O. HENRY Stories
When I read these O. Henry stories, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
PART TWO – continued from part one here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/02/17/o-henry-stories/
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Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS
A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The natural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect circles; the city man’s feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away from himself.
The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt’s optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature’s most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss?
Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief attribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wedding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the “round” of drinks.
On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been deflected. Imagine Venus’s girdle transformed into a “straight front”!
When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curious product—for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratin, and a New Yorker.
Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of all its ways—even of its recreation and sports—coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.
Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the problem of squaring the circle.
I could not resist quoting that mathematical introduction to this genius vignette, true true genius!
But I really should have predicted its ending as two circular country bumpkins meet in sharp angled New York as the last two survivors of a historic deadly determined feud with squirrel guns between a pair of families over several generations. But I didn’t!
I guess I have Nature’s deflected lines coming on board my ageing circles of life. With nuts still to hoard for the journey. 😦
THE FOOL-KILLER
“I sipped my absinthe drip and sawed wormwood.”
I am an author of fiction and I eventually made friends with the artist who clumsily misrepresented by illustration my printed fiction when published. I ever delighted in calling this artist friend a ‘fool’ to his face — and, enhancing my fiction with alcoholic drinks, as I often did, I included in this story reference to an absinthe drip when we two friends were meeting for a meal.
I shall never forget, though, this story’s character of the Fool-Killer who, with various pseudonyms, haunts us all. Here, though, the surprise I felt at the revealed identity of the Fool-Killer in this particular scenario actually transcended fiction itself! And that was nothing to do with the absinthe drip, I assure you. [Unsure, in O Henry’s day, whether ‘drip’ and ‘fool’ were synonymous!]
TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA
“…the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in America for a restful sojourn during the heat of midsummer.”
Hotel not for louts, but for those gentlefolk as hotel residents or ‘Freemasons’ of being in the know, in the know about this hospitable and refined oasis in the middle of Manhattan. Where today a lady staying there is beautiful in splendid dress, a man who also arrives separately is well-mannered and handsome, until this pair reveal who they really are to each other just before departing…
A prefect story that also amazingly has coolness within the heat of the day outside the city, during the ongoing heatwave in my own real-time, with the close coincidence of the two other works I happened to read and review earlier this very day! —
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/07/20/the-burnt-orange-heresy-charles-willeford/#comment-22487The intense heat of Florida
https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/30/the-night-comes-steve-duffy/#comment-22489 London as a furnace
EXTRADITED FROM BOHEMIA
“The waiter poured something in another glass that seemed to be boiling,but when she tasted it it was not hot.”
…like this very story, with Medora Martin up from Harmony, Green Mountains to New York, in middle age, to become an artist and set to “become a second Rosa Bonheur”, but tempted by a Mr Brinkley into the ‘Vortex of Bohemia’, but I gather there is an in-joke that New York is not Bohemia at all. As she is taken home again by someone called Beriah. Strange that I exhume my reviews of Mr Hardy and Oh Henry on the same day today after a few months — and they both have Rosa in their happenstance stories! (here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/thomas-hardy/#comment-1372)