Sealed The Gift of the Magi and Other O Henry Stories Read by Julie Harris and Ed Begley Vinyl Record Album LP retailer Mammon and the Archer

The Gift of the Magi and Other O Henry Stories Read is an album read by Julie Harris and Ed Begley. It also includes the stories Mammon and the Archer, The Cop and the Anthem, and Between Rounds. From the back cover: In these four stories, O. Henry offers you the “Friendliest, Most Satisfying Service" of a supermarket. He invites you to look up and observe the varied surface of humanity reflected in a mirror that shows the entire store. It seems to be magical, because each person there possesses some extraordinary quality, each carries his happy destiny with him. Clearly, here is a reflection of what appears to be everyday life, but altered by the author's exaggeration.

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The Gift of the Magi and Other O Henry Stories Read by Julie Harris and Ed Begley

Vinyl: Factory Sealed
Cover: Factory Sealed, some shrink open at edge, mild shelf wear, edge bumps

Side 1
The Gift Of The Magi (Read By Julie Harris)
Mammon And The Archer (Read By Ed Begley)

Side 2
The Cop And The Anthem (Read By Ed Begley)
Between Rounds. (Read By Ed Begley)
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His own life taught the author the surprising possibilities of the average citizen. If, for the supermarket manager, you substitute a teenager working in a drug store of the 1880's, you have William Sydney Porter (O. Henry, his pen name). There in Greensboro, North Carolina, he absorbed the picturesque view through which the local color writers enlarged romantically upon the Reconstruction South. At 20, when he moved to a Texas ranch, he adopted the Western tall tale. Three years in the Federal Penitentiary in Ohio (for embezzlement of funds when he was a bank teller in Austin) introduced him to a greater variety of people and gave him time to write. Perhaps it also gave him the determination to become successful in New York — the “Baghdad on the Subway” where popular magazines displayed his wares and made him famous. He died there in his forties. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, another writer who responded to the magical promises of life, he used up his energy worrying about money, his family, and the publishers' deadlines.

The Gift of the Magi, which met one of these deadlines, celebrates an extraordinarily unselfish love in what the author ironically calls “the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children.” Some readers find the tale contrived and sentimental;others admire the economy with which the single effect is achieved. Whichever you decide, the method is exaggeration. For example, the fragments and choppy movement of the opening lines suggest the extreme haste and desperation of Della, the very simple wife. The pattern of feelings rises from the depths of sobs to the height of smiling. At first all we see is “a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard.” At the end the face of the young husband, Jim, assures us that the beautiful hair will again flow down Della's back like “a cascade of brown waters," so beautiful that the Queen of Sheba's bright jewels and gifts depreciate by comparison. In the last line the young couple ascend to the level of the Magi, the Wise Men of the Christmas story in the Bible.

The title, Mammon and the Archer, contrasts the extremes of the New Testament demon of riches with Cupid, the pagan god of love. The people caricature the Nice Boy (Richard), the Sentimentalist (Aunt Ellen), the Socially-Proper Girl (Miss Lantry), and the Self-Made Man (Anthony Rockwall), who makes Eureka Soap and whose voice was so loud that it had once “chipped off pieces of the welkin (sky) on the Kansas prairies.” Exaggeration again dominates the climactic scene, the traffic jam, the worst in the history of New York: “It was two hours before a snake could get below Greeley's statue (that is, a short distance from the intersection where the congestion started).”

An author who could note “I would like to live a lifetime in each street in New York” could juxtapose the plushy world of Rockwall with Mrs. Murphy's boarding house in Between Rounds. Again the leading characters are extraordinary — this time Irish and humorous. Again the picturesque details shine out — as this time in the surge of the sidewalk with Mrs. Murphy plowing back and forth “like a soft mountain down which plunged an audible cataract of tears.” But here the anecdote remains slim so that O. Henry can play up the language of the Irish immigrant and his own irony. Listen for malapropisms as in “Tis no more than exercisin' the acrimony of a gentleman when we ask the dissent of ladies blockin' the way for steppin' between them,” and the punning “We would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.” Do not miss the irony of the title. As O. Henry commented in another story, no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love and ..." the McCaskeys tasted fully and lived happily in the slums.

Crowded, vast New York City – “This mischievous and marvelous monument”. (wrote E. B. White) again towers over The Cop and the Anthem. From Soapy's exaggerated view it seems a place "silent, grim, colossal.” His extreme desperation is equalled only by his enormous self-delusion, for he acts out of character most of the story. Part of the fun lies in the discrepancy between what is and what Soapy expects; for example, “He seemed doomed to liberty” Listen to the mock heroic opening. Hear the excessive alliteration that underscores absurdity in "Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.” Who is to say that Soapy wanted the wrong thing? At last his true self responded to the church anthem heard in a romantic setting near a street “damaged by improvements.” He was "cemented to the iron fence, for he had known it (the anthem) well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars.”

After recognizing the virtues in people like Soapy as exaggerated in O. Henry's supermarket mirror, one must agree that the average man or woman will prevail. What comfort there is in knowing that love can surmount poverty, that crime and marital quarrels can be funny, and eyen a traffic jam, purposeful. Morris Ernst, lawyer and author, once suggested that the mass media should report “the good news of which our republic is so full” instead of “pictures of mayhem, mugging, and murder." O. Henry emphasizes good news — and retailer not just for the people of his era. -FRANK R. SHIVERS, JR. Friends School, Baltimore

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