We have had cancellations, congratulations, and a lot of indignant letters about Ben Hecht’s “Dregs.” I print two of them below. As it happens, these stories are among the best things The Little Review has printed. With the exception of some of the poetry and two stories of Sherwood Anderson’s, they may be listed as the only “literature” we have published. Some one has compared them to Gorky. But this is not a very accurate judgment. As a reviewer pointed out in the November issue, Gorky could feel his stories, could imagine them deeply, but he could never quite tell them. The supreme virtue of Ben Hecht’s “Dregs” is that he could tell them. That is the art. Of course I have nothing to say to those people who deplore Mr. Hecht’s subject matter and urge me to use some moral judgment in selecting things for The Little Review. There is no such thing as moral judgment in literature. There should be no such thing in life, but unfortunately—
A Sorrowful Friend:
The Little Review: Literature, Drama, Music, Art. Which of these four shrines did you intend to desecrate in offering Ben Hecht’s “Dregs”? Or have you added an “unwritten” class to your list, comprehensive enough to include such bold portrayals of viciousness and filth, of licentiousness and lust, as these three degenerate—manifestations!
Little Review—how could you do it? You who have hitherto held so bravely to the tenets of beauty and truth in thought and expression, held to them courageously through storms of adverse criticism, consent to print descriptions of the bestial abnormalities of the scum of mankind! If you, who profess to look to a higher, better realization of life, consent to crawl in the gutter with the vermin, what can we expect of the lesser publications?
You have polluted an edition of your magazine; it is true that flames will destroy the manuscript, but what of the hideous memory that remains? Take heed—Little Review; remember that cleanliness is akin to godliness and—look to your soul!
Florence Kiper Frank, Chicago:
May I call your attention to the fact that Mr. Edward J. O’Brien, in his annual review of the year’s fiction, not only lists all the stories printed in The Little Review during 1915 among those possessing “distinction,” but double-asterisks (verb) the three sketches of Ben Hecht’s published under the title “Dregs.” This in the chaste and genealogical Boston Evening Transcript! And, following to the best of my ability Mr. O’Brien’s rather vague reference to and nebulous listings of the stories to be published in his anthology, The Best Stories of 1915 and Year Book of American Fiction, I can but come to the startled conclusion that Ben Hecht’s three stories are all to be reprinted in the estimable collection. Good for Ben Hecht, The Little Review, and Mr. O’Brien’s catholicity of judgment! Some of us there are who like to have our opinions backed and bolstered by authority. And what more august authority than the printed word of Boston. Some of us—but of course not your insurgents. Perhaps Mr. Hecht will resent congratulations. I tender them, nevertheless—with apologies. Good stuff, Ben Hecht! Do us some—more of them.
I’m truly grateful to your reviewer who found my play, The State Forbids, “negative as literature.” If he had found it bad architecture or mediocre sculpture I should have been less pleased.
Play making, to my mind, is not a form of literature (even though its medium chances to be words) but it is an art of spacing ... focusing ... building. Structure upon structure! Foundation. Ornament. Design. An art as distinct from other forms of word utility as color medium is from plastic art. Drama is related to literature only in so far as all arts are inter-related. No more than this. By drama I mean, of course, plays intended (at least in the writer’s mind) for production. These alone are plays. For one reason or another they may never reach the boards, but they must have lived in the writer’s fantasy as things produced. Desk drawer dramas are not plays.