O. Henry - The Story Behind The Gift Of The Magi - Christmas Special! - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

O. Henry - The Story Behind The Gift Of The Magi - Christmas Special!

 

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver.  We’re here to read works that have changed the world and have changed us.

 

I’m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  If you’re listening to this in real time, we are in the second week of December 2020- and have just finished the excrutiatingly brutal book Wuthering Heights.  So, as a sorbet to our spirits, for the next three weeks we will be doing a little light reading with traditional Christmas narratives.  This week we are going to feature O Henry and his wildly popular short story “The Gift of the Magi”.  Next week we feature “A Visit from St Nicholas” or better known as “Twas The Night Before Christmas” by Clement Clarke Moore (both American authors, btw), and finally, the week of Christmas we will rebroadcast our analysis of the Sacred Text from the book of Luke in the KJV of the Bible. 

But before we get into O Henry’s plot-twisting life story- let’s remind you that it is the month of giving- and we would like to give to you, our listeners, by featuring and promoting your small business on our social media platforms.  Send us a picture of your shop, café, restaurant, school, whatever you do, we want to give you a shout out-wherever you live in our world.  During this season of worldwide struggle, let’s help each other out by recognizing those so make our individual communities unique and identifiable - each as best we can.

 

Well, highlighting working community builders is certainly in the spirit of O Henry.  This famous short story illustrates this a little but the larger body of work by O Henry definitely features the working man- he identified with many of us and spoke to and for us- I guess this was a reason for his crazy success- but before we let loose and venture into the hills of North Carolina to meet the young Will Porter (and yes, his name wasn’t actually O Henry- let me ask all of you, if you’ve enjoyed our work, please continue to support us by sharing an episode of ours with a friend, visiting us on our social media and or giving us a rating.  It really helps us grow. 

 

And now- after all of that ado- let’s chat about O Henry or, as he was born into this world William Sidney Porter on September 11, 1862. 

 

Not an awesome time to be born in the United States of America- for one thing, we were still in the throws of the American Civil War.  There were massive casualities on both sides and no end in sight.  But there were other deadly forces moving across the world, and not just in the United States and Europe namely and in this case- Tuberculosis- a deadly terrifying life-threatening plague- as it still is today in much of the world.  At the time of O Henry’s birth it was more deadly than even the Civil War, (today it is still in the top ten killers on planet earth and has killed more humans on earth than any other single disease- but in O Henry’s day it was killing 1 of 7 people living in the United States- something we also saw in the Poe episodes.  At that time there was no known cure.  There was nothing anyone felt they do about this illness, and Porter’s mother died of it when he was 3 years old. 

 

Ironically, Will Porter’s Dad, was a doctor- except during the Civil War that meant a lot of work, but very little income.  No one had money and this included the Porters. Dr Porter moved in with his mother, so she could help him take care of his three boys.   But Dr. Porter had personal demons and soon became an alcoholic- a problem that would eventually get O Henry too.  But for his part, Little Will Porter did okay as a kid, his aunt provided for him a pretty impressive education.  He read a lot.  He worked as a pharmacist at a local pharmacy- normal stuff- his big change came at age 19 when he was invited to accompany a couple that was moving to Texas.  He was thrilled and embraced the change.  In fact, typical Texan-style- he learned the ways of cattle ranching and speaking Spanish!!!  Yeeehawww!!

 

And it seems Texas was a good spot for him.  He did well, in fact, he did well enough that by age 24 he was earning $100 a month working a job at the Texas Land Office.  And that meant he was well off enough to elope with the 19 year old Athol Estes.

 

Exciting as that plan sounds-  this is where things started to take a bit of a bad turn- no fault to Athol, I might add.  Sadly,she also had tuberculosis- which was why they had to elope- it seems, her parents didn’t feel comfortable with her getting married with this problem.  Anyway, here’s the short version, short, thereafter Will took a job at a bank.  His wife had two children, the first died within hours of his birth almost killing the mom, the second survived, but not without taking a toll on Athol’s health.  Between those two child births and the tuberculosis, she just couldn’t recover and the medical bills started piling up.  Porter, encouraged by his wife, still pursued his writing career, while also working at the bank.  He started his own news paper called the Rolling Stone- and wrote the articles for it- it was actually really popular- and Will was a really funny writer.  The paper was well-received and sold well- but not well enough..the paper lost money.  So, here’s how Will found himself- he was bleeding money with the newspaper.  He was bleeding money with Athol’s medical bills-and then there was an incident at the bank which resulted in a problem that would define him for the rest of this life.  In 1894, an examiner found a shortage in his bank register.  To this day, no one really knows what actually happened to that money- but it was missing.

 

Well, it’s understandable why he would be stealing money.  But it’s also very conceavable that someone else did as well.  At this time period especially in places like Texas, the supervision at banks was more akin to turning in money in a middle school on field day- chaotic and unsupervised- it was very common in fact- for people to borrow money from the register if they needed it and then pay it back- no harm no foul was – and people just turned their head.  I’m just saying, he may have stolen the money, but it’s also not just entirely possible, but very easy to see how someone else could have done it- and absolutely no one would have known.

 

Well, it was quite shocking when they accuse Will.  He had an absolutely inpeccable reputation.  Everyone loved him and no one thought he would do such a thing.  The idea that Will Porter would embezzle thousands of dollars was shocking- even to him- When he was accused of embezzling the $4,702.94- he panicked, guilty or not, though, he gots on a train from Houston to Austin (where he was supposedly going to visit his wife- she’d been staying with her parents since her illness had gotten so bad)- but never arrived at Austin- he changed directions headdd to New Orleans at first but eventually wound up in Honduras.  His plan was simple if not less than brilliant.  The plan seems to have been to stay there until the statute of limitations on embezzlement ran out.

 

Not the most well-thought out plan- apparently- he did write Athol and tried to convince her to move to Honduras- but she was very sick.  It  just was  not physically possible for her to do something like that.  In fact, she was going to die.  When he understood this was the reality, To his kind-hearted credit, he came back to the US and was with her all the way to her death.  Right after that, though, he had to face the courts- and this is where historians really don’t agree on what to do with O Henry’s guilt.  Did he do it or not?  Henry claimed even in prison that he never stole it.  One time medicine went missing in the hospital where he worked in the prison.  They asked him if he took it and he said this, “I am not a thief and I never stole a thing in my life.  I was sent here for embezzling bank funds, not one cent of which I ever got.  Someone else got it and I am doing time for it.”  So who knows if he had a hand in the embezzlement or not.  It seems that courts were not totally convinced: The end result of his trial was that most of the charges were dropped, but he was still convicted of stealing $299.60- which isn’t near as large a sum of money as the original accusation- but there was still the problem that he fled.  He received the minimum sentence possible but on April 25, 1898, the day the Spanish-American war started- was also the day he started his five year sentence in the Ohio Penitentiary. 

 

This period in prison, it seems to me, is what changed Will Porter into O Henry, although he had used the pen name before, and although we haven’t brought it up yet- this whole time since arriving he Texas he had already done quite a considerable amount of writing – he’d even sold work to be nationally syndicated.  But- his time in prison changed the person of Will Porter- the man who went into that prison was not the man who came out.  For one thing, he had quite a bit of free time inside, and he used it to hone his skills.  It was in the penitentiary that he came up with his unique style – the which we’ll talk about here in a minute.  But he also comes up with a perspective. 

 

Well, as far as life in prison goes, he had it as good as you could have it.  He was immediately assigned to the prison hospital because of his experience as a pharmacist (know that that job didn’t require the years of education back then that it does today)- but he lived there- he ate and slept there- he was trusted as a bookkeeper (ironically)- so he was kept entirely away from the general population of prisoners and the harassment of the guards that was a common problem in the prison.  So, it was never the physical hardships of prison that got to him so bad- in fact, so badly that threatened suicide shorting after arriving.

 

No, first of all, it was the shame of being in prison.  And he was going to keep those years secret for the rest of his life.  But secondly, and I believe this is what fueled the endless stories he could come up with in his career after prison, as the pharmacist- he saw, new and listened to hundreds and hundeds of prisoners.  He heard their stories, saw how they were treated in an impersonal prison system, and this moved him.  This is a quote from a letter he wrote his father in law from prison, “There are four doctors and about 25 other men in the hospital force.  The hospital is a separate b uilding and is one of the finest equipped institutions in the country.  It is large and finely furnishes and has every appliance of medicine and surgery….the doctor goes to bed about 10 o’clock and from then on during the night I prescripbe for the patients myself and go out ant attend calls that come in.  If I find anyone seriously ill I have them brought to the hospital and attended to by the doctor.  I never imagined human life was held as cheap as it is here.  The mean are regarded as animals without soul or feeling….he then goes to describe the brutal living and working conditions of the inmates- their 13 hour days, the way they were viewed by the outside world and the institution at large compared to how he saw himself and the other men within the system.  O Henry gets out after 39  because of his impeccable behavior in prison.  The story goes that he told a fellow prison, “I will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls.”

 

Well, Will Porters starts over- at age 40 going to New York a town he would call “the four million”, an ex-con, a widower, his daughter living with her grandparents

 

-but this time he won’t be Will Porter- he is O Henry.  He won’t use that name until his gravestone, sadly only 9 years later. 

 

He lived in a cheap hotel.  He lived in a community he called “Baghdad by the Subway”- this is the material for all of his stories.  He wrote about the common person. In his writings he tells their stories. And this brings success.

 

 He said this, “I would like to live a lifetime on each street in New York.  Every house has a drama in it.” His first year he publishes 17 stories, but it won’t be long til he’s publishing 66 stories a year.  He makes money. He gives urban life- the kind that is so easy to dehumanize- a human  face.  The people in the tenement houses aren’t just dirty masses- they are individuals with stories, hearts, personalities.   

 

 He mae a name for himself and finally started making real money.  He started making $500 per story- that’s a long way from the $100 a month back in Texas.   But the drinking was a problem.  He was drinking at a rate of two bottles of whiskey per day!!  Nobody can sustain that.  It made him shiftless as an employee- he produced great stories, but they would be late, he’d be hard to track because he spent his days wandering the streets moving from one cheap hotel to another.  He really frustrated his bosses, one of which was Joseph Pulitzer. 

 

Late in 1905, O Henry agreed to write a Christmas story.  But he never got around to doing it.  The due date for the story came and went and no story-  the illustrator for the story trudged through snow to track down o Henry because he needed to get started.  O Henry said this, “I’ll tell you what to do, Colonel.  Just draw a picture of a poorly furnished room, the kind you find in a boarding house or rooming house over on the West Side.  In the room there is only a chair or two, a chest of drawers, a bed and a trunk.  On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side.  They are talking about Christmas.  The man has a watch fob in his hand.  He is plahing with it while he is thinking.  The girl’s principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back.  That’s all I can think of now.  But the story is coming.”  The illustrator took that, but the story never came…to the desperation of the editor.  It was just a few hours before the absolute deadline.  O Henry told the editor to lie down.  He pulled out a bottle of scotch and three hours later delivered “The Gift of the Magi.”  It has been reprinted in magazines every year for the last 115 years. 

 

Well, not just that.  It’s inspired countless movies- there’s a muppet version, a sesame street version, a mickey mouse version, a Rugrats version, a SNL version and that’s just here in the US- there’s even a Family guy parody.  Internationally it’s been translated into languages and cultures all over the world- those that celebrate Christmas and those that don’t.

 

Well, before we read this ubiquitous Christmas story, we should finish out the story of O Henry’s short life which is so many ways mirrors a lot of his stories.  One of the key features of O Henry’s stories is their dependence on irony and surprise endings.  He was known for this.  Yet, the real irony is that he spent lots of energy keeping his life a secret while writing stories that were often based in fact, sometimes autobiographical. Not even his daughter knew until after his death that he was a convicted felon.  He never tried to clear his name.  He never wrote anything that resembled bitterness.  His stories weren’t known for their deep characterization or important complex themes- they were all plot.  They for formulaic; they were fun- he wanted to provide casual entertainment- and that was what he did.  He married again in 1907 to a childhood sweetheart, Sara Lindsey Coelman, he moved her and his daughter to live with him in New York.  He bought a really fancy house on Long Island as well as an apartment in Manhattan.  By this point he was making gobs of money, but spending it at a faster rate than he was making it.  He bought fancy clothes, he gave away money to poor people he ran into on the streets or in restaunts.  Sometimes beggars would approach him asking for pennies and he’d give them large wods of cash.  One critic called him, “gay, irresponsible, impudent, hoaxing; no writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been reading O Henry. What does a comment like that mean?  Do you think?

 

Well, it means he’s a genius, but like many geniuses not unhaunted. And the secrets or demons that were tormenting took a toll.   His marriage was short-lived.  Sara his ex-wife later said, “No one could manage that man, he was a law unto himself.”  In the summer of 1910, he collapsed in his hotel room.  A friend called an ambulance.  He checked himself into the hospital under the alias Will S. Parker.  He joked as they checked him in that he was going to die only worth 23 cents.  Right as he was losing consciousness he said this, “Turn up the lights, I don’t want to go home in the dark.”  In the morning he died by cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes. 

 

And yet again- the final irony, after he died his reputation grew, his stories made a fortune for his wife and daughter.  Five million copies of his book sold, and 8 years after his death the Society of Letters and Arts established the O Henry Memorial- and began awarding prizes every year to the best writers of short stories in America or Canada.  The Society Sold to doubleDay the rights to publish the O Henry Prizes stoires, and the O Henry Prize has been award to writers ever year since  then.  In 2019 the O Henry Prize printed it’s 100th anthology of the year’s greatest short stories.  In his lifetime, O Henry wrote over 250 short stories.  Many critics have called them sentimental-and that’s not an unfair criticism- but most of us don’t care that they are.  That’s what we like about them.  Others have said he wrote to keep his spirits up- that may or may not be true- because no matter why he wrote them- they have kept all of our spirits up for over 100 years. 

 

In that spirit, let’s read The Gift of the Magi- it’s simple- the narrator is omniscient- there are only three characters- a man and his wife and a woman who cuts hair for a living.   The plot like many of his stories forms a cross-pattern- two people are following paths, the story will intersect, and these two characters cross paths.  This causes the story to have an unexpected twist and creates the big situational irony- remember that’s when a situation is the opposite of what the characters or even we’d expect.  So…look for it…it’s not easy to miss though in this one- so let’s go- this story is set in a New York City apartment on Christmas Eve. 

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