Alexander Woollcott

Mr. Woollcott’s person is engaging enough to have jumped bodily from the pages of Charles Dickens, an author whom, by the way, he greatly admires. The first time I ever saw him was in Heywood Broun’s Paris studio, on New Year’s Eve, 1917-18. He was, there, a private in the United States Medical Corps, and his O. D.’s, I must say, made him seem more Bairnsfather than Dickens. He was lounged on a large low divan, peering solemnly at the company, a somewhat motley throng. Mr. Woollcott is short, rotund, jovial, given to elaborate and biting statements, punctuated by gestures which are often as grotesque as they are incisive. He was born in Phalanx, New Jersey, and was graduated from Hamilton College. Are not these facts, in themselves, Dickensonian? Woollcott, to me, is the most interesting of our dramatic critics; for he not only seems to have a knowledge of the theatre but he occasionally permits himself rare and unreasoning enthusiasms off the track of popular approval. His reputation was established as critic of the New York “Times”. He is now critic and colyumist of the “Herald”. It was his enthusiasm for Dickens which gave birth to a delightful volume, “Mr. Dickens Goes to the Play”. His enthusiasm for the army occasioned “The Command is Forward”. His enthusiasm for Mrs. Fiske prompted, “Mrs. Fiske ... Her Views on Acting, Actors and the Problems of the Stage”. More recently his essays have been collected in “Shouts and Murmurs”. The story he tells here is, he says, no essay at all. Maybe so. At any rate, it’s an interesting piece of literary history even if it does not do Mr. Woollcott justice in displaying him as the essayist of whimsicality and penetrating irony, which he is.

O. HENRY, PLAYWRIGHT

When, if ever, they call for a new editor of that amiable biography of O. Henry by C. Alphonso Smith, there should be added a chapter about his adventures as a playwright. To be sure, in the final stretch of this official history of Sydney Porter, the recording professor does say parenthetically: “Plans for a novel and a play were also much in his mind at this time, but no progress was made in actual construction.” Nothing, however, is vouchsafed as to what that play was, how it got into the aforesaid mind in the first place, and why it never came out. It never did come out, for as a playwright O. Henry was a little brother to that forlorn fellow who figures in Augustus Thomas’s reminiscences and whose successive lodgings in New York were always traceable by stray bits of manuscript which had never progressed beyond the brave beginning: “Act One, Scene One: A Ruined Garden.” To that family of dramatists O. Henry belonged. It was a large family. It still is.

This is really George Tyler’s story. He is one of those managers who are ever and always exploring for playwrights and players where no one else has looked. His ardor has always been addressed to the task of growing a dramatist where only a novelist grew before. He and Kipling, for instance, have spent unchronicled hours in conference over a Mulvaney play. But that is another story. Tyler would, I think, derive more heart-warming satisfaction out of extracting four acts from some reluctant teller of tales, than out of any contract he could sign with the most tested and chronically successful dramatist of the day. And just as the late Charles Frohman, by an incorrigible and disarming doggedness, finally badgered the bewildered Barrie into writing for the theatre, so Tyler hoped to make a playwright of O. Henry. He never encountered him on a street corner or dropped him a note about one of his stories without nagging him to try his hand at a play.

Every O. Henry story naturally prompted such a hope. Every one of them fairly tingled with the stuff of which plays are made; and much of that stuff, rented or borrowed or blandly stolen, has since found its way into theatres all over the world. But it was so much easier to write a story, and for a while the Tyler blandishments had no visible effect. The drowsy dramatist that is probably in all of us and that was certainly in O. Henry, stirred uneasily in response to the Tyler proddings, but never really wakened.

O. Henry’s connection with the theatre had been slight and discouraging. He had, in a needy moment, written the libretto of a musical comedy called “Lo”, for which Franklin P. Adams ingenuously fashioned the lyrics and A. Baldwin Sloane the music—a promising but impractical triumvirate whose first and only effort started boldly out from Chicago, wandered erratically around the middle west for fourteen weeks, and then died somewhere, alone, neglected, and unsung. New York never saw it and neither, for that matter, did O. Henry.

Then, in a sudden fit of industry, he drew up a scenario for a comedy, perhaps with the solemn intention of writing it, but more probably in the hope that it would impress the importunate Tyler and lead to a small advance of cash. Indeed, there is still in existence the back of an envelope which served as a ledger wherein were noted the sums, amounting in all to more than $1,200, that were doled out to O. Henry to keep his spirits up and in the faint hope that he might actually get around some day to writing that comedy.

The stories O. Henry wrote, their abundance and their spasmodic unevenness, can never be understood by one who does not keep in mind the fact that he was chronically penniless and forever dashing off pieces either to quiet some editor who had lent him money or to extract himself from pawn at some hotel. This continuous pauperism is usually explained in one of two ways, either that he tossed largess right and left like some latter day Robin Hood or that his pockets were continuously drained by blackmailers whose silence was necessary to his peace. But really no explanation is urgent, for O. Henry earned comparatively little money even in his most successful years and the great sums which his works eventually brought did not begin to stream in until after his death.

It was from such a fellow that Tyler received at last the somewhat cloudy scenario of a comedy to be based on “The World and the Door”, a story which appears now as the first one in the posthumous collection called “Whirligigs”. The story has as its setting one of those little lazy colonies of expatriates in South America—the wistful colonies of which every member has a good legal reason for not returning to the United States. O. Henry had seen them at close range in the unhappy years when he and the Jennings brothers were themselves fugitives from justice. “The World and the Door” spins a romance between a New Yorker who had shot down a fellow roisterer in a drunken brawl and a lovely woman who had given aconite to her husband and left hurriedly for foreign parts. The tale reaches its acute crisis when the two fugitives discover that neither victim has died and that both of them are free to abandon romance and return to civilization. From that story the scenario was made and set aside to simmer.

Then one Sunday morning, at a time when H. B. Warner, a Tyler star, was involved in a moribund entertainment that was sinking rapidly out in Chicago, in walked Tyler’s father all aglow over a new volume of O. Henry stories. It contained the yarn which every one knows as “A Retrieved Reformation”. I find that when, from time to time, polls are solemnly opened to decide which was the best of all he wrote, the vote goes either to that fragment, so Dickensy in its flavor, “An Unfinished Story”, or to that rarer and more delicate work, “A Municipal Report”. (My own choice would always be for “The Skylight Room”.) But I suppose there is no doubt that “A Retrieved Reformation” is the most widely known of all the tales O. Henry told. It is the story of Jimmy Valentine, ex-convict and retired safe cracker, who, having reformed and settled down as a bank cashier, has so artfully builded his alias that the pursuing detective cannot prove the identity. Just in the moment when he is turning away, baffled, panic word is rushed in that a child has been locked by accident in the bank’s new vault, a child sure to die of suffocation unless, by some miracle, there can be found in time one of the half dozen men in the world so expert in safe cracking that, with eyes blindfolded and fingers sensitized, they can decipher any combination. Of course the heroic Valentine must volunteer his buried talent and, by his success at it, confess the suspected identity. And of course, since O. Henry was a spinner of fairy tales, the detective does not laugh cynically and arrest the lad, but bursts instead into affecting tears and goes pensively away forever.

Tyler read that story, shut the book with a snap and began telegraphing hotly in every direction. Out in Chicago was Warner needing a new play as a drooping flower needs water. Then one wire went to O. Henry, offering $500 for the dramatic rights. The offer was accepted with pathetic promptitude, first by wire and then by the following letter:

Asheville, N. C., October 23, 1909.

Mr. George C. Tyler Liebler & Co. N. Y. City.

My dear Mr. Tyler: I hereby transfer to you the entire dramatic rights of the story you write me about—the title is “A Retrieved Reformation.” I am glad to be able to hand you over anything that you might be able to use.

But I want you to let the $500 that I owe you still remain owing, for I am going to write that play yet and soon. I’ve been in bad shape for a long time, both as to writing and refunding. I’m wrestling with a bad case of neurasthenia (so the doctor says), but I’m getting back into good shape again. I am living about six miles out of Asheville and spend most of the time climbing hills and living out-of-doors. I have knocked off 20 pounds weight. I eat like a drayman and don’t know what booze tastes like. In fact, I’ll be better than ever in another week or two.

I got out the scenario of “The World and the Door” some days ago and began to plan out the acts and scenes. I’ll surprise you with it as soon as I get down to hard work.

I deeply appreciate your leniency and kindness and intend to “come up to scratch” yet with the goods.

So, the dramatic rights of the “Retrieved Reformation” are yours and if you strike another story you like take it too.

In the meantime, I owe you $500, am going to pay it and remain

Sincerely yours

Sydney Porter.

P. S. If you want a more formal assignment of the rights of the story, send on the papers and I will sign ’em.

Tyler then sent for Paul Armstrong, a wise old artisan of the theatre, who could be counted on to turn the story into a play without spilling anything, and who could also be expected to do it quickly, as he too was probably without funds. Armstrong read the story, agreed to try his hand at it, and vanished. It turned out later that he had been locked up in a room at the Hotel Algonquin, but for a week there was no signal from him and it was upon an impresario fuming with impatience and uneasiness that he sauntered nonchalantly in at the end of that week. Tyler launched at once on a burning speech in which he gave his opinion of Broadway as a habitat for men who thought they were playwrights, his opinion of the faithless and the irresponsible denizens of that territory, and his opinion of his own bitter and thankless job, which he said, he was minded to forsake then and there in favor of farming. Which oration Armstrong interrupted by producing from his ulster the completed four act manuscript of a melodrama, the first of the crook plays, “Alias Jimmy Valentine”. The next day they were all on their way to Chicago and eleven days later the piece was produced there. Within three weeks, therefore, after Tyler first read “A Retrieved Reformation”, its dramatization began a run which was to make reputations for some people and fortunes for others; which was to tweak and tantalize playgoers all over America, England, France, Spain and South Africa; and which was to breed a very epidemic of plays in which no self-respecting protagonist would think of approaching the first act without a neat murder or at least a bank robbery to his credit.

I often think how much it adds to a playgoer’s interest in a piece to know something of the manner in which it came to be written, something of the source of its incident and its viewpoint, something, that is, of its own biography. Consider those first nighters in Chicago who encountered Jimmy Valentine in the Sing Sing scene, met with him the sorry procession of prison types and finally followed him in his precarious flight into respectability. How they would have gaped had they known (and probably not more than one or two of them even guessed) that this, in a sense, was O. Henry’s own story, that he too had been a convicted felon, that he had come to know the original of Jimmy Valentine when they were both in prison together in Ohio, and that at that very time he, like Jimmy, was building with his own hands a new identity in a new world.

If this missing chapter ever does find its way into the O. Henry biography, there ought, I suppose, to be a footnote about the actress picked up out of space to play the leading feminine rôle. For “Alias Jimmy Valentine”, that company of Warner’s out in Chicago would do well enough. But the cast of the play required a new leading woman. Someone mentioned casually that there was a promising newcomer to be seen that very afternoon in a special matinée somewhere on Broadway. Tyler dropped in, took one look, and engaged her forthwith—a lovely, droll, wide eyed young actress who had just come in out of the provinces and who was already footsore from her weary rounds of the managers’ offices in an effort to persuade someone that she knew how to act. Her name was Laurette Taylor.

But that is a footnote. And “Alias Jimmy Valentine” itself is important in the story of O. Henry as a playwright only because it yielded Paul Armstrong something like $100,000 while it yielded O. Henry, whose idea it had been, nothing like that at all. He made just $500 out of it. This painful discrepancy was something which the guileful Tyler meant that O. Henry should not be allowed to forget. Every week, when the official copy of the box office statement went through the mails to Armstrong as a matter of routine, a duplicate copy was mailed to O. Henry. It was, of course, a lean time in which Armstrong did not receive each week more for writing the play than O. Henry received all told for having invented it. After a little succession of such weekly reminders, the wear and tear upon O. Henry’s spirits became visible.

Witness this letter which arrived in New York early in 1910:

Asheville, N. C. Monday

My dear Mr. Tyler,

I had expected to be in N. Y. before this but I am not. I have been putting in all my time getting in good shape for future campaigns, and doing practically no work at all. Have entirely recovered my health and feel fine and fit. I have done barely enough writing to keep the possum from the door since I’ve been down here, but I think I have gained greatly thereby.

Got a little proposition to make to you.

If you’ll advance me $500, I’ll come at once to N. Y., establish myself in some quiet rural spot of the metropolis known only to yourself and your emissaries and get to work and finish a play. I will not let my whereabouts or even the fact that I am in the city be known to anyone but you; and I will give all my time and energy to the play.

As collateral, I can only make over to you the dramatic rights of all my stories until the work is done. The new play “Alias J. V.” has inspired me to believe I can do something for both of us.

If you will do this, let me know immediately and I will come.

Of course if you don’t care to do it, it won’t affect our future relations. But I want to get in the game, and I’ll stick to you exclusively until we try it out.

Yours as ever

Sydney Porter.

c/o Jas. S. Coleman.

The answer to this seems to have been cautious and conditional, for further explanations soon started north as follows:

Asheville, N. C., 1/25 ’10.

My dear Mr. Tyler:

I will be brief. Why I want the money in a lump sum is to make a getaway quick. Your proposition is better than mine, but it lacks the hastiness and expedition necessary to a big theatrical success. As I told you I have been busy down here for about four months getting rid of cirrhosis of the liver, fatty degeneration of the heart and neurasthenia—none of which troubles I have ever had. But I was about as nervous and reflex-actiony as the hind-leg of a frog as shown in the magazine-section of almost any Sunday newspaper. The country and the mountains have been worth more to me than money—I am almost as strong and tough as a suffragette.

But I have (by order of the Old Doctor) avoided work gladly and cheerfully. Consequently I have as much money on hand as was left lying around the box office at the last performance of “Lo.”

Now, suppose we have a few moments conversation as heart-to-heart as an editorial on chicken-salad in the Ladies’ Home Journal by Edward Everett Hale.

I owe something in the neighborhood of $500 down here that should and shall be paid before the obsequious porter of the So. Ry. Co. can have the opportunity of brushing the soot off the window sill of Mr. Pullman’s car onto the left knee of my new trousers. I’m not after money now—it’s transportation, transposition and a chance that I want. I can work the proposition out in the short story line; but it’s slow, Colonel, slow. I want to get into the real game, and I’ll stake my reputation as the best short story writer within a radius of Asheville that we can pull it off.

Here’s what I need in order to start things going.

I’ve got to pay up everything here and leave a small bunch of collateral with my long-suffering family to enable them to purchase the usual cuisine of persimmons and rabbits for a while.

I will do this.

If you will send me the necessary sinews, I will start for N. Y. on Wednesday or Thursday of next week. I will, on arrival, secure a room or two with privilege of bath 3 flights above, and ’phone you the next morning. Thenceforth I am yours and Mr. Ford’s until results have been accomplished. I will place all my time at your disposal until the play is finished. My proposition is not unselfish—I expect to make it profitable to myself as well as to you.

Proviso—

Don’t give it away to any magazine, or anybody else, that I am there. I will be in retirement and working for you as long as may be necessary. My mail will be sent here as it has been, and forwarded there. My family will remain here during the Summer. They seem to like the idea of my returning to N. Y., although I have been reasonably kind to them.

Now, listen.

You know how much “front” counts. I’m not afraid of N. Y. police or editors: but if I arrive there in a linen suit, pith helmet and tennis shoes what would Big Bill Edwards do to me but shovel me into a cart and dump me into East River?

So get busy with your telegraph blanks. Send me $750 by wire when you get this and I’ll strike N. Y. Thursday at the latest. I’ve got to have some margin, and you’ll get my exclusive services thereby. Take another chance. You can’t lose.

I am enclosing as a rather poor collateral the rights to my stories.

I hate to make any new dickers with the magazine people and that’s why I put the matter so strenuously up to you. I know now how much better (financially) the stage business is:—thanks to you.

Tell Oom Paul Armstrong that I hope he’ll crack the safe for all it’s worth in “Alias Jimmy”. I got the press notices that you had sent me.

I’m awfully sorry to have to come back to town and write a better play than Mr. Armstrong has—but I need the money—he won’t mind.

With best regards

Sydney Porter

c/o Jas. S. Coleman.

P. S. To summarize—$750—by—wire—not by an A. D. T.—satisfaction guaranteed or money refunded.

This appears to have been followed breathlessly by a telegram which read thus:

LIKE TO HAVE FUNDS DO WIRE TODAY WILL POSITIVELY BE THERE ON TIME HAVE CUT OUT SPENDING AND CHIANTI S. P.

Tyler seems to have thought it wisest to send only a part of the sum demanded and to do that by mail. By the end of February this glowing message came up from Asheville:

WILL ARRIVE AT NOON MONDAY IF YOUR HUNDRED WIRED TODAY EXCLUSIVE WORK GUARANTEED UNTIL SATISFACTORY RESULTS

SYDNEY PORTER

And this was followed by one even more urgent:

WIRE BALANCE AM WAITING AT THE DEPOT

PORTER

So Tyler wired the balance, but the promised phone message from the modest and secluded lodgings never came. The first tidings came from a hospital, to which O. Henry had been taken mortally ill with pneumonia. He had received the money, retained the margin, and started north. But once he had found himself at the gates of Bagdad, he had stood wide eyed for a moment and then drifted happily off among the bazaars, stumbling on some old cronies, and given himself over to celebration of his return from exile. Tyler never saw him again. And the great American play—“The World and the Door”, a comedy in three acts by the author of “The Four Million”—was never written.