Story-Teller's Story

THE QUIET LODGER OF IRVING PLACE-- William Wash Williams--Dutton ($2.50).

To most modern readers the tricky, concise, anecdotal stories of William Sydney Porter, who wrote some twelve volumes of them under the name of 0. Henry, are apt to have a faintly dated air. The work of an amazingly prolific popular writer who had few literary pretensions and fewer literary ambitions, their in variable surprise endings have grown less surprising with the years, and the narrow ness of their range and the monotony of their mood have grown more conspicuous.

Author Williams' amiable little book of personal reminiscences of 0. Henry gives a good account of the conditions under which many of the stories were written, paints an admiring but not very clear. portrait of their author, and suggests, as its most valuable contribution, something of the flavor of life in easy-going newspaper and Bohemian circles in pre-War New York. A young reporter on the New York Sunday World when he met 0. Henry, William Wash Williams was dazzled by him from the first. The Quiet Lodger of Irving Place consequently tells little that is new about the lodger, but is a nostalgic guide book to Irving Place in the days when it was bounded by Tom Sharkey's Saloon, 'Bony Pastor's vaudeville house, and the famed Scheffel Hall that O. Henry described in "Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss."

O. Henry took a furnished room at No. 55 Irving Place in 1902. He was then be coming well-known with his magazine stories and Author Williams was sent to locate him by the Sunday World's editor, who hired O. Henry to write a story a week, for $100 apiece. Then about 40, 0. Henry was heavyset, thick-featured, brown-haired, courteous, extremely reserved about his past and generally silent in company. Author Williams had known him for years before he learned that the short-story writer had served a prison term in Ohio for embezzling a bank. The short-story writer and the cub reporter quickly became friends, with Williams showing O. Henry the city, standing with him at bars, listening to the stories of bums, streetwalkers, cranks that gave O. Henry the material of much of his fiction.

0. Henry was always broke. If he wrote more than one story a week he would sell it, then write another at the last moment for the World. If his deadline was at nine in the morning he would remark easily that he still had all night, eat a leisurely dinner, start to work late, then arrive at his surprise ending, with the precise number of words necessary, just as the deadline arrived. Indignantly denying rumors that O. Henry was blackmailed--a story that grew up to explain his large income and constant poverty--Author Williams quotes many instances of his generosity, tells some stories of it that seem somewhat more startling than he apparently realizes. Thoroughly masculine, O. Henry sometimes made Williams uncomfortable by his taste for perfumes. Distrustful of women, he refused to go to mixed parties, once left a woman he was escorting to dinner in a restaurant because he thought she was flirting with a man at another table. Author Williams lists many such peculiarities, describes O. Henry's growing nervousness under the routine of work he set for himself, ends his account with O. Henry's marriage in 1907, suggests the origin for many of his tales.

O. Henry himself described Irving Place aptly as one of those "parallelograms instead of streets . . . inhabited by laundries, decayed Knickerbocker families and Bohemians who have nothing to do with either." Disliking physical exercise, he sat in a saloon called the Club, run by a bartender named Con Delaney, who gave him the inspiration for his "The Lost Blend." O. Henry also found material in Union Square, which he described in "The Gold That Glittered." He would sit on a park bench eating peanuts, which he said were good for you if you chewed them well, and talk with the characters who drifted past until he gathered the raw material for one of the stories he wrote each Wednesday night. Although Author Williams does not make the point, readers may get the impression that the raw material was usually grimmer than O. Henry's tales. The only literary advice the master ever gave his admirer was this: "The public won't stand for a grouch."

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