Jesse S. Smith

Author, Multimedia Producer, Dad

O. Henry: Never Give Up

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O. Henry

O. Henry is one of America’s best-beloved short story authors. The writer had a number of personal problems during his lifetime, but that’s not what we remember him for. We remember him for his humor, his wit, and his touching portrayals of love and the beauty of the human spirit. Although condemned for his mistakes during his lifetime, O. Henry achieved greatness and a measure of immortality through his writings.

O. Henry (a pen name of William Sydney Porter) wrote some of America’s best-loved short stories: notably The Ransom of Red Chief, which was later made into a movie; and The Gift of the Magi, which remains a perennial Christmas favorite.

The Gift of the Magi

The Gift of the Magi of course (spoilers, I assume you have read it) is the tale of a young married couple who are living in poverty and deeply in love. Each of them wishes to buy the other something grand as a Christmas present; but neither has the means to do so. So each of them sacrifices that which is most dear to them in order to purchase a gift for the other. She sells her hair to buy a chain for his pocket watch; he pawns his pocket watch to buy her some classy hair clips. Both gifts are thus rendered tragically useless, yet all the more touching. It is a story of selflessness, of prizing someone else’s happiness above one’s own self. It is a story about generosity of spirit. It is one of the greatest American short stories of all time. And the man who wrote it was a convicted felon.

The Life and Times of O. Henry

As a young man, William Sydney Porter was known as an entertaining fellow among his friends, a storyteller and a creative personality. While working a day job at a local bank, he founded a newspaper called The Rolling Stone and filled it with his own writings: much of it satire and short stories. Although it eventually reached a peak circulation of some 1,500 subscribers, the paper was not profitable and eventually folded. We can speculate that it was perhaps to fund his beloved business that Porter committed the worst crime of his life.

Porter embezzled money from the bank where he worked. He was caught, dismissed, and after a delay, charged with the crime. Out on bail and awaiting trial, he skipped the country to avoid his trial, and hid in Honduras for six months, where his closest associate was a notorious bandit.

Porter only returned to the States because his wife was grievously ill. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to five years in prison. He published 14 short stories under pseudonyms during the years he was imprisoned. This was when he began to publish short stories under the name, O. Henry. He was released early for good behavior and, after the death of his wife, moved to New York, where he remarried and wrote the bulk of the work he is remembered for. According to Wikipedia, he authored some 381 short stories during his years in New York. This impressive tally does not count the work of his earlier life, which also included a number of poems and pieces of nonfiction, not to mention all the self-published work that he wrote for his newspaper, The Rolling Stone.

Porter was an alcoholic. His second wife left him, and he died of liver cirrhosis about two years later. It’s clear that, like many creatives, he struggled with his own internal demons; and in the end, those demons consumed him.

Never Give Up

But we remember O. Henry not for the demons that weighed him down but for the greatness of spirit that lifted him up. He never ceased to strive, never stopped creating; and although his work was not particularly financially rewarding in his own lifetime, it is that work which has lived on long after his death, moving his readers to laughter and to tears.

Never give up. Your mistakes do not define you. No matter how bad your struggles may be, there is always hope. Even if you never become well-known during your lifetime, you may be remembered for your greatest achievement long after you have passed on. So be like O. Henry and continue striving, even after the world has condemned you! Keep going, and never give up.

 

Photo: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

William Blake: Never Give Up

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"Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing" by William Blake
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing circa 1786 by William Blake

 

William Blake was a quarrelsome troublemaker: a self-published author who was not well-liked in his own time.

William Blake is now a world-famous poet, best remembered for “The Tyger” (“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night”) and other colorful children’s poems from his illustrated collection, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” We remember Blake as one of the leading voices of the Romantic Period. We recall that in his early years he associated with democratic idealists who admired the revolutionaries of America and France (prior to that ultimate “cancel culture,” the Reign of Terror with its bloody guillotine, which seems to have put Blake off his revolutionary aspirations.) We think of Blake as a man who was commissioned to illustrate a work by Mary Wollstonecraft, and thus as an idealist who was, arguably, actively involved in promoting early feminist thought.

We selectively forget that Blake’s strident views, eccentric temperament, and at times erratic behavior made him actively disliked by his contemporaries. He was bullied by the other students in his teens; he quarreled with his co-workers during his apprenticeship; he bickered with his wife; he grew angry with the wealthy patron who tried to help him reinvent himself; and to top it all off, he stood trial for sedition after a physical altercation with a soldier. (The soldier, it seems, was trespassing and exceedingly rude about it. After Blake pushed him down the street, the soldier took revenge by making false accusations that carried the death penalty: a behavior such as the evil-minded continue to do on social media to this day.)

William Blake was an engraver by trade. After completing his apprenticeship and his University studies, he ran his own printing press. Blake did not trouble himself with movable type: instead he etched his work on metal plates with acid. His work often focused more on illustration than on text: illustrations which he and his wife would color by hand after the line art came off the press. In addition to selling his own self-published books, Blake accepted commissions, illustrating and printing on behalf of the notables of his day. Unfortunately this occupation was not a path to riches, and Blake’s correspondence from his later years complains of ill health and apologetically rehearses the necessity of charging rather more than what would have been typical in those days for a printed volume.

Blake was self-righteous in his unconventional religious views. Although such poems as “Little Lamb” and “The Tyger” stress a traditional view of Jesus as savior and God the creator, Blake’s other work stridently challenged orthodoxy and, especially, organized religion of all stripes. He claimed to have experienced visions; his writings boldly questioned whether the Biblical prophets had actually spoken to God; he had little patience for the Church; and in his groundbreaking treatise, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” he argued (rather convincingly) that humanity has completely mixed up which side is “good” and which “evil.” Such arguments form a curiosity from our perspective, but one can imagine that they brought down upon him the wrath of his more conservative and moralistic neighbors.

In fact, William Blake was so widely disliked in his own time that when he approached an art dealer with a concept for illustrating Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the dealer totally screwed him over by using Blake’s concept but giving the commission to one of Blake’s friends instead, on the rationale that Blake himself was, as Wikipedia puts it, “too eccentric to produce a popular work.” Furious at the betrayal, Blake cut off his relationship with the friend in question.

There has been a good deal of speculation regarding Blake’s personal sexual morality, given his unorthodox views comparing monogamy to oppression, and his apparent interest in women other than his wife, as alluded to in his allegorical poem, “My Pretty Rose-Tree.” Although there is no indication that Blake ever actually had relations outside his marriage, just thinking about it seems to have probably fueled some of the couple’s famous marital spats.

In summary, William Blake was the very embodiment of the visionary thinker with an artistic temperament. He was brilliant, but perhaps difficult to be around at times.

Blake’s life story teaches us this one important lesson:

The work you create and the ideas you espouse are ultimately more important than your personal reputation; and this is as it should be. A quarrelsome eccentric may be immortalized for creating works of beauty and genius.

So don’t give up. Never give up.

 

 

Sources

Wikipedia. (retrieved 10-30-2020). “William Blake – Wikipedia.” Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake

William Blake, author; David V. Erdman, editor; Harold Bloom, commentary. (1988). The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. New York, NY: Anchor Books (Random House, Inc.)

Photo: “Oberon, Titania, and Puck with Fairies Dancing” by William Blake, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Emily Dickinson: Never Give Up

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Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was unpublished and virtually unknown in her own lifetime.*

Like many modern introverts, Dickinson was most comfortable communicating through the medium of the written word. The famous recluse was a frequent correspondent, and sent many letters to her friends, often including poems with her communications.

Most of Dickinson’s best-known poems are from her earlier work. These pieces were carefully copied in her best handwriting onto tidy sheets of folded stationery, and hand-bound with string. The booklets she made in this manner are described as “fascicles” by Dickinson scholars. Of the nearly 1,800 surviving Dickinson poems, more than 1,000 were copied and hand-bound into fascicles. Of these poems, the vast majority appear to have been composed or transcribed between about 1858 and 1865, when the poet was in her late twenties and early thirties.

After 1865, Dickinson abruptly ceased her previously prodigious output, and stopped copying her work into bound fascicles. The reason is not immediately clear. We do know that her beloved dog died, and a household servant departed and was not replaced. Perhaps she fell into an episode of depression, and felt overwhelmed, as often happens to creative types. Perhaps she despaired of getting her work formally published: possibly because it was too personal, or possibly due to the sexism of the nineteenth-century printing industry, or possibly for other complex family or personal dynamics. This gets into the realm of speculation. Regardless, after having written more than 900 poems in the four years leading up to 1865, she wrote only 65 poems in the following six years, and bound none of them into fascicles. She resumed writing poems at a much slower pace after about 1871, but was much less concerned with getting these later pieces into a finished final state, and left most of them in loose-leaf form, without making final decisions regarding alternate wording. To the outside observer, looking back in time, it appears as though Emily Dickinson despaired that her poetry would ever be important to anyone other than herself or perhaps a small circle of close friends.  Her own family seems to have been unaware of her fascicles containing hundreds of brilliant poems, until they were discovered among her belongings after her death.

And yet, Emily Dickinson is now well-beloved for such memorable poems as “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.”  She is now widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century, and one of the greatest American poets of all time.

Don’t give up. Never give up.

 

Notes

*Although ten of Dickinson’s poems were printed in various newspapers during her lifetime, those were published anonymously, with no attribution, and without her permission.

 

Sources

Emily Dickinson, author; Cristanne Miller, editor, introduction and notes. (2016). Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press (Harvard University Press).

Emily Dickinson Museum. (retrieved 10-27-2020). The Publication Question. Retrieved from https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/poetry/the-poet-at-work/the-publication-question/

Wikipedia. (retrieved 10-27-2020). Emily Dickinson. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson.

Photo: Wikipedia

 

Sir Thomas Malory: Never Give Up

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Don’t give up!

Imprisoned for life, Sir Thomas Malory reframed an existing story.  In the process, he created a timeless classic.  After his death, Malory’s retelling of the tales of King Arthur was among the first books ever printed, when Caxton got a printing press.   Malory’s works have come down through the ages and are now  widely considered the standard canonical text of the King Arthur legends.

Sir Thomas Malory was a soldier.  After the war, he seems to have failed to adapt to civilian life.  One might speculate that his behavior (and his writing style) may have been consistent with PTSD with underlying bipolar disorder. The details are obscure, but in one way or another this eventually led to his being imprisoned for many years.

Self-righteous judgmental modern haters (such as the pathetic weak-faced coward who I saw interviewed in a recent TV documentary) love to exaggerate the salacious nature of the alleged crimes of which Malory was accused. That’s because losers try to make themselves feel better about their useless lives by lobbing false accusations at the great.

But the learned and highly esteemed Professor Helen Cooper of Cambridge University (editor of the Winchester Manuscript) has suggested that Malory’s alleged crimes may have been completely misrepresented in the legal record.

According to Cooper, Malory’s actual crime was probably that he had an affair with another man’s wife. In those days, women were treated as property, and her husband did not give consent. Therefore, Malory was imprisoned on what we would now consider false charges.

When he got out of prison after many years, Malory apparently took revenge by breaking into a parsonage, among other things.  One might speculate (based on nothing but pure imagination) that he went on a drunken crime spree. This poor choice resulted in his being sent back to prison for the rest of his life.

While in prison, Sir Thomas Malory created one of the pivotal works of English culture: Le Morte d’Arthur. This inspired, romantic, adventurous, magical book has become the source of all the familiar tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

Malory compiled, translated, paraphrased, condensed, and expanded his comprehensive handwritten version of the King Arthur stories from a variety of extant texts, most of them written either in French or in an already-antiquated dialect of English. It was a very scholarly endeavor requiring considerable thought, enthusiasm, inspiration, and boundless love for his subject matter. Malory’s frenetic prose style reveals a manic, unstoppable personality that shines through in his endless run-on sentences and limitless creativity. One pictures him, shivering and coughing in his prison cell, frantically scribbling on stacks of parchment paper, trying to get the entire Bible-sized tome completed before his life runs out.

One feels Malory’s personal connection to his subject matter in his (for the times) risque description of Lancelot’s love affair with Queen Guinevere.  One senses Malory’s tormented soul as Lancelot confesses his sins and receives forgiveness from the hermit Nacien. Time and again, Malory’s narrative (especially later in the book) returns to themes of forgiveness, grace, and the pure love of the Creator spirit.

No matter what mistakes this man may have made in his life, his work has something to teach us all in our lives.

So don’t give up! Never give up.  No matter what mistakes you may have made in your life, you still have something of value to share with the world.

Never Give Up – The Series

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broken sign reads, "Your mistakes do not define you."

Don’t give up. Never give up. When life gets you down and things aren’t going your way, just remember that there is always hope. You can achieve something important and make a meaningful impact on other people’s lives.

Even if you have made mistakes and poor choices in your life; even if you are not well-known or well-liked in your own time; even if you have been ostracized and vilified by your community: these distinctions place you in the company of the greats, people like Ovid, Dante, Sir Thomas Malory, and Emily Dickinson.

This series will discuss some of history’s greatest writers, poets, and playwrights who suffered disfavor or obscurity in their own lifetimes. Their life stories demonstrate the point that “meritocracy” is a myth (or at best, unreliable). Traditional “success” is not a measure of greatness. Creative genius and “success” are not the same thing. You might be one of the most brilliant creators of your era and yet die in obscurity, having never made a living from the work that you will be remembered for, as happened to Herman Melville and so many others.

I hope this series will provide inspiration to aspiring artists, authors, poets, and playwrights. No matter what happens, there is still hope. Keep going, keep trying, keep creating, keep doing!

As Aragorn said just before the vast army of orcs stormed Helm’s Deep: “There is always hope.”

 

 

Winnie-the-Pooh: Antihero

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Winnie-the-Pooh is an antihero.

And yet, when one thinks of antiheroes, one recalls the young truant Holden Caufield; the foolish semi-autobiographical criminals of Trainspotting and Fight Club and Crime & Punishment and The Beach and The Battle of Hillsboro; the complex disturbed mind of a Russell Banks protagonist, such as Wade Whitehouse in Affliction; and even the selfish young Nicholas Urfe of The Magus by John Fowles.

One does not immediately think of Winnie the Pooh.

But an antihero Pooh bear is, and this is why.

Not a Hero

A proper hero, according to the blog post I read a while ago that inspired this series, should know what is going on; should embody the morality of the audience; should have a plan for the situation based on their morality and their understanding of the situation; and should use their personal force of will (“agency”) to implement their plan and shape events to their will.

Winnie-the-Pooh, by contrast, has no idea what is going on; has no apparent personal philosophy or underlying morality; has no plan; and rather than shaping events to his will, tends to get swept along by events, which turn out for the best most of the time anyway because he is the main character in a children’s story.

Selfish, Greedy, Silly Ol’ Bear

Let us take, for example, the famous story of Pooh’s visit to Rabbit. This story is told in the first Winnie-the-Pooh book, titled Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, in the chapter, “In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets Into a Tight Place.”

Winnie-the-Pooh is wandering about aimlessly with no particular plan when he finds himself passing by Rabbit’s house. Being an incredibly self-centered individual, Pooh thinks to himself, “Rabbit means Company… and Company means Food and Listening-to-me-Humming.” Far from altruistic, this is the ultimate in self-centeredness. Pooh decides to stop by Rabbit’s house in hopes that Rabbit will feed him and indulge his musical experimentation.

Pooh sticks his head down the rabbit hole and asks if anyone is home. Rabbit, well aware of who the company is and exactly what Pooh wants, answers “No! … Nobody.” He wants Pooh to go away because he is well aware that Pooh is a selfish, annoying person who will eat all of Rabbit’s food. But Pooh rudely presses the point, takes advantage of social niceties to compel Rabbit to feed him, ignores Rabbit’s social cues when Rabbit would rather put the rest of the honey back in the pantry, and soon eats all of Rabbit’s honey. Hardly a hero, at this point Pooh is the villain of the story. To make matters worse, Pooh has overindulged to the point where he can no longer fit through the door, and gets stuck. Pooh is cuddly and lovable and sweet, but he is really a terrible person.

The Tao of Pooh

Benjamin Hoff makes a similar point in his popular book, The Tao of Pooh. Drawing the parallel between Pooh’s behavior and the Taoist philosophy of “not-doing,” Hoff explains:

“The surest way to become Tense, Awkward and Confused is to develop a mind that tries too hard – one that thinks too much. The animals in the Forest don’t think too much; they just Are.”

This is a different element of the antihero (and a Taoist philosophical practice that I badly need to master in my own life), but still a marked contrast with the ideal of the Hero with a Plan that Succeeds. Putting into practice (with no effort or conscious thought) the Taoist philosophy of not-doing, Pooh just sort of lets things happen. He is the antithesis of the forward-thinking planner. He doesn’t know what is going on, because he is a Bear of Very Little Brain. And that is precisely why we love him. And that, in turn, is why the world needs antiheroes, every bit as much as it needs heroes.