In “Lost on Dress Parade” you can again recognize the same old formula underlying the construction of “The Gift of the Magi” and “A Service of Love.” Another example of criss-cross plotting. “By Courier” is a typical syndicate story. The woman the doctor had held in his arms was only a patient who had fainted. It was all a mistake. The Best Girl forgives and forgets. Nevertheless it represents an improvement over the old type of similar story. The fair suspect was after all a patient and not the hero’s sister.
“The Furnished Room” is another indication that O. Henry was capable of feeling the pulse of his four million when he was so attuned, and “The Brief Debút of Tilly,” though in smaller measure, corroborates it.
Thus an examination of O. Henry’s work by any one not blinded by hero-worship and popular esteem, discloses at best an occasional brave peep at life, hasty, superficial and dazzlingly flippant; an idea, raw, unassimilated, timidly works its way to the surface only to be promptly suppressed by a hand skilled in producing sensational effects. At its worst, his work is no more than a series of cheap jokes renovated and expanded. But over all there is the unmistakable charm of a master trickster, of a facile player with incidents and words.
That William Sidney Porter was himself greatly displeased with his accomplishment, that he even held it in contempt is attested by his prevailing cynical tone. He knew he was not creating art, that he was not giving the best there was in him. There was not time for that and editors did not want it, and with a bitterness that Mark Twain and Jack London shared to their dying day he continued to perform tricks. Mr. William Johnston in his article in the Bookman, referred to above, states that after reading one of his, Mr. Johnston’s, stories, in some obscure Southern periodical, O. Henry wrote to him: “I wish I’d written that story.” The story was probably not remarkable in any particular way. Mr. Johnston is not known as a great story writer. But O. Henry must have felt that it was written sincerely and his own artifice weighed upon him.
This is the lesson that an honest teaching profession with any critical vision at all, undertaking to mold a generation of fiction writers, ought to point out. Instead of worshipping him blindly, calling him the “American Maupassant,” and quoting from his biographies painstaking proof that he was innocent of the crime of embezzlement for which he served a prison sentence, we might at least mention the danger of following his methods too slavishly. The puritanic impulse which inhibits any praise of a man’s work unless it can first establish his “sterling” character is excruciatingly laughable if not downright pathetic. Thus attempts have been made by meticulous biographers to establish the fact that Edgar Allan Poe never tasted any sinful beverage. And only then, having vindicated his character, does the conscience of these brave biographers permit them to accept Poe as a great writer and the pride of America. Whether O. Henry was guilty or not does not change his standing as a story writer, nor his influence on other writers, and it is only as such that the student and critic is interested in him.
In our attitude toward O. Henry and O. Henryism lies one explanation of the prevailing mediocrity of the contemporary American short story. The conventional editor, teacher, student, and reader look upon the short story as upon some interesting puzzle, the key to which is cleverly concealed until the befuddled reader is ready to “give up.” Our would-be writers seeking guidance from my profession are never disabused of this conception but deliberately encouraged to retain it. We overwhelm them with our analyses of the work of the Master, with our glowing tributes to his art and charm and genius, his purity of thought and his philosophy. An article on O. Henry, containing essentially the same material presented in this chapter, was rejected by a magazine circulating among young writers for the reason that “the editor does not hold your views with regard to O. Henry’s contribution to the American short story. He is our supreme short-story master....” In not a single textbook on story-writing, of the many that have come to my attention, have I found such a simple estimate of O. Henry as this: “His weakness lay in the very nature of his art. He was an entertainer bent only on amusing and surprising his reader. Everywhere brilliancy, but too often it is joined to cheapness; art, yet art merging swiftly into caricature. Like Harte, he cannot be trusted. Both writers on the whole may be said to have lowered the standards of American literature, since both worked in the surface of life with theatric intent.... O. Henry moves, but he never lifts. All is fortissimo; he slaps the reader on the back and laughs loudly as if he were in a bar-room. His characters, with few exceptions, are extremes, caricatures. Even his shop girls, in the limning of whom he did his best work, are not really individuals; rather are they types, symbols. His work was literary vaudeville, brilliant, highly amusing, and yet vaudeville.”[10]
This estimate, coming as it does from a standard source, cannot be discounted by attributing it to radical or ultra-advanced tendencies. The fact is that the case of O. Henry is so simple that even standard critics and historians, if they but choose to be open-minded, can see through it. When in 1916 Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould in an interview with the late Joyce Kilmer called O. Henry “a pernicious literary influence,” even the New York Times, though hastening to the defense of the wizard, admitted that there might be something in this outburst of depreciation of O. Henryism. “I hear that O. Henry is held up as a model by critics and professors of English,” said Mrs. Gerould. “The effect of this must be pernicious. It cannot but be pernicious to spread the idea that he is a master of the short story.” And the Times, in an editorial, although taking issue with Mrs. Gerould, was obliged to conclude:
“Maybe some day we shall get away from writing with a set of rules before us, and then we shall have literature instead of best sellers. Maybe the trouble with our writing is that we have developed technique to such a point that Tom, Dick and Harry are masters of technique and anybody who can get the hang of it can write a publishable story. Maybe our fiction has been whetted to a razor edge, until it is technique and nothing else. Maybe the story has been perfected until now we can tell perfectly a story that is not worth telling, but have not even thought of learning what stories are worth telling. Maybe, if we did that, and told them without thinking of technique and without knowing that there were any rules whatever, we might write stories that would be remembered, say, ten years hence. Maybe there is, after all, only one rule for telling a story—to have one worth telling and then to tell it as well as you can. Maybe that is what is the matter with the American drama as well as with American fiction. If we could unlearn some of the rules and forget technique we might not produce best sellers; and maybe if we told, as clumsily as our ignorance of the rules compelled us, stories that were worth telling, there might be no more best sellers, only stories that would live as long as the clumsy plots of Dickens and the inartistic anecdotes of O. Henry.”
Just how long O. Henry’s stories will live and his influence predominate is a prediction no one can safely undertake to venture at this time. It depends upon how long we will permit his influence to predominate. The great mass of our reading public will continue to venerate any writer as long as our official censors continue to write panegyrics of him, and our colleges to hold him up as a model. The literary aspirants coming to us for instruction are recruited largely from among this indiscriminating public. Sooner or later, however, we must realize that the American Maupassant has not yet come and that those who foisted the misnomer upon William Sidney Porter have done the American short story a great injury. Before this most popular of our literary forms can come into its own the O. Henry cult must be demolished. O. Henry himself must be assigned his rightful position—among the tragic figures of America’s potential artists whose genius was distorted and stifled by our prevailing commercial and infantile conception of literary values. Our short story itself must be cleansed; its paint and powder removed; its fluffy curls shorn—so that our complacent reader may be left to contemplate its “rag and a bone and a hank of hair.”
When the great American short-story master finally does come, no titles borrowed from the French or any other nationality will be necessary and adequate. His own worth will forge his crown, and his worth will not be measured in tricks and stunts and puzzles and cleverness. His sole object will not be to spring effects upon his unwary reader. His will be sincere honest art—with due apologies for this obvious contradiction in terms, for art can be nothing but sincere!—a result of deep, genuine emotions and an overflowing imagination. His very soul will be imbued with the simple truth, so succinctly put by Mr. H. L. Mencken, that “the way to sure and tremendous effects is by the route of simplicity, naturalness, ingenuousness.”[11]