Shel’s Comments (group member since Mar 05, 2009)

Shel’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

Also, the color in the story. The way the grass is is described as being tainted by the breath of people... I am wondering how this ties into the theme:

First, Spring has a "vitreous optic" which immediately made me think of Bataille, but anyway.

The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost formed a pastoral; the color motif was green--the presiding shade at the creation of man and vegetation.

The callow grass between the walks was the color of verdigris, a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil during the summer and autumn. The bursting tree buds looked strangely familiar to those who had botanized among the garnishings of the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky above was of that pale aquamarine tint that ballroom poets rhyme with "true" and "Sue' and "coo." The one natural and frank color visible was the ostensible green of the newly painted benches--a shade between the color of a pickled cucumber and that of a last year's fast-black cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a masterpiece.

And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the gentle concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief invasion of the editor's mind.

Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The April number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition before the tenth day of the month--a newsdealer in Keokuk had written that he could have sold fifty copies more if he had 'em. The owners of the magazine had raised his (the editor's) salary; he had just installed in his home a jewel of a recently imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning papers had published in full a speech he had made at a publishers' banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the jubilant notes of a splendid song that his charming young wife had sung to him before he left his up-town apartment that morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music of late, practising early and diligently. When he had complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign, tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly adown the wards of the convalescent city.

So this post contains spoilers.

The whole time you're thinking, Dawes the struggling writer is totally right and this Editor Westbrook guy is just full of it. When people encounter true drama in their lives, they are more apt to use the same language (or worse) that they would use every day when they react -- not be inspired by literature to speak with a loftier vocabulary about the pathos of human suffering and get all Job and stuff.

After all - not everyone is Hamlet or Macbeth, and really, Shakespeare builds their characters in such a way that the soliloquies make total sense given who they are. And O. Henry writes about the 'common man.'

The story spends quite a bit of time discussing the rightness or wrongness of tricking Mrs. Dawes in such a cruel way. And then - she's gone at the end! And because of money! How perfect is that. I mean, I'm not sure there is more to say than How Perfect... but that may be because this is O. Henry, the master of the surprise ending...

On the other hand, I was kind of dissatisfied. (gasp!) While we are certainly given motivation for her wanting to make money, or for her husband to make money, I'm not sure I'm given sufficient motivation for her to leave like that. Unless I'm meant to understand that all of Dawes' talk about how loyal and wonderful she is, and how she will do anything in the service of his Art, to be simply Dawes mistaking her love and loyalty... when all along she is just as tired as he is of the Maupassant hash and wants more. I thought that was one of the best lines of the story, by the way:

"It's Maupassant hash," said Mrs. Dawe. "It may not be art, but I do wish you would do a five-course Marion Crawford serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm hungry."

Wow. How do you fit a surprise ending, humor, a discussion of Art, and pathos all in one story.

I'm just - wow. What a great story. I will have to think on it for a bit.

Radically different from the other one...

And she had those lips that were such a lovely shade of gray. I wish I had lips that gray.

Here is where we will talk about O. Henry's Proof of the Pudding, since "Fox-in-the-Morning" is not quite what we were hoping.

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/O_Henr...

Discussion starts Thursday Mar 26. I'll post some thoughts later today.

No, let's keep talking about it. And really, it's what, a 30 minute max commitment... :-)

I was thinking about the play with language in the story.

The dialogue between the two Americans is hilarious and fascinating all at once. Here they are, talking about the code language of the telegram:

"'Tis not a cipher," he said, finally. "'Tis what they call literature, and that's a system of language put in the mouths of people that they've never been introduced to by writers of imagination. The magazines invented it, but I never knew before that President Norvin Green had stamped it with the seal of his approval. 'Tis now no longer literature, but language. The dictionaries tried, but they couldn't make it go for anything but dialect. Sure, now that the Western Union indorses it, it won't be long till a race of people will spring up that speaks it."

"You're running too much to philology, Billy," said Goodwin. "Do you make out the meaning of it?"

"Sure," replied the philosopher of Fortune. "All languages come easy to the man who must know 'em. I've even failed to misunderstand an order to evacuate in classical Chinese when it was backed up by the muzzle of a breech-loader. This little literary essay I hold in my hands means a game of Fox-in-the-Morning. Ever play that, Frank, when you was a kid?"

Turns out the Fox-in-the-Morning is a child's game about surrounding whomever is "it" to make sure they don't escape.

Anyway, apart from the fantastic sense of humor O. Henry had and the way he painted scenes so smoothly and expertly, making the reader feel like they are in the scene, I thought that this conversation about language was interesting on a number of levels. It's practically hermeneutics...: "All languages come easy to the man who must know 'em."

I love the way literature is described: "that's a system of language put in the mouths of people that they've never been introduced to by writers of imagination."

Very popular British candy, that's why (at least where I lived). All the kids eat it. I never developed a taste for it.

Now Cadbury's Creme Eggs, that's a different story.

One of my writing professors said that a writer should read twice as much as they write.

I'm not sure how she calculated it, though.

I do try to follow -- generally speaking (and it's much easier to read with kids around than it is to write). I try to read stuff that is like what I'm working on if I can find it, to see what's out there, and stuff that is entirely different. So far it's way easier to find the latter. Which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

Also, poetry and essays help a lot. Poems are about distillation, essays make a larger point about life. Both help in writing good sentences and scenes.

Ah. I feel another classic coming on.

Look at all I missed! I was at the opera last night, and the kids are on break, and I have a big French test tonight, and I just did my first boot camp workout yesterday so I was lucky to be able to walk to the computer...

So let's do Proof of the Pudding, for anyone who has thirst for more discussion and more O. Henry. Starting Thursday. Anyone who wants to continue discussing this one stays here and I'll post another thread for the other story. :-)

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/O_Henr...

Bastards! So much more sneaky than a spam post!

OK, here's what we'll do, if everyone doesn't mind. I think this story could use some discussion but it doesn't really fit the goals of the group. If you don't mind letting Mo pick a new story and we'll just have a compressed discussion time that starts Thursday.

My apologies for the bad pick. I had read it before, hoped it would stand on its own, but I understand how everyone feels. I will go through the rest of my list to vet it carefully, but I don't think we'll run into this again.

Should we skip it? Read Gift of the Magi?

I was just thinking something a little different might be fun but if it doesn't fit then we don't have to read it...

So. Cabbages and Kings. I'm going to toss out a few things I noticed and see what you guys think, and what you noticed too... and let's see what we get out of this story.

I thought this story was principally about language, code, and from a plot perspective the foreign-ness of the invader/interloper Americans.

In the preceding Proem, there is more than one reference to the "underlying threads." While I'm not confused by the concept in an abstract sense I can't say I totally get what the threads are in this story.

Then there is the introduction of this Isabel, this apparent femme fatale, this Helen of Troy, about whom Keogh says this: "they say she's got all the ladies of mythology, sculpture, and fiction reduced to chromos. They say she can look at a man once, and he'll turn monkey and climb trees to pick cocoanuts for her."

I've read my share of O. Henry and this truly is different from his other stuff, but the ear for dialogue and the familiar sense of humor are there. You can tell he was really there, I think.

The last two paragraphs from the "Proem" just preceding drew my attention:


So, there is a little tale to tell of many things. Perhaps to the promiscuous ear of the Walrus it shall come with most avail; for in it there are indeed shoes and ships and sealing-wax and cabbage-palms and presidents instead of kings.

Add to these a little love and counterplotting, and scatter everywhere throughout the maze a trail of tropical dollars—dollars warmed no more by the torrid sun than by the hot palms of the scouts of Fortune—and, after all, here seems to be Life, itself, with talk enough to weary the most garrulous of Walruses.

The Walrus and The Carpenter by Lewis Carroll can be found at http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/wa... with illustrations...

Obviously the title of the collection comes from the poem and is used in the epigraph - the stanza that is the most well-known:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."


The generally accepted interpretation, as I've read about it online, is that it's a conversation between Buddha and Jesus, dividing up humanity (the oysters) and shucking them for eating... there are others about it being about political figures...

I'm not sure what the total relevance is to the story we're reading, but there's the info in case we need it.

Unfortunately the only information I can find on fox-in-the-morning is about the TV channel's news show.

Of Cabbages and Kings Wikipedia says:

Some of his best and least-known work resides in the collection Cabbages and Kings, a series of stories which each explore some individual aspect of life in a paralytically sleepy Central American town while each advancing some aspect of the larger plot and relating back one to another in a complex structure which slowly explicates its own background even as it painstakingly erects a town which is one of the most detailed literary creations of the period.

That paragraph is what sold me on choosing the first full story in this collection ahead of his more well-known work. I also thought the story of the book's creation was interesting...

William Sydney Porter (his real name) was under indictment for embezzlement. He fled to New Orleans, and then Honduras. While holed up in a Tegucigalpa hotel for several months, he wrote Cabbages and Kings, in which he coined the term "banana republic" to describe the country, subsequently used to describe almost any small, unstable tropical nation in Latin America. (from Wikipedia) He returned to the U.S. when his wife took ill -- and was eventually imprisoned for 5 years for embezzlement where he was the prison's pharmacist.

I will figure it out. Thanks for letting me know.

Now, along with the preponderance of excellent commentary, I have to agree that this story is not so much about love, but ... maybe about living and how we choose to do it. Accidents. Choices, false and true.

I can add one to the list and make sure it's not about love. :-).

I picked that one because it was a fairly well-known work of his and it would be way too predictable for me to start with O. Henry or The Dead.

Part of what I'm trying to get out of this, too, is a starting point for all kinds of writers I (and others) haven't read or seriously considered -- so that I can better understand them in a group setting and then move on to read more of their stuff.

Hence the Roald Dahl story in the list, called The Bitch. I had previously thought of him as a most excellent children's book writer, because that's how he was introduced to me. And Murakami - so many have sung his praises that I thought it would be a good intro into his work.