Books: Little Weaklings

THE BEST SHORT STORIES: 1935—Edward J. O’Brien — Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

If U. S. literary life has no official academy to bestow honors and awards on authors struggling for recognition, it has in Edward Joseph O’Brien an editor who performs much the same function each year with conscientious enthusiasm. For 21 years Editor O’Brien has offered his annual collections of the best short stories, exhaustive, painstaking volumes which include, in addition to the texts of the best stories, a Roll of Honor of several hundred more, an index of distinctive short stories—each title neatly tagged with one, two or three stars to indicate the precise degree of its distinction. Following a somewhat obscure mathematical formula, Editor O’Brien also grades magazines by giving their percentages of distinctive stories (The American Mercury, 100%; Story, 98%; The Atlantic Monthly, 92%; Vanity Fair, 69%) and throws in for good measure the biographies of the writers who have not appeared on the Honor Roll before. There are 58 such biographies in the 1935 collection.

When Editor O’Brien began his work, Sherwood Anderson was almost unknown and Fanny Hurst got into an early collection with an ecstatic little tale about Russian refugees who found New York a haven from Tsarist oppression. Struggling against the limitations imposed on authors by the conventions of popular magazine fiction, Editor O’Brien called attention to the work that was then appearing in little literary magazines, boldly declared that the best short stories were being written by writers that few people had ever heard of. He reprinted the early work of Waldo Frank and Ruth Suckow, seemed particularly to favor episodic, formless sketches, especially those of the Midwest. Since he has always eagerly welcomed new talents, U. S. writers, who as contributors receive prestige but no royalties from Editor O’Brien’s collections, generally consider his labors of value, disregard his critical writings in which faint, almost imperceptible developments in the art of the short story are described in agitated and somewhat confusing prose.

His 21st collection finds Editor O’Brien viewing the future of the short story with profound alarm. The year 1934 was a bad one, in which only 200 stories were found worthy of three stars, but it was “a notable” year for new writers, producing Dorothy McCleary, Allan Seager and William Saroyan. Editor O’Brien finds the short story threatened by the developing political interests of editors and critics, utters a dark warning against Fascism — Fascism from the left as well as from right—and complains that there are now too many little magazines.

Readers less sensitive to the nuances of the art may find the stories suffering less from Fascism than from fatigue. The 27 stories have one feature in common: the immaturity, aimlessness or general helplessness of all their characters. No individual in the book seems able to visualize an objective and to work toward it. The tramps in Benjamin Appel’s Outside Yuma argue pointlessly through carefully described desert wastes; the young poet of Whit Burnett’s Division, broods vaguely for 57 pretentious and inconclusive pages; the unhappy little boy in Nancy Hale’s Double House is broken-hearted when he hears his father say that childhood is the happiest time of all. Aside from descriptions of moods and childish bewilderments, the stories describe impulsive, spasmodic acts of violence: the professor in Ernest Brace’s The Party Next Door strikes his wife when he realizes the dullness of his life; Zula, in Elma Godchaux’s Wild Nigger, buries her razor in her lover’s bosom when she finds him with a rival; a substitute parachute jumper in Charles Cooke’s Triple Jumps commits suicide because of his sweetheart’s infidelity. Although the best stories—David Cornel de Jong’s Home-Coming, and William Wister Haines’ Remarks: None —tell of sturdier folk, the book in general gives the impression that 1934 short-story characters cannot stand much adversity.