O. Henry: The Works and the Authors Style - Essay Example

The works and the style The “something startling will surely to happen at the end of the story” is inherent in the works of William Sydney Porter—O. Henry in the literary world. Numerous short stories, some of which could be found in Victoria Blake’s compilation, attest to this fact: The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein, The Memento, Mammon and the Archer, Springtime á la Carte, The Count and the Wedding Guest, and The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock. Although he shares the literary heavens with immortals like H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad, O. Henry is sui generis in the short story genre because of the familiar surprising denouement, paraphrases of famous literary lines, and the constant allusion to mythological characters and other writers, all in a few pages—where reading a daily broadsheet would seem an eternity of time. The above cited short stories take up seven (7) pages, except The Love-Philter which has five (5) and the Mammon, 10. In The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein the twist is when the powder that was supposed to be administered to a lady was mixed intentionally with an old man’s (lady’s guardian) coffee. The maker of the powder (Ikey), who harbors romantic feelings for the lady, gave it to a man, who has plans of running away with the lady, thinking that the “foolish” plan will soon be found out in time if he (Ikey) will reveal the plan to the old man. In the Mammon and the Archer O. Henry successfully “refuted” the romantic cliché ‘money can not buy love’ (although in the story itself the cliché takes another form: “money is dross compared with true love”). The father in the story paid drivers to block the car where his son and a lady is in, and consequently, to give a substantial amount of time to his son to win the heart of the lady. In The Count and the Wedding Guest, a character (Miss Conway) paraphrased the poem “Solitude” by American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox when she says “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and they give you the laugh.” In Springtime á la Carte, O. Henry alluded to James Henry Hackett, William Shakespeare, and to the works of Charles Reade. Philomela and satyrs, both mythological characters, were referred to in The Caliph, Cupid, and the Clock. Despite the numerous superficial depictions of events and characters, the existence of a “happy dilemma,” if there is one, lends power to O. Henry’s works: Chunk McGowan needed to decide whether to administer the powder, that Ikey made, to his lady or not; Miss Rosalie Ray whose “heart and soul were sick of men” especially those who frequent the theater, have to decide what to do with her relationship with a man whom she found to be keeping a piece of her yellow silk garters as a memento. O. Henry also saw the need to maintain a closer-to-reality approach in dealing with his characters. Unlike the characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the protagonists in O. Henry’s world pout no polished sentences. Abrupt, concise, and direct: that is how the utterances in his works are characterized. To be more emphatic about it, his characters are no different from the mental creatures by William Golding in his Lord of the Flies. Themes and Setting Admiration is due to those who have the audacity to compartmentalize the short stories of O. Henry into ‘love,’ ‘humor,’ or ‘crime’ categories. Although The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein seems to be a give-away as topping the list of “love” category, putting it only on such category would be, to say the least, too simplistic. If such is the case, a reader would be engaged in what is deemed to be a snobbish “let-us-look-for-keywords” guessing game. The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein is a love story only because a character wants to run away with a lady, in the same manner as The Memento is a love story because the main character was eventually ‘engaged’ with another character (a Reverend). Despite (or ‘Because of’?) the pervading love theme, ‘crimes’ were committed in the created world of short stories: making someone unconscious in order to run away with his ward is a ‘crime;’ and lying to someone you love—as what happened in The Count and the Wedding Guest—is easily a ‘crime.’ “Humor is not laughter, not mockery, not satire, but a particular species of the comic, which… ‘renders ambiguous everything it touches.’” (Kundera, 5) When Springtime á la Carte ends with “DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG,” a question should be posed: how ambiguous could O. Henry get? To a certain extent, O. Henry wants us to laugh, mocks us, makes a satire out of human nature—or of readers’ human nature—all at the same time, but prevalent in his works is the New York life, and deal for the most part with ordinary people: clerks, policemen, waitresses. Without falling into the trap of a reductio, O. Henry allows the readers to have a peep into another world called New York (á la John Malkovich’s Being John Malkovich) through his short stories: how love affects a typical citizen of New York?; Or, how a citizen of New York spends time—“the comings and goings of people in hurry and dread, controlled by the little metal moving hands of a clock always made him sad” (The Caliph, Cupid, the Clock)? Purpose Going through the short stories of O. Henry, one realizes the truth in what he allegedly said: “I teach no lesson, inculcate no moral, and advance no theory.” (Blake, xxiv) Although the simplicity and intensity are apparent, the short stories are by no means hastily made nor not well thought off. As what have been said earlier, O. Henry’s description of the events and characters is highlighted by reference to mythology and famous stage thespians. And although his works involve mystery endings they are not to be classified as ‘mystery.’ Looking for a definite purpose—or why O. Henry chose to write—on a short story, or a collection thereof, is at best, an exercise in futility. Unlike Friedrich Nietzsche (who offers a critique of what he calls ‘slave morality’) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (who attempts to solve every philosophical problem in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus), O. Henry is not a vessel of revolutionary ideas although he tries to “improvise” one like what he did in Springtime á la Carte. The story revolves around a girl who misses an old flame, who fails to send correspondences to her. As Fate would have it, the old flame happens to enter an establishment where the lady works—that involve preparation of menu cards. This gift of simplicity and crispness of language made the Atlantic Monthly to asseverate that O. Henry’s perception is “always shrewd, but never deep.” (Blake, 428) Although the relationship or analogy is forced, a reader would be tempted to say that, like Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest, O. Henry tries to ‘explain’ (or simply to ‘play’) literary quotes without philosophical embellishment. “Art works best when it satisfies the senses… [n]ot the intellect,” says Ahmad Zakii. (Chowdhury, 67) The quotes are seemingly typewritten with tongue in cheek: “Women are the natural enemies of clocks, and therefore the allies of those who would seek liberation from these monsters that measure our follies and limit our pleasures.” (The Caliph, Cupid, the Clock); and, “Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned.” (Mammon and the Archer). This is why O. Henry is such a literary gem: no amount of erudition in semantics is necessary to understand him; only an array of vast imaginative abilities. Criticisms His ‘world’ had writers—the list could be awesome—who could paint elaborate narratives of experience of each human face, which tells the readers to accept them as universal. There is nothing particularly wrong with that unless one believes that each reader has time and necessary psychological knowledge to ‘go’ deeper into the psyche of each human face depicted. Thus it is surprising that other scholars think that “money versus love” is a theme that could be found in some of O. Henry’s short stories. The problem with this kind of ‘putting-words-into-one’s-mouth’ is that nobody knows whether O. Henry really wanted love (or money) to be placed on the opposite side of money (or love). The short stories included in this paper suggest that love and money could sleep on the same literary, if not romantic, bed. The short stories by O. Henry captured the imagination of the public when he first wrote them primarily because of the ubiquitous trick endings. “The stories of O. Henry, as is true of the works of any writer on foreign soil, give us the feeling of being a finished, complete genre, and they contrast in our minds with that fluidity and vagueness now so evident in our literature.” (Ejxenbaum, 2-4). However, this same device overshadowed the display of character development and emphasis, if any, in the short story structure, i.e. the opening, climax, and denouement. Hence, the ‘trick ending’-fatigue set in. Consequently, it would be safe to assume that almost all readers do not remember how each story develops. Instead, the only concern is ‘how each story ends?’ This is the circumstance surrounding the disappointing situation every scholar on O. Henry must face: how could O. Henry be relevant again if his works are not made to be read and reread, but only to be remembered for their endings? Or, have the readers become knowledgeable about New York after having read some of his works? If so, could such knowledge be lifted up to the pantheon of what is universal—or to which every non-New Yorker could relate to? The answers, if there are any, are not easily accessible; buried under the heap of simplicity. There is danger in looking for so much historical, political, or even psychological value in O. Henry’s works. This is so, because there could be none. Maybe he merely wanted us to be entertained (or, wanted himself to be entertained with something the present generation has—‘blogs’ in the form of short stories). This is not a mere flight of fancy, for the following reason: Nobody knows if Miss Lynnette D’Armande (character in The Memento) really walked the steps of Broadway, and it is quite fascinating that, despite the knowledge that O. Henry’s stories are drawn from his commonplace experiences, no works have directly reflected his life in the federal penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio. This lack of (auto)biographical tint—with the possible exception of The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein—on and of his works makes it difficult for a reader to place each particular work side-by-side on the emotional zeitgeist of O. Henry during his writing of them. To best describe the importance of having such tint, one gravitates to what was written by Kay Johnson regarding Dang Thuy Tram’s book titled Last Night I Dreamed of Peace—“to offer a poignant take on life under fire.” (107). The phrase ‘under fire’ would then have a different meaning in O. Henry’s case: In 1882, he showed signs of tuberculosis, and quit his job eventually as a pharmacist. The analysis of each short story, therefore, is independent of his life, and vice versa. Concluding Remarks Even though the ability to ‘deep think’ could be put to rest whenever reading O. Henry short stories, there is one thing that makes readers love his works: they live! Sherlock Holmes (the famous detective of Baker Street) of Doyle, Ubermensch (or Superman—the advent of whom was proclaimed in the seminal work titled Thus Spake Zarathustra) of Nietzsche, and the ‘creatures’ (who, left on their own on an island devoid of adults, became savage beasts) of Golding could not be possibly found in the real world, but the thespians, pharmacists, and princes of O. Henry can. His characters may sometimes be naïve or silly. They may not utter any sentence worthy of being considered quotable, but they are always interesting. And such description—an understatement—extends to the short stories themselves. The stories are attention-grabbing that they are capable of affecting readers to act like lovers who hold books close to their chests while letting a sigh of relief. And sometimes a simple emotive sentence like “that is cute” would be apt to complete the experience. Works Cited: I. Books Blake, Victoria. Selected Stories of O. Henry. Barnes & Noble Classics: New York, 2003. Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed. Faber&Faber: London, 1993. II. Weekly Magazine Chowdhury, Neel. “A Man Apart.” Time Magazine 19 November 2007: 67. Johnson, Kay. “Casualties of War.” Time Magazine 31 December 2007/ 07 January 2008: 107. III. Journal Ejxenbaum, B. M. O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.  I. R. Titunik, trans. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Read More