O. Henry

 

            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.

 

 

 O Henry, 101 Stories, ed. Ben Yagoda (New York: the Library of America, 2021), pp. 828.

ISBN 978-1-59853-690-4

           

Bernard Malamud

            I have resisted increasingly importunate invitations to “monetize” this blog—that is, to license Mr. Google to try to sell you Coca Cola while I am ostensibly discussing the metempsychosis of material individuality or whatever—but I allow myself once every other year to make one quasi-commercial pitch.  I refer to my self-appointed role as cheerleader for the Library of America.  Most of us think of American power almost exclusively in economic or military terms.  Certainly our Congress, who regularly spend more on a part of a single weapon than they do on the combined annual budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, think that way.  But America’s cultural contributions in the fields of serious art and literature continue to be quite extraordinary.  (American dominance in popular culture hardly needs mentioning.)  Every nation should know and honor its own literary tradition, and many do so magnificently.  You are unlikely to encounter a cultivated Frenchman who doesn’t have a volume or two of the beautiful Bibliothèque de la Pléiade on his shelves.  The fairly recent founding of the Library of America, which produces in a beautiful uniform series moderately priced, very high quality editions of important American writers, ended a national embarrassment.

             At this point in my life I ought not to be adding to my “permanent” home library—the scare-quotes intended to cast ironic light on the idea that I could possibly still be thinking that any of my possessions are permanent.  But I find myself making exceptions in certain categories, and above all in the Library of America.  Over the past few weeks I was for a song able to pick up practically untouched copies of two volumes of the LoA edition of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986).

            How did I miss reading Malamud back in the day?  After all, he was winning prizes and getting lots of attention.  Perhaps it was because he was being so vigorously peddled by our intelligentsia as a “Jewish writer”, as though the category required some arcane ethnic expertise unavailable west of the Hudson, where I was at the time.  Well, you pay your money, and you take your choice.  You can’t read everything.  When I was an undergraduate in the late Fifties I bet the metaphorical farm on three American novelists—James Gould Cozzens (1903-1978),  John O’Hara (1905-1970), and William Styron (1935-2006).  I doubt that anybody under fifty has even heard of Cozzens, and I cannot imagine many are still reading O’Hara.  My investment in Styron was closer to being prescient, but I have to judge him finally as a disappointment. 

So the Library of America’s first two volumes of Malamud—covering the decades of the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties—are a kind of wonderful literary time capsule that allow me to go back and fill some unsightly gaps.  Late is generally better than never and often a great deal better.

            Malamud is a real master of the short story, and I have read several of his pieces with delight.  But I have spent most of my time on what must be his two most famous novels, The Natural and The Fixer.  My first surprise was that both of them are historical novels, though with very different senses of the “historical”.  The history behind The Fixer is sinister and repellent: an episode of the infamous anti-Semitic blood libel, born in the Middle Ages but still virulent in the last years of Romanov Russia.  If the subject alone is not enough to make you anxious, Malamud’s remorselessly complex characterizations will do the trick.

 The medieval blood libel--still going strong in 1913, and possibly in 2013

            Perhaps paradoxically the essence of historical fiction does not lie in fidelity to generally agreed upon historical “facts” but in the artist’s ability to reimagine them defensibly.  Malamud’s “take” on the episode of the blood libel offended the offspring of the victim/hero of the originating events.  This man (Mendel Beilis) had died only in 1934.  All Malamud could say was the obvious: two different stories, in some ways similar, in others very dissimilar.  As for his brilliant debut novel, The Natural, the story of a baseball player, it does have a definite historical germ in a bizarre instance of what might be called the “John Lennon syndrome”.  From time to time some deranged person seeks fame by shooting some famous person, and before there were rock stars there were baseball stars.  Yet its real “history” is the imagined world of the locker rooms and ballparks of the age of Babe Ruth.  But that is only the beginning of the book’s excellence.  Malamud is a “baseball novelist” in the same way he is a “Jewish novelist”—by getting inside his own minutely observed created world and animating it in a way irresistible for a reader.  Roy Hobbs, the “natural,” is perhaps a strange epic hero, but one perfectly suited to the strange epic world that, somewhere between fact and literary invention, was once our “national pastime”.

          So while it is perhaps a little embarrassing to be "discovering" major writers other people were reading half a century ago, it is comforting, indeed exhilarating to know that I have a copious source of future delight already on my shelves or modestly awaiting me, amazingly undervalued, among the Ebay listings.

Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in the Hollywood version

The Patriot's Library

          

As the term "liberty of the press" is adopted in this country without being understood I will state the origin of it and shew what it means.*

Last night on Channel Thirteen I watched the concluding episode of “The Abolitionists.”  Like most of “The American Experience” offerings, it was excellent.  It had the usual wonderful old photographs and the usual rainbow coalition of American historians offering commentary.  Their fad of speaking in a chatty historical present—“So Lincoln reads this letter, and he goes ballistic…” sort of thing—annoyed me, or perhaps annoys me; but that is a mere quibble overwhelmed by the quality of the information conveyed.

            I noticed that the National Endowment for the Humanities was on the list of financial supporters for the program.  That caught my eye, perhaps, because like many liberal arts professors I myself have enjoyed the support of the NEH in years past.  I did receive a fellowship from the Endowment one year, but my more extensive experience with the organization involved teaching several summer seminars, some for high school teachers and some for college professors.  Some of my happiest experiences in a long teaching career relate to those seminars.

            I am a patriot—that is, a lover of my native land—as I would hope that most of my far-flung readers are.  I can imagine few activities more truly patriotic than studying the history of my country—seriously, honestly, and with that kind of moral intentionality that compares the words of our founding documents and the lives of our acknowledged national heroes against the background of the actual social realities of the “American experience”, past and present.

            It was therefore discouraging to me to hear a self-proclaimed patriot in our Congress, when asked for concrete ideas as to how to attack an eminently unpatriotic sixteen trillion dollar national deficit, offer as his sole specific suggestion, defunding the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The budget request made by the NEH for 2013 is, I think, about a hundred and fifty million dollars.  For that amount of money the government could get about three-eights of one F-22 fighter plane, according to the most recent figures I’ve seen.  How I do wish H. L. Mencken were still with us.  We at last have achieved a congressional boobocracy fully worthy of his scorn.

            However, the purpose of this post is not to bash the benighted but to energize the enlightened.  It is my annual call to patriotism. Among the worthy groups that have enjoyed some very modest support from the NEH is the Library of America, the non-profit publishing enterprise with the mission of making available in scholarly and beautiful editions the works of important American writers.  I cannot imagine a more patriotic mission than the preservation and dissemination of our extraordinary American literary culture, and the chaste dust jacket of every Library of America volume discreetly but proudly is banded in red, white, and blue.

            My blog has apparently gained a readership far greater than I could have imagined.  My chief evidence for this claim, though circumstantial, is to me quite convincing.  It is the increasing frequency and urgency with which I am encouraged to “monetize” the blog—meaning make money off it by opening it to commercial advertisements.  Such a suggestion is of course highly gratifying to me.   First it means that somebody out there in cyberland who knows how to count readers has counted enough of them to offer me a little money to go commercial; second, because the money proposed is so little, I can safely scorn it, and with a deeply satisfying high-mindedness.  So I continue to promise my readers: as you scroll through Gladlylerne, you will not be encouraged to drink Pepsi or undergo liposuction, even at the hands of our board-certified plastic surgeons.

            The Library of America is another matter.  I will continue to make an annual appeal—entirely unsolicited by the librarians, needless to say, or even known to them--on the library’s behalf.  If you are an American, I urge you to visit the Library’s website.  If you are a literate American, I urge you in a spirit of patriotism to join as a subscriber.  We will grant a pass to semi-literates, for whom ordering merely one or two of the current specials will suffice.  I note that Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales is among them.  If you’re the kind of patriot who specializes in musket-lore, that’s the one for you.

*Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (Library of America, 76), p. 429.