Immagini della pagina
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER

SEVEN

FINDING HIMSELF IN NEW YORK

ON JULY 24, 1901, the day of his liberation, O. Henry went to Pittsburg where his daughter and her grandparents were then living. Mr. and Mrs. Roach had moved from Austin immediately after the trial. Mr. Roach was now the manager of the Iron Front Hotel in Pittsburg, and here O. Henry improvised an office in which he secluded himself and wrote almost continuously. The stories that had issued from the prison in Columbus had gone first to New Orleans and had been re-mailed there. Now the stories were sent direct from Pittsburg.

The call or rather invitation to New York came in the spring of 1902. Mr. Gilman Hall, associate editor of Everybody's Magazine but at that time associate editor of Ainslee's, had written an appreciative letter to O. Henry before the prison doors had opened. The letter was directed, of course, to New Orleans where the stories were thought to originate. "The stories that he submitted to Duffy and myself," said Mr. Hall, "both from New Orleans and Pittsburg were so excellent that at least the first seven out of eight were imme

diately accepted. For these first stories we gave him probably seventy-five dollars each." O. Henry did not go to New York under contract. He went because Mr. Hall, quick to discover merit and unhappy till he has extended a helping hand, urged him to come.

New York needed him and he needed New York. How great the need was on both sides it is not likely that Mr. Hall or Mr. Duffy or O. Henry himself knew. During the eight years of his stay, however, O. Henry was to get closer to the inner life of the great city and to succeed better in giving it a voice than any one else had done. To O. Henry this last quest of "What's around the corner," confined now to a city that was a world within itself, was to be his supreme inspiration. Very soon he found that he could not work outside of New York. "I could look at these mountains a hundred years," he said to Mrs. Porter in Asheville, “and never get an idea, but just one block downtown and I catch a sentence, see something in a face-and I've got my story." If ever in American literature the place and the man met, they met when O. Henry strolled for the first time along the streets of New York.

"Of the writing men and women of the newer generation," says Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice,* "the men and women whose trails are the subject of these papers, there are many who have staked claims to certain New

*See "The New York of the Novelists" (the Bookman, New York, October, 1915).

York streets or quarters. There has been but one conqueror of Alexander-like ambitions, that is, of course, the late O. Henry, and Sydney Porter's name will naturally appear again and again in these and in ensuing papers. To north, east, south, and west, stretch his trails; to north, east, south, and west, he wandered like a modern Haroun al Raschid. And like a conqueror he rechristened the city to suit his whimsical humour. At one moment it is his 'Little Old Bagdadon-the-Subway'; at another, 'The City of Too Many Caliphs'; at another, 'Noisyville-on-the-Hudson'; or, 'Wolfville-on-the-Subway'; or, "The City of Chameleon

Changes.""

The acceptance of the invitation to come to New York without a definite engagement is evidence that O. Henry had at last gained confidence in himself as a writer. This confidence was a fruit of the years spent in Columbus. Without faith in himself no power of persuasion could, I think, have induced him to launch himself in a city where he had not only no assured position but no friends or acquaintances. Like Childe Roland's acceptance of the challenge on the occasion of his memorable first visit to the Dark Tower, O. Henry's acceptance of the invitation to come to New York was in itself the pledge of ultimate victory. It is certain that he took with him to New York short story material not yet worked up, but that he had but that he had any definite

plan of publication, any particular plots that could be more easily completed in the more favourable atmosphere of a great city, is not likely. It is more probable that the desire to get into the game and the consciousness that he could play it now or never, if given a chance, were the ruling forces in the decision. The passion for self-expression which began in his earliest youth had grown with every later experience, and there was now added the determination, come what might, to give his daughter the best education possible. The road lay through the short story with New York as his workshop.

Nobody except the family trio in Pittsburg and the editors and publishers of Ainslee's Magazine knew that O. Henry was going to New York. He had spent a day or two in the city before he called at Duane and William streets to make himself known. "As happens in these matters," writes Mr. Richard Duffy,* "whatever mind picture Gilman Hall or I had formed of him from his letters, his handwriting, his stories, vanished before the impression of the actual man. To meet him for the first time you felt his most notable quality to be reticence, not a reticence of social timidity, but a reticence of deliberateness. If you also were observing, you would soon understand that his reticence proceeded from the fact that civilly yet masterfully he was taking in every item of the 'you' being presented to him to the accom

See the Bookman, New York, October, 1913.

paniment of convention's phrases and ideas, together with the 'you' behind this presentation. It was because he was able thus to assemble and sift all the multifarious elements of a personality with sleight-of-hand swiftness that you find him characterising a person or a neighbourhood in a sentence or two; and once I heard him characterise a list of editors he knew each in a phrase.”

No one in New York came to know him better or felt a warmer affection for him than Mr. Gilman Hall. "I was sure," said Mr. Hall, "that he had a past, though he did not tell me of it and I did not inquire into it. It was not till after his death that I learned of the years spent in Columbus. I used to notice, however, that whenever we entered a restaurant or other public place together he would glance quickly around him as if expecting an attack. This did not last long, however. I thought that he had perhaps killed some one in a ranch fight, for he told me that he had lived on a ranch in Texas. This inference was strengthened by finding that he was a crack shot with a pistol, being very fond of shooting-galleries as well as of bowling alleys. But when I found that he did not carry a pistol, I began to doubt the correctness of my theory."

Mr. Duffy relates that he found O. Henry a man with whom you could sit for a long time and feel no necessity for talking, though a passerby would often evoke from him a remark that later reappeared as the basis of a

« IndietroContinua »