I was talking the other day to Alfred Coppard, who has steered more
successfully than most English story writers away from the Scylla and
Charybdis of the modern artist. He told me that he had been reading
several new novels and volumes of short stories by contemporary American
writers with that awakened interest in the civilization we are framing
which is so noticeable among English writers during the past three
years. He asked me a remarkable question, and the answer which I gave
him suggested certain contrasts which seemed to me of basic importance
for us all. He said: "I have been reading books by Sherwood Anderson,
Waldo Frank and Ben Hecht and Konrad Bercovici and Joseph Hergesheimer,
and I can see that they are important books, but I feel that the
essential point to which all this newly awakened literary consciousness
is tending has somehow subtly eluded me. American and English writers
both use the same language, and so do Scotch and Irish writers, but I am
not puzzled when I read Scotch and Irish books as I am when I read these
new American books. Why is it?"
I had to think for a moment, and then the obvious answer occurred to me.
I told him that I thought the reason for his moderate bewilderment was
due to the fact that the Englishman or the Scotchman or the Irishman
living at home was writing out of a background of racial memory and
established tradition which was very much all of one piece, and that all
such an artist's unspoken implications and subtleties could be easily
taken for granted by his readers, and more or less thoroughly
understood, because they were elements in harmony with a tolerably fixed
and ordered world.
I added that this was more or less true of the American writer up to a
date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892.
During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date,
there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents
thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the
contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the
dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.
My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to take
the most readily understandable instance, was beginning to absorb large
tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the
experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish
and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that
all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting
upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen, and
eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative
minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half consciously and
half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of each separate
chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and fusing their
conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in artistic crucibles of
their own devising.
Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular
meaning in each case more or less escaped him. And then I ventured to
suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the
present stage than for Europeans, because American minds would grasp
readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously
escaped them in their experience, and so begin to formulate from these
books new intuitive laws. I suggested, moreover, that from the point of
view of the great artist these books were all more or less magnificent
failures which were creating, little by little, out of the shock of
conflict an ultimate harmony, out of which the great book for which we
are all waiting in America might come ten years from now, or five years,
or even tomorrow.
To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had
baffled him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos of a different
sort in English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I
did discover such a chaos, but that it seemed to me a chaos which was an
end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had
fallen, and men had come to babble with more and more complete
dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging
desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left,
while their work froze into a new Augustanism comparable to that of the
early years of the eighteenth century.
Next year, in conjunction with John Cournos, I shall begin in a parallel
series of volumes with the present series, to present my annual study of
the English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that
American chaos in which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From now on
I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph written by
Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let us begin so
low--isn't our range too coarse--too gross?--The Soul answer'd: No, not
when we consider what it is all for--the end involved in Time and
Space." Or, as the old Dutch flour-miller put it more briefly: "I never
bother myself what road the folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."
To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the
task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists,
may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in
formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than
dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead.
What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh,
living current which flows through the best American work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have
conferred upon it.
No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic
substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is
beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair
to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination
than we display at present.
The present record covers the period from October 1920, to September
1921, inclusive. During this period, I have sought to select from the
stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life
imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is
something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than
something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a
story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist's power of
compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth.
The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis
is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected
facts or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of
substance.
But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other
stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into
the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skilful selection and
arrangement of his materials, and by the most direct and appealing
presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.
The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous
years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The first consists of
those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of
substance or the test of form. These stories are listed in the year book
without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of
those stories which may fairly claim that they survive either the test
of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to
possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am
glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader
responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this
group are indicated in the yearbook index by a single asterisk prefixed
to the title.
The third group, which is composed of stories of still greater
distinction, includes such narratives as may lay convincing claim to a
second reading, because each of them has survived both tests, the test
of substance and the test of form. Stories included in this group are
indicated in the yearbook index by two asterisks prefixed to the title.
Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which
possess, I believe, the even finer distinction of uniting genuine
substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such
sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in American
literature. If all of these stories by American authors were
republished, they would not occupy more space than five novels of
average length. My selection of them does not imply the critical belief
that they are great stories. A year which produced one great story would
be an exceptional one. It is simply to be taken as meaning that I have
found the equivalent of five volumes worthy of republication among all
the stories published during the period under consideration. These
stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks prefixed
to the title, and are listed in the special "Roll of Honor." In
compiling these lists I have permitted no personal preference or
prejudice to consciously influence my judgment. To the titles of certain
stories, however, in the "Rolls of Honor," an asterisk is prefixed, and
this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal
preference, for which, perhaps, I may be indulged. It is from this final
short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.
It has been a point of honor with me not to republish a story by an
English author or by any foreign author. I have also made it a rule not
to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume.
The general and particular results of my study will be found explained
and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.
In past years it has been my pleasure and honor to dedicate the best
that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my labors to
the American artist who, in my opinion, has made the finest imaginative
contribution to the short story during the period considered. I take
pleasure in recalling the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews
Hallet, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Arthur Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, and
Sherwood Anderson. In my opinion Sherwood Anderson has made this year
once more the most permanent contribution to the American short story,
but as last year's book is associated with his name, I am happy to
dedicate this year's offering to a new and distinguished English artist,
A.E. Coppard, to whom the future offers in my opinion a rich harvest of
achievement.