When, if ever, they call for a new editor of that amiable biography
of O. Henry by C. Alphonso Smith, there should be added a chapter
about his adventures as a playwright. To be sure, in the final stretch
of this official history of Sydney Porter, the recording professor
does say parenthetically: “Plans for a novel and a play were also
much in his mind at this time, but no progress was made in actual
construction.” Nothing, however, is vouchsafed as to what that play
was, how it got into the aforesaid mind in the first place, and why it
never came out. It never did come out, for as a playwright O. Henry
was a little brother to that forlorn fellow who figures in Augustus
Thomas’s reminiscences and whose successive lodgings in New York were
always traceable by stray bits of manuscript which had never progressed
beyond the brave beginning: “Act One, Scene One: A Ruined Garden.” To
that family of dramatists O. Henry belonged. It was a large family. It
still is.
This is really George Tyler’s story. He is one of those managers who
are ever and always exploring for playwrights and players where no one
else has looked. His ardor has always been addressed to the task of
growing a dramatist where only a novelist grew before. He and Kipling,
for instance, have spent unchronicled hours in conference over a
Mulvaney play. But that is another story. Tyler would, I think, derive
more heart-warming satisfaction out of extracting four acts from some
reluctant teller of tales, than out of any contract he could sign with
the most tested and chronically successful dramatist of the day. And
just as the late Charles Frohman, by an incorrigible and disarming
doggedness, finally badgered the bewildered Barrie into writing for
the theatre, so Tyler hoped to make a playwright of O. Henry. He never
encountered him on a street corner or dropped him a note about one of
his stories without nagging him to try his hand at a play.
Every O. Henry story naturally prompted such a hope. Every one of them
fairly tingled with the stuff of which plays are made; and much of
that stuff, rented or borrowed or blandly stolen, has since found its
way into theatres all over the world. But it was so much easier to
write a story, and for a while the Tyler blandishments had no visible
effect. The drowsy dramatist that is probably in all of us and that
was certainly in O. Henry, stirred uneasily in response to the Tyler
proddings, but never really wakened.
O. Henry’s connection with the theatre had been slight and
discouraging. He had, in a needy moment, written the libretto of a
musical comedy called “Lo”, for which Franklin P. Adams ingenuously
fashioned the lyrics and A. Baldwin Sloane the music--a promising but
impractical triumvirate whose first and only effort started boldly out
from Chicago, wandered erratically around the middle west for fourteen
weeks, and then died somewhere, alone, neglected, and unsung. New York
never saw it and neither, for that matter, did O. Henry.
Then, in a sudden fit of industry, he drew up a scenario for a comedy,
perhaps with the solemn intention of writing it, but more probably in
the hope that it would impress the importunate Tyler and lead to a
small advance of cash. Indeed, there is still in existence the back
of an envelope which served as a ledger wherein were noted the sums,
amounting in all to more than $1,200, that were doled out to O. Henry
to keep his spirits up and in the faint hope that he might actually get
around some day to writing that comedy.
The stories O. Henry wrote, their abundance and their spasmodic
unevenness, can never be understood by one who does not keep in mind
the fact that he was chronically penniless and forever dashing off
pieces either to quiet some editor who had lent him money or to extract
himself from pawn at some hotel. This continuous pauperism is usually
explained in one of two ways, either that he tossed largess right
and left like some latter day Robin Hood or that his pockets were
continuously drained by blackmailers whose silence was necessary to
his peace. But really no explanation is urgent, for O. Henry earned
comparatively little money even in his most successful years and the
great sums which his works eventually brought did not begin to stream
in until after his death.
It was from such a fellow that Tyler received at last the somewhat
cloudy scenario of a comedy to be based on “The World and the Door”, a
story which appears now as the first one in the posthumous collection
called “Whirligigs”. The story has as its setting one of those little
lazy colonies of expatriates in South America--the wistful colonies of
which every member has a good legal reason for not returning to the
United States. O. Henry had seen them at close range in the unhappy
years when he and the Jennings brothers were themselves fugitives from
justice. “The World and the Door” spins a romance between a New Yorker
who had shot down a fellow roisterer in a drunken brawl and a lovely
woman who had given aconite to her husband and left hurriedly for
foreign parts. The tale reaches its acute crisis when the two fugitives
discover that neither victim has died and that both of them are free
to abandon romance and return to civilization. From that story the
scenario was made and set aside to simmer.
Then one Sunday morning, at a time when H. B. Warner, a Tyler star,
was involved in a moribund entertainment that was sinking rapidly out
in Chicago, in walked Tyler’s father all aglow over a new volume of
O. Henry stories. It contained the yarn which every one knows as “A
Retrieved Reformation”. I find that when, from time to time, polls are
solemnly opened to decide which was the best of all he wrote, the vote
goes either to that fragment, so Dickensy in its flavor, “An Unfinished
Story”, or to that rarer and more delicate work, “A Municipal Report”.
(My own choice would always be for “The Skylight Room”.) But I
suppose there is no doubt that “A Retrieved Reformation” is the most
widely known of all the tales O. Henry told. It is the story of Jimmy
Valentine, ex-convict and retired safe cracker, who, having reformed
and settled down as a bank cashier, has so artfully builded his alias
that the pursuing detective cannot prove the identity. Just in the
moment when he is turning away, baffled, panic word is rushed in that
a child has been locked by accident in the bank’s new vault, a child
sure to die of suffocation unless, by some miracle, there can be found
in time one of the half dozen men in the world so expert in safe
cracking that, with eyes blindfolded and fingers sensitized, they can
decipher any combination. Of course the heroic Valentine must volunteer
his buried talent and, by his success at it, confess the suspected
identity. And of course, since O. Henry was a spinner of fairy tales,
the detective does not laugh cynically and arrest the lad, but bursts
instead into affecting tears and goes pensively away forever.
Tyler read that story, shut the book with a snap and began telegraphing
hotly in every direction. Out in Chicago was Warner needing a new play
as a drooping flower needs water. Then one wire went to O. Henry,
offering $500 for the dramatic rights. The offer was accepted with
pathetic promptitude, first by wire and then by the following letter:
Asheville, N. C., _October_ 23, 1909.
Mr. George C. Tyler
Liebler & Co.
N. Y. City.
+My dear Mr. Tyler+: I hereby transfer to you the entire dramatic
rights of the story you write me about--the title is “A Retrieved
Reformation.” I am glad to be able to hand you over anything that
you might be able to use.
But I want you to let the $500 that I owe you still remain owing,
for I am going to write that play yet and soon. I’ve been in
bad shape for a long time, both as to writing and refunding. I’m
wrestling with a bad case of neurasthenia (so the doctor says),
but I’m getting back into good shape again. I am living about six
miles out of Asheville and spend most of the time climbing hills
and living out-of-doors. I have knocked off 20 pounds weight. I eat
like a drayman and don’t know what booze tastes like. In fact, I’ll
be better than ever in another week or two.
I got out the scenario of “The World and the Door” some days ago
and began to plan out the acts and scenes. I’ll surprise you with
it as soon as I get down to hard work.
I deeply appreciate your leniency and kindness and intend to “come
up to scratch” yet with the goods.
So, the dramatic rights of the “Retrieved Reformation” are yours
and if you strike another story you like take it too.