Such, in brief, is the Sweatshop in the rear where the toiling Asterisks labor in weary shifts of one, two and three, pounding out asinine averages and percentages of permanency and near-permanency and plu-permanency with a zeal that would do credit to the framer of a Volstead Act.
Now let us walk round to the front of the Factory, where in his cosy business office which he calls the “Introduction” the Foreman of the works, Mr. Edward J. O’Brien, will tell us in the airy argon of the shop all about the Fictional Flivvers—in which he is a second-hand dealer—how they are made, what they are worth and, if permanent, just how long their permanence will last.
As Foreman O’Brien warms up to his subject he will describe in vitally pulsating phrases that would drive a movie writer mad with envy, the convulsion of Nature that attended the birth of the American Short Story. “The ever-widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.”
All of which speechifying translated into plain talk conveys the astounding information that the hooch of American Fiction is being brewed in the much-advertised Melting Pot! Well, why couldn’t he say so and be done with it?
Speaking of the Anglo-Saxon he says: “The Anglo-Saxon was beginning to absorb large tracts of other racial fields of memory and to share the experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian and Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic.” The Melting Pot again! What did I tell you! Continuing, Mr. O’Brien describes the process of fermentation as a new chaos set up by tracts of remembered racial experience interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen and eager civilization. He doesn’t explain exactly how a thing so completely lacking in the elements of design as a chaos should be “set up” to get the best results. All he tells us is that fresh chaos is good material for American literature, and that our Mr. Anderson and others are very busy in a half unconscious way, trying to make “worlds” out of it.
By “worlds” I take it Mr. O’Brien means something vast and vague and “vitally compelling” and “organic” that our Mr. Anderson and others will fuse into American Fiction “in artistic crucibles of their own devising.”
On the whole, things look pretty bright for the American Short Story, what with the “fresh living current which flows through the best American work, and the Psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it,” and the “seething maelstrom of cross currents,” and the “dynamic creative energies,” and above all the chaos, the great American Chaos—fresh—unlimited—inexhaustible—ripe for the “artistic crucible,” in which it is soon to be fused into a new cosmos of “organic fiction” by the White Headed Boy of the Western World.
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On the other hand, how gloomy the outlook pictured by Mr. O’Brien for the Englishman and the Scotchman and the Irishman! “Living at home—writing out of a background of racial memory and established tradition.” It fairly gives me the shivers. No wonder their fiction lacks compelling vitality!
But wouldn’t you think that with all the Chaos lying round loose in Europe these days, the Scotchman at least would grab enough of it to create a bonnie new world of vitally compelling fiction for himself? That’s what I thought, but it seems I thought wrong. The Foreign Chaos differs from the Domestic variety in that it is “an end rather than a beginning, a Chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen.”