O. HENRY Stories
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Edited by Guy Davenport
My previous reviews of older or classic books HERE
When I read these O. Henry stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
13 thoughts on “O. HENRY Stories”
THE RANSOM OF MACK
“I’ve thought that if I ever had extravagant money I’d rent a two-room cabin somewhere, hire a Chinaman to cook, and sit in my stocking feet and read Buckle’s History of Civilisation.” […] “Give me a cuckoo clock and Sep Winner’s Self-Instructor for the banjo, and I’ll join you.”And these two men do just that, still not too old, and settle into their idyllic haven … until they start talking of the mysteries of womenfolk. Even machinations that I could not fathom evolve, showing how such mysteries, when thought about, rub off on men. Best not to think such thoughts. Best not to think at all. (I was happy, though, how neat it ended.)
I have returned here, despite my earlier abdication of duty…
A CALL LOAN
“In the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become extinct.”
A cattleman made big money in those days where this takes place, and then he founded a bank but trusts a friend too much with a dodgy call loan by wholly banking on a cattle deal – and a dyspeptic inspector of banks arrives…
Well, the events pan out happily, if that’s not a spoiler and a half, but you, the trusty reader, can bank on my redeeming the debt of such a mistaken divulgence by means of my effort in drawing your attention to this brief work in the first place, eventually resulting in your enjoyment of its amusing and worthily amoral moral.
I have returned here, despite my earlier abdication of duty…
A CALL LOAN
“In the breast of the rib-sprung sex the genius of purse lightening may slumber through years of inopportunity, but never, my brothers, does it become extinct.”
A cattleman made big money in those days where this takes place, and then he founded a bank but trusts a friend too much with a dodgy call loan by wholly banking on a cattle deal – and a dyspeptic inspector of banks arrives…
Well, the events pan out happily, if that’s not a spoiler and a half, but you, the trusty reader, can bank on my redeeming the debt of such a mistaken divulgence by means of my effort in drawing your attention to this brief work in the first place, eventually resulting in your enjoyment of its amusing and worthily amoral moral.
Well, the events pan out happily, if that’s not a spoiler and a half, but you, the trusty reader, can bank on my redeeming the debt of such a mistaken divulgence by means of my effort in drawing your attention to this brief work in the first place, eventually resulting in your enjoyment of its amusing and worthily amoral moral.
THE PRINCESS AND THE PUMA
“The Chronicle of the Princess, the Happy Thought, and Lion that Bungled his Job.”
We are introduced to royalty as cattle ranch monarchs, but they are not otherwise in the story, but their daughter is centre stage as she gulls a princely suitor with a lion cull.
A story that reminds me of politics today. I’d recognise that Trumpish mane anywhere! And his gun-toting apologists, too.
But is it Neuces country, or Nueces? My available text has both.
THE INDIAN SUMMER OF DRY VALLEY JOHNSON
“I reckon I was locoed to be makin’ a he poll-parrot out of myself for a kid like you.”
Dry Valley is called Dry Valley to differentiate him from another boring sheepman called Elm Creek Johnson. He sells his sheep farm and sort of retires as a melancholy bachelor of 35, but then while fighting off kids scrumping his strawberries, sees that one of them is 19 year old girl and realises as an epiphany that he has been acting as if he were in the autumn of his years! It takes both her mimicking of his ludicrous dress code and his whipping of her with his whip to bring this story to its own special epiphany! You know somethin’ – O Henry has a style to die for, making you feel reborn. No way can anyone convey the simple-complex tactility and brainsizzling of its semantics, phonology and graphology. Beyond any “anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between us and the setting sun.”
THE REFORMATION OF CALLIOPE
“Go to him all spraddled out, boys. And don’t git too reckless, for what Calliope shoots at he hits.”
Not sure that last bit is quite right! You see, Calliope is mostly drunk when he goes on shoot-outs in the township of Quicksand. And this town’s Marshall and his spraddled henchmen have a final shoot-out with him, and then his mother turns up on the train with a trunk to see him after eight years. I shoot out at stories and sometimes hit their meanings and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I hit on spoilers by happenstance. Hope no plot spoilers hit here. The fast switching of the Marshall’s badge, and eight jars of home-made quince jam, notwithstanding. (Still counting site hits as unique readers.)
THE PRINCESS AND THE PUMA
“The Chronicle of the Princess, the Happy Thought, and Lion that Bungled his Job.”
We are introduced to royalty as cattle ranch monarchs, but they are not otherwise in the story, but their daughter is centre stage as she gulls a princely suitor with a lion cull.
A story that reminds me of politics today. I’d recognise that Trumpish mane anywhere! And his gun-toting apologists, too.
But is it Neuces country, or Nueces? My available text has both.
A story that reminds me of politics today. I’d recognise that Trumpish mane anywhere! And his gun-toting apologists, too.
But is it Neuces country, or Nueces? My available text has both.
THE INDIAN SUMMER OF DRY VALLEY JOHNSON
“I reckon I was locoed to be makin’ a he poll-parrot out of myself for a kid like you.”
Dry Valley is called Dry Valley to differentiate him from another boring sheepman called Elm Creek Johnson. He sells his sheep farm and sort of retires as a melancholy bachelor of 35, but then while fighting off kids scrumping his strawberries, sees that one of them is 19 year old girl and realises as an epiphany that he has been acting as if he were in the autumn of his years! It takes both her mimicking of his ludicrous dress code and his whipping of her with his whip to bring this story to its own special epiphany! You know somethin’ – O Henry has a style to die for, making you feel reborn. No way can anyone convey the simple-complex tactility and brainsizzling of its semantics, phonology and graphology. Beyond any “anamorphous shadow of a milestone reaching down the road between us and the setting sun.”
THE REFORMATION OF CALLIOPE
“Go to him all spraddled out, boys. And don’t git too reckless, for what Calliope shoots at he hits.”
Not sure that last bit is quite right! You see, Calliope is mostly drunk when he goes on shoot-outs in the township of Quicksand. And this town’s Marshall and his spraddled henchmen have a final shoot-out with him, and then his mother turns up on the train with a trunk to see him after eight years. I shoot out at stories and sometimes hit their meanings and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I hit on spoilers by happenstance. Hope no plot spoilers hit here. The fast switching of the Marshall’s badge, and eight jars of home-made quince jam, notwithstanding. (Still counting site hits as unique readers.)
“They were enemies by the law written when the rocks were molten.”
A wonderful display of a fading violet called Maggie who always went to to the strictly-ruled-attendance dance – in a boxing hall? – accompanied by her best friend and her best friend’s ‘fellow’. Well, what can one say, other than Oh, Henry, how did you fill your modern baroque style with such emotions of rivalry, friendship and brash fisticuffs, and the man Maggie chose to be escorted by with something sharper than a fist. Possible spoiler Is that it all worked well in the end for Maggie. Seems to indicate that instant risk-taking foolhardy instinctive pragmatism is worth more than enduring a slog of a lifeful?
Coming out as a de-sheathing.
“Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner, music, Rembrandt’s works, pictures, Waldteufel, wall paper, Chopin and Oolong.”
Another married couple into art and literature, trying to base their very existence on it, caring what each of them think of the other in marriage. I say ‘another’ couple, because half an hour ago I reviewed HERE The Door of Opportunity by W Somerset Maugham. A completely different plot and characterisation, but if you compare one story to the other in their (for me just now) synchronously preternatural mutuality of synergy, you can read even further beyond each story to new realms of thought about married couples who depend in some way on art and literature as their raison d’être alongside the day jobs. Compare and CONTRAST these two stories, in fact.
Oolong as well as the reference at the start of the O Henry story to the Great Wall of China. Today its Coronalwall!
“Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts of lava.”
…and in the city boarding-house, a married couple bicker with flatirons etc, flung at each other, as the folks sit on the outside stoop, and all hell breaks loose when a six year old boy is found to be lost. The couple halt their warfare to speculate on how they would feel if their own six year old boy had been born six years before, and was now lost, as lost he actually was by dint of never having been here at all, I guess. Whether the lost boy is found or not, YOU have to guess, like me, whether, thereafter, the couple resume their lethal marital warfare. Jawn was the husband’s name, by the way.
“While looking in her mirror she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber.”
This word-flighty story of Dulcie – who scrimps in Manhattan with weekly wages of a debatable small amount of dollars, five or six – and of Piggy, a man who I did not seem to like, and hoped Dulcie would not get attached to – and of a ‘fly cop’ or ‘angel policeman’ who seems to know the narrator – and of whether the only things that are not debatable by others at all are the telling of your dreams and what a parrot might say to you. The story seems to be a suitably debatable and happenstance companion to ‘Freda’ that I reviewed earlier today here.
“His scarfpin was a large diamond, oddly set.”
I’ll meet this forgotten story’s next reader here, at precisely 3.19 pm in 2040. That thought will keep me alive. Better than spoiling its plot.
By ‘juxtaposition’ with the precocious boy, also wildly and knowingly talking to adults, in William Trevor’s GOING HOME (a story I happened to read only just half an ago HERE), the love between two lovers is now not lost in translation, but won!
“A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares and penates sky-high.”
John used to his routines coming home from work on the shepherding bus and later regular temptation to go out and out again to play pool with his mates, leaving his crazy quilter of a wife at home. The shock of her sudden absence at home to visit her sick mother, makes him feel guilty at the way he is unappreciative of her, and if I tell you more about it that would give you no need to read this story at all. The story is its own false alarm, I guess. O, Henry, the readers love thee after all. Time’s pendulum over routine’s pit, notwithstanding.
“not to be sneezed at”
A firm’s younger replacement buyer (co-owner of the firm) from prick-smart Cactus, Texas, a city that has now been replaced with the “earthquakes and Negroes and monkeys and malarial fever and volcanoes” of Caracas City, instead. But he gets his woman nevertheless with the enticements of a valuable diamond ring and a gold marriage band.. Both misogyny (in assessing hidden female motives) and racism deployed just for the story’s smart arse ending. O, Henry, shame on you. But without such stories we would not know what people thought back then, nor learn to remind ourselves what similar things many of them still think now!
“It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologuing, thumb-handed barber.”
Rich man Blinker fed up today with signatures and scratchy pens, takes a boat on the river and meets a common girl who sort of teaches him that the common mob has its worthy moments, a sort of falling in love on Blinker’s part, and she says where she lives. So someone wrote down that building for this story’s title with a scratchy pen, accepting, with resigned loss, Blinker’s own fate, with a new common wisdom. Blinker and title found to be mutually owned. The boat’s collision with another boat being a dress rehearsal for wisdom’s near-death flashpoint of synchronicity. Stay close or you’ll sink!
“, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its own virus.”
I am afraid I did not understand at all this story about a hose-cart driver’s seeming biased obsession with the war between Japan and Russia, utilising pins on a map.
“Gather the idea, girls — all black, you know, with the preference for crêpe de — oh, crêpe de Chine — that’s it. All black, and that sad, faraway look, and the hair shining under the black veil…”
A girl in China black, seemingly in the “mullygrubs”, enjoys dressing as a Goth, and makes up a whole story to a new admirer about a Count’s death in Italy, her fiancé, so that she can dress in black as mourning. In fact, all ends romantic and happy! Or does it? A neat ending to this story, whatever the case.
“I met him to-day on the Bowery, and what do you think he does? Comes up and shakes hands.”