The Days of the Caliph

ALIAS O. HENRY (294 pp.) -- Gerald Longford--MacmHlan ($5).

William Sidney Porter was an alcoholic, a liar, a convicted embezzler. He betrayed his friends, deserted his family, fled the U.S. to escape prosecution, seldom paid his debts, deceived both his wives, and led many a simple shopgirl down the garden path. Yet, as O. Henry, he also wrote some of literature's most engaging short stories, and he had a grace of mind and manner that won nearly all who met him. Even one of his mothers-in-law said fervently: "Will was a noble man with a true heart."

In this excellent new biography Author Langford, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas, traces Porter's roller-coaster life and attempts to explain the contradictions of his personality. He was born in Greensboro, N.C., a year after the Civil War began, the son of a country doctor who neglected his practice to spend his time trying to build a perpetual-motion machine. Even by the standards of the Reconstruction South, the Porters were desperately poor, and at 19 Will went to Texas as the guest of another doctor who was worried by the boy's "hacking cough." At just about every crisis in his life, Will was able to find kindly acquaintances who would similarly ease his path by lending him money, giving him free room and board, finding him jobs.

Prison Banquet. To the Texas of the 1880s Will Porter seemed the beau ideal. He dressed nattily, was quick-witted, had a good voice for midnight serenades or amateur theatricals, could dash off a funny verse or a caricature with ease. He married pretty, well-to-do Athol Estes, promptly moved in with her stepfather, and through the efforts of a friend got a job at Austin's First National Bank. All went swimmingly until 1894, when Will was 32 and the father of a five-year-old daughter. Then a sharp-eyed bank examiner dropped in at the First National and found a shortage of $5,557.02 in Will's accounts. Porter fled to Central America, came back when his wife was dying and finally stood trial.

Sentenced to five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary, Will landed once more on his feet. He got a comfortable job in the hospital and became a valued friend of the prison doctor. With five other prisoners (two train robbers, three embezzlers and a forger) he founded the "Recluse Club," which met on Sundays in an unused prison office and ate lavish dinners, complete with silverware, napkins and flowers.

More important, Porter at last had time to write. It was on some of the 14 stories he sent out from jail that he first used the name O. Henry--he chose the last name, said Porter, out of the society columns of a New Orleans newspaper and the initial O. because it is "about the easiest letter written." These first stories have all the professionalism of his later work--they are sentimental, comic, marvelously contrived and carry a sting of surprise at the end. Many turn on what was to be a constant theme for O. Henry: the vindication of a man who has seemingly forfeited all claim to respect.

Fat Rat Bat Cat. Freed in 1901, Will Porter got to Manhattan as quickly as he could, determined to bury the past without a clue. He wrote feverishly and with almost instant success. Some of the money that poured in went to the support of his daughter; most just dribbled away. Editors sought him out (he was usually found in a hotel room conveniently near a saloon), and he was soon writing a weekly story in the New York World about adventures in Baghdad-on-the-Subway. In the guise of a modern Harun al-Rashid, Will searched the city for fun and ideas, and found both, from Hell's Kitchen to the cancan dancers at Koster and Bial's.

An easy touch, a lavish tipper, a generous host, he loved all that was seamy and unconventional. In An Unfinished Story he wrote about a man named Piggy who "was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat and the magnanimity of a cat ... He could look at a shopgirl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He . . . prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner." In a moment of candor, Will Porter told a friend: "I was Piggy."

One June Day. Whatever his private morality, his fiction was without moral blemish. He disliked being called the American Maupassant, protesting: "I never wrote a filthy word in my life" (neither did Maupassant, whose language teased, but never stripped). Once, when a fellow inmate wanted Porter to write about prison conditions, he answered: "I tell you I will not attempt to bring a remedy to the diseased soul of society." Writing for money alone, he swore that "if I had a prosperous peanut stand on Broadway . . . I would never write another line."

His genius lay in his plot making, and, like his tragically eccentric father, he made the mistake of thinking that he could achieve perpetual motion--and turn out his beautifully machined tales forever. He brought to the short story the elements of pace, geniality, color and surprise. Some of his gems--the tenderly sentimental Gift of the Magi, the tortuous Whirligig of Life, the feud-ridden A Blackjack Bargainer--are as inventive as will ever be written. But after O. Henry had been in Manhattan eight years, the mechanism that had produced more than 250 stories slowed down. More and more often, his hand went out to the bottle instead of the pen. He tried to regain his balance by marrying again (a childhood sweetheart), but only succeeded in creating another victim. He sold the dramatic rights to his story A Retrieved Reformation for $500 and then saw it make hundreds of thousands for others as the Broadway hit Alias Jimmy Valentine. He talked and talked about a novel but never got it on paper. His stories became more labored as debts mounted and the gift slipped away. One June day in 1910, Will Porter was rushed to the hospital and died of cirrhosis of the liver, but not before he whispered to the nurse a sentimental but effective punch line that might have come from one of his own stories: "Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark."

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