December 10, 1905—The Sunday magazine section of the New York World published a short story by a hopeless romantic named William Sidney Porter—better known to his growing readership by the pen name O. Henry—that became one of the most enduring of Christmas tales, “The Gift of the Magi.”
You don’t have to take forever to turn out a literary classic. Nathaniel Hawthorne turned out The Scarlet Letter in six weeks; William Faulkner claimed that Sanctuary was a “potboiler,” though most modern criticism thinks otherwise. And “The Gift of the Magi” (originally printed as “Gifts of the Magi”) resulted from O. Henry sitting down in Pete’s Tavern, a watering hole on Irving Place in Manhattan, and not stopping until, two hours later, he had achieved a tale with his trademark surprise ending, but also with a mixture of poignancy and irony that has made this one of the truly classic Yuletide tales.
The story has a simple premise: Della, a young newlywed, wants to give her husband Jim a gift worthy of him, but she is desperately poor. The only way she can pay for a fob to go with his grandfather’s watch is to cut off and sell her gorgeous long hair. At the same time, not knowing of her sacrifice, Jim pawns that same watch so he can pay for a comb she can use for the same hair. The couple discover their mistake on Christmas, and laugh it off.
More than a century ago, O. Henry had already anticipated the difficulties inherent in the commercialization of Christmas. The cost of goods might have changed, but not the emotions of generosity and love that lies at the heart of the holiday spirit.
(Or, at least, it does in what poet Thomas Gray called “the short and simple annals of the poor.” One suspects that if a similar event transpired in the Trump household, The Donald would announce to the offending party, after a merciless grilling over how they could not have foreseen this eventuality, “You’re fired!”)
Kevin Fallon’s recent appreciation of the tale for The Atlantic offers an incisive reading of this much-anthologized short story. But I suspect that something of a generation gap exists between him and—well, me.
In considering adaptations of the short story, he offers the following:
* An episode of Glee. Sorry, I didn’t watch any episode of this show until Thanksgiving.
* Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978), with Bert and Ernie reprising, in effect, the role of the young couple. By the time this episode appeared, I was studying for finals in college—well beyond the show’s core audience.
You don’t have to take forever to turn out a literary classic. Nathaniel Hawthorne turned out The Scarlet Letter in six weeks; William Faulkner claimed that Sanctuary was a “potboiler,” though most modern criticism thinks otherwise. And “The Gift of the Magi” (originally printed as “Gifts of the Magi”) resulted from O. Henry sitting down in Pete’s Tavern, a watering hole on Irving Place in Manhattan, and not stopping until, two hours later, he had achieved a tale with his trademark surprise ending, but also with a mixture of poignancy and irony that has made this one of the truly classic Yuletide tales.
The story has a simple premise: Della, a young newlywed, wants to give her husband Jim a gift worthy of him, but she is desperately poor. The only way she can pay for a fob to go with his grandfather’s watch is to cut off and sell her gorgeous long hair. At the same time, not knowing of her sacrifice, Jim pawns that same watch so he can pay for a comb she can use for the same hair. The couple discover their mistake on Christmas, and laugh it off.
More than a century ago, O. Henry had already anticipated the difficulties inherent in the commercialization of Christmas. The cost of goods might have changed, but not the emotions of generosity and love that lies at the heart of the holiday spirit.
(Or, at least, it does in what poet Thomas Gray called “the short and simple annals of the poor.” One suspects that if a similar event transpired in the Trump household, The Donald would announce to the offending party, after a merciless grilling over how they could not have foreseen this eventuality, “You’re fired!”)
Kevin Fallon’s recent appreciation of the tale for The Atlantic offers an incisive reading of this much-anthologized short story. But I suspect that something of a generation gap exists between him and—well, me.
In considering adaptations of the short story, he offers the following:
* An episode of Glee. Sorry, I didn’t watch any episode of this show until Thanksgiving.
* Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978), with Bert and Ernie reprising, in effect, the role of the young couple. By the time this episode appeared, I was studying for finals in college—well beyond the show’s core audience.
The Gift of Love (1978), starring Marie Osmond. I have one ready-made excuse about missing this one (see above), and yet another: I have never been in the habit of watching Osmond Family TV appearances, nor by individual members of same.
* The Gift of the Magi, a one-hour musical adaptation (1958) starring Gordon MacRae. This premiered before I was born and I had not seen it even mentioned anywhere on this planet until Fallon’s piece.
The one adaptation I have seen—which, for some odd reason or other, Fallon doesn’t mention—would have to be, I’m willing to wager, one of the best, if not the best, of the whole bunch. It’s a 15-minute adaptation that appeared in a wonderful film “anthology” of five stories by the fiction master, O. Henry’s Full House (1952). If you ever have a chance, catch it.
The last time I recall that Hollywood attempted a similar anthology film was New York Stories, and the results were uneven. (Woody Allen’s entry, “Oedipus Wrecks,” was hilarious; Martin Scorcese’s “Life Stories,” okay; Francis Coppola’s “Life Without Zoe,” overly derivative of the Eloise stories.)
In contrast, there isn’t a bad segment in the O. Henry project, though my favorite remains, overwhelmingly, “The Ransom of Red Chief.” (The idea of Fred Allen and Oscar Levant as cranky would-be kidnappers is hysterical.)
But “Gift of the Magi,” with Farley Granger and Jeanne Crain in the roles of Jim and Della, measures up to the poignancy of the original story. (The two actors are in the image accompanying this post.) Director Henry King had come off a pair of extremely well-done psychologically oriented action films with Gregory Peck (Twelve O’Clock High and The Gunfighter), and his winning streak continued with this small-scale piece. (Ironically, over the next decade, he would be unable to bring this same delicacy of touch to two ambitious 20th-century literary classics--Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.)
Jim and Della are, in the best possible senses, fools for love. So was their creator, who, in that respect--and a few others--resembles Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald, of course, was mad--often literally so--for his Zelda. O. Henry was so devoted to his first wife Athol that, though he could have safely stayed out of the country until embezzlement charges against him blew over, he chose to return when he learned she was dying of tuberculosis, and went away in prison for a stretch for his devotion.
Both writers were highly competent professionals who made a fortune turning out short stories, but ended up in constant financial straits--partly because of severe problems with alcohol.
Both writers also lived peripatetic lives, even ending up, at one point or another, in the same small Southern city: Asheville, N.C. Fitzgerald visited it while Zelda was institutionalized there in the 1930s. O. Henry’s second wife, Sara Coleman Porter, was a native of the city, and she had him buried beside her and their daughter.
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