His Writers' Workshop? A Prison Cell

The life of William Sydney Porter came with a twist at the end. The man who achieved fame under the pen name "O. Henry" had spent more than three years in federal prison on embezzlement charges—a secret that he carried to his grave when he died on June 5, 1910. Not even his daughter knew. It took the investigations of a professor, C. Alphonso Smith of the University of Virginia, to unearth the startling truth. Shrewd observers might have guessed that Porter was hiding something. During his decade-long run as one of America's best-loved writers, which included authorship of "The Gift of the Magi," he avoided conversations about his past. He turned down requests for interviews. He dodged cameras. Yet when Smith announced his discovery in 1916, the effect was the opposite of what Porter had feared. Rather than shunning him as a criminal, the public became fascinated by a personal history that might have been lifted from one of his own tales.

I know the name, but not his work. And I seem to remember there is a bar near Union Square, below Gramercy Park, that is named O'Henry. I've been there, maybe when I worked at MetLife. So I went searching on the Web, and found it via Google maps.

Pete's Tavern, on 18th Street and Irving Place, that's the place. Here is the banner from its website. Also, a picture from Panoramio.

That's what I remember.

Pete's Tavern first opened its doors in 1864. From that date to today it has remained open. This achievement makes Pete's Tavern both an official historical landmark and the longest continuously operating bar and restaurant in New York City. It even stayed open during Prohibition: disguised as a flower shop. Pete's Tavern is proud of its history and steadfastly maintains its traditions. It still looks as exactly as it did when its most celebrated regular O. Henry wrote the classic Gift of The Magi here at his favorite booth by the front doors, in 1902.

From its website, some of its history.

One hundred years after his death, Porter's legacy as a master of the short story appears secure. In his hometown of Greensboro, N.C., the local historical museum plans to reopen next month after extensive renovations. It will include a new section on O. Henry. In Texas, where Porter spent his early adulthood, there are museums devoted to him in Austin and San Antonio. In New York, his final home, the book industry selects a set of O. Henry Prize Stories each year and publishes them in a special volume.

Which is curious, based on this next paragraph: Lots of high-school students still receive a taste of O. Henry, but college professors rarely put his work on their syllabi. To be sure, the bulk of Porter's output was middling. He specialized in pleasant diversions whose main purpose was to entertain. The tales can feel contrived. Even the best bear the marks of hasty composition. Several legends surround the writing of "The Gift of the Magi," but all agree that Porter cranked it out under deadline pressure in just two or three hours. Despite the story's popular appeal, it's easy to believe that "The Gift of the Magi" would have benefited from a second draft.


If so, if his work is middling, why did O.Henry become so well regarded?

Imprisoned by Clichés, Laments and Exposition

Jorge Martín's opera "Before Night Falls" given its premiere recently by the Fort Worth Opera, is based on the memoir by the dissident Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas. Tortured and imprisoned by the Castro regime, Arenas was forced to repudiate his writings and his identity as a gay man; a few years after escaping to New York in the Mariel boatlift, he was stricken with AIDS and committed suicide. It's a subject with great possibilities, but Mr. Martín, who wrote his own libretto in collaboration with the memoir's translator, Dolores M. Koch, outlines the story without really making the audience live it. The Arenas character, Rey, is onstage for every scene of its 2½ hours of music, singing about his suffering, but it's never clear what it was that he wrote that was so threatening to the regime. And as lament follows lament, Rey never seems to change.

More than Communists, Cubans in power and with influence are machos, and homosexuality is not accepted.

Most of the opera is exposition and lamentation without dramatic tension, so it's a relief when an actual antagonist—Victor, the Castro hardliner—finally starts torturing Rey by burning his manuscript and knocking him around in prison. The most dramatic moment comes when Victor forces Rey to watch a television broadcast of Ovidio, Rey's mentor, denouncing his own writing and that of his friends, including Rey. And although one of Rey's greatest crimes in Cuba was to be homosexual, that fact, though much talked about, gets little expression, except in two gauzily homoerotic group ballets (cue those harp glissandos). Perhaps in deference to the sensibilities of Fort Worth, we never see Rey in a love relationship with a man.

Forth Worth sensibilities?

A magnum opus for Ransom

Austin, Texas


Even without a Texas nexus, it's an excellent fit: Magnum's huge archive of press prints—some predating the founding of the venerated photographers' cooperative in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others—has arrived at the University of Texas's Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center here. (The archive was recently bought by the private investment firm of computer magnate Michael Dell; the Ransom Center will catalog and exhibit it for at least five years.) To reposition itself in today's digital marketplace, Magnum will use the funds realized from the two tractor trailers full of what it produced so well using old-school technology. The Ransom Center, having recently celebrated its own 50th anniversary, will continue doing what it only seems to get better at: collecting and preserving the paper trails of many media, including the materials just deaccessioned by Magnum.
deaccessioned: the process of legally removing objects from a repository/museum's collections.

 Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos - 

Cartier-Bresson's 'Place de l'Europe. Gare Saint Lazare' (1932).

At last count, Ransom's large building on the UT campus houses 36 million manuscript pages, one million rare or significant books, five million photographs, and 10,000 objects, from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter to the sunglasses Gloria Swanson wore in "Sunset Boulevard." While many of Ransom's 70,000 annual visitors come to gawk at its Gutenberg Bible (one of only 48 complete copies) or the first photograph taken in nature by Joseph Niepce in 1826, what places Ransom in the rarefied company of research libraries like Harvard's Houghton, Yale's Beinecke or the Library of Congress is the breadth and depth of its 20th-century British and American collections.

Most of the contents are accessible to anyone with an I.D. and a wish-list. Simply walk in and you can soon be rifling (carefully) through acid-free boxes of Tennessee Williams's papers, as Vanessa Redgrave did when she went searching for a certain previously unpublished, unproduced Williams play. Or you can have a look at Ezra Pound's copy of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," in which the poet scribbled "For E.P., miglior fabbro, from T.S.E."—the mold that grew on the inside cover is left as provenance; Pound buried it in Italy to protect it during the war.

The Ransom Center was named for its founder, Harry Huntt Ransom, an English professor and then university chancellor, who decided in the 1950s that Texas needed its own Bibliothèque Nationale. Rather than compete, so late in the game, for rare books with long-established libraries, Ransom took the unconventional tack of pursuing the prepublication manuscripts and archives of late-19th- and 20th-century British and American writers, for which little market then existed. (Not so now.) Flush with funds from university oil revenues, the "Great Acquisitor," as Ransom was called, snapped up the collections of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw, to name a few, as well as many nonliterary archives, such as that of theatrical and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, and 5,000 boxes of producer David O. Selznick's papers.

The Harry Ransom Center - The Magnum archives arrive at the Ransom Center.

Enter Thomas F. Staley, a James Joyce scholar, who took the helm of the Ransom Center in 1988, 12 years after Ransom's death. Among the 100 archives he's scored for the Ransom during his tenure are those of British playwrights Tom Stoppard, John Osborne, David Hare and Arnold Wesker, as well as those of writers David Mamet, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively and the Ransom's largest single-author collection, the 10-ton archive of Norman Mailer. Today most of the funding for Mr. Staley's acquisitions—including the $5 million tab in 2003 for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's Watergate papers and $2.5 million in 2005 for Mailer's—comes from the endowments of private sources he so adroitly cultivates. (As for the Magnum acquisition, MSD Capital, L.P. would not divulge the pricetag, but a source familiar with the transaction said the Ransom has insured it for more than $100 million.)

Affable, kinetic and with an impish sense of humor, the 74-year-old Mr. Staley conducts operations from an office whose decor and contents feel slightly at odds with the contemporary setting: rare books mingle in antique bookcases with Joyce journals and review copies of new books; the walls are covered with autographed memorabilia from the past century. An Eve Arnold photo of Marilyn Monroe, sitting in a playground reading "Ulysses," fairly leaps off the wall.


Mr. Staley typically looks at up to five collections a month, adding that while he "certainly could not imagine a Virginia Woolf doing this, more authors today are aware of the possibilities and try to negotiate their archives during their lifetimes because they need the money." Mr. Staley's ability to tap deep pockets—quickly—for an acquisition is legendary. As a result, he says, "we get a shot at many of them, the first-refusals."

Steve McCurry / Magnum
Steve McCurry's famous photo 'Pakistan. Peshawar. 1984. Afghan Girl at Nasir Bagh refugee camp' is part of the collection.

In a shrewd game of what he stresses is "chess, not checkers," Mr. Staley keeps three different tiers of authors on his radar screen, looking for those likely to be future subjects of literary scholarship. (A group of curatorial-minded younger readers scouts collectable younger talent.) He stays in personal touch and also monitors the writers' personal (read: financial) circumstances. He knows the dealers, is friends with many of the writers, and has terrific stories of hard-ball negotiations—successful or not—with an Osborne (who held out during his lifetime; his widow subsequently made the deal with Mr. Staley) or a Wesker (who made lunch for Mr. Staley at his home in Wales and showed him his archive, stored in a damp barn covered with plastic, in hopes of getting Mr. Staley to up his offer—he didn't). Mr. Staley also tells of the fun he had, in the early '90s, marshaling a "minyan" of Texans for the funds to "get I.B. Singer's archive out of New York."

More on Photography

Robert Adams's Heart of Darkness

He makes frequent forays to London and delights in the serendipity of stumbling upon a folder of moldy, mouse-nibbled Beckett and Harold Pinter letters while poking around Stoppard's barn, helping the playwright pack up his papers for Austin. But it would be hard to top his discovery, years ago, while inventorying a newly acquired collection of Joyce papers, of some onionskin leaves that Mr. Staley "realized were the famous lost link, the missing draft with Joyce's corrections in his own hand to the opening of 'Finnegans Wake'—an item more valuable than the price we had paid for the entire collection." This is empirical proof of Mr. Staley's axiom that "10% of an archive represents 90% of its value, and 90% of an archive is worth 10% of the price."

That great sucking sound made by the exodus of the papers of so many British writers from "over there" to here has understandably generated some push-back from across the pond, some going so far as to denounce it as "cultural vandalism." Others blame their own for simply lacking the cultural chutzpah of a Tom Staley.


Ms. Lewis writes about the arts for the Journal from Austin, Texas.
* ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
* MARCH 25, 2010


A Magnum Opus for Ransom
By Anne S. Lewis