Wind of destiny — Context and Discussion

Letters as Artifacts of Voice

The letters in the excerpts display a distinctive voice that shifts between playful banter and raw confession. The writer addresses Caroline with a mix of teasing and yearning, calling her 'a Heaven-sent, home-bred, ideal-owning, scrumptious, sweet, wholesome human.' He mocks his own silence: 'I know I’ve been as the old darky song goes, “A liar and a conjurer, too.”' The prose is peppered with colloquialisms and self-deprecation, yet it also reveals a deep loneliness. He describes his quiet street where 'the little clock on my desk ticking sounds as loud as a cricket chirping under the honeysuckle vine on your porch on a fall night.' This blend of humor and vulnerability is a recurring pattern, suggesting a man performing for his correspondent while also reaching for genuine connection.

City vs. Mountain: A Recurring Contrast

The excerpts repeatedly juxtapose the noise and artificiality of New York with the imagined peace of the Blue Ridge mountains. The writer complains of 'elevated trains, waggons (notice the English two g’s), trams (also English), and cries of hucksters (mostly Dagoes).' He longs for 'sunrises and the squirrels' and 'morning glories on a board fence.' The city is a place where 'you can’t take forty steps in the wildwood without stumbling over a sardine box or a salmon can.' Yet he also insists New York is 'the only place to live,' where 'you can choose the kind of life you want.' This ambivalence—disgust and attraction—runs through the letters, making the setting a character in itself.

The Unseen Correspondent and the Reader's Position

The excerpts give us only one side of the exchange. Caroline’s letters are referenced but never quoted directly, leaving the reader to infer her character from the writer’s responses. He chides her for living 'placidly in that dull little mountain town' and imagines her being rowed by men who 'rip the buttonholes out of his collar trying to pull up car windows.' This asymmetry creates a sense of eavesdropping. The writer’s plea—'Write and tell me exactly what you think about when you take your hair down and sit on the rug at 11:30 P. M.'—is intimate, yet we cannot know her reply. The reader is positioned as a third party, privy to one voice’s longing and frustration.

Readers should attend to the interplay between the foreword’s claim of authenticity and the fictional background. The letters may be real, but the narrative that surrounds them is acknowledged as invention. This hybrid form invites a reading that is both biographical and literary, where every detail—from the clock’s ticking to the mention of Scotch at 2 A.M.—carries the weight of a life being shaped into story.

There’s a moment in Wind of Destiny where O. Henry’s letters seem quieter than his stories, as if the real man hid between the lines. That same hush crept over me while leafing through Mr. Jervis, Vol. 2 (of 3) — Reading Notes—another world where the public self and the private one never quite meet, leaving only a soft, almost homesick pause on the page.