Let Me Feel Your Pulse

O. Henry (1862–1910)
From O. Henry: 101 Stories

Interesting Links

“Why O. Henry Is So Much More Than Those Short Stories You Had to Read in School” (Michael Dirda, The Washington Post)

“Two Appropriate Things to Place on the Graves of O. Henry and Thomas Wolfe” (AVL Lit Map, Asheville)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Conscience with Art,” O. Henry
• “How to Cure a Cold,” Mark Twain
• “The Yellow Wall Paper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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O. Henry: 101 Stories
840 pages
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Three illustrations by Walter W. Fawcett from the 1910 Doubleday book publication of Let Me Feel Your Pulse: “He began to look more like Napoleon” | “I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led out of Madison Square Garden” | “‘What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?’” (Austin Public Library)

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In 1929 a reporter for the Detroit News learned that the widow of William Sydney Porter was taking a rest-cure in a Battle Creek sanitarium. He dropped by the facility to interview her and to learn how she met her husband, who had died two decades earlier. “The story is this,” she began. “Years ago there was a girl.”

She was thirteen years old, and she was mad about a boy of nineteen who lived not far from her in a sleepy, lazy, lovely little town in North Carolina. That little girl was I, and the boy was Will Porter. . . .

That boy, the big, gentle, sweet-eyed boy, went out into the world to make a fortune. . . . One day I read a story by a man named O. Henry. It was such an odd name. I remembered it, and looked for other stories by him. . . . And as I wondered about and dreamed there came a neighbor one day who said: “What do you think? This O. Henry, the writer, is nobody but Willie Porter.”

My heart leaped. . . . I sat down and wrote the author. It must have been a funny, stilted, crazy little letter, trying to be formal and neighborly and old-pally and—well, he answered. I was going to Boston in a few days to visit some relatives, and we arranged to meet in New York.

Do you think romance isn’t? How can one think so? We met and loved—and he followed me back home, and he was shy, and he was afraid of me—I mean in the way lovers are afraid—and I guess I must have helped him just a bit. For two weeks there were walks on the mountainside and dreams dreamed out loud, and then—we were married.

You will find that story, our story made funny and happy and full of humor in “Let Me Feel Your Pulse.” At least the ending is there.

Sara Porter told this story frequently—in interviews, in magazine articles, even in an autobiographical novel—until her death at the age of 91 in 1959. As time went on, the recollections became more romantic and idealized and whimsical—and further from the truth. Instead of a “few days,” more than two years passed between her first letter in July 1905 (when she was 37 and Porter was 42) and, many letters later, their reunion in New York in September 1907. Their engagement, which seems to have been impulsive and unexpected on both their parts, occurred during that first visit—and their subsequent marriage was anything but a success, according to all who knew them.

It got off to a promising start, when Porter went to Asheville in late November for the wedding. The planned ten-day honeymoon turned into more than a month as he gloried in not having to do anything. But when the newlyweds returned to New York at the beginning of the new year, Porter’s missed deadlines, his accumulating debts, and the need for funds to support him and his wife began to weigh on him. In addition, his seventeen-year-old daughter from his first marriage soon joined them. The frantic pace of his activity, his need for silence and solitude to finish his writing, and his wild mood swings began to take their toll. “Three months after our marriage he proposed that I go home for a little while and I burst into tears,” Sara recalled in one of her earliest accounts. “I remember the puzzled expression his face wore. He thought the change would do me good, and he wanted the opportunity to get some extra work done.”

Over the next two years, the Porters would travel between New York and Asheville. Sara and her stepdaughter would return to North Carolina, and Porter would visit for a few days. Or the two women would return to New York and try to make another go of it as a family in various hotels and residences or, for one stretch of time, in a house forty miles away from Manhattan, on Long Island. For the most part, however, they lived apart. “He did not know how to rest,” she wrote. “‘When this is done, and that is done, I will rest,’ he would promise me . . . . Soon the work possessed him. Sometimes his letters were buoyant, ‘I am turning out more work than I have for a year,’ sometimes depressed, ‘Things are coming my way, if I can only get my work out.’”

Meanwhile, Will Porter’s health rapidly deteriorated, exacerbated by his drinking. Sara was in denial about his alcoholism, and he tried to hide his excesses from her. “One time when we were living in New York Will came in late one night. He was sort of unsteady on his feet,” she told an interviewer in 1952. “One of his friends told me later that Will was hanging to a lamp post that night in front of the house. Will said, ‘I'm ashamed to go in to Sara like this. Isn’t this ridiculous? My head is just as clear as a bell, but my legs won’t stand up!’ I didn't say anything to him about it.”

He visited several doctors in New York about his recurring illnesses; at least one warned him about his drinking and may have (accurately) diagnosed cirrhosis. At one point, he told Sara he had diabetes. In March 1909, he wrote to his editor at Doubleday, who was patiently waiting for O. Henry’s first novel, for which the publisher had made several hefty advances:

I’ve been pretty well handicapped for a couple of months and am in the hands of a fine tyrant of a doctor, who makes me come to see him every other day, & who has forbidden me to leave the city until he is through with me, & and then only under his own auspices and direction. It seems that the goddess Hygiene and I have been strangers for years; and now Science must step in and repair the damage.

Toward the end of the year, he headed to Asheville again, fell sick, and sought out a local physician, who finally handed him a diagnosis he felt he could live with. “I’ve been under the weather with a slight relapse,” he updated his editor. “But on the whole I’m improving vastly. I’ve a doctor here who says I have absolutely no physical trouble except neurasthenia, and that outdoor exercise & air will find me as good as new. As for the diagnosis of the N. Y. doctors—they are absolutely without foundation. I am 20 pounds lighter, & can climb mountains like a goat.” Toward the end of his stay in Asheville, he wrote “Let Me Feel Your Pulse,” the last story he would complete.

In late February 1910, Porter returned to New York. His wife and daughter would never see him again. Ensconced in the Caledonia Hotel, a block away from Madison Square Park, he was supposed to be working on his novel and the stage adaptation of his story “The World and the Door.” He began two other stories, neither of which he finished; otherwise, he made little progress on his writing. On June 3, after three months of inactivity and declining health, he called Anne Partlan—one of the first people he had befriended in New York—and requested her help. When she arrived, he was semiconscious; two days later he died.

Only days after Porter’s death, “Let Me Feel Your Pulse” appeared in Cosmopolitan Magazine under the title “Adventures in Neurasthenia: Some Experiences of a Nerve-Sick Man Seeking Health.” The story served as an unintentionally macabre addition to the news articles surrounding Porter’s death. (“If sick get well by reading O. Henry’s ‘Adventures in Neurasthenia’” boasted the unfortunate headline atop the issue’s table of contents.) Although Sara Porter implied in her 1929 interview that this work was a retelling of their last days together in Asheville (renamed Pineville in the story), the truth is that she (under the name “Amaryllis”) doesn’t appear until the final pages, when the supposed cure for neurasthenia is revealed. Rather than a scene from a marriage, then, the story is instead a humorous chronicle of Will Porter’s final illness and his confusing, contradictory experiences with doctors in New York and North Carolina.

Notes: Oscar “Battling” Nelson was a Danish American boxer who was world lightweight champion, 1905–6 and 1908–10; Lord Horatio Nelson was vice admiral in the British navy in the late eighteenth century. Lime hash was given to children by dentists to build up the lime salts in their teeth. Dog bread is a simple type of cornbread. Nux vomica was derived from seeds of the strychnine tree and used to treat a variety of ailments in traditional medicine. Armour & Company was a Chicago meat-packing firm founded in 1867. Financier and investment banker J. Pierpont Morgan owned a series of yachts he named Corsair. He purchased the 300-foot steam yacht Corsair III in 1899. The phrase “Tennessee-papers-please-copy” refers to the practice followed by many local newspapers, which often added the line “[name of place] papers please copy” to certain society items (especially obituaries) if the news was likely to be of interest to readers in another location. Mary Noailles Murfree, using the pen name Charles Egbert Craddock, wrote local-color stories and novels set in the Appalachian Mountains.

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