The Best Short Stories of 1919 | Page 3

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.