I should like to take the text for my remarks this year on the American
Short Story from that notable volume of criticism, "Our America" by
Waldo Frank. For the past year, it has been a source of much questioning
to me to determine why American fiction, as well as the other arts,
fails so conspicuously in presenting a national soul, why it fails to
measure sincerely the heights and depths of our aspirations and failures
as a nation, and why it lacks the vital _elan_ which is so
characteristic of other literatures. We know, of course, that we are
present at the birth of a new national consciousness in our people, but
why is it that this national consciousness seems so tangled in evasion
of reality and in deep inhibitions that stultify it? Mr. Frank suggests
for the first time the root of the cancer, and like a skilful surgeon
points out how it may be healed. His book is the first courageous
diagnosis of our weakness, and I think that the attentive and honest
reader will not feel that he is unduly harsh or spiritually alienated
from us. Briefly put, he finds that our failure lies in not
distinguishing between idealism in itself and idealization of ourselves.
We regard a man who challenges our self righteousness and self
admiration as an enemy of the people. What we call our idealism is
rooted in materialism and the goal we set ourselves virtuously is a goal
of material comfort for ourselves, and, that once attained, perhaps also
for others.
"No American can hope to run a journal, win public office, successfully
advertise a soap or write a popular novel who does not insist upon the
idealistic basis of his country. A peculiar sort of ethical rapture has
earned the term American.... And the reason is probably at least in part
the fact that no land has ever sprung so nakedly as ours from a direct
and consciously material impulse...."
Mr. Frank goes on to point out that because our dreams are founded on a
material earth, they none the less have a hope of heaven, and that the
American story is really a debased form of wish fulfilment. "While the
American was active in the external world--mature and conscious
there--his starved inner life stunted his spiritual powers to infantile
dimensions.... What would satisfy him must be a picture of the contents
of real life, simplified and stunted to the dream-dimensions of the
infant. And with just this sort of thing, our army of commercialised
writers and dramatists and editors has kept him constantly supplied.
"There is nothing more horrible than a physically mature body moved by a
childish mind. And if the average American production repels the
sensitive American reader the reason is that he is witnessing just this
condition.... The American is aware of the individual and social
problems which inspire the current literatures of Europe. He is
conscious of the conflicts of family and sex, of the contrasts of
poverty and wealth. Of such stuff, also, are his books. Their _body_ is
mature: but their mental and spiritual _motivation_ remains infantile.
At once, it is reduced to an abortive simplification whereby the reality
is maimed, the reader's wish fulfilled as it could only be in fairyland.
But the fairyland is missing: the sweet moods of fairyland have withered
in the arid sophistications of American life.... And yet the authors of
this sort of book are hailed as realists, their work is acclaimed as
social criticism and American interpretation. And when at times a
solitary voice emerges with the truth, its message is attacked as morbid
and a lie.
"It is easy to understand how optimism should become of the tissue of
American life. The pioneer must hope. Else, how can he press on? The
American editor or writer who fails to strike the optimistic note is set
upon with a ferocity which becomes clear if we bear in mind that hope is
the pioneer's preserving arm. I do not mean to discredit the validity of
hope and optimism. I can honestly lay claim to both. America was builded
on a dream of fair lands: a dream that has come true. In the infinitely
harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We
believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America
is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with
physical degeneration. But we do not wish to believe that this is so. We
bask in the benign delusion of our perfect freedom.... Yet spiritual
growth without the facing of the world is an impossible conception."
Mr. Frank instances the case of Jack London as an example of how
inhibition may crush an artist, while rewarding him with material
success. "The background of this gifted man was the background of
America. He had gone back to primal stratum: stolen and labored and
adventured. Finally, he had learned to write. Criticism grew in him. He
pierced the American myths. He no longer believed in the Puritan God....
But what of this experience of passion and exploration lives in his
books? Precisely, nothing. London became a 'best-seller.' He sold
himself to a Syndicate which paid him a fabulous price for every word he
wrote. He visited half the world, and produced a thousand words a day.
And the burden of his literary output was an infantile romanticism under
which he deliberately hid his own despair. Since the reality of the
world he had come up through was barred to his pen, he wrote stories
about sea-wolves and star-gazers: he wallowed in the details of bloody
combat. If he was aware of the density of human life, of the drama of
the conflict of its planes, he used his knowledge only as a measure of
avoidance. He claimed to have found truth in a complete cynical
dissolution. 'But I know better,' he says, 'than to give this truth as I
have seen it, in my books. The bubbles of illusion, the pap of pretty
lies are the true stuff of stories.'"
You may say that this is a hard saying. Perhaps it is. But as I was
writing this morning, I received a letter from which I shall quote as a
living human document. It came to me from an American short story writer
whose work I have not had occasion to mention previously in these
studies. This artist has done work which ranks with the very best that
has been produced in America, but it very seldom finds its way into
print for the very reasons that Mr. Frank has mentioned. There is no
compromise in it. It offers us no vicarious satisfaction of our self
esteem. "I have only a blind, consuming passion of ideas. And this blind
passion of ideas drove me and hounded me till I had to tear loose from
everything human to follow it. For two years I lived in savage
isolation. I thought myself strong enough to live alone and think alone,
but I am not. What writes itself in me is too intense for the light
weight American magazines. My last story took me months to write and I
had to ruin it by tacking on to it a happy ending or starve."
Now you may say that the writer of this letter should not have isolated
himself from humanity. But in reality he did not. His stories are
instinct with the very pulse of humanity. The American editor fears
their reality, and so the writer really found that humanity had turned
from him. Meanwhile, the unpublished work of this writer, who is dying,
is America's spiritual loss. In the same way America lost Stephen Crane
and Harris Merton Lyon and many another, and is losing its best writers
to Europe every day. This annual volume is a book of documents, and that
is my excuse for quoting from these two writers. You will find the
indictment set forth more fully by a master in a recent novel, "The
Mask," by John Cournos, another writer whom America has lost as it lost
Whistler and Henry James.
It is not easy to play the part of Juvenal in this age, and I shall not
do it again, but it is because my faith in America is founded on her
weaknesses as well as her strength that I make this plea for sincerity
and artistic freedom. America's literature must no longer be the product
of a child's brain in a man's body, if it is to be a literature, and not
a form of journalism.
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
formulae, 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 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 November, 1918, to September,
1919, inclusive. During these eleven months, 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 skillful selection and
arrangement of his material, 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 eleven months under consideration.
These stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks
prefixed to the title, and are listed in the special "Rolls 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, and Arthur Johnson, 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 Anzia Yezierska, whose story, "Fat of the Land",
seems to me perhaps the finest imaginative contribution to the short
story made by an American artist this year.