The Best Short Stories of 1919 | Page 3

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 formul?, 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.
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