WORK IN SHORT STORIES
The Little Girl sketched this impression of an Indian Summer Dusk:
... Just now the great blue dusk, after an Indian summer day. It deepens and seems to laugh, then all is night. Huge black clouds roll up, promising a storm. Against them, tall, selfish, unafraid, stand the poplar trees. The great Mother of the dusk is singing, the God in Nature is singing, and Nature's belongings, all of them, sing in this magical moment. One feels it all in one's self, feels the glory, the romance, the very core-life of the Universe. The matings too, taking place in the grass and air; the matings of the two streams, the two grains of sand; the matings of butterflies, birds and bees. It all flows through one's body like music and honey and sunshine....
Nothing but space is around me. I feel all hollow inside. Power and beauty and all things else flow through ... and out, like a sieve. My body is far below me, yet it will be taken care of. It does not stumble, nor make any clumsy, unnecessary movement. Finding it alone and forgotten, Rhythm catches it in her gentle arms. Slowly, softly, gently, Rhythm carries it along, the same that carries the deer so swiftly in the forest, the mountain sheep from ledge to ledge and over valleys, and that which waves the trees' long arms so gracefully.... The night moves on its way, the threat of storm is passed. I am back again—an untellable freshness has sweetened hair and clothing. I am all glowing inside.
This was done two years ago. There was a kind of dream story which she recently finished, gratifying the artistic sense entirely, but in a way that ruined it for the general reader. It was all new to her that there could possibly be two ways to regard a bit of workmanship. Five or six story-writers were present for the reading, and out of the fruits of that evening, we surely saw the lesser beauty give way before a greater. We forecasted the readers of the future, who would prefer the more spiritual, more challenging story texture and dénouement.
There has always been The Few—glad to discover the real, answering to interior order and clarity, "straight grain,"—but the fact for enthusiasm now is that the world is being peopled with the awakened. These young moderns are recognising each other from day to day, pulling together for better social order, utilising the wisdom of the East, and the drive of the West—labouring in new paths, daring new leaps, working out philosophies as fresh and ancient as the dawn and, what is straighter to the point, demanding modern books, written out of an integrity to match their own....
Short story writing in America is less a trade and more of an art since Edward J. O'Brien, the poet, took his chair in the flow of the output and began to say which was which. There are a number of people in America who know a good short story when they see one; this is true among those who buy short stories, but editors cannot always buy what they want. A deal of mechanism in a magazine has to be oiled and energised by different kinds of minds from those who paint the pictures and write the tales. O'Brien knew both ends—also he knew that big, unobtrusive part of the market that looks long and pointedly for the real tale.
He is a queer boy—from the bleak fishing grounds north of Boston. He is in no hurry. You couldn't tell if he really wants anything. He doesn't seem to want much—for O'Brien.... After he had his main line and most of the ramifications of his idea laid, he told the editors to send on the stories. Most of them did. O'Brien did a lot of work in a few weeks, did it startlingly well. He started something.... Now, if a writer sits down, suddenly struck with a fine idea for a tale, and this fine idea precludes the possibility of selling it for a high price—the writer dares go ahead and finish the task, because he knows O'Brien will get to the thing in due time, and that if it is really what it seems and the performance of the idea adequate, then the work will not be utterly lost.
As a matter of fact, this is a bit of self-placation, since no work is lost; no one gets the value of a big thing to anything like the degree of the man who does it; no big thing is lost from the world, not even if dropped in a sewer, if it is really important for the world to have it. We are all a bit too heavily handicapped with our own idea of what the world should have from our own shops—at the same time, when we are young, we pant for the quicker return, the answering hail within reason—at least, within time and space. Now O'Brien has come, strangely arrived, his proper phylacteries in place, the touch of tinted haze about his head, the right man.