O. Henry: the early years

When O. Henry died in 1910, he was fondly remembered in the magazines. This full page photo showed up in a 1912 issue of Bookman, which I came across recently while looking for something else at google books. Dated 1886, it shows him in the front row (left) as "W. Porter," with three other young men identifying themselves as the "Hill City Quartette." 

He would have been a 24-year-old bachelor at the time, living in Austin, Texas. According to Wikipedia: "Porter was a good singer and musician. He played both the guitar and mandolin." The quartet "sang at gatherings and serenaded young women of the town." His writing career was yet to begin.

Coming up: Cy Warman, Frontier Stories (1897)

O. Henry: Western writer

  

I came across this photo of O. Henry in a February 1904 issue of The Critic. A brief note describes his mysterious appearance among the New York literati:

Less than a year ago the readers of popular magazines began to be startled and delighted by certain fantastic and ingenious tales, mainly dealing with Western life and bearing the strange device "O. Henry" as a signature. In a short time people began to talk to each other about the stories, and very soon they began to ask who the author was.

It was then that a new problem fell upon this over-puzzled age,—who is "O. Henry"? No one seemed to now the author's real name, and immediately vague and weird rumors began to be afloat and the nom-de-guerre was soon invested with as much curiosity as surrounds an author after his decease.

But, like most mysteries, when it was probed there was no mystery about it. "O. Henry's" real name is Mr. Sydney Porter, a gentleman from Texas, who, having seen a great deal of the world with the naked eye, happened to find himself in New York about two years ago, and there discovered a market where people would buy stories of his experiences.

Being of a lazy disposition he very naturally quitted active life and took to his desk. He signed the name "O. Henry" merely because he did not take his real self seriously as a maker of fiction. He really does shun notoriety—a most unusual characteristic among present-day writers—and he disclaims any intention of having purposely created a mystery about his identity. But he is still not too old to become a professional.

It was a fabrication, no doubt invented by William Sidney Porter (1862-1910) himself. The account of his relocation from Texas neatly skips over his time spent in an Ohio prison for embezzlement. O. Henry's collection of western stories, The Heart of the West, published in 1907, was reviewed here a while ago.

Coming up: Woody Harrelson, Billy Crudup, The Hi-Lo Country (1998)

Book: Heart of the West

O. Henry

O. Henry was the pseudonym of short story writer William Sydney Porter (1862-1910). Given a casual acquaintance based on “The Gift of the Magi” and “The Ransom of Red Chief,” you may not think of him as a writer of westerns. In a way, he was.

A good many of his stories are set in the West. Though a native of North Carolina and at the end of his life a New Yorker, he lived in Texas for health reasons for fourteen years during his twenties and early thirties (1882-1896). After two years there on a sheep ranch, where he learned to ride and shoot, he settled in Austin, working as a pharmacist, draftsman, and bank teller.

The bank job led to a turn of fortune straight out of one of his stories. History remains unclear about the facts of the case, but after an investigation, a federal court found him guilty of embezzlement. He then left Texas to serve three years of a five-year sentence in the Ohio pen. There he began publishing stories under various pen names – among them the one that remained his nom de plume, O. Henry.

Ohio State Penitentiary, Columbus, Ohio

Style. A collection of his stories set in the West appeared in 1907, called Heart of the West. Imagine Alfred Henry Lewis’ Wolfville yarns (reviewed here a while ago) read aloud by W. C. Fields, and you’ll get something of their spirit.

Like Lewis, O. Henry loves wordplay. He will put together a long shopping list of things that would not normally end up together:

Me and Mack would light our pipes and talk about science and pearl diving and sciatica and Egypt and spelling and fish and trade winds and leather and gratitude and eagles, and a lot of subjects that we’d never had time to explain our sentiments about before. “The Ransom of Mack”

It doesn’t have to be a long list either. Here he makes a point about how lapses in conversation are not unusual among Texans:

In Texas discourse is seldom continuous. You may fill in a mile, a meal, and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. “Hearts and Crosses.”

Like Lewis, he can freely mix regionalisms, slang, and occasional flights of inflated diction for humorous effect. Clarity is flung to the winds when a simple insult, for instance, must surrender to this kind of expression:

I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. “The Handbook of Hymen”

Here one of his characters explains to his friend how he’s never really understood women:

I never had the least amount of intersection with their predispositions. Maybe I might have had a proneness in respect to their vicinity, but I never took the time. I made my own living since I was fourteen; and I never seemed to get my rationcinations equipped with the sentiments usually depicted toward the sect. I sometimes wish I had. “The Ransom of Mack”

After all that verbal meandering, I love the directness of those last five words. They are the unvarnished expression of a simple, poignant truth.

The characters in his stories reach for phrases from Latin and other languages, as well as classical allusions, often maladroitly. We’ve already seen “the music of the spears” above. As a further example, Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis come out as Squills and Chalybeates. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam gets mangled into Ruby Ott and Homer K. M.

As characters reach for more elevated language, the malapropisms multiply. A lady friend tells a man that his friend is no gentleman, then objects when he tries to raise a defense. “It’s right plausible of you,” she says,” to take up the curmudgeons in your friend’s behalf; but it don’t alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady.”