O. Henry - The Story Behind The Gift Of The Magi - Christmas Special!
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O. Henry - The Story Behind The Gift Of The Magi - Christmas Special!
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Hi, I\\u2019m Christy Shriver.\\xa0 We\\u2019re here to read works that have changed the world and have changed us.
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I\\u2019m Garry Shriver, and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.\\xa0 If you\\u2019re 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.\\xa0 So, as a sorbet to our spirits, for the next three weeks we will be doing a little light reading with traditional Christmas narratives.\\xa0 This week we are going to feature O Henry and his wildly popular short story \\u201cThe Gift of the Magi\\u201d.\\xa0 Next week we feature \\u201cA Visit from St Nicholas\\u201d or better known as \\u201cTwas The Night Before Christmas\\u201d 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.\\xa0
But before we get into O Henry\\u2019s plot-twisting life story- let\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 Send us a picture of your shop, caf\\xe9, restaurant, school, whatever you do, we want to give you a shout out-wherever you live in our world.\\xa0 During this season of worldwide struggle, let\\u2019s help each other out by recognizing those so make our individual communities unique and identifiable - each as best we can.
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Well, highlighting working community builders is certainly in the spirit of O Henry.\\xa0 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\\u2019t actually O Henry- let me ask all of you, if you\\u2019ve 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.\\xa0 It really helps us grow.\\xa0
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And now- after all of that ado- let\\u2019s chat about O Henry or, as he was born into this world William Sidney Porter on September 11, 1862.\\xa0
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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.\\xa0 There were massive casualities on both sides and no end in sight.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 At the time of O Henry\\u2019s 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\\u2019s day it was killing 1 of 7 people living in the United States- something we also saw in the Poe episodes.\\xa0 At that time there was no known cure.\\xa0 There was nothing anyone felt they do about this illness, and Porter\\u2019s mother died of it when he was 3 years old.\\xa0
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Ironically, Will Porter\\u2019s Dad, was a doctor- except during the Civil War that meant a lot of work, but very little income.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 \\xa0But Dr. Porter had personal demons and soon became an alcoholic- a problem that would eventually get O Henry too.\\xa0 But for his part, Little Will Porter did okay as a kid, his aunt provided for him a pretty impressive education.\\xa0 He read a lot.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He was thrilled and embraced the change.\\xa0 In fact, typical Texan-style- he learned the ways of cattle ranching and speaking Spanish!!!\\xa0 Yeeehawww!!
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And it seems Texas was a good spot for him.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 And that meant he was well off enough to elope with the 19 year old Athol Estes.
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Exciting as that plan sounds- \\xa0this is where things started to take a bit of a bad turn- no fault to Athol, I might add.\\xa0 Sadly,she also had tuberculosis- which was why they had to elope- it seems, her parents didn\\u2019t feel comfortable with her getting married with this problem.\\xa0 Anyway, here\\u2019s the short version, short, thereafter Will took a job at a bank.\\xa0 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\\u2019s health.\\xa0 Between those two child births and the tuberculosis, she just couldn\\u2019t recover and the medical bills started piling up.\\xa0 Porter, encouraged by his wife, still pursued his writing career, while also working at the bank.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 The paper was well-received and sold well- but not well enough..the paper lost money.\\xa0 So, here\\u2019s how Will found himself- he was bleeding money with the newspaper.\\xa0 He was bleeding money with Athol\\u2019s 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.\\xa0 In 1894, an examiner found a shortage in his bank register.\\xa0 To this day, no one really knows what actually happened to that money- but it was missing.
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Well, it\\u2019s understandable why he would be stealing money.\\xa0 But it\\u2019s also very conceavable that someone else did as well.\\xa0 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 \\u2013 and people just turned their head.\\xa0 I\\u2019m just saying, he may have stolen the money, but it\\u2019s also not just entirely possible, but very easy to see how someone else could have done it- and absolutely no one would have known.
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Well, it was quite shocking when they accuse Will.\\xa0 He had an absolutely inpeccable reputation.\\xa0 Everyone loved him and no one thought he would do such a thing.\\xa0 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\\u2019d 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.\\xa0 His plan was simple if not less than brilliant.\\xa0 The plan seems to have been to stay there until the statute of limitations on embezzlement ran out.
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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.\\xa0 It \\xa0just was \\xa0not physically possible for her to do something like that.\\xa0 In fact, she was going to die. \\xa0When 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.\\xa0 Right after that, though, he had to face the courts- and this is where historians really don\\u2019t agree on what to do with O Henry\\u2019s guilt.\\xa0 Did he do it or not?\\xa0 Henry claimed even in prison that he never stole it.\\xa0 One time medicine went missing in the hospital where he worked in the prison.\\xa0 They asked him if he took it and he said this, \\u201cI am not a thief and I never stole a thing in my life.\\xa0 I was sent here for embezzling bank funds, not one cent of which I ever got.\\xa0 Someone else got it and I am doing time for it.\\u201d\\xa0 So who knows if he had a hand in the embezzlement or not.\\xa0 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\\u2019t near as large a sum of money as the original accusation- but there was still the problem that he fled.\\xa0 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.\\xa0
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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\\u2019t brought it up yet- this whole time since arriving he Texas he had already done quite a considerable amount of writing \\u2013 he\\u2019d even sold work to be nationally syndicated.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 For one thing, he had quite a bit of free time inside, and he used it to hone his skills.\\xa0 It was in the penitentiary that he came up with his unique style \\u2013 the which we\\u2019ll talk about here in a minute.\\xa0 But he also comes up with a perspective.\\xa0
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Well, as far as life in prison goes, he had it as good as you could have it.\\xa0 He was immediately assigned to the prison hospital because of his experience as a pharmacist (know that that job didn\\u2019t 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.\\xa0 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.
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No, first of all, it was the shame of being in prison.\\xa0 And he was going to keep those years secret for the rest of his life.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He heard their stories, saw how they were treated in an impersonal prison system, and this moved him.\\xa0 This is a quote from a letter he wrote his father in law from prison, \\u201cThere are four doctors and about 25 other men in the hospital force.\\xa0 The hospital is a separate b uilding and is one of the finest equipped institutions in the country.\\xa0 It is large and finely furnishes and has every appliance of medicine and surgery\\u2026.the doctor goes to bed about 10 o\\u2019clock and from then on during the night I prescripbe for the patients myself and go out ant attend calls that come in.\\xa0 If I find anyone seriously ill I have them brought to the hospital and attended to by the doctor.\\xa0 I never imagined human life was held as cheap as it is here.\\xa0 The mean are regarded as animals without soul or feeling\\u2026.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.\\xa0 O Henry gets out after 39 \\xa0because of his impeccable behavior in prison.\\xa0 The story goes that he told a fellow prison, \\u201cI will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls.\\u201d
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Well, Will Porters starts over- at age 40 going to New York a town he would call \\u201cthe four million\\u201d, an ex-con, a widower, his daughter living with her grandparents
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-but this time he won\\u2019t be Will Porter- he is O Henry.\\xa0 He won\\u2019t use that name until his gravestone, sadly only 9 years later.\\xa0
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He lived in a cheap hotel.\\xa0 He lived in a community he called \\u201cBaghdad by the Subway\\u201d- this is the material for all of his stories.\\xa0 He wrote about the common person. In his writings he tells their stories. And this brings success.
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\\xa0He said this, \\u201cI would like to live a lifetime on each street in New York.\\xa0 Every house has a drama in it.\\u201d His first year he publishes 17 stories, but it won\\u2019t be long til he\\u2019s publishing 66 stories a year.\\xa0 He makes money. He gives urban life- the kind that is so easy to dehumanize- a human\\xa0 face.\\xa0 The people in the tenement houses aren\\u2019t just dirty masses- they are individuals with stories, hearts, personalities.\\xa0 \\xa0
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\\xa0He mae a name for himself and finally started making real money.\\xa0 He started making $500 per story- that\\u2019s a long way from the $100 a month back in Texas.\\xa0 \\xa0But the drinking was a problem.\\xa0 He was drinking at a rate of two bottles of whiskey per day!!\\xa0 Nobody can sustain that.\\xa0 It made him shiftless as an employee- he produced great stories, but they would be late, he\\u2019d be hard to track because he spent his days wandering the streets moving from one cheap hotel to another.\\xa0 He really frustrated his bosses, one of which was Joseph Pulitzer.\\xa0
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Late in 1905, O Henry agreed to write a Christmas story.\\xa0 But he never got around to doing it.\\xa0 The due date for the story came and went and no story-\\xa0 the illustrator for the story trudged through snow to track down o Henry because he needed to get started.\\xa0 O Henry said this, \\u201cI\\u2019ll tell you what to do, Colonel.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 In the room there is only a chair or two, a chest of drawers, a bed and a trunk.\\xa0 On the bed, a man and a girl are sitting side by side.\\xa0 They are talking about Christmas.\\xa0 The man has a watch fob in his hand.\\xa0 He is plahing with it while he is thinking.\\xa0 The girl\\u2019s principal feature is the long beautiful hair that is hanging down her back.\\xa0 That\\u2019s all I can think of now.\\xa0 But the story is coming.\\u201d\\xa0 The illustrator took that, but the story never came\\u2026to the desperation of the editor.\\xa0 It was just a few hours before the absolute deadline.\\xa0 O Henry told the editor to lie down.\\xa0 He pulled out a bottle of scotch and three hours later delivered \\u201cThe Gift of the Magi.\\u201d\\xa0 It has been reprinted in magazines every year for the last 115 years.\\xa0
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Well, not just that.\\xa0 It\\u2019s inspired countless movies- there\\u2019s a muppet version, a sesame street version, a mickey mouse version, a Rugrats version, a SNL version and that\\u2019s just here in the US- there\\u2019s even a Family guy parody. \\xa0Internationally it\\u2019s been translated into languages and cultures all over the world- those that celebrate Christmas and those that don\\u2019t.
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Well, before we read this ubiquitous Christmas story, we should finish out the story of O Henry\\u2019s short life which is so many ways mirrors a lot of his stories.\\xa0 One of the key features of O Henry\\u2019s stories is their dependence on irony and surprise endings.\\xa0 He was known for this.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He never tried to clear his name.\\xa0 He never wrote anything that resembled bitterness.\\xa0 His stories weren\\u2019t known for their deep characterization or important complex themes- they were all plot.\\xa0 They for formulaic; they were fun- he wanted to provide casual entertainment- and that was what he did.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 He bought a really fancy house on Long Island as well as an apartment in Manhattan.\\xa0 By this point he was making gobs of money, but spending it at a faster rate than he was making it.\\xa0 He bought fancy clothes, he gave away money to poor people he ran into on the streets or in restaunts.\\xa0 Sometimes beggars would approach him asking for pennies and he\\u2019d give them large wods of cash.\\xa0 One critic called him, \\u201cgay, 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?\\xa0 Do you think?
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Well, it means he\\u2019s a genius, but like many geniuses not unhaunted. And the secrets or demons that were tormenting took a toll.\\xa0 \\xa0His marriage was short-lived.\\xa0 Sara his ex-wife later said, \\u201cNo one could manage that man, he was a law unto himself.\\u201d\\xa0 In the summer of 1910, he collapsed in his hotel room.\\xa0 A friend called an ambulance.\\xa0 He checked himself into the hospital under the alias Will S. Parker. \\xa0He joked as they checked him in that he was going to die only worth 23 cents.\\xa0 Right as he was losing consciousness he said this, \\u201cTurn up the lights, I don\\u2019t want to go home in the dark.\\u201d\\xa0 In the morning he died by cirrhosis of the liver and diabetes.\\xa0
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And yet again- the final irony, after he died his reputation grew, his stories made a fortune for his wife and daughter.\\xa0 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.\\xa0 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\\xa0 then.\\xa0 In 2019 the O Henry Prize printed it\\u2019s 100th anthology of the year\\u2019s greatest short stories.\\xa0 In his lifetime, O Henry wrote over 250 short stories.\\xa0 Many critics have called them sentimental-and that\\u2019s not an unfair criticism- but most of us don\\u2019t care that they are.\\xa0 That\\u2019s what we like about them.\\xa0 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.\\xa0
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In that spirit, let\\u2019s read The Gift of the Magi- it\\u2019s simple- the narrator is omniscient- there are only three characters- a man and his wife and a woman who cuts hair for a living.\\xa0 \\xa0The 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.\\xa0 This causes the story to have an unexpected twist and creates the big situational irony- remember that\\u2019s when a situation is the opposite of what the characters or even we\\u2019d expect. \\xa0So\\u2026look for it\\u2026it\\u2019s not easy to miss though in this one- so let\\u2019s go- this story is set in a New York City apartment on Christmas Eve.\\xa0
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