I suppose there is no one of us who can honestly deny that he is
interested in one way or another in the American short story. Indeed, it
is hard to find a man anywhere who does not enjoy telling a good story.
But there are some people born with the gift of telling a good story
better than others, and of telling it in such a way that a great many
people can enjoy its flavor. Most of you are acquainted with some one
who is a gifted story-teller, provided that he has an audience of not
more than one or two people. And if you chance to live in the same house
with such a man, I think you will find that, no matter how good his
story may have been when you first heard it, it tends to lose its savor
after he has become thoroughly accustomed to telling it and has added it
to his private repertory.
A writer of good stories is really a man who risks telling the same
story to many thousand people. Did you ever take such a risk? Did you
ever start to tell a story to a stranger, and try to make your point
without knowing what sort of a man he was? If you did, what was your
experience? You decided, didn't you, that story-telling was an art, and
you wondered perhaps if you were ever going to learn it.
The American story-teller in the magazines is in very much the same
position, except that we have much more patience with him. Usually he is
a man who has told his story a good many times before. The first time he
told it we clapped him on the back, as he deserved perhaps, and said
that he was a good fellow. His publishers said so too. And it _was_ a
good story that he told. The trouble was that we wanted to hear it
again, and we paid him too well to repeat it. But just as your story
became rather less interesting the twenty-third time you told it, so
the stories I have been reading more often than not have made a similar
impression upon me. I find myself begging the author to think up another
story.
Of course, you have not felt obliged to read so many stories, and I
cannot advise you to do so. But it has made it possible for me to see in
some sort of perspective, just where the American short story is going
as well as what it has already achieved. It has made me see how American
writers are weakening their substance by too frequent repetition, and it
has helped me to fix the blame where it really lies.
Now this is a matter of considerable importance. One of the things we
should be most anxious to learn is the psychology of the American
reader. We want to know how he reacts to what he reads in the magazine,
whether it is a short story, an article, or an advertisement. We want to
know, for example, what holds the interest of a reader of the _Atlantic
Monthly_, and what holds the interest of the reader of the _Ladies' Home
Journal_.
It is my belief that the difference between these various types of
readers is pretty largely an artificial difference, in so far as it
affects the quality of entertainment and imaginative interest that the
short story has to offer. Of course, there are exceptional cases, and I
have some of these in mind, but for the most part I can perceive no
essential difference between the best stories in the _Saturday Evening
Post_ and the best stories in _Harper's Magazine_ for example. The
difference that every one feels, and that exists, is one of emphasis
rather than of type. It is a difference which is shown by averages
rather than one which affects the best stories in either magazine. Human
nature is the same everywhere, and when an artist interprets it
sympathetically, the reader will respond to his feeling wherever he
finds it.
It has been my experience that the reader is likely to find this warmly
sympathetic interpretation of human nature, its pleasures and its
sorrows, its humor and its tragedy, most often in the American magazines
that talk least about their own merit. We are all familiar with the
sort of magazine that contents itself with saying day in and day out
ceaselessly and noisily: "The _Planet Magazine_ is the greatest magazine
in the universe. The greatest literary artists and the world's greatest
illustrators contribute to our pages." And it stops there. It has
repeated this claim so often that it has come to believe it. Such a
magazine is the great literary ostrich. It hides by burying its eyes in
the sand.
It is an axiom of human nature that the greatest men do not find it
necessary or possible to talk about their own greatness. They are so
busy that they have never had much time to think about it. And so it is
with the best magazines, and with the best short stories. The man who
wrote what I regard as the best short story published in 1915 was the
most surprised man in Brooklyn when I told him so.
The truth of the matter is that we are changing very rapidly, and that a
new national sense in literature is accompanying that change. There was
a time, and in fact it is only now drawing to a close, when the short
story was exploited by interested moneymakers who made such a loud noise
that you could hear nothing else without great difficulty. The most
successful of these noisemakers are still shouting, but their heart is
in it no longer. The editor of one of the largest magazines in the
country said to me not long ago that he found the greatest difficulty
now in procuring short stories by writers for whom his magazine had
trained the public to clamor. The immediate reason which he ascribed for
this state of affairs was that the commercial rewards offered to these
writers by the moving picture companies were so great, and the
difference in time and labor between writing scenarios and developing
finished stories was so marked, that authors were choosing the more
attractive method of earning money. The excessive commercialisation of
literature in the past decade is now turned against the very magazines
which fostered it. The magazines which bought and sold fiction like soap
are beginning to repent of it all. They have killed the goose that laid
the golden eggs.
This fight for sincerity in the short story is a fight that is worth
making. It is at the heart of all that for which I am striving. The
quiet sincere man who has something to tell you should not be talked
down by the noisemakers. He should have his hearing. He is real. And we
need him.
That is why I have set myself the annual task of reading so many short
stories. I am looking for the man and woman with something to say,--who
cares very much indeed about how he says it. I am looking for the man
and woman with some sort of a dream, the man or woman who sees just a
little bit more in the pedlar he passes on the street than you or I do,
and who wishes to devote his life to telling us about it. I want to be
told my own story too, so that I can see myself as other people see me.
And I want to feel that the storyteller who talks to me about these
things is as much in earnest as a sincere clergyman, an unselfish
physician, or an idealistic lawyer. I want to feel that he belongs to a
profession that is a sort of priesthood, and not that he is holding down
a job or running a bucket shop.
I have found this writer with a message in almost every magazine I have
studied during the year. He is just as much in earnest in _Collier's
Weekly_ as he is in _Scribner's Magazine_. I do not find him often, but
he is there somewhere. And he is the only man for whom it is worth our
while to watch. I feel that it is none of my business whether I like and
agree with what he has to say or not. All that I am looking for is to
see whether he means what he says and makes it as real as he can to me.
I accept his substance at his own valuation, but I want to know what he
makes of it.
Each race that forms part of the substance in our great melting pot is
bringing the richest of its traditions to add to our children's
heritage. That is a wonderful thing to think about. Here, for example,
is a young Jewish writer, telling in obscurity the stories of his people
with all the art of the great Russian masters. And Irishmen are bringing
to us the best of their heritage, and men and women of many other races
contribute to form the first national literature the world has ever seen
which is not based on a single racial feeling. Why are we not more
curious about the ragman's story and that of the bootblack and the man
who keeps the fruit store? Don't you suppose life is doing things to the
boy in the coat-room as interesting as anything in all the romances?
Isn't life changing us in the most extraordinary ways, and do we not
wish to know in what manner we are to meet and adapt ourselves to these
changes? There is a humble writer in an attic up there who knows all
about it, if you care to listen to him. The trouble is that he is so
much interested in talking about life that he forgets to talk about
himself, and we are too lazy to listen to any one who forgets to blow
his own trumpet. But the magazines are beginning to look for him, and,
wonderful to say, they are beginning to find him, and to discover that
he is more interesting and humanly popular than the professional chef
who may be always depended upon to cook his single dish in the same old
way, but who has never had time to learn anything else.
Now what is the essential point of all that I have been trying to say?
It is simply this. If we are going to do anything as a nation, we must
be honest with ourselves and with everybody else. If we are story
writers or story readers, and practically every one is either one or the
other in these days, we must come to grips with life in the fiction we
write or read. Sloppy sentimentality and slapstick farce ought to bore
us frightfully, especially if we have any sense of humor. Life is too
real to go to sleep over it.
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 organised 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 of our work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which our 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, 1919, to September,
1920, 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 group 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
yearbook 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, an even finer distinction--the 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
our 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 an English story,
nor a translation from a 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.
As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this
annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet,
Wilbur Daniel Steele, Arthur Johnson, and Anzia Yezierska, so it is my
wish to dedicate this year the best that I have found in the American
magazines as the fruit of my labors to Sherwood Anderson, whose stories,
"The Door of the Trap," "I Want to Know Why," "The Other Woman," and
"The Triumph of the Egg" seem to me to be among the finest imaginative
contributions to the short story made by an American artist during the
past year.
#Edward J. O'Brien.#
#Forest Hill, Oxon, England,#
November 8, 1920.