Rediscovered
О.
Henry is a refreshing relief from cur¬
rent sobbing, cursing school of fiction.
By PHIL CLARK
“AtboUlc ClU/ro-llmcC'
Under the towering trees on a steep
hillside in Asheville’s Riverside Ceme¬
tery, a plain granite block marks the
grave of one of the best loved and
most widely read tellers of tales who
ever crossed the American literary
scene.
This was a tragic-comic, off-beat,
lovable, loving writer who is properly
buried in Asheville even though he
wasn’t born here, and whose tombstone
doesn't even carry the name under
which his stories gripped the attention
and affection of millions of readers.
The inscription says simply: "1862
— William Sydney Porter — 1910."
That's all. You have to know from
some other source that this is the grave
of the man who wrote under the pen
name of O. Henry.
Here lies all that is mortal — and
just possibly artistically immortal — of
the author of Cabbages and Kings.
The Tour Million. The Gentle Grafter,
The Heart of the West, and the other
collections of tales which O. Henry
poured out for eager editors and a
huge army of readers over a startlingly
brief period between 1899 and his sud¬
den death from penumonia in New
York in 1910.
William Sydney Porter — O. Henry
to the world by his own choice — was
a North Carolinian by birth, born in
Greensboro far down in the rolling
Piedmont.
Hut in purest truth O. Henry was
no more native or resident of Greens¬
boro, or Asheville, or even the South,
than is the continent-drifting wind that
moves the tall branches above his
quiet grave.
More than any writer we've ever
had, O. Henry was blood and bone
of no one place, but of a wide and
wonderful sweep of American cities
and states, ranches and tenements, skid
rows and live oak plantations.
So when his second wife, Mrs, Sara
Coleman Porter of Asheville, refused
despite strong pressure to have his
ashes removed to his Greensboro birth-
22
place, she was right in more ways than
one.
Mrs. Porter, who outlived her hus¬
band by fifty years to die here last
year at the age of 9 1 , said simply that
O. Henry had been happy here, that
his grave in Riverside was peaceful
and beautiful, and she saw no reason
to change his resting place. She lies
there beside him now, and there’s less
reason than ever to take his ashes
anywhere else.
O. Henry wrote a handful — but a
wonderful handful — of tales about
the mountain people of this region.
And through the trees from his grave,
you can get a glimpse of the tall blue
mountains to the west.
Beyond those mountains lie other
scenes of his story telling. Cow-coun¬
try Texas, New Orleans, the Gulf of
Mexico with its ragged, slumber¬
ous rim of “banana republics." Be¬
hind, through his storyteller's memory,
lie the heat-numbed courthouse squares
of the unawakened South, and north¬
wards the jumbled, jangled, clangorous
city which he alone saw with a seeing
eye and heard with a hearing ear —
New York. Baghdad-on-thc-Subway.
Of course, all this tum-of-thc-ccn-
WIlllAM SYDNEY PORTER
tury panorama is gone now. Brown-
stone New York is gone, along with
O. Henry's cactus-spiked, sweat-and-
leather Wild West, and the sleepy Deep
South towns where a bankrupt but still
prideful cotton aristocracy made gently
ironic discords with the inrushing twen¬
tieth century.
Also, for some 30 years or more.
O. Henry’s reputation as a writer of
real creative rank and merit has been
gone too, and that’s the real point to
this dissertation.
I don’t mean that he’s been forgot¬
ten — not by the readers, at least.
They tell me at Pack Library that
there’s a modest but steady call for
his books. But there’s no denying,
cither, that he’s been very much out
of fashion for decades among the
serious literary critics. And on this last
point I'm willing to wager a small slice
of my prophetic capital that there's
going to be a change.
I’m making this wager on two
grounds, both purely personal. One is
the recollection of the devouring way
I read O. Henry’s stories myself years
ago when the discovery that the printed
page was a magic carpet was still new
and wonderful.
The second is that for the first time
in a quarter of a century I’ve been
reading the stories once again. And
finding them still wonderful.
Of course, it's a different kind of
pleasure than the first time around.
The stories as stories — as meaning¬
ful drama — move back a little in
importance and instead the incredibly
rich background tapestry of sights and
sounds, people and places, gets
stronger and more important.
Also. I find that for me anyway the
method for re-enjoying O. Henry is to
take it easy. The method is to read a
story, skip a few days, then read an¬
other.
That way, you avoid an overdose
of his chief technical trademark and
the thing that helped mightily to kill
him off with the Upper Case Critics —
THE STATE, NOVEMBER 11, 1961