does not seem to me to have been as able or as well balanced a man as Lyndon Swaim who, strangely enough, though not ascertainably related, was soon to succeed William Swaim both as editor and as husband and thus to become the only father that O. Henry’s mother knew.
William Swaim had convictions and he hewed to the line. When “the nabob gentry” of Greensboro, as he called them, sought to bend the Patriot to their own purposes, he wrote as follows (May 30, 1832):
They soon learned from our tone that we would sooner beg for bread and be free than to compromise our principles for a seat upon a tawdry throne of corruption. Still bent upon the fell purpose of preventing, if possible, an unshackled press from growing into public favor, their last resort was to ransack hell, from the centre to the circumference, for slanderous fabrications; and these have been heaped upon us, without cause and without mercy, even until now. But thanks to a generous public, they have thus far sustained us “through evil as well as through good report,” and we would rather bask for one hour in their approving smiles than to spend a whole eternity amidst the damning grins of a concatenation of office-hunters, despots, demagogues, tyrants, fools, and hypocrites.
When subscribers subscribed but took French leave, Editor Swaim threw the lasso after them in this wise:
STOP THE RUNAWAYS!
The following is a list of gentlemen who, after reading our paper for a time, have politely disappeared and left us the “bag to hold.” We give the name of each, together with the amount due, and the place of his residence at the time he patronized us. Should this publication meet the eye of any delinquents and should they yet conclude to forward to us the amount due, we will publicly acknowledge the receipt and restore him who sends it to better credit than an act of the legislature could possibly give. Any person who will favor us with information of the residence of any or all of these absentees shall have the right to claim the homage of our sincere thanks:
Joseph Aydelotte, Esq., Guilford County, North Carolina. Twelve dollars.
John Lackey, Tarboro. Nine dollars.
James Hiatt, not recollected. Nine dollars.
“William Atkinson, unknown. Nine dollars.
Jacob Millers, not recollected. Nine dollars.
Joseph Bryan, whipt anyhow and may be hung. Six dollars.
Is there not at least a hint of O. Henry in this “unexpected crack of the whip at the end?”
