Reading literature is a slow business, unhurried, steady, pick-and-shovel work through an often at first unyielding field of words. Forgetting that makes what is valuable a frustration, and we risk leaving the literary land before there’s fruit to harvest.
The American author O. Henry (the pen name of William Sidney Porter) was a prolific writer of short stories, among them a particularly short one entitled “The Last Leaf.” This is a tale about art and sickness and will and breakthrough, and as the story begins, after introducing the artists Johnsy and Sue, there appears this passage:
In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores….
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.
What stands out most prominently in the passage is the figure of speech called personification, a technique which attributes animate qualities to inanimate things. The disease pneumonia has been transformed into Mr. Pneumonia, who stalks and touches and smites as a person might, and in doing so the author vivifies an otherwise impersonal and abstract medical condition—abstract, at least, to those of us affected only literarily. In addition to the way a writer configures a narrative passage, we should also be ever aware of the vocabulary and its overtones. Pneumonia, for example, derives from the Greek for lung, the organ of breath, that by which we live. Perhaps we should expect an answering idea to appear.
But we would still be reading too quickly if we contented ourselves with merely recognizing the personification and vocabulary in the passage. Yes, personification humanizes an abstraction, but what we need in order to slow ourselves down—and in doing so reap more insight from a story—is to ask what is implied in characterizing disease as a stalking man. In other words, what accompanies humanization? If personification vivifies an abstraction, what comes with vivification, with being alive as a human being? One answer, of course is agency: will, choice, determination, and the moral values and stature which result from that. Physical diseases do not stalk and touch and smite, but personified diseases do. Physical diseases are not responsible entities, but humans are. And with that animation—the word derives from the Latin for breath and came to mean the soul—we are set up to look for its literary sequelae as the story unfolds.
So now the doctor wants to speak with Johnsy’s friend Sue. He invites her into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow (more on that prepositional phrase in a moment), and what he says to her follows up to complement the idea of agency which the immediately preceding personification suggested:
“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well.”
That fine stitching, both literary and logical, is what we should see, and probably can only likely see, if we are reading slowly, thoughtfully, looking at what the literary structure implies (and might even necessitate) in order to weave a tight and coherent scene rich in perceptiveness and suggestion. One might argue, for example, that personifying the disease has given Johnsy, as it were, an active opponent whose malefic interest must lead her to an awareness of her own agency, which leads to the idea of decision, which leads to the idea of responsibility, both the artist’s in the story and our own in our lives—that this idea of personal responsibility is what O. Henry wanted to treat in writing his story. (Now whether you agree with that reading or discover another, you’ll have to read the story for yourself to decide. You can find it in the Dover Thrift Edition of 100 Great Short Stories, edited by James Daley, 2015.)
Finally, a grammatical aside about that curious prepositional phrase with a shaggy, gray eyebrow. Reading slowly also means reading linguistic structure closely enough that we can understand the syntactical logic behind the forms. A preposition (with, in, by, etc.) will form a phrase, and a prepositional phrase in its entirety can be used most often as an adverb or adjective. As an adverb, which is its use here, the prepositional phrase will convey the notion of accompaniment (I went with my family), of manner (he spoke in anger), or time (they will arrive in an hour), among other logical notions. When the doctor invites Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow, the writer had him do so in a manner which at once characterized the doctor’s physical appearance and professional authority, both of which prepared the ground for his impatience over his patient’s willful withering. That knowing manner will advance the story toward the theme of responsibility and ultimately insight. The phrase, though, pops out to us because we so often use the preposition with to convey accompaniment. The absurdity of that possibility here is the energy behind the popping.
The Romans of the ancient world had the adage multum non multa, by which they meant that one should study and think and ponder deeply, not necessarily extensively, that we can see principles at work if we look thoroughly at even a few instances. By reminding us that more is not necessarily better, that adage can help us slow down enough to read literature more thoughtfully and to our wider pleasure, letting the hare race ahead only to fall asleep midway.
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