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 (Eudora Welty, on Writing and Reading)

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.” — Southern short-story writer and novelist Eudora Welty (1909-2001), On Writing (2002)

Quote of the Day (William Faulkner, on ‘Truth and Justice’ in the Old South)

" ‘I'm interested in truth,’ the sheriff said.

‘So am I,’ Uncle Gavin said.  ‘It's so rare.  But I am more interested in justice and human beings.’

‘Ain't truth and justice the same thing?’ the sheriff said.

‘Since when?’  Uncle Gavin said.  ‘In my time I have seen truth that was anything under the sun but just, and I have seen justice using tools and instruments I wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot fence rail.’" ― William Faulkner, “An Error in Chemistry," in Knight's Gambit (1949)

Quote of the Day (Carson McCullers, on a ‘Dreary’ Southern Town)

“The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long. On Saturdays the tenants from the near-by farms come in for a day of talk and trade. Otherwise the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all the other places in the world. The nearest train stop is Society City, and the Greyhound and White Bus Lines use the Forks Falls Road which is three miles away. The winters here are short and raw, the summers white with glare and fiery hot.”— Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1943)

Quote of the Day (Chris Offutt, on the CIA and Cooking)

“An unfortunate truth of espionage is that the public only hears about the errors of the CIA; their success stories are never revealed. The opposite is the case for cooking—culinary flops are forgotten while the great meals are remembered long after. The smart cook strives for the best of both worlds—in the field and the kitchen—behaving as a clandestine operative of cuisine. Here are the essential rules for cooks and spies: Discard your failures swiftly. Learn from mistakes. Identify saboteurs such as a clumsy prep-cook or a spouse who hides the salt. Take credit for others’ work and blame your mistakes on underlings. Most importantly: keep your top recipes secret.”  —Chris Offutt, “CIA Cake and Jeff Davis Pie,” Oxford American, Fall 2014

Photo of the Day: Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home, Savannah, GA

Today would have been the 90^th birthday of the Southern novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor. I owe it to her fiercely perfected talent and her fierce faith to post this photo I took this past November, on an afternoon trip to Savannah, of the outside of the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home.

O’Connor did not live here long—only 13 years, before her family relocated to a farm in Milledgeville—but it was enough to forge her. The house was deeded to her, and she still, in fact, owned it when she died, only 39 years old, of complications from lupus—the same disease that struck down her father in middle age.

Much to my chagrin, the home was closed that day when I visited. But I had seen it on my prior visit to Savannah, in fall 1999. I knew from the short tour of the house I took then that the interior reflected the comfortable middle-class lifestyle of her family, and that it included her baby carriage, her cradle and bedroom furniture.

For the devoutly Catholic O’Connors, their Savannah location was—to borrow a phrase—a godsend. The family worshipped at the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist (a landmark that I discussed in this prior post), just across Lafayette Square. Young Mary Flannery was baptized three weeks after her birth, in the cathedral; later, the building would be the site of her early education, at St. Vincent’s Grammar School, as well as her first communion and confirmation.

But back to the small Georgian row house at 207 Charlton Street that you’re looking at now. It was actually owned by maternal second cousin Mrs. Raphael Semmes (“Cousin Katie”), who had the garden and mansion next door. In Flannery’s mid-30s, as lupus forced her to use a cane, Mrs. Semmes accompanied her to Lourdes for a cure.

It was also, in the back of this house, that an amusing episode—one that “marked me for life,” she chuckled later—occurred. One of the five-year-old girl’s feats was training a “frizzled” chicken to walk backward. A New York newsreel company, Pathe, got wind of this and sent a cameraman down to record the action. Years later, as an adult, when she was not writing, she was indulging to the hilt her fascination with farm animals. (At one point, she raised 40 peacocks.)

O’Connor’s fiction—dark, violent, absurd at points—could be called Southern Gothic. Her private voice—highly intelligent, surprising, warm but sharply funny, unafraid to take on the central questions regarding her faith—can be heard unmistakably in Habit of Being (1979). Her collected works now form part of the Library of America, the handsome hardbound series of books dedicated to preserving the nation’s best literary tradition.