O. Henry’s Novel Novel

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to page numbers in the Penguin edition with introduction and notes by Guy Davenport.


     Cabbages and Kings, O. Henry’s only novel, is hardly a novel at all, but then his short stories are hardly short stories, either. Far from the “realism” widely practiced during his lifetime, O. Henry composed his work according to a structural standard which owes a debt to Edgar Allen Poe’s use of abstraction and rhetoric more than to Flaubert's realism. Thus, his trademark surprise endings ignore plausibility, preferring the formal maneuver of an ironic reversal. His themes are trivial, often commonplaces or forgettable sentimental emotion, often nothing more than the most available idées reçues, yet his work is entertaining, carefully crafted, and presents a consistent and original vision.
     Cabbages and Kings is a collection of short stories, presented as narrations by various characters who play a role in the story. Their tales are bound not just by a common cast, setting, and narrative frame; the central issue, more a mental puzzle than a dramatic conflict, is resolved only at the end, when the medium changes from raconteur story-telling suddenly to motion pictures, at that time nearly new. Just to require more ingenuity of himself and his clever readers, the author has added an apparently adventitious correspondence to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Every addition is not so much part of a solution as it is a retarding of any solution at all. The author is a juggler whose audience gasps as he puts yet another object into the air.
     In the work as a whole one is never engaged by a central problem more momentous than a challenging crossword. One looks often in vain for psychological insight, absorbing specific detail, or moving emotion in O. Henry’s novel, often finding instead the most available and conventional thought. The same sort of patterning is observable on the smaller scale of the sentence. O. Henry’s favorite rhetorical device, the use of ironic semi-comic periphrasis, evident on every page of the novel, does not so much provide information useful for understanding as it makes wisecracks, abstracting the reader, making emotional identification unlikely, but allowing the intellectual delight of the author’s formal play. In both the work as a whole and a good many of its subsidiary units, the author is delaying the action, as one after another of the oddball characters take a turn, as throw-away one-liners fall this way and that from a marvelous almost hypnotic sparkler.
     It was such techniques that endeared the popular American author with the most advanced Russian Formalists. To critics such as Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum [1], William Sydney Porter, who churned out stories for the market, almost four hundred before his death at forty-seven, who published a story a week in the New York World’s spectacularly illustrated Sunday Magazine for over a year, was a literary avant-gardist. The theorists of the revolutionary Soviet Union applauded a writer who used racist expression less for promulgating white supremacy than for simple convenience.
     Abstraction is characteristic of much comedy, in which the protagonist is viewed as flawed by the normative reader. Characters reduced to a single trait in the Theophrastian sense are familiar from Menander through Jonson to Neil Simon, and Cabbages and Kings can boast no psychological development or complexity. The authorial tone is consistently acceptance and warm amusement. The general run of locals are terminally soporific in the most familiar sort of tropical stereotype, [2] though their leaders combine a similar idleness with rapacious avarice and the capacity for violence. The expatriates of Anchuria are likewise capable of combining phenomenal laziness with terrific greed, but as outsiders they are a bit more cautious about hedging their bets.
     Every now and then what seems a point of principle intrudes, though it may in fact be nothing more than the occasional absurd demands of ego. Such “actions generated by core beliefs” such as “Beelzebub” Blythe’s conscientious refusal to blackmail someone who is standing him drinks or Carolus White’s inability to do a portrait to order that falls short of his artistic ideals are likely to seem more peculiar than principled. In general, though, this is a land in which everyone is out for number one. Their selfishness is a fact of nature, like the Vesuvio Fruit Company’s exploitative domination of the land.
     In a comedy like Cabbages and Kings no real harm can come to anyone, so the reader may simply relax and make the most of the passing drolleries. Though occasionally a death may be mentioned, the reader’s sympathy is never engaged in the least. The linkages of the various narratives only emerge in the conclusion, the reader having been pleasantly suspended until that point (stymied perhaps more by the unlikeliness of the plot as by its brilliance). As in a whodunit mystery, the point of the plot is to remain concealed until the conclusion.
     Apart from the broad and comely design of the whole, the strongest element in O. Henry’s novel is the wit and ingenuity of his richly comic periphrases. The prose regularly erupts in jokes released like a string of slightly damp firecrackers. Yet none of the jokes advances the story. Each acts to delay and distract the reader, passing time, running out the clock, until the final curtain.
     For example, the story proper begins by setting the scene, yet it is less a scene from nature than it seems a motif of a tropical shirt or perhaps a neon barroom fantasy. “Coralio reclined, in the mid-day heat, like some vacuous beauty lounging in a guarded harem.” With details like “vacuous” and “guarded” irrelevant except to underline misogynistic conventions, O. Henry entertains his readers while they await anything likely to launch a storyline. In this Margaritaville “the palms waved their limber fronds foolishly like an awkward chorus at the prima donna’s cue to enter.” (9) Since this world is satirical, the dancers must be “awkward” and the prima donna doubtless acts the role of a comically temperamental diva of the sort portrayed in Mozart’s Der Shauspieldirektor.
     In his role as consul John Atwood discusses with a pair of entrepreneurs their plan to introduce the phonograph to Anchuria. He warns them that the locals, being “simple-hearted children of nature” (73) might react in one of two ways. “They may become inebriated with attention, like an Atlanta colonel listening to ‘Marching Through Georgia,’ or they will get excited and transpose the key of the music with an axe and yourselves into a dungeon.” (74) The series of moves, from the unlikely lexical choice of “inebriated” to the image of the Confederate officer, presumably apoplectic at hearing the Union anthem, then to the musical metaphor and the sudden rather Gothic axe and dungeon. It makes little sense – after all, both alternatives are hostile -- but it maintains an effervescent string of phrases, keeping the reader slightly off balance while suggesting the unpredictability of the plan.
     His method reliance on received ideas, in common with most comedy, is manifest. When Henry Horsecollar runs interference to free his own private co-conspirators from the threatening crowd of local conspirators by whom they are outnumbered, the rhetoric rises in a pyrotechnic display of racism.


"Then that cultured Red Man exhaled an arrangement of sounds with his mouth that made the Latin aggregation pause, with thoughtfulness and hesitations. The matter of his proclamation seemed to be a cooperation of the Carlisle war-whoop with the Cherokee college yell. He went at the chocolate team like a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter. His right elbow laid out the governor man on the gridiron, and he made a lane the length of the crowd so wide that a woman could have carried a stepladder through it without striking against anything." (83)


     Even the very opening term here is twisted to the point of dizziness. Horsecollar, who has seemed as sensible as anyone else in the story and more admirable than many, had been introduced to Mellinger as an “Injun. Tame Injun” (75) to indicate that his presence would be inoffensive. Yet in this critical moment the success of this “cultured Red Man” does not depend on his social suavity but rather on an altogether savage utterance wild enough to paralyze his antagonists. It is yet unclear to what extent their craven abashment is due to their being not quite white themselves, but a “Latin aggregation.”
     Racist bomblets continue to detonate in the following phrases. A Carlisle war whoop is a ironic reference to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the federal government’s most important Native American educational institution for forty years, whose goal was total assimilation to mainstream American culture under founder Richard Henry Pratt’s slogan "Kill the Indian: Save the Man." Then, in a reverse use of racist stereotypes, the “Cherokee college yell” makes an ironic comparison between an indigenous barbarian and an American college football fan. Somehow the careless use of racial pejoratives proceeds to proliferate out of control. The Latin Americans are christened “the chocolate team,” a belittling tag predicting their lack of resistance in the face of the masterful Horsecollar who himself is oddly equated to “a bean out of a little boy's nigger shooter,” a phrase opening a nasty glimpse into nineteenth century Southern life (and into O. Henry’s readiness to make use of racist jocularity).
     O. Henry’s deft ear is attracted to such clichés and seeks sometimes to redeem them in better coin. To start the spin, a centuries-old proverb is put to the service of the most mercenary of interests: the Anchurian bureaucrats. “Spilled milk draws few tears from an Anchurian administration. Many are its lacteal sources; and the clocks’ hand forever point to milking time. Even the rich cream skimmed from the treasury by the bewitched Miraflores did not cause the newly installed patriots to waste time in unprofitable regrets.” (97) The reader can only sit back and watch as the author rings his changes on the topic of milk from the opening twist and the slyly pedantic slightly evasive “lacteal” through the effective image of graft and corruption as “milking time” to the dramatic climactic mention of “rich cream.”
     The national characteristics of Anchuria, while resting securely in racist stereotype, do convey some information about the Honduras that Porter came to know during his year residence there. The filibustering of private citizens and the neo-colonialism of the Vesuvio Fruit Company are indeed drawn from life. [4] The rapacious opportunism of individuals, institutions, and governments is a given, a subset really of the readiness of everyone in this fictional world to grab at the main chance. Meanwhile, though, until that big score arrives, all are satisfied with indolence, their ambitions daily delayed to make time for a drink and a sunset and some diverting conversation. In the last analysis, O. Henry’s theme is simple: “There is nothing doing now, let us tell a few stories before night falls.”
     Cabbages and Kings, indeed, may be said to be made up of such chatting. The experience of reading it offers pleasures not unlike those of the oysters as they enjoyed “a pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,/ Along the briny beach.”


The time has come,' the Walrus said,
To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.'
   

     If the reader has been beguiled by the many conversations by the Coralian shore, as entertained, perhaps as the ingenuous mollusks, the denouement upon reaching the last page is not so final as theirs. To be devoured by O. Henry means no more than to relish passing a bit of time absorbed by the Vitagraphoscope [3] of his imagination.




1. See in particular the latter’s “O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story.”

2. Stereotypes may have their claims, of course. I recall entering more than one Nigerian office during the heat of the afternoon and finding half the workers dozing, heads on their desks.

3. The word Vitagraphoscope seems to be a neologism, perhaps compounding Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and sold by the Edison Manufacturing Company, and Biograph, a film production and exhibition company founded by William Kennedy Dickson also in 1895. Dickson had broken from Edison.

4. Included in the long list of individual Americans (apart from U. S. military forces) who have meddled militarily in Latin America are William S. Smith, William Walker, William A. Chanler, Gregor MacGregor, and James Long. The Vesuvio corporation, of course, represents the United Fruit Company, which once dominated Honduras, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, leading to dictatorships of collaborators throughout the region and to such events as the violent repression of striking workers in Colombia in December of 1928 in which three thousand workers are thought to have been massacred.