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 perfect 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-22487 The 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)
To be continued soon…
FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY
“Even Broadway that morning was a discord in Vuyning’s ears; and in his eyes it paralleled for a few dreamy, dreary minutes a certain howling, scorching, seething, malodorous slice of street that he remembered in Morocco. He saw the struggling mass of dogs, beggars, fakirs, slave-drivers and veiled women in carts without horses, the sun blazing brightly among the bazaars, the piles of rubbish from ruined temples in the street – and then a lady, passing, jabbed the ferrule of a parasol in his side and brought him back to Broadway.”
Vuyning (pronounced ‘Vining’) tries to grapevine as both parasite and host to and from a ‘crook’ who stands around Broadway with other pruning penknifers, who seeks sartorial sense from Vuyning and the latter from the former more down to earth practical sense of the West and so forth with the outcome of his captivating the woman he had wooed for years to go West with him, if not to Morocco!
It may all mean something else, but that is what this tentacular syntax map of words meant to me. Story as both parasite and host; its reader, too! We all affect what we read to our own interpreted cut of its once multi-tailored bespokeness.
Cross-referenced with Thomas Hardy’s On The Western Circuit: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/thomas-hardy/#comment-1618
[[ This story is not in this book of selected stories, but I reviewed it today in’That Glimpse of Truth’…
THE COP AND THE ANTHEM: O. Henry
“…averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard.”
After ‘eleemosynary’ Soapy, of whom we have an image of frayed trousers, received Jack Frost’s warning card, and thus he needs his own ‘hegira’ to what he calls the Island. And he does this by reprehensibly breaking the law several times unsuccessfully enough not to be sent to such a ‘rosy dream’ by any policeman, then magistrate.
Law as philanthropy! The masher cinch. A wishful ‘transplendent’ goal that is hailed to a halt by an anthem from a chance church organ, infusing him with an algorithm of remorseful humiliation moving through the slow motion gears towards a new purpose to obviate the encroaching coldness by more positive means.
Except the “dreadful enchantment” in all the previous fair cops became an unfair one as “a hand laid upon his arm” simply for doing nothin’ at all!
PS: But what about the woman he tried to ‘mash’ — who was looking at shaving mugs in a shop at the time Soapy did this — and who hoped he would take her to a pail of suds? ]]
From Internet: ‘Hard toilet soap with a pleasant smell was produced in the Middle East during the Islamic Golden Age, when soap-making became an established industry. Recipes for soap-making are described by Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi (c. 865–925)…’
And the origin of the name Masher seems to be Islamic.
THE MEMENTO
A story of two actresses on Broadway with three coincidences, one of them mine! First the hostel where one of the ladies was staying while waiting for acting parts, a labyrinth of a place with ‘rumoured bathrooms’. Wonderfully described place and people with character, and our first lady accidentally thinks of another lady actress when looking at photos, someone whose gimmick was throwing a garter at the audience the end of her act, but had retired and not been seen for ages, and seventeen minutes later she unexpectedly turns up by knocking on the first lady’s room door! The first coincidence.
“The meeting of the two was not marked by the effusion vocal, gymnastical, osculatory and catechetical that distinguishes the greetings of their unprofessional sisters in society. There was a brief clinch, two simultaneous labial dabs and they stood on the same footing of the old days. Very much like the short salutations of soldiers or of travellers in foreign wilds are the welcomes between the strollers at the corners of their crisscross roads.”
She explained that she had fancied a man where she had been holding out, but a man who hankered after an idolised angel in the past a memento of whom he kept cherished in a ‘rosewood casket’! (“She didn’t seem to be on to the details, but she knew that he had been hit pretty hard. He was paler and thinner, she said, and he had some kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady in a little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk drawer in his study.”) And, one day, she surreptitiously opened the rosewood casket and found one of her old garters in it! And thus she had hurriedly escaped his attendance upon her today’s older self, and, for whatever inferred reason she did this, we shall spend eternities speculating, I guess. That was the second coincidence.
The third coincidence? Well, I picked up this O. Henry collection again today, after a long delay in real-time reviewing it, and I continued where I left off, and this was about an hour after reviewing Oliver Onions’s own story concerning rosewood HERE!
JEFF PETERS AS A PERSONAL MAGNET
“‘Mr. Mayor,’ says I, after laying my ear to his right shoulder blade and listening, ‘you’ve got a bad attack of super-inflammation of the right clavicle of the harpsichord!’ […]
‘ I’m one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,’ says I. ‘The lame talk and the blind rubber whenever I make a pass at ’em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control.’”
This is a story of a double duping, one by the mayoral authorities to entrap this fake doctor called Jeff Peters, and then one by him and his new partner upon the authorities in hindsight! All with a glut of Joycean con-trickery dialogue.
Even before reading this, I already thought that a preternatural faith in such rarefied literature has its own magnetism of life’s cure-all!
Cross-referenced here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/09/06/the-fiddler-of-the-reels-by-thomas-hardy/
MODERN RURAL SPORTS
“I never answered a word. I stood still, repeating to myself the rollicking lines of that merry jingle, ‘The Man with the Hoe.’ When I looked at this farmer, the little devices I had in my pocket for buncoing the pushed-back brows seemed as hopeless as trying to shake down the Beef Trust with a mittimus and a parlor rifle.”
Not sure I followed all the word-braggadocio of the old American-Joycean references here, but I do get that Jeff Peters again and his pal Andy step off the train randomly at a town where they can dupe or con farmers, easy bait, always, farmers. But farmers seem to have gone hi-tech with data by wireless and there is no way through with the goldbrick trick, yet one farmer finally succumbs to the under-the-walnut trick just for the pleasant nostalgia of being duped or conned!
THE MAN HIGHER UP
“‘It’s part of my business,’ says Bill Bassett, ‘to play up to the ruffles when I want to make a riffle as Raffles. ‘Tis loves that makes the bit go ’round. Show me a house with a swag in it and a pretty parlor-maid, and you might as well call the silver melted down and sold, and me spilling truffles and that Chateau stuff on the napkin under my chin, while the police are calling it an inside job just because the old lady’s nephew teaches a Bible class. I first make an impression on the girl,’ says Bill, ‘and when she lets me inside I make an impression on the locks. But this one in Little Rock done me,’ says he. ‘She saw me taking a trolley ride with another girl, and when I came ’round on the night she was to leave the door open for me it was fast. And I had keys made for the doors upstairs. But, no sir. She had sure cut off my locks. She was a Delilah,’ says Bill Bassett.”
I never want to “cast Persians” on who steals what from whom, when making cross-references in literature, and these three friendly rival crooks, by chance, meet up, Jeff Peters again, and someone called Bill Bassett … and a gent called Alfred Ricks who gets off the train on the trackside side, with Jeff somehow meeting them there after tantamount to ambushing himself with vengeful fruit farmers, and, meanwhile, smartarse Bill shows off to the other two when they reach a lonely town, and they think Ricks is a loser, a turtle turned on its back. Meanwhile, later, Jeff buys all the decks of cards in town from a store, and then returns them to the same store, saying it was mistake, and sells them back to the store half price, but having marked all their backs! Construe that! Yet Ricks is the one eventually laughing all the way to the bank, I guess!
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