I have a tentative plan this year to read more short story collections from some of my favorite authors. Thus far, I’ve read Jack London’s Stories of the North (1965) and Minority Report and Other Stories (2004) by Philip K. Dick. It’s slow going, but you should see the stack of books that await me! This could take me a while.

I chose Cabbages and Kings as my next read because, come on, it’s O. Henry! And this is his first published work (1904).

Descriptions of this book call it “a collection of related stories,” though after having read it, I’m not sure why they don’t just call these 19 stories a novel. I mean after all, aren’t the chapters in a novel nothing more than snippets of “a related story”?

Because I like to review stories individually, I intended the same for this book, though honestly, by the end it felt like I was just summarizing chapters. So I don’t know how this review will hold up—-if nothing else, treat is as an amateur’s Cliff Notes on the book most famous for coining the phrase “banana republic.”

1. “The Proem: By the Carpenter” – I recall from two decades ago when I first purchased the Complete Works of O. Henry that it’s good to read his stories with a dictionary close at hand. It’s not that he wrote with intentional obscurity, but because he wrote more than a century ago, and some of his terms then-common have now turned archaic. In this preamble (“Proem”), he doesn’t use archaic language, but he does include some Spanish phrases that I wanted to look up, because I like to know what I’m reading! It’s important to note that this collection of short stories is linked together, so one cannot quite expect from these stories what they normally might expect from O. Henry, tightly packaged stories with surprise endings. This introduction fits that bill, supplying the setting of Anchuria, a fabled island nation in the Caribbean upon which the American pirate Goodwin and his new bride, Senorita Guilbert live in simple luxury.

2. “Fox-in-the-Morning” – This story takes us back to the moment when the President of Anchuria made off both with $100k of the nation’s treasury and with the opera sensation Senorita Guilbert herself. Of this woman, “They say she’s got all the ladies of mythology, sculpture, and fiction reduced to chromos” (chromos, short for chromolithograph, or the colored picture of the day). In other words, she’s quite a looker. We meet Goodwin, apparently an American diplomat, who’s just received advanced word by telegram of the President’s abdication. The “cryptic” telegram is written in American slang from the time period, a language that the Anchurian spies couldn’t have figured out. I understood most of it, except “we need the spandulicks” (money).

3. “The Lotus and the Bottle” – Here we meet the American Consul, 24yo Geddie. Haunted by a lover spurned, of whom he’s reminded in the newspaper, he proposes to his native beauty in hopes of forgetting Ida forever. A chance walk upon the beach brings him upon a message in a bottle, which he swears must have come from Ida herself. He ends up risking his life to save it.

4. “Smith” – We meet Smith who steps off his yacht hoping to meet the Consul Geddie and doctor Gregg. Goodwin is here too, and I’m happy Smith isn’t named “Griffith.” Smith seems to be your average traveler, but his careful, suspicious watching of another ship off the coast makes one wonder.

5. “Caught” – An exciting story that ties us back to the beginning, answering many of the questions which arose in the Proem, yet not all. There must have been a thick line distinguishing chapters from stories back in 1904. This style of writing has become far more popular in recent decades, each chapter highlighting the experiences of a different character until all their various threads bind together into a cord.

6. “Cupid’s Exile Number Two” – “The trouble began, as often begins instead of ending, with a romance.” Geddie’s replacement is Johnny Atwood of Alabama, a lazy youth who’s filled the tropical outpost and couldn’t care less about the work: “You can’t expect a Democrat to work during his first term of office.”

7. “The Phonograph and the Graft” – A good story about an honest graft, though please note that this one contains some racial slurs in passing. Two men figure out a con to play against the simple natives of Anchuria and make a week of it. But along the way they meet Mellinger who’s found that best way to con the folks in these islands of deception is with honesty, the rarest of qualities.

8. “Money Maze” – Colonel Falcon of the new regime is sent to the town to investigate just where the $100k went. Of course, we learn that both Godwin and Guilbert know where it’s gone as they sit in their palatial mansion.

9. “The Admiral” – Of Felipe, O. Henry writes, “He was a perfect sailor, if an imperfect man.” Quite the introduction of Anchuria’s new Navy: a confiscated smugglers ship, a mentally disabled man as Admiral whose uniform was made piecemeal from whatever he could find. This was the first instance of “a maritime banana Republic,” a term that O. Henry coined.

10. “The Flag Paramount” – It turns out The Admiral is short lived! A traitor convinces him to give him an official ride aboard his ship before mutiny strikes and the entire navy is defeated in a single blow.

11. “The Shamrock and the Palm” – A great anecdote from an Irishman about how he was bamboozled by a politician in Guatemala who convinced him to leave new Orleans to help with a revolution when in fact he just wanted him on the railroad building team. After escaping with the man in a banana boat, he turns the tables and returns the favor.

12. “The Remnants of the Code” – Beelzebub Blythe, a drunkard of the town has a piece of news that Goodwin would be willing to pay top dollar to keep secret.

13. “Shoes” – Such amusement! What began as a practical joke about the open market for a shoe store among the barefoot natives may very well turn into an economic boon for Coralio.

14. “Ships” – The shoes attempt worked and took Johnny back to America with his girl. Keough takes over as consul and with one last bow, Johnny’s prank lands home against the guy he intended to be his friend.

15. “Masters of Arts” – Keough convinces an American artist pal to come pay a $10k trick on the new dictator of Anchuria, and it turns out not as you might expect, unless you expect an O.Henry-type ending. I’d certainly like to see a recreation of this painting, if some fan every made one!

16. “Dicky” – This was the most incomplete of tales yet, or at least the one most lacking in immediate answers to the why’s introduced. Dicky and Pasa are brand new characters and they get in a scrape and out of it but that’s about it.

17. “Rouge et Noir” – So this book is definitely a chapter-based novel way more than a collection of short stories. Dockery the Red Irishman does surprise us in this chapter, so I guess it was worth reading on.

18. “Two Recalls” – The O. Henry twist you’ve been waiting for! He doesn’t say it outright, but we know who the real Miraflores is. This chapter gets the clearest “banana republic” mention from former Detective O’Day.

19. “The Vitagraphoscope” – An artistic flourish at the end that’s…more suggestive of a capstone that it actually is. But as O. Henry tells the readers plainly,  “Whoever sits the show out may find, if he will, the slender thread that binds together, though ever so slightly, the story that, perhaps, only the Walrus will understand.”

As my long-overdue reintroduction to the writings of O.Henry, this was unexpectedly long but pleasurable to read. It had its romance and mystery and tropical feel, but above all its spots of humor that make O. Henry’s writings so enjoyable to read. I look forward to reading his next published work, The Four Million (1906).

©2022 E.T.