Chapter IV: Part TWO (2)

In the last week I have seen only two street cats and only one to speak to, and that one was a stray orphan kitten who had been adopted by a kind-hearted bookbinder; the other when I would have accosted her gave me one strange look and vanished.

I glanced hurriedly down at my shoes as my hands flew instinctively to my necktie and hat, but the foot-gear were mates (of long standing) and the hat and tie were each in its proper place; nothing was there about my attire to shock the sensibilities of the most fastidious feline!

What did it mean? No cat had ever treated me with such discourtesy before. Then it was that I bethought me of how few of the feline brotherhood or sisterhood I had seen abroad of late.

Have they been carried off by an epidemic? Do cats catch influenza? or catalepsy? Has the scrap-market been affected by the high cost of living? Has the percentage of nutriment in the garbage can diminished to the vanishing point? Have the mice struck for shorter hours?

As I pondered thus at the corner of a lowly street, there tripped past my line of vision a fur coat whose opulence and sheen made its background of untidy brick and stone seem doubly dull and dingy. The motive power of this unlikely pelt was (as far as could be seen) lisle thread and oxford ties but I made no further note of the girl; my mind was fixed on the coat—it was the third of its kind I had observed in as many minutes in that mean street.

A shiver ran through me; I had seen a ghost, a procession of ghosts. It was as if a ouija board had suddenly screamed miaou!

And they say cats come back.

THE RUTHLESSNESS OF MR. COBB

One by one the idols of tradition go by the board. William Tell’s Apple and Paul Revere’s Ride were long ago cast into the trash-basket of Fiction; even Joan of Arc has been received into the mythology of Sainthood, and now that hero of our happy childhood, Casablanca, the boy who stood on the burning deck, is about to be snatched from us by that reckless iconoclast, Mr. Irvin Cobb.

Like the ruthless Woodman in the poem, Mr. Cobb has struck his axe into the very roots of this revered tree of our childish belief⸺

According to Cobb, the Casabianca-tree is only a nut tree and a horsechestnut tree at that. Writing in the _Saturday Evening Post_, he tells us that Casabianca was nothing more than a “feeble-minded leatherhead.” If that be so then Barbara Frietchie was a leatherhead, and Edith Cavell, and all the host of those who gave up or were ready to give up their lives for that purely imaginary thing, an ideal, and what _could_ the blessed Evangelist have been thinking of when he wrote “_He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal._” John 12:25.

Exactly two thousand years ago when the city of Pompeii was destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a Roman sentinel, another idol of tradition just such a leatherhead as Casablanca, refused to desert his post and was burned to death for the very foolish reason that he was “on duty.” He is there to this day, standing “at attention,” in the shape of a cast made from the matrix of molten lava that enveloped his living body and you may call him a leatherhead if you like, but the memory of his leatherheadedness will endure when sensible people like you, dear reader, and me and Mr. Cobb are forgotten.

* * * * *

Nevertheless there are two sides to every question, and it is quite possible that Casabianca may have been a perfectly sensible lad, whose only thought was to disobey his captain and desert his post, but the tar melting from the heat in the seams of the deck, and adhering to his feet caused him to stick to the ship. Be that as it may, _I_ shall stick to Casabianca!

MY LAKE

Mr. Finchsifter has compared my Lake to a gleaming sapphire reposing on a corsage of emerald green plush.

I have never seen Mr. Finchsifter’s wife—I do not even know that Finchsifter is married, but since the emerald plush bosom of his poetic fancy, stands for miles and miles of heaving Pines and fluttering Laurels and Finchsifter stands barely four feet six in his stockings, by all the laws of natural selection the human embodiment of his Brobdingnagian simile, must be either Mrs. Finchsifter or some not impossible Eve of a Finchsifter dream Paradise. A colossal counterpart (I picture her), of the waxen Demi-Goddess in the Finchsifter show window displaying with revolving impartiality on a faultless neck and bosom the glittering treasures of India, Africa, Peru, Mexico and Maiden Lane.

To be strictly truthful, I do not know that Mr. Finchsifter’s show window can boast such a waxen deity as I have described; indeed for all I know he possesses neither a show window nor the merchandise to advertise in such a window, but I have as the saying is, a “hunch” that Mr. Finchsifter’s imagery as applied to my Lake is based on something more than a mere academic interest in the adornment, textile or lapidarious of the human form.

And my Lake—in the first place it is not my Lake (but of that later), neither does it resemble a sapphire any more than the Pines and Laurels on its bank (save that when agitated they heave or flutter) resemble a green plush corsage.

If I were asked for an image, I should compare my Lake to an India-rubber band rather than to a sapphire. In form an elongated ellipse, it possesses an elasticity of circumference that is little short of miraculous.

The boastful pedestrian, glowing from his early morning trot around its shore will tell you it is a good ten miles.

The persistent swain, scheming to lure his Heart’s Desire, high heeled and reluctant, to the amorous shades of “Lover’s Landing,” tells her, upon his honor, that it is not more than a mile all the way round. To be precise, the distance round my Lake is something between a stroll and a “constitutional”—or to put it relatively about what the circumambulation of an ocean liner’s deck would be to an athletic inch worm.

As I said before, my Lake is not my Lake. It is nobody’s Lake. Not a human habitation profanes its bosky shores. The only beings that make even a pretense of ownership are five starch-white swans that patrol it from morning till night, turning fitfully this way and that and probing its depths and shallows with their yellow bills as if seeking for the missing Deed of title. On certain days when the diamond Lake is still, and the Pine and Laurel corsage is untroubled by a tremor, the starch-white company is doubled by five ghostly “understudies” who reflect their whiteness curve for curve and feather for feather with a fidelity of inversion that may find its match only in the art of a Shaw or a Chesterton.

It was on such a day as this that I met Mr. Finchsifter. I had completed the circuit of the Lake and leaving the wooded path that skirts its shore ascended through the woods to the level ground above, where on the further side of a well kept automobile road rises the lofty iron grille that engirdles for miles the country seat of Barabbas Wolfe, the Sausage King, typifying at once, by the safe deposit-like thickness of its bars and the view-inviting openness of its scrollwork, the innate love of show, tempered by newly acquired exclusiveness of a lord not to the manor born.

Gazing, in beady eyed appraisal at the neat but somewhat constricted Italian garden to which the railing at this point invited the eye—stood Finchsifter.

In this crowded jungle of spotless stone Lions, tomblike seats and arches backed by California privet and immature cypresses there was an irreverent suggestion of the Villa D’Este done into American slang.

He turned hearing my step, “Where is it I have seen it—before?”

“In the movies perhaps”—I ventured.

“That’s it! Thank you very much!” he exclaimed. “I knew I had seen it somewhere!”

After ascertaining my name in reluctant payment for the unsolicited tender of his own he continued, “but the Lions show better in the ‘pictures’ don’t they? Why didn’t they get them with moss already.”

“With moss?” I queried.

“Sure!” said Finchsifter. “Didn’t you know such a stone Lion comes also with the moss, the same as the genuine old antique furniture comes with the real hand-made worm-holes!”

I remembered guiltily how on the occasion of my last visit to Lake towers when asked by Mrs. Barabbas Wolfe, what I thought of her marble Lions, I had exclaimed with truthful enthusiasm “Wonderful! But my dear lady _how_ do you keep them so clean?”

We walked on together, and though avoiding as we did so the physical proximity of my Lake we could not exclude it wholly from our conversation.

It was a passing glitter of the water caught through the pines below us at a turn in the road that inspired the Diamond-plush simile from which try as I may, I shall never be able to dissociate the image of my Lake.

Greatly to my surprise I found myself becoming interested in Finchsifter, and during the luncheon which followed our return to my Bungalow and the dinner that evening at his hotel, we laid what promised to be the foundation of a lasting friendship.

To be sure he was a man of many words, but the words of Finchsifter were well trained words, old family servants that knew their places and never presumed, or took liberties with the listener.

If a reply or comment were imperative—an adjective caught at random gave instant clue to what had gone before—even as a single toe joint restores to the naturalist the forgotten form of the Iohippus.

Finchsifter was a mental rest cure, his talk was soothing as a verbal brain massage. I conceived that one might form the Finchsifter habit, in time even become a slave to it as men become slaves to cocaine, Psychoanalysis, or Taxicabs.

But this was not to be.

As a would-be suicide has been turned from his purpose by the chill of the water into which he has plunged—so it was by Finchsifter himself that I was cured of the Finchsifter habit.

It was on the occasion of our second meeting, appointed at the suggestion of Finchsifter that we take our matutinal walk around the Lake in each others company.

He greeted me with a delighted smile, exclaiming as he took my hand in both of his very new saffron gloves.

“I have a great idea found—!—You are a poet? yes? Then you know all about this Free Verse which I read always about in the magazines? Perhaps you can yourself make it? Yes?” His face fairly shone with the inner flame of his project.

I found myself harkening against my will. What possible interest could Finchsifter have in verse of any kind—let alone free verse. “This will never do,” I reflected. “If he compels me to listen—then we shall cease to be friends—I came here to rest. I might as well take the first train back to New York!” Finchsifter was still talking. Eyeing me keenly as if mentally debating my trustworthiness—he continued: “If it is sure enough Free, then it don’t cost nothing.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, recalled abruptly from my own thoughts.

“Free verse!” cried Finchsifter. “That’s my scheme!—but don’t you tell it—It is between only ourselves—fifty-fifty—we split everything—_we_ create the demand—we corner the supply, you and me together corner all the free verse in the United States—in this world for that matter and sell it for—” Again he hesitated—“If I might ask it—about what does a Poet get for such a little piece of poetry? The kind that is not free. A piece so long I mean.”—He measured a sonnet’s width of air between his thumb and fore-finger—“what do you get for that much?” I told him what the magazines pay me.

“What! A dollar a line! Gott in Himmel! we make a fortune! That’s what I tell Rebecca—If we corner all the free verse in the United States and sell it for no more as five cents a line—we make our fortune! but a dollar a line!—Himmel!”—he fairly danced for ecstasy and then it was I made the discovery, by which I lost if not a Fortune at least a Finchsifter.

I stood still as the tide of words with its flotsam of tossing gestures, continued—I heard nothing. I only waited for Finchsifter to subside.

“Am I right!” He gasped at length with what by every law of supply and demand should have been his latest breath.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”—I replied angrily. “All I know is we’re walking the wrong way.”

“What do you mean the wrong way?” said Finchsifter.

“The wrong way round the Lake that’s what I mean!”

* * * * *

I don’t know how long we stood there arguing the question, I only know that his mind was inaccessible to reason, persuasion—even bribery, for, as a last resort, I offered to give him a list of all the best free verse writers in America if he would only listen to reason—nothing would move him—Finchsifter had always walked round the lake from right to left and always would—and what I said about his rubbing its precious plush corsage the wrong way of the nap was all rot.

I turned on my heel and left him. Half an hour later when we met at Lover’s Landing which is exactly half way round the Lake we passed without speaking.

And now I must wait each day until Finchsifter has taken his walk from right to left round my Lake, taking my walk (from left to right) in the chill of the evening to pacify the tutelary Goddess by smoothing back her green plush corsage, which has been rubbed the wrong way by Finchsifter.

THE HUNDREDTH AMENDMENT

After the passage of the Ninety-eighth Amendment making it a misdemeanor to “_manufacture, sell, own, possess, purchase, nurse, dandle or otherwise caress or display that effigy of the infant form commonly known as a Doll_” … the abolition of that feathered symbol of vicarious maternity, the Stork, followed as a matter of course.

The passage of the Anti-Stork Bill or, to be more accurate, the Ninety-ninth Amendment, thanks to the tenacity and tact of President John Quincy Epstein, was the most expeditious piece of legislation put through by the hundred and fifth Congress.

It must not be forgotten, however, that the introduction of lectures on obstetrics into the curriculum of the kindergartens had done much to educate the child vote and that at the time the fate of the Stork was hanging in the balance, that once esteemed Bird of Prurient Evasion was already becoming unpopular and well on its way to join the Dodo.

And now the department of government devoted to the cause of Infant Uplift, having abolished the Mock-Offspring and settled the fate of the Bird of Nativity, cast about for some new Field of Endeavor.

And what more fitting than that they should light upon that hoary old imposter masquerading under the several aliases Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle, and Father Christmas?

At once the Propaganda was started.

Press agents were engaged, lecture tours arranged, magazines subsidized.

No matter what it might cost, this “Vulture gnawing at the Palladium of Infant Emancipation” must be destroyed!!

Santa Claus, once, in the memory of living men and women, adored by children and winked at by their parents, was now branded as an imposter, a mountebank, a public nuisance, and a perverter of infant intelligence.

Santa Claus was an outlaw from the Commonwealth of Reason.

It was “thumbs down” for Santa!

It may be well to explain right here (since none of the events chronicled in this History has yet happened) that the movement for the Emancipation and Self-Determination of Infants, which has now taken such great strides, had its initiation in the presidential term of Miles Standish Sovietski when Congress extended the franchise to every child over five years of age who had made any serious contribution to literature or higher mathematics.

It was in the same year that President Sovietski signed the Sixty-fourth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, prohibiting the publication of fairy tales, and Congress suspended the Limitation-of-Search Act in order that private libraries and nurseries might be raided without warning and all copies of the forbidden works summarily seized and destroyed.

Simultaneously with the federal enactment, the states of Washington, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon, ever in the advance of any great intellectual movement, passed laws prohibiting “_the personification or representation, public or private, in theatre, music hall, club house, lodge, church fair, schoolhouse, or private residence, of any supernatural, fairy, or otherwise mythical person or persons or fraction thereof_.”

The passing of a Constitutional Amendment was now an almost every-day occurrence. Indeed, since the ratification of the Forty-fourth Amendment prohibiting the use of sarsaparilla as a beverage (coffee and tea had been legislated out of existence five years earlier) the enactment of a new Amendment excited little or no comment. Even the Seventy-ninth Amendment forbidding “_the use of caviar, club sandwiches, and buttonhole bouquets, except for medicinal purposes_,” received only casual notice in the Metropolitan Dailies.

The twentieth century was rapidly nearing its close and the political apathy that for fifty years had been gradually benumbing the Public morale now threatened to paralyze completely what little still remained of courage and initiative.

Even the latest work of Bernard Shaw, “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Infinite,” published (with a five volume preface) on Mr. Shaw’s hundred and fortieth birthday, aroused so little resentment that his projected visit to the United States had to be abandoned, in spite of the fact that “Bean and Soup o’Bean,” written only a week earlier, was acknowledged to have contributed largely to the triumph of the Seventy-ninth Amendment, making Vegetarianism compulsory in the United States.

The Hundredth Amendment passed quickly though the earlier stages of routine and perfunctory debate without any appreciable sign of anything approaching popular protest.

Here and there a guarded expression such as “Poor old Santa! I’m sorry he’s got to go!” was voiced, in the privacy of a club, by some elderly gentleman. Nothing more.

Somewhere, behind Somebody, was a Power that directed and guided—perhaps threatened. Nobody knew who or what or where it was or in what manner it worked, but work it did and to such purposes that, after a scant week of cut and dried speech-making that deceived no one, the Amendment was submitted unanimously by both houses of Congress and the foregone conclusion of ratification was all that remained to make the abolition of Santa Claus an accomplished fact.

Then, inevitably as fish follows soup, followed the ratification.

The Hundredth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting Santa Claus, slipped through the ratification process like an oil prospectus in a mail chute. There was only one hitch, Rhode Island, but since Rhode Island had refused to ratify a single one of the last Seventy-nine Amendments, her action was accepted as part of the program and a proof of unanimity.

So Santa Claus was abolished?

Not so fast please!—Who’s writing this History anyway?

* * * * *

’Twas the night before Christmas
And in the White House
Not a creature was stirring
Not even a * * * * *

For the benefit of the clever reader who may have guessed the word left out in the last line of the above quatrain, I will explain that the asterisks are used in obedience to a clause of the Ninety-first Amendment prohibiting, both in speech and print, the use of the word * * * * * which, as the political emblem of the Free People’s Party (now happily defunct), came into such contempt that it was made a misdemeanor “_to print, publish, own, sell, purchase, or consult any book, pamphlet, catalogue, circular, or dictionary containing the word * * * * *_” It has been estimated that over eighty million dollars’ worth of Century and Standard dictionaries were destroyed in the first year of this Amendment’s operation. The loss in Nursery Rhymes, children’s books, and Natural Histories is beyond computation.

But to return to the White House.

President John Quincy Epstein had retired to his study on the second floor shortly before midnight, taking with him the engrossed copy of the Hundredth Amendment which now only required his Spencerian signature to expunge the name of Santa Claus forever from the American speech and language as utterly and irrevocably as the forbidden word * * * * *.

The hours passed in a perfectly orderly manner, like school children at a fire drill—_one, two, three, four_—without pushing or jostling—_five, six, seven, eight_—(don’t you think history is much more interesting in the form of a simple “Outline” like this than spun out in the common manner?)—_nine, ten_—! At eleven o’clock the door of the President’s study was burst open by the order of the Vice President, Rebecca Crabtree, now, by a sudden and mysterious stroke of Fate, herself become the President of the United States.

For John Quincy Epstein was dead.

How or just when he died will never be known. Always a cold, forbidding (not to say prohibiting) man, his body when found was still cold—if anything colder; his watch which should have marked the exact moment of his demise, was ticking merrily, so the exact moment will forever remain unrecorded.

But Santa Claus still lives and will live forever!

On the massive gold-inlaid-with-ivory desk (a Christmas gift from the United Department Stores of America), lay a paper, inscribed, and signed in the President’s handwriting, and sealed with his official seal.

It was the presidential veto of the Hundredth Amendment; and by virtue of a clause in Amendment Thirty-three “_no Constitutional Amendment vetoed by the President shall ever be resubmitted to the country nor any fraction thereof_—”

Santa Claus will live forever! Hurray for Santa Claus!

SAY IT WITH ASTERISKS

A vague and terrifying science, astronomy! Only as a subdued though highly decorative lighting effect can I regard the stellar pageant with equanimity.

To be sure I have learned to locate the Dipper and Orion and Cassiopeia’s Chair and a few other popular favorites, but this painful knowledge was acquired solely for its conversational value on summer evenings at week-end, house or yachting parties.

Beyond that, all I know about the science of astronomy could be as accurately demonstrated with the perforations of a colander, held up to the light, as on the most perfect star map in the Encyclopedia Britannica. If the truth must be told, I much prefer Asterisks.

* * * * *

With a moon and a mariner’s compass and a good road map or chart, the traveler by land or sea can get along very well without the stars, but in the trackless mazes of literature and art, how would the wandering Philistine fare without Asterisks? An anthology or guide of any kind without Asterisks would be as unthinkable as a Dalmatian dog without spots or a red-headed boy without freckles.

Imagine yourself in the city of Berlin with a de-stellated Baedeker. You would make Moses-when-the-light-went-out look like a torchlight procession!

Not that I cite Herr Karl Baedeker as the model of stellar perfection. Too many stars may prove as demoralizing as too many cooks. Even that guide, topographer and friend of the tourist is at times bewildering, if not misleading.

On page 133 of Baedeker’s Berlin, “_Furniture From the Boudoir of Queen Marie Antoinette_” has two stars, ** while “_Elijah in the Desert_,” on page 108, has, in addition to all his other troubles, to worry along with one star.

And that is not the worst of it.

On page 163, “_a well-preserved Archæopteryx in Solnhofen slate_,” to me by all odds the most interesting object in Berlin, has no star at all! * * *

But no matter how annoying it is, you must never blame the Asterisks. They only did as they were told and stood where Herr Baedeker placed them and, if they did wrong, Herr Baedeker alone was responsible. A good writer—or editor—is good to his Asterisks, and when he puts them in a false position we must make due allowance.

If Asterisks could combine and form a protective union, there might be some hope for them, but a flair for collective bargaining is not in their nature. That being the case, I suggest the establishment of a Federal Licensing Bureau empowered to investigate the qualifications of would-be employers of Asterisks and issue or withhold licenses accordingly.

And it is high time something were done about it.

Only lately there has been brought to my notice a case of so flagrant a nature that, were there such an institution as a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Asterisks, I should feel it my duty to call their attention to it.

To come down to brass tacks, as the saying is, the flagrant case of cruelty to Asterisks, to which I refer, consists of a fat book, called “The Best Short Stories of 1921.” Edited by Edward J. O’Brien—Published by Small Maynard.

Never, I think, were a mob of overworked employees so pitifully huddled together in an ill-ventilated factory as are the Asterisks in this Sweatshop of Twaddle.

The Sweatshop proper—if a Sweatshop may be so qualified—is situated in the rear of the book, occupying about a fifth of its volume, and consists of:

A Bibliographical Roll of Honor of American Short Stories for 1920 and 1921 in which “_the best stories are indicated by an Asterisk_.”

A Roll of Honor of Foreign Short Stories in American Magazines in which “_Stories of special excellence are indicated by an Asterisk_.”

Volumes of short stories published in the United States. “_An Asterisk before a title indicates distinction._”

Volumes of short stories published in England and Ireland. “_An Asterisk before a title indicates distinction._”

Volumes of Short Stories published in France. “_An Asterisk before a title, etc._” Follows then a list of articles on the Short Story and last of all An Index of Short Stories in Books, and here the Asterisks are forced to work overtime and Mr. O’Brien’s English gets a bit sloppy. He says:

“_Three Asterisks prefixed to a title indicate_ the more or less permanent _literary value of the story_.”

“More or less permanent” reminds me of an advertisement I once saw in a street car: “Face Powder makes your complexion _more irresistible_.” Is it possible that Mr. O’Brien wrote it?

In the division entitled Magazine Averages, Mr. O’Brien comes another cropper with “_Three Asterisk stories are of_ somewhat permanent _literary value_.” Again, in the introduction, “_Sherwood Anderson has made this year once more the_ most permanent _contribution to the American Short Story_.”

Mr. O’Brien’s invention of varying degrees of permanence is an important contribution to science and entitles him to receive at the very least the Order of the Golden Asterisk of the Second Class with Palms.

* * * * *

Such, in brief, is the Sweatshop in the rear where the toiling Asterisks labor in weary shifts of one, two and three, pounding out asinine averages and percentages of permanency and near-permanency and plu-permanency with a zeal that would do credit to the framer of a Volstead Act.

Now let us walk round to the front of the Factory, where in his cosy business office which he calls the “Introduction” the Foreman of the works, Mr. Edward J. O’Brien, will tell us in the airy argon of the shop all about the Fictional Flivvers—in which he is a second-hand dealer—how they are made, what they are worth and, if permanent, just how long their permanence will last.

As Foreman O’Brien warms up to his subject he will describe in vitally pulsating phrases that would drive a movie writer mad with envy, the convulsion of Nature that attended the birth of the American Short Story. “_The ever-widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races_.”

All of which speechifying translated into plain talk conveys the astounding information that the hooch of American Fiction is being brewed in the much-advertised Melting Pot! Well, why couldn’t he say so and be done with it?

Speaking of the Anglo-Saxon he says: “_The Anglo-Saxon was beginning to absorb large tracts of other racial fields of memory and to share the experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian and Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic._” The Melting Pot again! What did I tell you! Continuing, Mr. O’Brien describes the process of fermentation as a new chaos set up by tracts of remembered racial experience interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen and eager civilization. He doesn’t explain exactly how a thing so completely lacking in the elements of design as a chaos should be “set up” to get the best results. All he tells us is that fresh chaos is good material for American literature, and that our Mr. Anderson and others are very busy in a half unconscious way, trying to make “worlds” out of it.

By “worlds” I take it Mr. O’Brien means something vast and vague and “_vitally compelling_” and “organic” that our Mr. Anderson and others will fuse into American Fiction “_in artistic crucibles of their own devising_.”

On the whole, things look pretty bright for the American Short Story, what with the “fresh living current which flows through the best American work, and the Psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it,” and the “seething maelstrom of cross currents,” and the “dynamic creative energies,” and above all the _chaos_, the great American Chaos—fresh—unlimited—inexhaustible—ripe for the “artistic crucible,” in which it is soon to be fused into a new cosmos of “organic fiction” by the White Headed Boy of the Western World.

* * * * *

On the other hand, how gloomy the outlook pictured by Mr. O’Brien for the Englishman and the Scotchman and the Irishman! “Living at home—writing out of a background of racial memory and established tradition.” It fairly gives me the shivers. No wonder their fiction lacks compelling vitality!

But wouldn’t you think that with all the Chaos lying round loose in Europe these days, the Scotchman at least would grab enough of it to create a bonnie new world of vitally compelling fiction for himself? That’s what I thought, but it seems I thought wrong. The Foreign Chaos differs from the Domestic variety in that it is “an end rather than a beginning, a Chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen.”

Once more, to translate the O’Brien speechifying into speech—for the benefit of readers who are not movie fans—the American brand of Chaos is fresh and the European Chaos is stale.

The elemental principles underlying all forms of creation are the same, whether you are creating a short story or a buckwheat cake. The same dynamic laws must be obeyed.

You may have the very best possible formula for the creation of a buckwheat cake and the best crucible—I mean the most artistic frying pan that can be bought; but unless the contributory elements of heat, butter and eggs are physically and spiritually beyond reproach, your buckwheat cake will be a failure.

So, too, you may have the most perfect recipe for a short story—from Mr. O’Brien’s own book—and you may have the most vitally compelling Psychology—straight from the farm—but if your Chaos be of the European cold-storage brand instead of the “strictly fresh,” or, better still, “new-laid” domestic variety, your Short Story will be—like most of those in Mr. O’Brien’s collection—quite unfit for human consumption.

* * * * *

That Mr. O’Brien is a scientist of the first rank has been amply proved by his startling invention of comparative Permanence—see Roll of Honor—but, though it is interesting to know that by the use of Asterisks what was once believed to be the essential characteristic of Permanence can be modified, I doubt if half of one per cent Permanence will ever become popular.

But Mr. O’Brien has made another and more practical contribution to science.

He has computed by means of Asterisks, that thirty-eight short stories by American authors “would not occupy more space than five novels of average length.”

What a priceless boon to the budding author about to embark upon his first short story!

All he has to do is to borrow five novels of average length, cut out the pages and divide the total number into seven equal piles, each one of which will be seven and three-fifths of the total pile.

Six of these piles he may throw away or return to the friends who loaned them—or the Public Library, as the case may be. He must then take the seventh pile and placing the pages end to end on the floor—the roof of the house will do if the floor be too small—and procuring a strip of paper of exactly the same length, begin the Story at one end and continue writing until he reaches the other end.

This will insure the work’s being of the right length for an American Short Story, and, if Mr. O’Brien’s other two conditions as to “form and substance” are properly fulfilled, the Story will be quite all right and may be published—with three Asterisks—in the Roll of Honor for the following year.

* * * * *

The luncheon hour at the O’Brien Sweatshop is devoted to an Efficiency Drill of all the Asterisks employed.

The Drill lasts an hour and is designed to keep the Asterisks in perfect physical condition for their arduous work.

First, there is a grand march of Asterisks in varying formations of ones, twos and threes. This is followed by running matches and exhibitions of high jumping, wrestling and leaping through hoops.

An exciting game of Roll of Honor closes the exercises.

This is the most violent exercise of all and consists of rolling blindfold down an inclined plane and landing in a huge pile of short stories.

The Asterisk that picks up the best Short Story, receives as a reward an honorable mention in the Annual Report.

* * * * *

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?

Great Heavens, no! Hans Christian Andersen.

* * * * *

I have not the space to speak in detail of more than one of the Stories in Mr. O’Brien’s collection, nor will it be necessary; one specimen of the deadly _Amonita Bulbosa_ in a mess of mushrooms is enough to justify the partaker thereof in damning the whole dish, if he live to express any opinion at all; so, if in a collection that claims to be composed of “Best Short Stories” I find one that is very bad in both Substance and Form, indeed so bad in Substance that it hardly deserves to be called a Story at all, I may surely, with perfect justice, damn the whole book as being false to its title and not what it pretends to be.

But in censuring Mr. Anderson’s story “Brothers,” I am not so much criticizing the author as admonishing the compiler of “The Best Stories” for the gross misuse of an Asterisk.

One does not have to be an officer of the S. P. C. A. to rebuke a truck driver who is abusing a horse that is hitched to a truckload of junk that is much too heavy for it.

By the same token, I do not pose as a critic when I take Mr. O’Brien to task for hitching an Asterisk to Sherwood Anderson’s story, “Brothers.”

I should not have noticed the Anderson load of junk, but for the stupidity of its driver, which annoys me.

It is no way to treat an Asterisk.

* * * * *

The kindest thing that can be said of “Brothers” is that its inclusion in a collection of American Short Stories puts it in a false position. It is unmistakably American—the mark of the “Melting Pot” is all over it—and I suppose it is Short, though it takes a lot of patience to read it, but it is _not_ a story in the accepted sense of the word.

It starts nowhere, it does nothing and it gets nowhere, reminding one vaguely of the three Japanese monkeys who see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing.

To apply the O’Brien test, it has no Substance. The weaver went through the motions of weaving, but he wove nothing. There is no “stuff” here.

Neither has it Form. The material—such as it is—is not shaped “into the most beautiful and satisfying form by skillful selection and arrangement.” That is to say, it violates Mr. O’Brien’s own rule.

If I were asked to give the thing a name, I should say that “Brothers” is a sort of cross between a very dull parody of one of G. S. Street’s “Episodes” and a grimy but ambitious newspaper “story” touched up with a dash of that old-fashioned freak of lap-dog literature known as the “Poem in Prose,” much petted by Turgenieff in the early eighties, a vehicle—if one may be permitted to change similes in midstream—in which you pay as you enter and as you leave, both.

You pay as you enter with a soddenly self-conscious rhapsody in G minor, and you pay as you leave with a tiresome repetition of the same.

When a Story of the O’Brien school begins like that, you feel sure it is going to lead to something disgusting and you are seldom disappointed, certainly not in this instance.

It is a sort of elegy on the falling leaves.

Mr. Anderson almost weeps for pity of the falling leaves. Listen to the patter of the Andersonian tears:

“* * * the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October, leaves should be carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.”

You have a feeling as you read this, that Mr. A. rather fancies it himself. You can almost hear him say: “I do this fallen-leaf stuff rather well, if you know what I mean!” and since it is the only pretty bit in the Story, you hardly blame him for repeating it at the end.

For my part, I am suspicious; I am not from Missouri, but, nevertheless, I require to be shown.

I ask myself: “Is Mr. Anderson sincere?”

I read further on, and I find that he is not.

This is what I read:

“* * * His arms tightened about the body of the little dog so that it screamed with pain. I stepped forward and tore the arms away, and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared at the dog lying at his feet.”

Nothing more about the little dog until, a few lines further on, Mr. Anderson shows that the dying agony of a little dog excited only a passing interest in him. “An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest went past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It may be that the dog, like the workman’s wife and her unborn child, is now dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling like rain—the yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down heavily * * *,” and so on, with a repetition of the opening rhapsody of grief for the falling leaves.

So, you see, to Sherwood Anderson a falling leaf is a heart-rending sight, but a falling puppy, even though its ribs be crushed and it scream with agony, is quite another thing.

No, Mr. Anderson is not sincere.

And if an artist, though he fairly reek with seething dynamic chaos and vitally compelling psychology, have not sincerity, all the Asterisks in Mr. O’Brien’s sweatshop will avail him naught.

End of Project Gutenberg's Neither Here Nor There, by Oliver Herford