Literary Arts: Essay
TWAIN ON O’HENRY
Eugene N. Laughridge
2014 UNIFOUR SENIOR GAMES
TWAIN ON O. HENRY
Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and North Carolina’s own O. Henry-- born William
Sidney Porter, in Greensboro--are the three American writers who are most read
worldwide. O. Henry, an inveterate reader, is said to have been profoundly influenced
by Twain’s work. In fact, in “The Snow Man,” O. Henry’s last short story, started before
he died and “rounded out” following his death by his editor, O. Henry mentioned Twain
and the humor in several of Twain’s works. O. Henry’s short stories often were favorably
compared with those of Twain, and Twain would have had to have been familiar with
them. During Twain’s writing career, and particularly in his autobiography written in the
final years of his life, Twain wrote often quite critically about other writers. Although
Twain apparently never published an opinion about O. Henry’s work, Twain’s thoughts
about it may be inferred by what Twain had to say about Bret Harte and James
Fenimore Cooper, in particular.
Bret Harte was more closely a contemporary of Twain than were either Cooper or
O. Henry and, early in their writing careers, Harte and Twain were friends. By some
accounts, this ended in 1877 with the failure of a play on which they had collaborated.
In Twain’s autobiography, written after Harte had died and only a few years before
Twain himself passed away, Twain displayed his sharp wit in acerbic comments about
the deceased author. Twain credited Harte with keen observation of scenes and
characters that Harte encountered in his stay at a California mining camp, but he
derided Harte’s invention of mining techniques “never employed there.” Twain also
charged Harte with inventing a quaint mining dialect “which no man in heaven or earth
had ever used until Harte invented it” and added that “with Harte it died, but it was no
loss.” From there, Twain went on to assail Harte’s physical appearance, choice of
clothing, and character, as well as accusing him of being a second rate imitator of
Charles Dickens.
Given that the subjects, settings, and even the style of O. Henry’s writing were
similar to those of Harte, as well as to those of Twain himself, Twain’s failure to record
any fault he found with O. Henry’s works might be taken to reflect a positive opinion of
it. More to the point, however, O. Henry’s stories might be evaluated against the many
faults that Twain found in the writing of James Fenimore Cooper.
Undoubtedly Twain was inflamed by praise Cooper received from college
professors of the day, and particularly that of British novelist Wilkie Collins who
proclaimed Cooper as the “greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced
by an American.” In 1895, Twain published “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” an
essay in which he famously skewered Cooper’s writing. Twain facetiously wrote that, in
just two-thirds of a page in Deerslayer, Cooper set a record by scoring 114 offenses
against literary art, out of a possible 115, and, in the entire work, violated “eighteen of
nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction.” Twain likely
would give O. Henry a pass on many, but probably not all of the eighteen violations he
detailed in his lampooning of Cooper.
Twain stated that “if Cooper had been an observer his inventive faculty would
have worked better; not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly.”
O. Henry dropped out of school at the age of 15 and, before he turned to writing while
imprisoned for bank embezzlement, worked as a store clerk, a ranch hand, a licensed
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pharmacist, a draftsman, and a bank clerk. He had remarkably diverse opportunities for
observation throughout his short life, and his writing showed that he was an acute
practitioner of the art. From experience, he knew not only what could not be done, but
what could be done and a lot about how to do it. It was his gift to impart his life’s
observations to the reader in a delightfully entertaining way, and it is hard to imagine
that Twain could fault O. Henry’s powers of observation.
Twain noted that tales should “accomplish something and arrive somewhere,” but
that Cooper’s Deerslayer accomplished nothing and arrived “in the air.” By contrast, O.
Henry’s tales seemed always to arrive at a definite conclusion, although it is their
particular charm that often it was somewhere other than where or how the reader first
suspected they were going.
Twain criticized Cooper for the inclusion in his stories of extraneous details and
characters and also remarked that “the personages in a tale shall be alive, except for
the corpses, and that always the reader should be able to tell the corpses from the
others.” “Both, dead or alive,” Twain said, “shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being
there,” details that he thought Cooper sometimes overlooked. O. Henry, as did Twain
himself, often included fairly extensive and unusually colorful descriptions to establish
characters and settings of his tales; however, the separate parts of O. Henry’s stories
almost always seemed germane to the development of the plots. With the exception of
his colorful and entertaining details of scene, character, and dialog, O. Henry, unlike
Cooper, generally used a straightforward, simple, and economical style. Furthermore,
the conduct and conversation of O. Henry’s characters seemed to justify the
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descriptions he gave to them, a characteristic not applying consistently to Cooper’s
characters. In addition to being clearly defined and remaining consistent from beginning
to end; almost all—if indeed not all—of O. Henry’s characters were likeable. The reader
was rarely, if ever, left indifferent to O. Henry’s characters or left, as Twain said of
Cooper’s characters, wishing both” the good people and the bad ones would all get
drowned together.”
Certainly neither O. Henry nor his characters ever patronized or spoke down to
the reader as Twain accused Cooper and his characters of doing. And where Cooper
was inclined to stoop to the introduction of supernatural or other external forces to effect
his ends, O. Henry very rarely allowed, let alone required, such suspect interventions in
his stories. O. Henry’s tales, while sometimes approaching the limit of credibility,
always at least seemed to be plausible, something that Twain clearly illustrated did not
always pertain to Cooper’s stories.
Twain saw what he termed as Cooper's gift in the way of invention as merely a
lazy way of advancing a plot or achieving an impractical conclusion. Among Twain’s
illustrations of Cooper’s “inventions,” he cited Cooper’s having a” moccasined [sic]
person tread in the tracks of a moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail,” and said
that “Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick.” Another
of Twain’s peeves was Cooper’s use of broken twigs at any time a “Cooper character”
was in peril and absolute silence was priceless. “There may be a hundred other handier
things to step on to alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around,” Twain
wrote, “but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry
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twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact,” wrote Twain. “the Leatherstocking
Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.” Against this background,
any contrivance of conveniences by O. Henry seemed even more authentic than it
might otherwise have seemed.
O. Henry likewise avoided both what Twain characterized as Cooper’s use by his
heroes of common sense solutions that had somehow escaped all of the other
characters in the story, and Cooper’s unrelated or even impractical principles of outdoor
craft. Twain observed that “even the eternal laws of Nature have to vacate when
Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader.” O. Henry’s
characters never seemed to do things such as Cooper’s did, as when having hopelessly
lost the trail of a person being tracked, turning the course of a stream in order to see the
tracks of the person in the sludge of the water’s previous path.
Whereas Twain believed that Cooper did not bother to use the correct words, or
perhaps even not know how to do so, both Twain and O. Henry frequently intentionally
had characters only “come near” what they meant rather than to state it directly. Again
in Twain’s terms, both he and O. Henry might use a word’s “second cousin” rather than
the precise term that it actually implied to the reader, but only as they each might use
less than standard grammar for good effect, and never from carelessness nor for lack
of knowledge.
Twain also observed that Cooper’s “inaccurate observation resulted in his poor
construction of dialogue,” and, as Twain colorfully illustrated with examples, “the talk
wandered all around and arrived nowhere; conversations consisted mainly of
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irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look,
as not being able to explain how it got there.” As Twain said of Cooper, the
conversations in O. Henry’s tales had a curious sound to modern ears. The colorful
wordplay of O. Henry’s dialogue, however, trickled along like a delightful and surprising
brook that may have wandered a bit from here to there but always arrived in good time
exactly where and when it was meant to arrive.
Twain said that “Cooper's word-sense was singularly dull. When a person has a
poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near
the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a
literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also
perceive that he does not say it.” In comparison with Cooper, or even with Twain
himself, O. Henry showed himself to be what Twain termed a “word-musician.” As
shown in the following example from “The Ransom of Mack,” O. Henry used what Twain
called “approximate words” intentionally and precisely because of the entertaining way
that they allowed the reader to understand what the author meant, and to enjoy the
process of understanding it:
“’Why, yes,’ says I, in a tone of voice; ‘I know [women] from Alfred to
Omaha. The feminine nature of similitude,’ says I, ‘is as plain to my sight as
the Rocky Mountains is to a blue-eyed burro.
I’m onto all their little
sidesteps and punctual discrepancies.’
‘I tell you, Andy,’ Mack says, with a kind of a sigh. ‘I never had the least
amount of intersection with their predispositions. Maybe I might have had a
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proneness in respect to their vicinity, but I never took the time. I made my
own living since I was fourteen; and I never seemed to get my ratiocinations
equipped with the sentiments usually depicted toward the sect. I sometimes
wish I had,’ says old Mack.
‘They’re an adverse study,’ says I, ‘and adapted to points of view. Although
they vary in rationale, I have found ‘em quite often obviously differing from
each other in divergences of contrast.’”
In summary, O. Henry’s possible violation of the rules postulated by Twain and
cited as broken by Cooper seemed entirely intentional for effect and for what they
added to O. Henry’s tales. In fact, it is in these regards that O. Henry achieved his most
entertaining effects. Although O. Henry’s characters spoke on both sides of the borders
of what Twain referred to as “human talk,” their dialogue rang true and could be clearly
understood. To use Twain’s phrases, the exceedingly colorful speech of O. Henry’s
characters consistently had discoverable meaning, discoverable purpose, showed
relevancy, and remained “in the neighborhood of the subject at hand.” As Twain said it
should, O. Henry’s dialogue helped out the tale, stopped when people had nothing more
to say, and generally was exceedingly interesting to the reader. While O. Henry’s
characters may have talked, as Twain described it, “like an illustrated, gilt-edged,
tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering,” their form of expression
remained as such throughout the story and was at least authentic enough that Twain
was not offended enough to take issue with it. It was O. Henry’s craft, as truthfully it
often was for Twain himself, to use “folksy” or otherwise quaint language as a large part
of an entertaining story. O. Henry even addressed consistency of dialogue in his short
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story “Proof of the Pudding,” where he had one of the characters state as follows:
“People in real life don’t fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises. They
simply can’t do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same
vocabulary that they use every day and muddle up their words and ideas a little more,
that’s all.”
Of Cooper’s art, or lack thereof, Twain eventually concluded, “It has no invention;
it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no
seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words
they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor
is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! [sic] indescribable; its lovescenes odious; its English a crime against the language.” After discounting all of that,
Twain said, what is left of Cooper’s work is art, and he thought that all must admit it.
Had he taken occasion to comment on O. Henry’s work and to compare it to his
own, let along to that of Cooper, it seems likely that Twain would say that O. Henry’s
stories had the invention, order, system, sequence, result, lifelikeness, thrill, stir, and
sense of reality that were missing from those of Cooper. He would have seen that O.
Henry’s characters were clearly drawn and consistent throughout the story. He would
not have denied O. Henry’s humor, and he would have delighted in O. Henry’s
conversations. Perhaps Twain would not have recognized O. Henry’s craft as equal to
his own, but he would have recognized it as art and he would have thought that all must
admit it.
The End