CHAPTER CVII
BAGDAD-ON-THE-SUBWAY
The short story writer who signed the pen name O. Henry burst like a meteor upon the magazine world of New York. His first stories appeared in 1902, when he had only eight years of life before him. In that time he became the recognized king of the craft; everybody read him, high and low, those skilled in writing as well as the plain people with whose fates he dealt. He poured out his stories at the rate of one or two every week, and if he did not get the highest prices ever heard of, it was because he cared nothing about money and did not trouble to claim his own.
He was a strange, reserved man, deeply loved by his few friends, but hard to get at, and resentful of the intrusion of lion hunters. He had the tenderness and sentimentality of the Southern gentleman, combined with a secretiveness which puzzled the denizens of his Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Only a few facts about his life were known; that he had lived on a ranch in Texas, had been a drugstore clerk, had written for papers in New Orleans, had traveled in Central America, and was a widower and had a young daughter—that was all his best friends knew. There was a gap in his life, and no one ventured to question him. But several years after his death a biography was published, and the disclosure was made that America’s short story king had served three years and three months as a federal prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. That was where he had begun his career as a story writer; that was where he had got his intimate knowledge of gentle grafters and chivalrous highwaymen; that was where he had acquired the pathos and the heart-break.
It was characteristic of America that there should have been a great fuss over this disclosure. There was the daughter, and also a new wife, and these thought that the dreadful secret so long hidden should have stayed hidden. Likewise some editors and reviewers thought it. Here was a man who was assumed to belong to the ages, and here was a story more moving and more instructive than any volume O. Henry had published; but they wanted to bury it in his grave—because, forsooth, America is the land of respectability, and the deepest tragedies of the human soul are of no consequence compared with the desire of two ladies to escape humiliation in a matter for which neither was in any way to be blamed.
It appears that O. Henry was a teller of a bank in Texas, the affairs of which were very loosely handled. Something over a thousand dollars was missing; somebody else got it, and O. Henry got the trouble. He was on his way to stand trial, when he fell into a panic; he could not face the ordeal, and ran away to Honduras. But then, learning that his wife was dying of tuberculosis, he could not stand that either, and came home. His wife died, and he went through his trial in a daze of shame, and went to prison, to witness that infinity of horrors which America heaps upon those who have threatened its property interests.
While in Honduras “Bill” Porter—that was his real name—had made a strange acquaintance, Al Jennings, a train-bandit much wanted by Wells-Fargo detectives. The two men came back to America and fate brought them to the same penitentiary. Jennings has since reformed, and has given us the story of himself and his literary friend in a book called “Through the Shadows with O. Henry.” So we are privileged to see the raw material out of which the stories were made, and to watch the maker at his work.
He had become the drug clerk of the prison, and in his spare hours he wrote incessantly, in order to forget the human anguish about him. He would take the outlaw stories of Jennings, the stories of all varieties of offenders in the prison, and transform them to his own uses. Outside was his little daughter, carefully kept in ignorance as to her father’s whereabouts; he must have money to send her a Christmas present, and so he ground out manuscripts and mailed them to magazines.
And so once more, as in the case of Mark Twain, we see the spirit of bourgeois America, embodied in the personality of a woman, engaged in remodeling the soul of a genius. Here was a mass of material, palpitating with life, and ready to be shaped into one of the great tragic records of the ages. And here was a loving and tender-hearted, humorous and blundering Southern gentleman, with no grasp of social forces and no understanding of what had happened to him, engaged in sentimentalizing and feminizing that mass of material.
Take one example, the story of “Jimmy Valentine,” the most popular character O. Henry created. This story was made into a play, which had enormous success both in America and England; it was stolen and dramatized several times in France and Spain; it was the source of a new stage variety, what is known as the “crook play.” The story tells about a little child who is locked by accident in a bank vault, and will be suffocated in a few hours. A famous safe-cracker learns of her plight and opens the safe, and thereby reveals himself to a detective who has been hunting him. But the detective, being a magazine detective, is kind-hearted and easily moved to tears; he foregoes the glory and reward of capturing a famous crook, and the crook retires to be good and happy ever afterwards in the company of the little child. Such is the underworld according to American magazine mythology.
And now, what was the true story of “Jimmy Valentine”? There was a great scandal in the state of Ohio; some high-class crooks, of the kind who never go to the penitentiary, had stolen millions of dollars, and locked all the papers in a vault and escaped. These papers must be had, and it was not possible to blow open the vault with dynamite, for fear of destroying them. So the governor applied to the penitentiary for a competent safe-cracking artist. A man came forward. He had been a gutter-rat, starving in childhood, like Al Jennings, who tells his story. At the age of eleven, a “ravenous little rag-picker,” he had broken into a box-car and stolen ten cents worth of crackers, and had been sent to a “reformatory,” and turned out a master-crook, at eighteen. A year later they had sent him to the penitentiary for life—an “habitual criminal.” Now he was dying of tuberculosis, and his old mother was dying of grief, because she had not been permitted to see her son, or even to hear from him for sixteen years.