Once or twice a year this space takes a quasi-commercial turn as I encourage all literate Americans to become subscribers to or even patrons of the Library of America, the non-profit publishing venture devoted to producing handsome, durable, and authoritative editions of the best work of the best writers to grace our land since the seventeenth century. America’s extraordinary literary heritage is in some ways like our national parks, something to be preserved, cherished, and explored, an intellectual and spiritual treasure house, and a licit source of pride and patriotism. What particularly impels me to this subject today is one of their most recent volumes (no. 345 in the Library’s continuing series) that arrived in my box last week: O. Henry, 101 Stories.
Though I have spent much of my life in libraries, including some of the most famous of the world, what the word "library" first brings to mind is the eccentric and disorganized collection of books shelved behind a wood-burning cooking stove in a farmhouse I once lived in with several of my uncles and aunts. The collection was eclectic. There were several old religious books, which were however overwhelmed by a multi-volume set of Brann the Iconoclast, a Texas free-thinker and scourge of Baylor Baptists, one of whom shot him to death in demonstration of his love for our Lord. Brann’s pungent essays included “The Mistakes of Moses,” dealing with the narrative absurdities of the Pentateuch. I read it with mixed terror and delight. There was a select collection of “How To” books, the most important being Audel’s five-volume Carpentry and Builder’s Guide, which had been used by my Uncle Wayne in building his own house, all made from timber he and his sister had themselves cut and stone they had quarried on his wild Ozark land, in about 1932. For me the most treasured volumes were those my Uncle John called “literature”—a few classic English novels, The Bible in Spain, A Treasury of Great Poetry, and what seemed to me a whole shelf of the individual collections of short stories by O. Henry. “This man,” my Uncle John told me, “is a really great writer.” Like so much else this beloved guru conveyed to me, the judgment was spot on.
O. Henry didn’t invent the short story, but it is nearly impossible to imagine the genre without him. In terms of output and consistent quality, there are but two other giants whom I can class with him: Maupassant and Chekhov. (John O’Hara gets an honorable mention, and there are doubtless others I am neglecting.) Amazingly the three were near contemporaries. O. Henry was twelve years younger than Maupassant and two years younger than Chekhov.
O. Henry is of course a pseudonym of still slightly uncertain origin. The man’s real name was William Sidney Porter. As a human being he was notably imperfect. He was a petty embezzler who fled to Latin America to avoid prosecution but soon returned to face trial and a three-year stint in an Ohio prison. His early death (at age 47) was hastened by his serious alcoholism. All of us are in large measure “products of our times and circumstance”; but one can detect in certain writers a particularly strong sense of autobiographical burden. One of the things that that draws me to Porter’s work is the particular nature of its connections to biographical circumstance. Porter was born into the white middle class of the South during the Civil War, and thus inherited the curiously complex sense of being a loser that still animated many of the older people I knew when I was much younger. Faulkner’s novels are replete with them in many forms, almost all of them involving dimensions of fantasy and denial, geographical escape, and the reinvention of a plausible self. O. Henry became a kind of populist cosmopolitan for whom New York City—the city of How the Other Half Lives as well as the baronial palaces of Park Avenue-- would be the inexhaustible laboratory of his fictional examinations of the vagaries of human nature in their peculiarly American manifestations. The first of his books I picked up in the family home was The Four Million, twenty-five New York stories first gathered together in 1906. This collection unites several of his most famous pieces, including what is probably the most famous, “The Gift of the Magi”. Some of them I hardly understood, and all of them had references I couldn’t catch. Only many years later did I realize the political message of the book’s title. It was a democratic put-down of the four hundred prominent families supposedly on Mrs. Astor’s exclusive list of people who counted in New York society.
O. Henry’s production of short stories was prodigious and during his most intensive periods of production nearly incredible. Out of many hundreds of stories I presume there must be a few clunkers, but I have so far found none in the selection of a hundred and one gathered in the Library of America volume. When I became a professional student of literature in the 1960s I discovered that this author was regarded by many professional literary critics as rather primitive and passé. His distinguishing characteristic was said to be the “surprise” or “trick” ending, as though cunning plotting was child’s play. In fact, O. Henry’s skills as a writer do include narrative mastery. He writes stories in the sense that most people understand that word. Something happens. There are characters in relationship who engage the interest of the reader. Character is related to action. But the narrator is always there too, and usually important in controlling the emotional or dramatic tone of the piece. O. Henry was a very funny guy with a very subtle and modulated wit. An excellent feature of the Library of America editions is the very discreet, disciplined and helpful collection of editorial notes, many of them explaining topical or historical references few of today’s readers are likely to appreciate without some help. Certainly I need it. For a “popular” writer, there is an impressive richness to his web of reference, allusion, and silent quotation. My relatives were not college graduates, but they came from an era, as Porter himself had come, when a high school diploma had genuine significance as a guarantor of a certain level of cultural sophistication. This was the man’s intended audience, as it had been also for Mark Twain and other of our great American masters of narrative. He enjoyed and well deserved his high reputation among what used to be called general readers. And given the fact that he has been dead for more than a century, one finds a surprising, unexpected currency in his pages.
ISBN 978-1-59853-690-4
No comments:
Post a Comment