Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on Dixie in The City That Never Sleeps)

“While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was ‘Dixie,’ and as the exhilarating notes tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table.

“It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafés in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés at nightfall. This applause of the ‘rebel’ air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long–shot winners at the New Orleans race–track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a ‘fad’ in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now—the war, you know.

“When ‘Dixie’ was being played a dark–haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft–brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table and pulled out cigarettes.”—American short-story writer William Sidney Porter, aka “O. Henry” (1862-1910), "A Cosmopolite in a Café," in The Four Million (1906)

Recently, I have taken to dipping into more of the short stories of the writer we know as “O. Henry.” I don’t know how much the younger generation has been exposed to him in high school or college, but when I was growing up he was nearly inescapable, cropping up constantly in anthologies (especially his Christmas tale “The Gift of the Magi,” which I discussed in this post from over 13 years ago).

As a matter of fact, more certainly than the presence of a New Yorker-style short story, there is an O. Henry one: i.e., one featuring an ironic, usually witty, reversal.

Those surprise endings became a trademark for the writer. The problem, such as it is, boils down to this: When read in bulk, the novelty wears off.

And when I write “bulk,” I mean bulk. The collection I’m reading now is called 100 Selected Stories. This paperback is substantial, totaling more than 700 pages.

But even here, it only begins to tap the writer’s astonishing output. Estimates of the number of his short stories that I’ve seen on the Internet range from 300 to “more than 600”—all collected in nine volumes published from 1904 to 1909, the year before his death.

So yes, after reading one of these stories after another in rapid succession, you are so sure a surprise is coming that it ceases to be surprising.

But, as I’ve been discovering by reading him in a collection as well as in viewing a DVD of a largely forgotten 1957 TV series, The O. Henry Playhouse, starring the great character actor Thomas Mitchell, other traits of the author besides the surprise twist come to the fore.

The quotation at the start of this current post, for instance, brought me up short. It highlights one of his less remarked upon but equally rare skills, as a social historian.

While plying his trade as a short-story writer in the early 1900s, O. Henry set many of his tales where he lived, in Manhattan—or, as he put it, “Bagdad-on-the Subway.”

The city was coming into its own as an international melting pot, and the writer was there to chronicle it all, from society swells in elegant restaurants and hotels to fleabag dumps on the Bowery.

O. Henry depicted all these characters without snobbery. He would have felt himself the least inclined of anybody to judge: After all, he carried with him the secret stigma of serving three years for embezzling from a bank in Austin, Texas, in the 1890s.

One last point: this passage also reveals O. Henry as a Southern writer. Such fiction is more than just novels and short stories written by and/or about people who live below the Mason-Dixon line, or in the states comprising the vanished Confederacy. The other quintessential element of such works is storytelling.

O. Henry’s yarns came from sitting around listening wherever he went. But, as a longtime resident of Texas who started using his pseudonym in New Orleans while briefly on the lam for his crime, he also had an affinity for Southerners.

Being too young to have fought in the Civil War for his native state of Ohio, he would not have heard the “Mosby rebel yell” emitted by the “dark-haired young man” with a shudder, but with curiosity, and maybe even affection.

(For more on O. Henry as a social historian with a Southern affinity, I urge you to read David Madden’s August 2014 article in the Citizen-Times of Asheville, NC—the city, incidentally, where O. Henry is buried, near his second wife and daughter from his first marriage.)

Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on One Advantage of a Low Salary)

“My salary as bookkeeper in the hardware concern kept at a distance those ills attendant upon superfluous wealth.” —American short-story writer William Sidney Porter, aka O. Henry (1862-1910), “Confessions of a Humourist,” in Waifs and Strays: Twelve Stories (1917)

Quote of the Day (O. Henry, on a 'Super-Bountiful' Thanksgiving Feast)

“[Stuffy] Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a senatorial roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar. Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week before flew like popcorn, strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze, carrying fine snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with after-dinner contempt.”—William Sidney Porter, aka O. Henry (1862-1910), “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen,” in The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories of the Four Million (1907)

This Day in Literary History (O.Henry’s “Magi” Published)

December 10, 1905—The Sunday magazine section of the New York World published a short story by a hopeless romantic named William Sidney Porter—better known to his growing readership by the pen name O. Henry—that became one of the most enduring of Christmas tales, “The Gift of the Magi.”

You don’t have to take forever to turn out a literary classic. Nathaniel Hawthorne turned out The Scarlet Letter in six weeks; William Faulkner claimed that Sanctuary was a “potboiler,” though most modern criticism thinks otherwise. 

And “The Gift of the Magi” (originally printed as “Gifts of the Magi”) resulted from O. Henry sitting down in Pete’s Tavern, a watering hole on Irving Place in Manhattan, and not stopping until, two hours later, he had achieved a tale with his trademark surprise ending, but also with a mixture of poignancy and irony that has made this one of the truly classic Yuletide tales.

The story has a simple premise: Della, a young newlywed, wants to give her husband Jim a gift worthy of him, but she is desperately poor. The only way she can pay for a fob to go with his grandfather’s watch is to cut off and sell her gorgeous long hair. 

At the same time, not knowing of her sacrifice, Jim pawns that same watch so he can pay for a comb she can use for the same hair. The couple discover their mistake on Christmas, and laugh it off.

More than a century ago, O. Henry had already anticipated the difficulties inherent in the commercialization of Christmas. The cost of goods might have changed, but not the emotions of generosity and love that lies at the heart of the holiday spirit.

(Or, at least, it does in what poet Thomas Gray called “the short and simple annals of the poor.” One suspects that if a similar event transpired in the Trump household, The Donald would announce to the offending parties, after a merciless grilling over how they could not have foreseen this eventuality, “You’re fired!”)

Kevin Fallon’s recent appreciation of the tale for The Atlantic offers an incisive reading of this much-anthologized short story. But I suspect that something of a generation gap exists between him and—well, me.

In considering adaptations of the short story, he offers the following:

* An episode of Glee. Sorry, I didn’t watch any episode of this show until Thanksgiving.

* Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978), with Bert and Ernie reprising, in effect, the role of the young couple. By the time this episode appeared, I was studying for finals in college—well beyond the show’s core audience.

* The Gift of Love (1978), starring Marie Osmond. I have one ready-made excuse about missing this one (see above), and yet another: I have never been in the habit of watching Osmond Family TV appearances, nor by individual members of same.

* The Gift of the Magi, a one-hour musical adaptation (1958) starring Gordon MacRae. This premiered before I was born and I had not seen it even mentioned anywhere on this planet until Fallon’s piece.

The one adaptation I have seen—which, for some odd reason or other, Fallon doesn’t mention—would have to be, I’m willing to wager, one of the best, if not the best, of the whole bunch. 

It’s a 15-minute adaptation that appeared in a wonderful film “anthology” of five stories by the fiction master, O. Henry’s Full House (1952). If you ever have a chance, catch it.

The last time I recall that Hollywood attempted a similar anthology film was New York Stories, and the results were uneven. (Woody Allen’s entry, “Oedipus Wrecks,” was hilarious; Martin Scorsese’s “Life Stories,” okay; Francis Coppola’s “Life Without Zoe,” overly derivative of the Eloise stories.)

In contrast, there isn’t a bad segment in the O. Henry project, though my favorite remains, overwhelmingly, “The Ransom of Red Chief.” (The idea of Fred Allen and Oscar Levant as cranky would-be kidnappers is hysterical.)

But “Gift of the Magi,” with Farley Granger and Jeanne Crain in the roles of Jim and Della, measures up to the poignancy of the original story. (The two actors are in the image accompanying this post.)

Director Henry King had come off a pair of extremely well-done psychologically oriented action films with Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High and The Gunfighter), and his winning streak continued with this small-scale piece. 

(Ironically, over the next decade, he would be unable to bring this same delicacy of touch to two ambitious 20th-century literary classics--Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.)

Jim and Della are, in the best possible senses, fools for love. So was their creator, who, in that respect--and a few others--resembles Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald, of course, was mad--often literally so--for his Zelda. O. Henry was so devoted to his first wife Athol that, though he could have safely stayed out of the country until embezzlement charges against him blew over, he chose to return when he learned she was dying of tuberculosis, and went away to prison for a stretch for his devotion.

Both writers were highly competent professionals who made a fortune turning out short stories, but ended up in constant financial straits--partly because of severe problems with alcohol.

Both writers also lived peripatetic lives, even ending up, at one point or another, in the same small Southern city: Asheville, N.C. Fitzgerald visited it while Zelda was institutionalized there in the 1930s. O. Henry’s second wife, Sara Coleman Porter, was a native of the city, and she had him buried beside her and their daughter.