Perhaps quality might have suffered; perhaps the thread of invention would have snapped had not Annan’s contract with the Planet ended with September.
He had done twenty stories for Coltfoot in six months. Those stories made Annan. It had finally come to—“Have you read Barry Annan in this week’s number?” That, and a growing hostility always certain to be aroused by recognition, were making of the young man a personage.
From the very beginning, scarce knowing why, he had avoided the shallow wallow of American “letters,” where the whole herd roots and snouts—literati, critics, public,—gruffling and snuffling for the legendary truffle disinterred and gobbled up so long—so long ago.
Already the younger aspirants hailed him. Already the dreary brethren of the obvious stared disapproval.
The dull read him as they read everything. It takes all kinds of pasture to keep a cow in cud. She chews but never criticises.
Realists peered at him evilly and askance. His description of swill didn’t smell like the best swill. There were mutterings of “heretic.”
The “small-town” school found fault with his microscope. Waste nothing—their motto—had resulted in a demand for their rag-carpets. But here was a man who saved only a handful of threads and twisted them into a phrase which seemed to do the duty of entire chapters. No, the small-town school took a sniff at Annan and trotted on down the alley.
As for the Romanticists, squirming and writhing and weaving amid their mess of properties and scenery, what did they want of the substance when the shadow cost nothing?
No, Annan didn’t fit anywhere. He was just a good story-teller.
Outside that, his qualifications for writing fiction were superfluous, from an American audience’s point of view, for, to please that audience, he didn’t have to write good English, he didn’t have to be intellectual, cultured, witty, or a gentleman. But these unnecessary addenda did not positively count against him.