The reputation of O. Henry, never accepted in serious literary criticism, has nevertheless a curious vitality to which the recent publication of O. Henry’s Complete Works (Doubleday, 2 vols., 1,700 pp., $10.00) is only the latest testimony. Steven Marcus here finds the critic’s verdict just, but, at the same time, notes O. Henry’s role as the founder of a very popular genre in our culture—the self-conscious, artificial “folklore” of the Great Metropolis.
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The Complete Works of O. Henry consist of two volumes totaling 271 stories and 1,700 pages. These statistics are all the more impressive when we learn that all the stories were written within about ten years—from 1900 to 1910, the year of O. Henry’s death. Unfortunately it is for this energy, rather than any literary achievement, that these two volumes arouse our admiration. For, when all is said and done, O. Henry was a hack, and his writing bears all the traits of the hack—slipshodness and repetitiveness both of subject matter and treatment, with occasional ironic hints that he knew he was a hack. Perhaps it is a mistake to publish such a writer in bulk; what virtues he has are most evident in isolation (when one reads his stories in anthologies they seem better than when read together). Yet, though his stories have no great interest as literature, they document some of the important changes that were taking place in American writing in general, and in America’s opinion of itself, in the first years of this century.
O. Henry was a “popular” writer; the great majority of his stories were written in what he thought was the vernacular—in some kind of dialect, either of a rural region or of a district in a city. But unlike previous works in the tradition of colloquial writing, O. Henry’s dialect turns out to be quite remote from speech; one is tempted to say that it is entirely artificial. What the reader witnesses in these stories is the corruption and attenuation of the relation between popular writing and the people it purports to describe. This is O. Henry’s notion of the speech of a prospector:
Now, Rebosa, I’m old enough to have owed money to your father. And that old, specious, dressed-up, garbled, seasick, Ptomaine prancing around avidiously like an irremediable turkey gobbler with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get him invested in this marriage business?
And that of a farmer in Indiana:
“Sure, Bunk,” says he. “The yellow primrose on the river’s brim is getting to look to us Reubs like a holiday edition de luxe of the Language of Flowers with deckle edges and frontispieces.”
Not only was he insensitive to speech rhythms, but he was quite unable to distinguish between the accents of the various regions of the country, his cowboys in the Panhandle talk in the same cadences and with a vocabulary indistinguishable from the cowboys on Broadway and the Bowery. O. Henry throws up a Chinese wall of verbiage between the reader and the object, and his writing is full of adjectives, “cute” solecisms, and badly mixed images.
We are to consider the shade known as purple. It is a color justly in repute among the sons and daughters of man. Emperors claim it for their especial dye. Good fellows everywhere seek to bring their noses to the genial hue that follows the commingling of the red and blue. We say of princes that they are born to the purple; and no doubt they are, for the colic tinges their faces with the royal tint equally with the snub-nosed countenance of a wood-chopper’s brat.
Scarcely any distinction can be made between the language of O. Henry’s characters and the language of O. Henry himself. This is not the language of the folk-story, where either an identity of language exists between the teller and the subject, or where there is a ritualized separation of the formal language of the story from the vernacular; nor can it be mistaken for the technique of the sophisticated writer, who, utilizing the unique qualities of dialect, juxtaposes it to the traditional, complex, and discriminating language of literature. The best writers of dialect usually manage to convey the strong traditional characteristics that survive in the language of an isolated region; the vitality of the speech of the frontier, as we find it in Lincoln, Mark Twain, or Bret Harte, came partly from the influence on it of the Bible, partly from its preservation of old, fine locutions, and partly from its ability to absorb harmoniously the rhythms and words of the language of other groups. By O. Henry’s time the ability of the popular writer to exploit this kind of material was almost lost—as, one suspects, was much of the integrity of the spoken language itself. Why this happened is too complicated to discuss here; I only wish to point out that it was tied up with the massive migration, in the last half of the 19th century, of rural people into the cities.
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O. Henry was a typical product of this change. He was a half-educated man, at ease neither with literature nor with semiliterateness; and one knows the direction in which he leads. He leads to Damon Runyon and the language of the modern “tough” detective story, to a contorted and abstract sense of the language, a nearly total absence of any sense of its genuine idiom and of the relation of speech to character and intelligence. O. Henry’s language is awkward, silly, and inane, bat it is not often ugly. In Runyon and his disciples, in the detective story, in Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, the language has become horrid, a caricature of itself, too easy to imitate, incapable of color, flexibility, or precision. O. Henry is the midpoint of this decadence.
It is to O. Henry’s credit, however, that, unlike later hacks, he is not pretentious about his writing. Because of this his tales retain some of the purity of the folk anecdote, the joke, or the simple reminiscence from which they arise; occasionally they display a bareness and directness of effect that is O. Henry at his best. The stories are about what folk stories usually are about—separated parents and children, separated lovers, lack of money, the gay highwayman, the encounter between city and country. The famous “trick ending” is employed in about 75 per cent of the stories. O. Henry manufactures an arrangement of events in which, say, a lover finds it impossible to marry his beloved, as in “The Higher Abdication,” and then without provocation or, it seems, meaning, delivers him from that dilemma by hauling in a long lost son. Or in “Springtime a la Carte” he has separated lovers reunited by the typewriting on a menu. The trick ending is used much more frequently in the stories about New York than it is in those about the West. O. Henry believed in the therapeutic virtue of the West (one of his favorite tales concerns a city bum reformed by the strength, humanity, and clean living of the open range), which in itself worked the wonders that in the city only coincidence could accomplish.
In the stories about the city the coincidence surely was intended to offset the poverty, hunger, and loneliness that beset his lower-class New Yorkers. In “The Cop and the Anthem,” for example, a hobo smells winter in the air and decides to get himself thrown into jail. But no one, he finds, is interested in having him arrested, regardless of how flagrantly he breaks the law. But then, ironically, just after having been moved by a religious service to reform, he is picked up by a policeman in front of the church. Here is how the tramp, cold and alone, resolves to face life again:
There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. Tomorrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. . . . He would be somebody in the world.
By being thrown in jail he is absolved from any such exertions, and the ending gratifies the wish with which he began the story. But the pathetic moment just before he is arrested is the most genuine one in the story; there, for a moment, the despair of mendicancy is realized.
Although O. Henry’s ridiculous and inadequate changes of fortune are intended to divert the reader from the likely consequences of the stories, they actually reinforce the picture of the drab lives of his characters. The endings are a kind of halfhearted assurance that all is well, that Providence still watches—an assurance whose palpable improbability only suggests the reverse.
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In an uninspired way, the trick ending is the counterpart of those ironic mechanisms for explaining American reality which Mark Twain and Henry Adams developed late in their careers. Adams’s theory that the second law of thermodynamics—the law of entropy or declining energy—applied in human history, reflects not only his sense of being the undistinguished tail-end of an illustrious family, but also the fact that conditions in America had changed so that men like Adams could no longer find their way to the top. Twain’s grim conception of a total and mechanical determinism is relevant both to his life, in which personal failure played a large part, and to his apprehension that America was not the place that the popular ideology of boundless opportunity and change declared it to be. Likewise in O. Henry, the grotesquely optimistic ending was the response to American conditions of a man who had spent three years in jail for embezzlement, who until he was almost forty had accomplished nothing, and who must have perceived, even in the flush of his success as a journalist, that his talent was irretrievably meager and ephemeral—and that there was no escape from that limitation even in America.
Adams and Twain responded to their perception of changing American realities with a sterile and mechanical pessimism that turned the New World into a dull and drab and hopeless thing. Here we find these two men at their weakest. O. Henry, who had neither their courage nor their intelligence, responded to these same realities with a simple obtuseness, and a precarious good humor that took the place of thinking.
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