BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY
The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a
meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared
in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time
he became the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high
and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose
fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two
every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it
was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim
his own.
He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but
hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had
the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman,
combined with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his
Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that
he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had
written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and
was a widower and had a young daughter--that was all his best friends
knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him.
But several years after his death a biography was published, and the
disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three
years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary.
That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where
he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous
highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the
heart-break.
It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great
fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife,
and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have
stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was
a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more
moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but
they wanted to bury it in his grave--because, forsooth, America is the
land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are
of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape
humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed.
It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of
which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was
missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He was on
his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the
ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was
dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home.
His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and
went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps
upon those who have threatened its property interests.
While in Honduras “Bill” Porter--that was his real name--had made a
strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by
Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate
brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and
has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book
called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see
the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the
maker at his work.
He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he
wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He
would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties
of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside
was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s
whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so
he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines.
And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of
bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in
remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material,
palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great
tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted,
humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social
forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in
sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material.
Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular
character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had
enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and
dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new
stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.” The story tells about
a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be
suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight
and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has
been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is
kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward
of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy
ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the
underworld according to American magazine mythology.
And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great
scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who
never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked
all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it
was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of
destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a
competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a
gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his
story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had
broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had
been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at
eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for
life--an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his
old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see
her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years.
This man had a method of opening safes, which consisted of filing his
finger-nails off, so that with the quivering raw flesh he could feel the
dropping of the “tumblers,” as he turned the dial of the lock. He was
promised his liberty if he would open the vault for the great state of
Ohio. He did it in ten seconds; and then the promise was broken, and he
went back to die in prison. When his coffin was carted out, there was
his old heart-broken mother in the slush and snow, toddling along with
streaming eyes and stretched-out hands behind the cart.
That was a real story, you see; and O. Henry was in the prison when it
happened, he felt the thrill of horror and fury that ran through the
place when the pardon was denied. But, you see, if he had written that
story, he would not have had any Christmas gifts to send to his little
daughter, nor would he have been invited to Bagdad-on-the-Subway to be
crowned the short story king. So unwilling was he to face reality that
he did not even use the detail about Jimmy Valentine’s filing off his
finger-nails. No, the crook in his story has to open the safe with a
special fancy set of tools!
You see, O. Henry simply could not face the pain of life; he did not
know what to do about it, and so he dodged it--just like the magazine
writers and the magazine public of his period. He could not even face
his own disgrace; his heart was dead in that prison, even the thought of
freedom was a terror, because of the awful secret he would carry.
Jennings quotes him: “The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain.
If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I
will not become an outcast.”
Understand, he knew himself to be innocent; and yet he took the position
of an ex-convict, crouching and trembling. There were other men who went
to prison, for example, ‘Gene Debs, who also knew himself to be
innocent; he came out a warrior and a saint. But O. Henry accepted the
social system as permanent, identical with destiny.
He was often compared to Maupassant, and that hurt his feelings, for he
said that he had never written a filthy line in his life, and he did not
wish to be compared to a filthy writer. You see here the limitations of
his understanding; morality means sex, and he is revolted by Gallic
brutality, and practices sentimental Southern reticence. But in a more
fundamental way his point of view is identical with that of Maupassant;
for to both writers class greed has taken the place of God in control of
the universe. The French writer jeers and hates, while the American
smiles and weeps; but each finds the point of his story in the
incongruities and absurdities which this artificial economic fate
inflicts upon its helpless and uncomprehending victims.
Strike through the pathos and the tragedy of O. Henry at any point, and
what do you find? Everywhere and inevitably one thing, the Big Business
system of America. Here is a waitress in a restaurant with white
porcelain walls and glass-topped tables and a ceaseless clatter of
crockery. Yes, it is pathetic for a girl to carry loads of crockery all
day, and try to keep virtuous on a starvation wage. Then close the O.
Henry book, and consult Moody’s Manual of Corporations, and you discover
that the great chain of restaurants has been bought by Standard Oil;
America’s “great clamorer for dividends” has doubled the prices of the
food without improving its quality, and has failed to raise wages to
keep pace with the cost of living.
Or take James Turner, who presses hats all day and has to stand on his
feet, which makes them sore; he finds his escape in reading Clark
Russell’s sea-tales, and having got a copy, he is happy even in jail.
Consult a study of the sweated trades, and you note that hat pressing is
a secondary and parasitic industry, incapable of being organized;
therefore the poor devil has no one to protect his sore feet. A part of
his equipment is a jeering scorn for those who are striving to enlighten
him. “Say,” he asks, “do I look like I’d climbed down one of them
missing fire-escapes at Helicon Hall?” That is his way of saying that he
has no vision of a better world; it is O. Henry’s idea of being a
sociologist. (If you have any curiosity concerning Helicon Hall and its
fire-escapes, the story is in “The Brass Check.”)
The obscure and exploited masses of New York, the waitresses and
hat-pressers and soda-jerkers and bums and taxi drivers and policemen,
O. Henry’s Four Million, adopted him as their favorite writer, because
he knew their lives, he loved them, and they felt that love under the
cover of his laughter. And in truth it is a pleasant thing when you are
in trouble to find a heart which feels with you; but it is an even more
important thing to find a head which understands the causes of your
trouble and can help you to escape it. The Four Million will have to
look elsewhere than to O. Henry for that head.
There was an essential fact about him which his official biographer
fails to mention; he was a true Southern gentleman in another
respect--that he drank too much. Al Jennings records that he was half
drunk when Jennings encountered him, sitting in front of the American
consulate in the little town of Trujillo, Honduras. They proceeded to
get all the way drunk, and to celebrate the Fourth of July by shooting
up the place. And there is much other drinking scattered through the
story. In the prison O. Henry was in charge of certain supplies, and he
found that contractors were robbing the prison, and he wanted to expose
them; but Jennings showed him that if he did so, he would get himself
thrown into the hole, and beaten to death by the prison powers who were
sharing in the graft. So our poor Southern gentleman kept silence, and
received large presents of wine and liquor. When he came to New York,
this habit had him in its grip, and never let him go.
So here is a point about the O. Henry stories; they are alcoholic
stories, and take the alcoholic attitude toward life. The friends of O.
Henry, who spent their time trying to save him, will understand what all
of us know who have had to do with Southern gentlemen of the old school:
that a victim of alcohol can weep with pity and can mingle laughter with
his tears; he can be charming and beautiful, gentle and kind; but one
thing he can rarely have, and that is a firm grasp of the realities
about him; another thing he can never by any possibility have, and that
is an attitude of persistent and unflinching resolve. Yet these are
exactly the qualities which the Four Million will have to develop before
they can escape from their slavery in Bagdad-of-the-Traction-Trust.