What do you think?
Rate this book
368 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1945
"Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other."The writers of short stories, the bar has been set. And it's really high. I've known it since I was about eight or nine, when my mother (bless the heart of the amazing literature teacher I have the privilege to be descended from!) slipped me a nondescript brown-cover book opened to the page with the title 'The Gift of the Magi'.
"Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls."O.Henry wrote about people; the everyday 'little people', mostly those of New York (even though there will be a fair few set in the West and the South of the US, and an entire collection in a 'banana republic' of South America). Those who were usually beneath the notice of the 'great and powerful' of this world.
According to the 'connoisseur' of the 'cream of society' of that time Ward McAllister, there were only about four hundred people in New York who mattered (the list lives on, despite its idiocy - think of Forbes 400, for example). According to O.Henry, there were a few more - four million, to be exact, the entire population of the metropolis at the time.The stories focus on the moments in life of the 'four million', always keeping their unique individuality in focus and not the study of them as a group. We see the shop girls, and struggling clerks, cabbies, small-time crooks, residents of furnished rooms or cheap furnished apartments, artists, secretaries, and even a likely few of the 'four hundred' in their run-ins with the remaining 3,999,600, those who "came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around."
As the introduction to his best-known collection 'The Four Million' simply states:
"Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen--the census taker--and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."
"Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry."Most of the stories are the simple snippets of life - be it in a big city or on a remote ranch. The everyday troubles and pleasures. Many of them are love stories - not the romance stories kind of love but the kind that springs to life in the tiny furnished apartments after long hours of low-paid work which still does not manage to leech the humanity of those who are not the society's cream:
"One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.Our world is a constant contrast of haves and have nots, and have nots have to try very hard just to stay afloat, just to get something out of life that is not very gentle to them. The differences between the wealthy and the poor are highlighted - but the decision of what to do with the highlights is left up to you. O.Henry does not preach; he just provides a gentle voice to those who usually don't get it.
[...]
Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim."
"During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount. Don't care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts. Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six dollars per week.And yet the stories are not written to be the social critique, to pursue an agenda, to stir up anger. They seem to be written just to give the voice to the 3,999,600 that otherwise just quietly go about their lives in the streets of a big city or the fields of the West, keeping their dignity, and finding little pleasures in life, and asking for no condescending pity, and just being people.
[...]
For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at "Billy's" restaurant, at a cost of twenty-five cents—and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers—show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper!—came to six cents; and two Sunday papers—one for the personal column and the other to read—were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and—
I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie's life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. 'Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours."
"As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.--------
"Who are they?" I asked.
"Why," said he, "they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid 'em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?"
"Not on your immortality," said I. "I'm only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies."