H.L. Mencken

The Morning Union/October 25, 1925

One of the caressing signs of the times in literary America is the decay of the O. Henry influence upon the short story. Ten or fifteen years ago it threatened to engulf the cornfed literati completely, as that of Kipling had engulfed them in the preceding generation. Every go-getting young fictioneer in the Republic tried to write like the gifted jailbird. And most of the pedagogues of the English faculty devoted themselves to harangues and monographs upon his art.

No more. I can’t recall encountering a story of the O. Henry type in any first-class American magazine for five years past, and all the professors are now baying other and grander stags. All, that is, save a forlorn few–and these survivors are professors, not of beautiful letters, but of the commercial short story. Their pupils, disdaining Century and Scribner’s, aim for the all-Action yellows, where the quick mazuma is.

In such fields the ghost of Henry continues to stalk, and all his old tricks display themselves: The snap ending, the elaborately artificial phrase, the sob in the laugh. But nowhere else.

It is, as I hint, a blessed reform. For O. Henry, in his day, threatened to reduce the American short story to a feeble compound of transparent fraudulences. His manner was easy to imitate. Any neophyte with a hand for words could approximate it after four trials. He got it himself from bad newspaper reporters; it was chiefly compounded of slang made grandiloquent. And his snap endings, after a little practice, turned out to be easy, too. One simply turned the bartender, at the climax, into a poet, or the poet into a burglar. Henry had his own story as a model. He rang 200 changes upon it, and his imitators rang 10,000 more.

II.

What kept him below the salt was his defective sense of character—his incapacity for making his people live. The same marionette served him for his whole stock company. His Latin American revolutionists, his cowboys and his bartenders all spoke the same language, and were Identical under their skins. The dramatis personae of one story might have been moved into any other story without material loss of reality. All of these folk were stuffed dummies, worked by palpable wires and spouting the same uniform and unnatural jargon.

Great fiction, it must be obvious, contains juicier stuff. What we think of, when we recall story of the first rank, is not the plot, nor the style, but the people. Who remembers the plot of “Vanity Fair”? Or its tricks of phrase? But who, having met her, ever forgets Sharp? Some of the greatest fiction on the shelves, indeed, is immensely defective in plot—for example, “Vanity Fair” itself. And more of it is undistinguished and even crude in style—for example, the whole canon of Balzac, and most of the work of Dickens. But Balzac and Dickens had something better than style, and that was the capacity to create such personages as Pere Goriot and Micawber. So their novels live.

The short story responds to the same test exactly. Kipling conquered the world, not with phrases and trick endings, but with characters. He had the phrases and trick endings, too, but it was Terence Mulaney who made him. When he abandoned Mulvaney for hollow pseudo-scientific ingenuity—that is, when he abandoned character for plot—he blew up with a bang. Some of his later stories show a bold and luxurious imaginativeness; they are Immensely more “original.” schoolmarm sense, than anything O. Henry ever wrote. But they are completely forgotten—and Mulvaney lives on.

What survives of Bret Harte today? Only Mr. Jack Hamlin and Col. Culpepper Starbottle. They remain as real as Dogberry, Falstaff, or Robinson Crusoe. Harte, achieving them, attained to a sort of immortality. The rest of his work is already forgotten.

III

The same test, I believe, may be applied to contemporary writers; it is, perhaps, the surest of all gages of that Intrinsic skill and dignity. O. Henry, judged by it, failed miserably; and so did many of the writers who got a great deal of notice in his time; for example, James Lane Allen. But it leaves Dreiser unscathed, for it will be a long while before Hurstwood passes into the shadows, and it is kind to Jack London, for if he could not create a veritable man, he could at least create a tremendous dog.

This capacity for imagining and projecting character is rare, even for writers otherwise skillful. The late Henry James lacked it, and so I incline to the fear that he will presently vanish into thin air, despite the pother about him now. It is a significant fact that, in the postmortem discussion of him, “Daisy Miller” seems to be getting more attention than any of the books of his later years. The explanation, I believe, lies in the plain fact that in Daisy he came nearest to creating a living character. In “What Maisie Knew” he made his second best attempt; after that all his people stiffened into marionettes. He wrote about them magnificently, but it was like writing about mathematical symbols.

What lifted Mark Twain above Howells? Simply his infinitely keener feeling for character. Mark could not write about a railway conductor or an after-dinner orator without making the fellow live. His gallery is immense and superb: Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, the nigger Jim, old Finn, the king and the duke, Aunt Polly, the Widow Douglas, Col. Grangerford—nine masterpieces in one book! What did Howells offer to match them? He offered a pleasant manner—and a series of vacuums, each tagged with a name and a habitat, but every one as cold and empty as a political issue of 1884.

IV.

Howells, judged by the standard set up by schoolmarms, male and female, was a vastly more accomplished writer than old Mark. He wrote far more refined English; he was more learned and urbane; he appealed to higher tastes. But he lacked, alas, the thing that was worth all those other things lumped together; he lacked the capacity to imagine genuine human beings. His people, to mouth a stale phrase, are never quite convincing. One does not believe in them. One does not feel with them. One does not remember them.

I suspect the schoolmarms of today are making much the same mistake about Sinclair Lewis they made about Mark Twain. It is easy to see he is a somewhat crude and blatant fellow—that such novelists as Mrs. Wharton, for example, are much more refined. His English sometimes fevers the grammarian. His humor is often low and buffoonish. He lacks all feeling for what young college professors call the more delicate values. Personally, like Mark before him, he is loud.

But despite all these handicaps, he has managed to do something that all the Mrs. Whartons, striving desperately, have failed to do: he has created a series of brilliantly vivid and plausible characters, Instantly recognizable and overwhelmingly real. Babbitt is certainly no mere pasteboard figure in a story book. He has all the savor and authenticity of Abraham Lincoln, John L. Sullivan, or Buffalo Bill; he belongs to the small company of perfect and unforgettable Americans. His character becomes symbolic; his name is almost a common noun.

Only three other American writers have ever projected an imaginary man with surpassing skill, and compelled such quick recognition of his reality. Mark Twain did it with Col. Mulberry Sellers. Finley Peter Dunne did it with Mr. Dooley. Montague Glass did it with Potash and Permutter. Mark Twain, dead, has at last forced himself into the literature books, but Dunne and Glass are still on probation. It took the professors 40 years to discover the difference between Whitman and Whittier, and most as long to penetrate to that between Mark and Howells. On some lingering tomorrow, I take it, Dunne, Glass and Lewis will be overwhelmed with sudden and startling kisses.