The Short Story
THE short story is the most popular form of literature in the United States to-day. It has become, indeed, a product singularly American; it has lent itself easily to our hurried way of life. There are a limited number of our citizens who take the time for long reading, but there are an unlimited number who read in snatches while traveling or at home. .Magazines (short stories) are what they read. Not unnaturally the magazines tend to standardize their type of fiction: they put a high premium upon the entertaining situation, breezy dialogue, and the happy ending. Whether because of this craftsmanship or because of their millions of readers, popular magazine writers only exceptionally survive in book form. Writers like Katharine Mansfield, on the other hand, who search for greater freedom in the short story, have to depend essentially upon book publication. Each guild, of course, has produced its masters: from the magazines have risen O. Henry, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ring Lardner; from the ‘independents’ Katharine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway.
After Richard Harding Davis, the short-story idol of the late '90s, came O. Henry. His early stories, written in prison, appeared when magazines were beginning to grow; in New York he wrote for editors, pressing him for copy long overdue; as Willa Cather says, ’he made the short story go into the world of the cheap boarding house and the shopgirl and the truck driver’; he wrote with amazing invention, a bright antithesis of phrase, pathos that was usually concealed, and with a famous twist at the climax of his plot. Those who love his tales, those interested in the mystery of writing, will he repaid in the reading of a new biography. The Caliph of Bagdad (Appleton, $3.50), by two of his old associates, Robert H. Davis and Arthur B. Maurice. O. Henry was an evasive man, and it is impossible to extricate him wholly from the shadows that darkened his career. The problem of his jail sentence is a case in point : it can hardly be whitewashed as Bob Davis would have us believe. A partial rather than a thorough book, this new biography is unquestionably rich in its personal anecdotes and unquestionably right in its analysis of O. Henry’s source material and technique.
The twelve hundred pages of The Book of Tish (Farrar and Rinehart, $2.00) are a monument to the technique of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Mrs. Rinehart’s eccentric old maids, Tish. Aggie, and Lizzie, are probably the most lovable characters ever sponsored by the S. E. P. But as one reads their adventures en masse, one is uncomfortably aware of certain properties which by repetition build up a ‘Tish formula.’ The danger signals set in the opening paragraph, — Tish’s increasing audacity, the crossed lovers, Aggie’s false teeth, the blackberry cordial, the intervention of Charlie Sands, these are the elements which make the stories individually delightful but somewhat standardized when in bulk.
Of course there is more to them. Underneath their gay pattern there runs a gently ironic commentary on the years 1910 to 1930: here in the absurd antics of three old maids are pictured the extremes to which we Americans are carried by our fads and fancies. Mrs. Rinehart is ingenious, her humor is infectious, her narrative as natural as practice can make it. One should not complain if she chooses the magazine, not the book, as her medium.
Mr. Charles R. Walker’s stories. Our Gods Are Not Born (Cape and Smith. $2.50), were written with a book in mind. Post-war impressions seeking to depict the tension, frustration, and recklessness of our contemporary life, these sketches have more intellectual than narrative value. The author is in earnest; to be entertaining is the least of his tenets. He aims to give you the study of a single character faced with a crisis of readjustment. At his best, as in ‘The Murderer’ and ‘God Bless You, Mr. Vice-President,’ his personalities hold you fast; at his second-best, the pages become fragmentary and too indirect, the phrasing too self-conscious.
Many Thousands Gone, by John Peale Bishop (Scribners, $2.50), is a group of five narratives. picturesque, beautifully graphic, whose theme is the invaded South of the Civil War. The first two pieces touch with high lights the Southern temperament, the last three {and notably the title story, which won the Scribner Prize) disclose the shock and disrupting tragedy that followed the invasion. More arresting than battle scenes, because so much more intimate and touching, are these vignettes of the womenfolk, the stay-at-homes who lived in a crumbling world and suffered loss, degradation of spirit, and fear. The prize story and ‘Young Death and Desire’ are my favorites, emphasizing as they do the objective and episodic method here employed with such skill, proportion, and good effect by the author. Mr. Bishop is to be congratulated.
