There have been many unkind things said about the late-lamented year Nineteen Twenty-One, but after inspecting this work of Edward J. O’Brien’s I am inclined to think that the title proclaiming it to be a collection of Nineteen Twenty-One’s best Short Stories, is the most slanderous statement of them all. It is enough to make even the Statue of Liberty blush!
In no English-speaking country is the Short Story such a recognized feature of everyday social intercourse as it is in America.
It is almost impossible for two Americans to meet anywhere or at any time of the day or night without an exchange of Short Stories. Sometimes the form of the telling is good, sometimes bad. More often it is very bad form indeed, but two things the Story must have—to “get over”—substance and brevity.
The same two things are demanded in the written story. I do not include Form, because Form is essential to Brevity. Artistic Brevity cannot be achieved without Form.
Substance, to paraphrase the Bard, is such stuff as Stories are made on. It must be of good weave, or the story will not hold together.
Some of the Stories in the O’Brien collection are of a rotten fabric, others, while well woven, have a most disagreeable pattern. Others again are dyed with imported dyes from Kipling, Conrad and Company. At least one of the stories has no fabric at all, but the weaver—like the Weaver in the Fairy Tales—has gone through the motions of weaving so plausibly, not to say impudently, that many, like Mr. O’Brien, are deceived by it.
Mr. O’Brien, defining Substance, tells us that it amounts to nothing unless it be organic substance “in which the pulse of life is beating.” Thereby he admits that Substance is Stuff, but insists that it must be Live Stuff!
Mr. O’Brien is mistaken; in one of the finest Short Stories ever written the Substance of the Story is a Shadow!
The Story is by “Anderson.”
What, our Mr. Anderson?