Voyage around My Cell

When I was eight my views on literature were precise and unshakable and my confidence in myself much greater than it is now.

I had decided O. Henry was the world’s best author.

During Prohibition, the folks who bought one of Andy’s two-dollar canes and had the wit to unscrew the head of the cane by two full turns to the right and hold it to their mouth had, as a reward for their acumen, a half pint of smuggled whisky trickle down their throat.

If the man who wrote this wasn’t the world’s best author, then who was?

And how about the decision the three grifters made when things got messy, wasn’t that wonderful?

Things had come to such a fine pass that honesty was the best policy.

One day at a tea garden, I shared my judgment of O. Henry with my uncle’s fiancée.

A smile of such kindliness appeared on the young woman’s face that, along with the large parasol right behind her, the tablecloth in front of her, and the pebble-stone pathway on the ground, it became stamped onto my memory like a photograph.

Even at that age I could sense that if someone smiles at you with such kindliness something has to be wrong.

“You might want to wait until you read the classics before making a final decision on that,” she told me.

But I wasn’t the kind of child who would change his mind for a kindly smile.

I stuck to it.

When I was ten, my father gave me Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage around My Room. “You might like this,” he said.

I loved it.

O. Henry ceded