What is the first one, “Tobin’s Palm,” if not a mere long-drawn-out jest? Is it anything more than an anecdote exploiting palmistry as a “trait”—to use another technical term—or point? It isn’t New York, nor Tobin, nor any other character, that makes this story interesting. It is O. Henry’s trick at the end. The prophecy is fulfilled, after all, in such an unexpected way, and we are such satisfied children!
What is the second story, the famous “Gift of the Magi”? We have discussed it and analyzed it in our texts and lauded it everywhere. How much of the life of the four million does it hold up to us? It is better than the first story; yes, much better. But why is it a masterpiece? Not because it tries to take us into the home of a married couple attempting to exist in our largest city on the husband’s income of $20 per week. No, that wouldn’t make it famous. Much better stories of poverty have been written, much more faithful and poignant, and the great appreciative public does not even remember them. It is the wizard’s mechanics, his stunning invention—that’s the thing! Della sells her hair and buys a fob for hubby’s watch; while at the same time hubby sells his watch and buys her a comb. But you don’t know all this until they get together for the presentation of the gifts, and then you gasp. We call this working criss-cross, a plot of cross purposes. In this story we usually overlook entirely one little thing—the last paragraph. It really is superfluous and therefore constitutes a breech of technique. We preach against preaching. Tell your story, we say, and stop. “Story” is synonymous with action. O. Henry didn’t stop—so that even he was sometimes a breaker of laws. But this uncomfortable thought doesn’t really have to be noted!
“A Cosmopolite in a Café” is a little skit proving that “since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed.” It is the type of writing that is termed “short story” by our humorous weeklies.
“Between Rounds” is the first story in the volume that really displays O. Henry’s gift of mature satire. Here underneath his superficial jesting lurks reality. The pathos in the lives of the McCaskeys and the Murphys is touched upon, lightly to be sure, but sufficiently to indicate that O. Henry saw it.
The plotted happy ending with plenty of “punch” is best exemplified by “The Skylight Room.” The gullible reader must have really thought that Billy Jackson was little Miss Leeson’s name of some star. But not so, ha-ha! It really was the name of the ambulance doctor who came to take her to the hospital. “Fishy,” you say? Not any more than “A Service of Love.” Not that the young couple in this latter story might not have both worked and concealed the fact from each other. But why both in a laundry and in the same laundry? Coincidence of course! Incidentally, can you recognize the “Gift of the Magi” here? Shakespeare may have never repeated, but O. Henry did, very frequently too. Here we have again the poor loving couple trying to get along on next to nothing a week. A slightly different twist but the formula is the same. Even the names of the principals are almost the same. In “The Gift of the Magi” we had Della and Jim, in “A Service of Love” we have Delia and Joe.
In “The Coming-out of Maggie” O. Henry again brushes real life and real romance. In the hands of a sincere artist this material could have been worked into an immortal story. As a matter of fact, the same basic theme—the heart-hunger of a neglected girl—has been treated by Gorki in his “Her Lover.”[8] And the difference between the two stories is the difference between tinsel and diamond.
“Man About Town,” “The Cop and the Anthem” and “An Adjustment of Nature” are trivial things—expanded anecdotes at best. “Memories of a Yellow Dog” presents O. Henry at his happiest. It is a fine bit of satire—a field in which lay his strength. In “The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein” the wizard again displays his bag of theatrical tricks. And so he does in “Mammon and the Archer,” with its needless anti-climax—again breaking the law: “Thou shalt stop when through.” “Springtime à la Carte” is a long-drawn-out joke. So is “From a Cabby’s Seat.” In “The Green Room” O. Henry once more had a cursory glimpse of his “four million.”
Now we reach “An Unfinished Story.” Thanks to the good imps that may have influenced him to leave this story unfinished. It is the only one in the volume that shows O. Henry was capable of genuine emotion and had a sense of artistic truth. Dr. Blanche Colton Williams would not include it among O. Henry’s best because “It is just what the author called it—unfinished.”[9] Yes, admittedly, it is unfinished—in a technical sense. The $5 a week shop-girl has nothing to wear and does not go to the dance with Piggy. And that’s all that happens, except a little sermon at the end in which O. Henry intimates that the fellow that sets fire to an orphan asylum, and murders a blind man for his pennies, has a cleaner conscience than the prosperous-looking gentleman who hires working girls and pays them five or six dollars a week to live on in the city of New York. To “finish” this story would have necessitated the distortion of truth, the blurring of the drab little picture. That Sidney Porter refused to do it indicates to what extent he was above the practical standards of his admiring disciples and interpreters.
“The Caliph, Cupid and The Clock” is a bit of romantic clap-trap. So is “Sisters of the Golden Circle.” “The Romance of a Busy Broker” is the old absent-minded-professor-who-forgot-he-was-married joke belabored to the dignity of a story.
“After Twenty Years” is another bit of writing that has been burdened with unqualified encomiums by the O. Henry clergy. The ingenuity of the plot and the strong “kick” at the end fill them with a halleluiah ecstacy. An empty little crook story, sketchy, anecdotal, is hailed as a masterpiece.