Nom de Plume (13 page)

Later, as his fame grew, various stories were released about the origins of his pen name. Porter told the
New York Times
that he came across the surname “Henry” in the society pages of a New Orleans newspaper, and that he wanted something short for a first name. A friend suggested using a plain initial. “O is about the easiest letter written,” Porter decided, “and O it is.”

There was yet another version. After having dabbled in a number of pseudonyms, Porter took his name from Orrin Henry, a guard at the Columbus prison. Some said that the pseudonym came from the French pharmacist Etienne-Ossian Henry. Others said that the author had used “O. Henry” as an expletive so often that someone suggested it as his pen name.

The scholar Guy Davenport had his own rather dubious theory about the name, arguing that it was an assemblage from the first two letters of “Ohio” and the second and last two of “penitentiary.”

So, take your pick.

In 1904, Porter got a shock when he was asked to meet with an editor at the
Critic
, a monthly literary magazine. The editor said, “You are O. Henry, are you not?” Caught off-guard, Porter didn't deny it, but he did claim that there was no real mystery about writing under a different name. He hoped that a mundane story would defuse any desire by the editor to publish an exposé, and to dig into his past. He spoke as if confiding in the editor, saying that he was simply shy and averse to publicity, and that his lack of confidence had led him to use pen name. He then changed the subject, and hoped that the matter would go no further.

But a few weeks later, he picked up the new issue of the
Critic
and saw that the editor had proceeded with his scoop anyway. The article noted that the public was delighted by “certain fantastic and ingenious tales” bearing “the strange device O. Henry as a signature.” It went on: “No one seemed to know the author's real name, and immediately vague and weird rumors began to be afloat and the nom de guerre was soon invested with as much curiosity as surrounds an author after his decease.” Fortunately for Porter, the editor had simply published what he'd been told—so now it would be known, at least to some, that Porter was O. Henry, but no one had connected him back to the bank teller who'd been arrested and convicted. “[L]ike most mysteries, when it was probed there was no mystery,” the article said of the unmasking. “O. Henry's real name is Mr. Sydney Porter, a gentleman from Texas, who, having seen a great deal of the world with the naked eye, happened to find himself in New York.” Porter's real secrets remained safe. Still, he fretted over how the
Critic
had found the story in the first place, who had tipped off the editor, and how the magazine had gotten hold of an old photograph of him to accompany the story. Luckily, the fact of Porter's pseudonym did not spread to the rest of the country right away. He could relax for a while, though he lived in fear that at any time he'd be found out and ruined. He decided that even if some people knew that he was O. Henry, he would at least minimize how much information was known about William Porter.

After the publication of O. Henry's well-received
Cabbages and Kings
came
The Four Million
, in 1906, spreading his fame even further. The book included what would become his most celebrated story, “The Gift of the Magi,” with its famous opening:

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

The much-anthologized story is required reading for most students, but the story behind it is not well known. The night that the piece was due, his editor, in desperation, sent an illustrator out to track down O. Henry and extract it in person. When the illustrator arrived at the writer's apartment, he found that O. Henry had not even started. Supposedly, O. Henry then handed him a roughly drawn sketch and said, “Just draw a picture of a poorly furnished room. . . . 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. . . . 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.” Then he finished a few hours later.

As usual, the details of anything to do with William Porter are sketchy at best. According to another story about “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry wrote the entire story in a booth at Pete's Tavern, near Gramercy Park—a bar established in 1864 whose tagline is “The Tavern That O. Henry Made Famous.” He is said to have gone to Pete's every morning. When he was in the midst of writing, though, he would order a bottle of Scotch to be delivered to him.

Gilman Hall was the magazine editor who'd given Porter his first writing contract, and they became friends. “I was sure that he had a past,” he once recalled, “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.”

Porter did a fine job of keeping the most painful parts of his past a secret. In a wide-ranging interview he gave to the
New York Times
in the spring of 1909, the reporter George MacAdam commented that “so far as the public is concerned, all he will do is to materialize between the covers of magazine and book . . . while he himself remains invisible behind the pen name.”

Noting that “for the past six or seven years O. Henry has been one of the most popular short-story writers in America,” MacAdam mentioned that even though “he has kept himself under a bushel,” his real name was now well known, having “leaked from a hundred and one different sources.”

The
Times
was clearly proud of having obtained unprecedented access to its elusive subject. MacAdam showed a dash of smugness in pointing out, “Many are the interviewers who have sought him, but he has turned a deaf ear to their siren song.”

Now Porter was talking, but he wasn't necessarily telling the truth. “Let me see: I was born in 1867,” he told the reporter. (He wasn't.) Taking out a pencil and a scrap of paper to calculate his age, he added, “That makes me 42, almost 43 years old, but put down 42.”

He was asked what he had done after
The Rolling Stone
had ceased publication.

“A friend of mine who had a little money . . . suggested that I join him on a trip to Central America,” he said, “whither he was going with the intention of going into the fruit business.” (Or, more accurately, whither Porter was going to avoid being sent to prison.) After that, instead of mentioning where he'd actually spent the next three years, he said that he moved to New Orleans and “took up literary work in earnest.” If by “New Orleans,” he meant “Columbus, Ohio,” then yes, he was telling the truth. There was no mention of his years in Austin, his years in prison, or even his marriage and daughter.

His few straightforward responses in the interview came when he was asked to talk about his writing. On his advice to young writers: “I'll give you the whole secret to short story writing,” he said. “Rule 1: Write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule 2.” And on the virtues of his work, he said, “People say I know New York well. Just change Twenty-Third Street in one of my New York stories to Main Street, rub out the Flatiron Building, and put in the Town Hall and the story will fit just as truly in any upstate town. At least, I hope this can be said of my stories. So long as a story is true to human nature all you need do is change the local color to make it fit in any town.”

A woman who knew Porter socially in New York once spoke of how difficult it was to engage him in conversation, except superficially, because “he protected himself from the crude and rude touch of the world in a triple-plated armor of mirth and formality.” He bristled at personal questions (though he didn't mind reminiscing about his early years in North Carolina), and felt most at ease in the role of raconteur. “His wit was urbane, sophisticated, individual; entirely free from tricks and the desire to secure effects,” the woman recalled. “It was never mordant nor corrosive; it did not eat or fester; it struck clean and swift and sure as a stroke of lightning.”

It must have flattered him when, in his early days in New York, as his fame was growing and people began to speculate about his true identity, at least one impostor emerged. Gilman Hall recalled that only a few editors knew who O. Henry was and where he lived. An editor from a competing magazine boasted to Hall one day that he'd just learned that “the real O. Henry” was a college undergraduate who'd “admitted” that he was the author. Hearing this, Hall laughed and informed the editor that the
real
“real O. Henry” had in fact just left his office. When Hall related the amusing anecdote to Porter, he replied that so long as the paychecks were sent to the right man, he didn't care how many other aspiring O. Henrys there were.

Having established himself as an important writer was all the more reason to guard his privacy—particularly any unsavory aspects of his past that didn't conform to his image as a man of letters. His rise to prominence was remarkable: one critic argued that O. Henry “took the place of Kipling as a literary master,” and said that on “the shelf of my prized American classics” were Poe, Thoreau, Whitman, Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, W. D. Howells—and O. Henry.

Another critic insisted that O. Henry should be considered a source of national pride: “More than any author who ever wrote in the United States, O. Henry is an American writer. And the time is coming, let us hope, when the whole English-speaking world will recognize in him one of the great masters of modern literature.”

Porter's personal life, too, had finally brought a measure of happiness—if short-lived, yet again. In 1905, after reading one of O. Henry's short stories, a childhood friend from Greensboro, Sara Lindsey Coleman, wrote a letter to the author inviting him to visit her. She'd gained her own impressive reputation as a short story writer, albeit locally, in North Carolina. Her family was prominent, as her father had served as a colonel in the Confederate army. She was witty and gracious, and Porter corresponded with her for a while before inviting her to come visit him in New York. (A diehard southerner, she admitted to him that she loathed the city.) Upon seeing her again, on his forty-fifth birthday, Porter fell in love and proposed. He confessed the entire (true) story of what he said was his wrongful imprisonment, and his journey to becoming a writer. They were married on November 27, 1907, in Asheville, and Gilman Hall served as best man. But within two years, owing mostly to Porter's alcoholism, the marriage deteriorated. They never divorced, however. His wife lived until the age of ninety-one; she died in North Carolina in 1959. She outlived even her husband's daughter: Margaret died in California at the age of thirty-seven.

But 1907 was a good year for the author: he was married and at the height of his fame. The third O. Henry story collection,
The Heart of the West
, was published, as well as a fourth,
The Trimmed Lamp.
He repeated the same feat for the next few years, issuing two story collections annually—but these were his final years. (He would die at the age of forty-seven.) Porter had begun to resent his success and admitted that he felt constrained by it. Everyone by now knew what an “O. Henry story” was, and even he had tired of his predictable story structure. He boasted that he would write a novel, but he never did.

Although his fame was accompanied by a very comfortable income, Porter was perpetually in debt. He used his earnings to buy Scotch, wine, and beer; tipped waiters at restaurants in amounts that matched the check for his meal; gave money freely to panhandlers; and generously treated his friends. He was compulsive in his giving, always ending up flat broke himself. Some of his debt, apparently, could be traced to silencing blackmailers. One woman from Austin was prepared to reveal to the press that he was a convicted embezzler. For her silence she requested a thousand dollars, an astronomical sum at the time, and he caved in to her demands. Perhaps fearing that she could be arrested for blackmail, she left Porter alone and never approached the media with her story.

Despite the agony he had suffered over his past and the memories that haunted him, he received adulation from the public. Fans wrote to him asking for autographs, inscribed books, and photographs (which he usually declined to provide).

By 1909, his wife was living in North Carolina with her mother while Porter remained in New York. When he saw a doctor that summer, he was told that he had an enlarged heart, bad kidneys, and a severely compromised liver. During periods of relative recovery, he smoked and drank heavily, in denial that he was killing himself, and was more deeply in debt than ever.

On June 3, 1910, his kidneys failed. He called for help, then passed out. When he arrived by taxi (at his insistence) at New York Polyclinic Hospital on East Thirty-fourth Street, he wanted to protect his privacy. He requested permission to register under an assumed name, and as if casually checking into a hotel, he signed in as “Will S. Parker.” Following an emergency operation, his condition stabilized, and his wife began to make her way up to New York by train from North Carolina. She arrived too late to see him alive again.