FICTION.
AME RIC AN SHORT STOR I ES.*
FROM these twenty stories, taken as a whole, certain prevailing characteristics emerge. The first of these is a preoccupation
with particular types of personality or of society, and the second is a lack of interest in, or capacity for, drama. Even in those which tend towards the dramatic type the action and drama are often little more than details in a character study of an individual or a society, and where they are meant to be more they generally fail. In "The Token," for instance, the dramatic climax, -even in the •hands of so capable a writer as Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, falls flat, though the whole structure of the story is skilfully designed to lead up to it. Mr.
Sherwood Anderson in " I'm a Fool" has produced an excellent tale—a long, garrulous narrative in dialect, in which the .
subject, a stable boy, displays his own character ; but though there are dramatic incidents, the primary concern is character.
Similarly, Mr. Conrad Aiken, in a delightful and whimsical tale called "The Dark City," paints a family portrait. It is full of small, illuminating incidents and bright movement, but it has not, and does not require, drama. Miss Katharine Gerould in " Belshazzar's Letter " presents an evening party with unusual skill and charm : her arrangement of the hither- and-thither of general conversation is especially well done, and the characters are touched in with sureness and delicacy.
Yet she blurs her dramatic moment and leaves us, at the crisis, puzzled for a while as to what precisely has happened.
We do not wish to imply that drama is essential to a short story. The undramatic story is a perfectly legitimate type which includes many examples of the highest quality ; and we point out its prevalence among this collection merely as an interesting phenomenon which, in the light of the other fact that most of the dramatic stories fail as drama, seems to possess a significance for present-day American literature which we should like to see discussed. Mr. Edward O'Brien, the editor of the present collection, claims for them that they possess the distinction " of uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in American literature." Such a statement considerably exaggerates the importance of the majority of the stories printed here. Many of them are, in fact, quite second-rate ; but there are a few, on the other hand, which show that in America to-day there are writers who can do good work, and may yet do extremely good work, in this form. Since the death of Katherine Mansfield they have nothing to fear from a comparison with English short story writers.
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