A Book Of Contemporary Short Stories

Text extracted from opening pages of book: A BOOK. OF CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES EDITED BY DOROTHY BREWSTER, PH. D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IV LW YORK CITY With an Appendix on writing the Short Story by LILLIAN BARNARD GILKES NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1936 INTRODUCTION WHEN the material was selected for The Book of Modern Short Stories, published by The Mac millan Company in 1928, the chief interest for several years in that field had been centred upon new devices in technique, as part of the reaction against standardization and formula. A story, it was pointed out, might have an emotional pattern instead of a plot; it might rely for its effect upon mood instead of action; it might drift off down the stream of consciousness instead of cracking the whip of the surprise ending. That collection, therefore, was planned to illustrate different ways of handling material, in stories ranging from one extreme to the other of the types once defined in a book review by Virginia Woolf: on the one hand, the self-sufficient and compact type, in the manner of the French masters, with no thread left hanging, the last sentence often lighting up the whole circumference of the tale; and on the other hand, the loosely trailing rather than tightly furled'* type, in the manner of Chekhov, the stories moving slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away. Since the appearance of the 1928 collection, the annual volumes edited by Mr. E. J. O'Brien and the O. Henry Memorial Committee, besides all the anthologies that are occasional rather than perennial, have continued to take excellent care of the generalrun of interesting con temporary short stories. Meanwhile the preoccupation of critics has been shifting, as the third decade of the century has moved on into the fourth, from form to subject-matter; or rather since no serious critic regards form and subject-matter in any other light than as two I n trodu ction aspects of the same entity the emphasis has shifted. And with the shifting of emphasis there have developed sharp conflicts of opinion. Just as in politics it has be come more and more difficult for the indifferent and the neutral to avoid being drawn to the Right or to the Left, so in criticism lines of battle have been formed on what had been only a pleasant parade-ground. The attack comes from the critics of the Left: from Marxians in New Masses and International Literature to such young revo lutionary poets as Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis, they all have been insisting upon the obligation of the artist, especially the writer, to concern himself with the dominant issues of the day; with the way society is going, or might go, or should go. In any era this obligation ex ists, they say. But it is less binding during periods of relative stability. Stability, however, is far from char acterizing our era, filled as it is with the prospects and portents of revolutionary change and counter-revolu tionary regression. The attack is met by those who disagree profoundly with such a view of the artist's obligation. To their mind his duty is to keep himself as far as possible detached from the current discontents and to remain beyond or above the battle. As the first group of critics urge descent into the Red Square of conflict into the streets, comrades those of the opposing campcounsel retreat to an ivory tower of contemplation. The dust of the controversy gets into our eyes and settles on the books and pictures over which the dispute is waged. It is a small inconvenience in comparison with the mental stimulation of the battle, but it does demand that we do a good deal of dusting-off . Such an office this present anthology is intended to perform for certain kinds of stories. Here are the best examples the editor could find ( without restriction as to country, so far as translations were available) of what may be roughly labelled ivory tower sto