Ben Yagoda is the author, coauthor or editor of fourteen books, including an edition of O. Henry’s short stories for the Library of America.
His latest book is Alias O. Henry,
a biographical novel about short story writer O. Henry’s years in New York,
1902-1910. He was awarded Guggenheim and MacDowell Fellowships to pursue this
project.
He has written about language, writing
and many other topics for Slate.com, the New York Times Book
Review and Magazine, The American Scholar, Rolling
Stone, Esquire, and
publications that start with every letter of the alphabet except X and Z.
Between 2011 and 2018, he contributed
roughly one post a week to Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog
about language and writing. You can find links to some of his posts here.
He is a native of New Rochelle, New
York; a graduate of Yale; and a resident of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. In
2018, he retired after twenty-five years teaching writing and journalism at the
University of Delaware. Before that, he worked as a film critic for the Philadelphia Daily News and an editor for Philadelphia and other magazines.
Davis: Why did you write a novel about O. Henry?
Yagoda: My first thought was to write a biography. I started reading his short stories and was surprised at how much I liked many of them, especially the humor and the portrait they painted of life in New York City in the first decade of the twentieth century. (That led me to propose an O. Henry anthology of the Library of America, which they agreed to and which was published in 2021.) Then I started to read the previous biographies, and stopped when I came to Gerald Langford’s Alias O. Henry, published in the 1950s. I felt that Langford had done such a good job of ferreting out the knowable facts of O. Henry’s life (or I should say William Sydney Porter’s, as that was his real name), that I couldn’t add much.
I
pondered some other ways of writing about O. Henry and settled on a novel, in
part because it would give me a chance to give an answer to some of the open
questions about his life. For example, was he really guilty of embezzlement,
for which he was tried and convicted in Texas in the late 1890s, and served
three and half years in federal prison? Doubts have been raised about what
really happened, in part because Porter said virtually nothing in his own
defense at his trial. And why, once he settled in New York after his release
from prison, did he so adamantly refuse to talk about or even acknowledge his
prison experience? Treating his life as fiction would also give me the chance
to propose origin stories for some of his stories, to create some characters it
would be fun to hang around with for a couple of years, and, finally, to
explore some of what was going in on New York in a fascinating period. I
borrowed Gerald Langford’s title simply because I felt it was perfect.
Davis: Was his life as
interesting as those of his fictional characters?
Yagoda: In some ways yes, in some ways no. He wasn’t a
safecracker like Jimmy Valentine or a kidnapper like the bumbling main
characters in The Ransom of Red Chief, but he had a colorful history
before he landed in New York—working at ranches in Texas, starting a humor
magazine, and, after his initial arrest for embezzlement, absconding to
Honduras, where he spent six months before returning home to stand trial. In
New York, however, his real life (as opposed to in my book) was pretty dull,
mainly consisting of sitting at his desk and writing stories, taking long walks
in the city, and occasionally going out for drinks or meals with a small circle
of friends.
Davis: How did his life
experiences affect his fictional stories?
Yagoda: As noted above, he was very secretive in life, and in his writing, he was the opposite of an autobiographical writer. But he wrote about a fair number of criminals and lowlifes, to a large extent using experiences and information he had gleaned from his fellow inmates while in prison. And he has a number of very clever stories about writers and writing, such as Tommy’s Burglar and Proof of the Pudding.
Davis: How did you research
the life of O. Henry? How did you research the O. Henry era of New York?
Yagoda: On O. Henry’s life, I read all the biographies, the
most useful of which were Langford’s, plus a few written in the 1920s and ‘30s
by people who actually knew him, like Robert Davis and Al Jennings, both of
whom are characters in my novel. On the era, I kind of went off the deep end,
consulting dozens of histories, contemporary accounts of novels, and delving
into newspapers, magazines, and documents like the handwritten reports of
investigators who went undercover to expose what was going on in brothels. In
fact, I had to make a concerted effort to stop researching and start writing.
Davis: How much of the novel
is fact and fiction?
Yagoda: The background and information given about the
real-life people who show up in the book—Porter, Jennings, and Davis, plus Bat
Masterson and Hattie Rose and a number of figures in more or less cameo
roles—is more or less true, but every scene in the book, and of course the
dialogue and thoughts I describe, is made up.
Davis: Did O. Henry really meet and work with Bat Masterson and other real people you write about in the novel?
Yagoda: No question that Bob Davis was his editor. As for Masterson and the others, all I will say is that the interactions are plausible.
Davis:
Was he truly blackmailed about his past life in prison?
Yagoda: Perhaps.
Davis: Why did O. Henry write so many stories about crime and criminals?
Yagoda: Excellent question! In part because such stories are perennially interesting, in part because (as I mentioned above) he had gotten a lot of good material from his fellow inmates, and also possibly in part because even as he was obsessively private about his criminal past in his daily life, he may have felt compelled to share part of it on the page.
Davis: Do you have a favorite O. Henry story?
Yagoda: The famous ones - Gift
of the Magi, A Retrieved Reformation, The Ransom of Red Chief,
The Last Leaf, The Cop and the Anthem - all hold up well. But
when asked to name my favorite, I generally pick a lesser known one, An
Unfinished Story, where O. Henry confronts more directly (and angrily) than
anywhere else the economic pressure young working women in New York were under,
and the choices that pressure forced them into.
Davis: Why do you think O.
Henry is still being read today?
Yagoda: Simple—he was a great
storyteller.
Davis: What do you believe
is his place in American literature?
Yagoda: When he died in 1910, he was one of the most
successful and popular writers in the country. But pretty quickly the times
started to pass him by, as writers like Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, Sally
Benson, and John Cheever used the short story to present slices of life (often
fairly grim ones), while O. Henry’s touchstones of wry humor or pathos and
heavy plotting, especially his trademark twist endings, came off as
old-fashioned. But he continued and continues to be read in middle schools and
high schools (where I first encountered him), and I hope that this novel and
the anthology I edited will eventually help him to regain a little stature as a
splendid storyteller, a deft humorist, and a true craftsman who made his
adopted city of New York his own.
Davis: Thank you for speaking to me today.
Note: You can read my Washington Times On Crime column on O. Henry via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment