O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 | Page 4

longer, and the battle-flags are furled in the Parliament of Man"; but the short story follows the gleam, merely by virtue of authorship and by reflecting the peoples of the earth.
When Lee Foster Hartman created his Chinese hero in "The Poppies of Wu Fong," dramatized Oriental inscrutability with Occidental suavity and sureness, and set off the Oriental gentleman in American surroundings, he brought together the nations in a new vision of the brotherhood of man. This story was preferred, for the reasons implied, by Frances Gilchrist Wood, who sees in Wu Fong's garden the subtle urge of acres of flowers, asleep under the stars, pitted against the greed of profiteers; who sees in answer to Western fume and fret the wisdom of Confucius, "Come out and see my poppies." The story was rejected by other members who, while applauding the author's motivation of character, his theme, and his general treatment, yet felt a lack of emotion and a faltering at the dramatic climax.
Wilbur Daniel Steele's "The Marriage in Kairwan" presents an appalling tragedy which, if it be typical, may befall any Tunisian lady who elects for herself man's standard of morality--for himself. Such a story is possible when the seeing eye and the understanding heart of an American grasps the situation in Kairwan and through the technician's art develops it, transforms it, and bears it into the fourth dimension of literature. The thread of narrative runs thinly, perhaps, through the stiffly embroidered fabric, heavy as cloth of gold; the end may be discerned too soon. But who can fail of being shocked at the actual denouement? The story may be, as Ethel Watts Mumford admits, caviar. "But if so," she adds, "it is Beluga Imperial."
Donn Bryne's "Wisdom Buildeth Her House," is constructed on a historic foundation, the visit that Balkis, Queen of Sheba, made to Solomon, King of the Jews. Mr. Bryne has not only built a cunning mosaic, plunging into the stream of Scriptural narrative for his tessellations and drawing gems out of The Song of Solomon, but he has also recalled by virtue of exercising a vigorous imagination, the glory of the royalty that was Sheba's and the grandeur of her domain in pictures as gorgeously splendid as those from an Arabian Night. He has elaborated the Talmud story with mighty conviction from a novel point of view and has whetted his theme on the story of a love the King lacked wisdom to accept. The Chairman of the Committee prefers this story; but other members assert that it lacks novelty and vitality, nor can they find that it adds anything new to the Song of Songs.
These three first choice stories, then, are strong in Oriental flavour, characters, and setting.
Again, democracy (in the etymological sense of the word, always, rather than the political) is exemplified in the fiction of 1921, in that the humblest life as well as the highest offers matter for romance. More than in former years, writers seek out the romance that lies in the lives of the average man or woman. Having learned that the Russian story of realism, with emphasis too frequently placed upon the naturalistic and the sordid, is not a vehicle easily adapted to conveying the American product, the American author of sincerity and belief in the possibility of realistic material has begun to treat it in romantic fashion, always the approved fashion of the short story in this country. So Harry Anable Kniffin's "The Tribute" weaves in 1,700 words a legend about the Unknown Soldier and makes emotionally vivid the burial of Tommy Atkins. Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant the provincial teacher at Columbia for a term of graduate work. Humorously and sardonically the college professor is served up in "The Better Recipe," by George Boas (Atlantic Monthly, March); the doctorate degree method is satirized so bitterly, by Sinclair Lewis, in "The Post Mortem Murder" (Century, May), as to challenge wonder, though so subtly as to escape all save the initiated.
Sophie Kerr's "Wild Earth" makes capital in like legitimate manner of the little shop girl and her farmer husband. Wesley Dean is as far removed from the Down Easterner of a Mary Wilkins farm as his wife, Anita, is remote from the Sallies and Nannies of the farmhouse. Of the soil this story bears the fragrance in a happier manner; its theme of wild passion belongs to the characters, as it might belong, also, to the man and woman of another setting. "Here is a romance of the farm," the author seems to say; not sordid realistic portrayal of earth grubbers. So, too, Tristram Tupper's "Grit"