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

shoulders in Miss Spadoni's tales;
Englishman, Dane, and South Sea Islander shake hands on the same
page of W. Somerset Maugham's "The Trembling of a Leaf";
Norwegian, Frenchman, and Spaniard are among us, as before;
Bercovici's gypsies from the Roumanian Danube, now collected in
"Ghitza," flash colourful and foreign from the Dobrudja Mountains and
the Black Sea. In one remarkable piece of melodrama, "Rra Boloi," by
the Englishman Crosbie Garstin (Adventure), and the African witch
doctor of the Chwene Kopjes enters short-story literature.
The Oriental had been exploited to what appeared the ultimate; but
continued interest in the Eastern problem brings tidal waves of
Japanese and Chinese stories. Disarmament Conferences may or may
not effect the ideal envisioned by the Victorian, a time "when the war
drums throb no 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