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EDWARD J. O'BRIEN: BEST SHORT STORIES AND THE PRODUCTION OF AN AMERICAN GENRE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Jacquelyn S. Spangler, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University

1997

Dissertation Committee:

Professor Debra Moddelmog, Advisor Approved by

Professor Susan Williams Û . Advisor Q Professor Valerie Lee Department of English Professor Melanie Rae Thon UMI Number: 9731720

UMI Microform 9731720 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeh Road Ann Arbor, Ml 48103 ABSTRACT

From 1915-1941, during his twenty-six years as the first editor of Best Short Stories (the annual anthology that continues today as Best American Short Stories), Edward

J. O'Brien established that series as a center of judgement for the literary ideal of the short story. As the leading authority on the American short story, O'Brien achieved his goal of transforming the short story from a commercial to a literary genre by defining acceptable standards of form and substance, by promoting the Iowa Writer's Workshop, by influencing the early twentieth-century American short story canon, and by shaping the scope and focus of short story theory. This study looks at O'Brien's editorship of the

Best Short Stories and argues that, although O'Brien was committed to maintaining a mass audience for the short story, his project of literary genrefication excluded the existing story audience from cultural authority and ultimately sacrificed popular support for the newly emerging story form.

The cultural, economic, and political values inherent in the "standards" that O'Brien endorsed are illustrated in

ii the stories he chose to reprint in his series and by those which he excluded, namely stories of the Harlem Renaissance and those by writers of color. This project analyzes

O'Brien's aesthetic within a cultural and historical context, arguing that, despite poststructural awareness of language and representation, contemporary short story criticism continues to reflect O'Brien's standards for the literary ideal of the American short story, a position which has perpetuated an exclusive critical apparatus that dominates and determines the production of short stories well into the postmodern era.

Ill Dedicated to Janet Kesselring Spangler

IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank my adviser, Debra Moddelmog, for her

intellect, her interest in this dissertation, and her

support which made this project possible.

I thank Susan Williams for extending the scope of this

project into the 19th century and for generously sharing her

knowledge of cultural production.

I am grateful to Valerie Lee for her enthusiasm for

this dissertation and her valuable input. I am also

grateful to Melanie Rae Thon for her careful consideration

of these pages and for giving me the chance to talk it out.

I also wish to thank Cartha Sexton for endless help with red tape, and Mary Castoe for the many messages she

delivered. Thanks to Jim Bracken for research clues and

Viola Newton for last minute editing and inspiration.

Muchas gracias to Pirouz. VITA

March 28, 1963.... Born - Dixon, Illinois

1992...... M.A. English, The Ohio State University

1992 - present.... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate,

The Ohio State University

Publications

1. Spangler, Jacquelyn, "Death to America." Kansas Quarterlv/Arkansas Review. 28(1), 1997.

2. Spangler, Jacquelyn, "What I Saw From There." Southwest Review. 79(2&3), 1994.

Fields of Study

Major Field; English

VI TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract...... 11

Dedication...... Iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita...... vl

Chapters:

1. Introduction: Best Short Stories and the Production of Taste...... 1

2. A Democracy of Letters: Cultural Nationalism and O'Brien's Aesthetic...... 48

3. Best Short Stoles: An Aesthetic of Exclusion.... 108

4. Theorizing the Short story: Beyond the New Critical Myth...... 176

5. Conclusion: O'Brien's Canon...... 208

Bibliography...... 216

Vll CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION BEST SHORT STORIES AND THE PRODUCTION OF AMERICAN TASTE

The public taste is now being created. Add to this, the period in our national life: we are coming to our artistic maturity. Add the profound social transition that was upon us before the war. And add any other factor you may choose for what may come after the war; for I think that momentous events stand on the threshold of the world. — Edward O'Brien, Best Short Stories (1915)

In 1915, young poet and literary aficionado Edward J.

O'Brien published the first anthology of contemporary

American stories. Best Short Stories and Yearbook of the

American Short Story (later called Best American Short

Stories), an annual series that has continued uninterrupted publication until today, and has influenced the careers of

such literary figures as Sherwood Anderson and Ernest

Hemingway, John Cheever and John Updike, Eudora Welty and

Joyce Carol Oates to name a few. Although comprehensive histories of the American short story had been published before 1915, and literary publishing companies such as

Houghton Mifflin, Harper and Brothers, and Charles

Scribner's Sons were publishing collections of individual authors, O'Brien was the first to collect stories newly published in American magazines by contemporary authors, many of them virtually unknown.

O'Brien's editorship of the Best Short Stories began in

1915 with the outbreak of the First World War and ended in

1941 when he died soon after a heart attack suffered during the London blitz of World War II. Establishing his authority during the years between the two world wars— transformative years for the cultures of the United States, for the development of American Literature as an academic discipline within American universities, and for the short story as a literary genre— O'Brien rose to prominence in part because of his ability to recognize the significance of his historical moment and to assert his taste among a range of literary and cultural forces. For example, like most editors and social critics of the time, O'Brien was emphatically concerned with what he saw as the emergence of an American national culture and, like most academicians, the need for defining and legitimizing American literature.

This dissertation shows :hat O'Brien's authority was so tremendously influencial because it was dispersed in many different aspects of short story production. Through his participation in literary lecture circuits, his two books of criticism, and his appearance in magazines as guest editor, judge, and story reviewer, O'Brien's critical voice reached a wide and varied audience. His interest in Midwestern realism supported the writers and teachers who became instrumental in the development of the Iowa Writers'

Workshop, and his crucial involvement with the establishment and promotion of Story magazine integrated his taste into the most institutionalized structures of story production of his time. Most important, however, O'Brien established and maintained authority by providing an annual prize of national distinction that, by O'Brien's rights to the title and his authority as editor, was accepted and revered as the

"Best."

This study demonstrates O'Brien's influence on the development of the American short story, emphasizing his role in creating the early twentieth-century short story canon and the means by which short stories continue to be produced today. Although the focus remains on O'Brien, it is important to note the impact of other editors such as

H. L. Mencken and other sites of influence such as the growing number of literary organizations that, at times, intersected with O'Brien's project to promote a particular type of literary story, while at other times, operated outside of his range of interests and scope of influence.

The impact of O'Brien and his Best Short Stories must be considered within their historical and cultural contexts of which a complete exploration exceeds the scope of this dissertation. My attempt to contextualize O'Brien's influence on the development of the American literary short story is enhanced and complicated by the historical distance that a late twentieth-century perspective can bring to such a study. Many literary figures of his day, however, celebrated with unqualified rhetoric what they considered to be O'Brien's most significant contributions. Martha Foley, for example, O'Brien's successor, said of his series, "His anthology created a new awareness of the short story as an important literary form, a new questioning of its reason for existence" (Best 1942 xv). Of the magnitude of O'Brien's role in shaping American taste, the first director of the

Iowa Writers' Workshop, Wilbur Schramm wrote, "The project which he began in 1915 as a record of one man's taste grew slowly into a national monument" (9).

Reacting against the formulaic stories encouraged in popular magazines, O'Brien began Best Short Stories in response to the commercialization of the American short story. O'Brien considered the mass production of short fiction— "the ruck of the interminable commonplace"— and the high payment magazines could afford to pay their contributors a temptation that threatened to corrupt the motivations of the "true artist" and thus to thwart the possibility of establishing a literary standard for the

American short story. When O'Brien began his series, the short story craze that had played a major role in the boom of mass magazine production at the turn of the century continued to support and promote magazines in the marketplace. By 1915, at least thirty-six nationally distributed periodicals regularly featured fiction, and leading publishers of short fiction— Collier's,

Cosmopolitan, McCall's, and Saturday Evening Post— had each achieved one million in circulation, a record that had been held since 1906 by The Ladies Home Journal So profitable was it for magazines to feature fiction in the early thirties that Cosmopolitan paid authors up to $5000 for a short story. As late as 1950, despite a dramatic national shift in mass magazines away from publishing fiction,

Saturday Evening Post received between 60,000-200,000 unsolicited manuscripts (Peterson 126).

Perusing the fiction published in magazines of mass circulation reveals a taste for an idealized world of prosperous debutantes and happy marriages, with the names of popular fiction magazines such as Snappy Stories, Breezy

Stories, and Saucy Stories reflecting the tone and content most often associated with the magazine story. Although mass magazines built and maintained an American audience for the short story, their financial support by commercial advertisers led critics to complain that the mercantile culture of the advertising industry influenced editorial decisions and thus contaminated the literary integrity of the short story. In his efforts to convince the American public that their taste was undeveloped and polluted by what the popular magazines advertised as "literary," O'Brien turned his most aggressive energies toward popular magazine editors— "the enemy" as he often called them,

"moles...grubbing blindly in the old furrow," "fussy children playing with complicated machinery" (Best 1932 x;

Dance 141). While editors of Saturday Evening Post,

Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, McClure's and other magazines of mass appeal supplied a consistent demand for stories often characterized by obvious plots, sentimental tones, stock characters, and trick or happy endings, O'Brien used the Best Short Stories to support the early editorial efforts of the so-called "little magazines" that began publication in the teens and flourished throughout the 30s, particularly those concerned with promoting an elite

"literary" form of the genre. Among the vast recognition for O'Brien's role in the little magazine movement, the editors of American Prefaces dedicated a posthumous volume to O'Brien, declaring, "Every little magazine, every serious young writer, has been in debt to him" (Schramm 2).

The influence of the little magazine movement on modern fiction and the twentieth-century short story audience cannot be over-estimated, particularly its role in the shifting emphasis in popular magazines from fiction to nonfiction. By the end of the thirties, as Time, Inc., and the Reader's Digest Association began to tower over the magazine industry, the editorial policies of Edward Bok, Samuel McClure, and other mass-market advocates were already being replaced. As new teams of literary professionals revamped such mainstays of feature fiction as the Ladies

Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, little magazines grew in number and in prestige, and the little magazine as an alternative site for publication gradually became a trend of the past. By the time of O'Brien's death, authors were chosen for publication in the popular, high-paying magazines after they had proven successful among editors of specifically literary journals. O'Brien's role in the advancement of the Little Magazines ultimately affected the loss of a popular audience. Consequently, his influence extended to the relocation of cultural authority, the shift of literary judgement from the New York halls of commercial magazines to the university offices of literary magazines.

Currently, scholars like Andrew Levy attest to the success of American creative writing programs, claiming that the increasing number of university-sponsored literary magazines corroborates the theory that "short story publication appears to have become one of the missions of higher-education " (1). Levy interprets this movement optimistically, pointing to the success of writing programs in creating a base of short story teachers and readers.

Significantly, Levy supports his argument by referring to the increased sales of the Best Short Stories, stating that

"During this recent period (1983-88), the sales of the yearly Best American Short Stories anthology increased from

26,000 to 50,000,” evidence that the American short story is

"experiencing a renaissance” (1). While these sales figures do indicate increased interest in the short story, my thesis is less optimistic than Levy's. Although a "base” of short story teachers and readers continues to grow, it is ultimately confined to editors of literary journals and participants in university writing programs who continue to refine the acceptable standards of the genre. Based on the model of the Best Short Stories as the literary ideal, the short story form has grown increasingly exclusive of the non-academic American audience, giving way to a self- perpetuating story economy that is all but closed to the majority of American readers.

This chapter will illuminate the central role of

O'Brien's Best Short Stories series in distinguishing the literary short story in America from the commercial form, and how the literary story came to be recognized and institutionalized both as an academic discipline and as an art form, one whose value is determined by its permanent place in the literary canon and whose creation is limited to the modernist conception of the artist. Historicizing the widening dichotomy between the literary story and the popular— a segregation of not only audiences but ultimately of writers and styles as well— I examine the formative years of the Best Short Stories from three vantage points :

8 first, its central position of judgement for the ideal form

and substance of the short story; second, its role in

shifting publication of short stories to little magazines,

particularly those published in the Midwest and in Story

magazine, and consequently shifting the market for the short

story from a popular to an elite audience; finally, its

effect on short story pedagogy in American universities,

particularly its influence on the establishment of the Iowa

Writers' Workshop, the first program in the world to offer a

Ph.D. and the Master's of Fine Arts degree for a creative

dissertation or thesis and the only program of its kind for

the next twenty years. My thesis is that the diminishing

reception of the short story in the United States is due in

great part to O'Brien's contribution to the construction of

literary taste and to the academic theorists, the critics of

the literary presses, and the directors of university writing programs who, sharing O'Brien's assumptions about

the short story, define the genre today.

Part I. Cultural Authority: Edward J. O'Brien and the Construction of the American Short Story Audience

Born in 1890, Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien was educated at Boston Latin School and Boston College High

School, then attended Boston College from 1906 to 1908 and

Harvard in 1908 and 1909 before quitting with aspirations of becoming a poet. As a reporter for the Boston Post, he formed a close friendship with William Stanley Braithwaite, whom he assisted in editing a poetry magazine inspired by

Harriet Monroe's Poetry.^ After O'Brien published an article about the short story at the Post, Hiram Greene serially published his "Best Short Stories of 1914" in the

Post’s Illustrated Sunday Magazine. The following year y

Small, Maynard and Company of Boston published the annual in book form, holding the copyright until 1926 when, out of financial necessity, the title was sold to Dodd, Mead and

Company.^ O'Brien acknowledged the need for a publisher to legitimize his taste, announcing in his 1915 introduction,

"Because an American publisher has been found who shares my faith in the democratic future of the American short story as something by no means ephemeral, this year-book of

American fiction is assured of annual publication for several years" {Best 1915 11).<

During his eleven years with Small, Maynard, O'Brien established himself as the country's leading authority on the American short story. Already a familiar figure among the literary world of New York, O'Brien's early involvement with the Greenwich Village art scene had acquainted him with such influential writers as Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken, John

Gould Fletcher, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Vachel

Lindsay, as well as Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, who published O'Brien's 1919 anthology The Great Modern English

10 Stories and whom he enlisted for the publication of

Hemingway's In Our Time. After the establishment of the

Best Short Stories series, O'Brien continued to provide

annual commentary on the short story for the Post, as well as for Dodd, Mead's magazine the Bookman and a variety of

British magazines. His judgement by asterisks— one to three determined by degree of "literary permanence"— was recognized by newspapers and critics throughout the country, reviewers honoring him with such titles as "Short Story

Czar," "Dean of the Short Story," and "Caliph of the Short

Story World.

While he chided the American expatriate in Europe for romanticizing the idea of exile (Best 1927 xi), O'Brien himself moved to England in 1922 where he compiled his anthologies of American stories from across the ocean. Also in 1922, with co-editor John Cournos, O'Brien began a corresponding annual anthology to the American Best Short

Stories, Best British Short stories, a series of which

O'Brien assumed sole editorship in 1933 and which continued publication until his death. His first book of short story criticism. Advance of the Short Story, was published in

1923, and was one of the first volumes of criticism about contemporary short fiction. Successfully received and often quoted, the book was reissued in 1930. By 1934, a party list in honor of O'Brien included such influential names in the publishing industry as Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer

11 of Random House; president of Book of the Month Club Harry

Scherman; Joseph Krutch; Frederick Scribner; and John

Farrar; as well as such established writers as William

Carlos Williams and Thomas Wolfe, and such noted book reviewers as Harry Hansen and Herschel Brickell.® By the time of his death, O'Brien had not only published four volumes of verse, two critical books about the short story, a biography of Neitzche, and a short story writing handbook, but he had also edited two literary magazines, and a handful of story and poetry collections/ in condolence for his death, Dorothy McCleary wrote to O'Brien's mother, "[Edward] is almost a legendary figure, even to those of us lucky enough to have known and talked with him."®

O'Brien's acerbic opinions, his forthright attack against the editors of popular magazines, and the controversial selections of what he called "the best" drew early criticism and instigated heated debate in the newspapers and periodicals where most of the writing about stories was printed. As early as 1917, O'Brien's critics questioned the objectivity of his standards. Helen R. Hull, for example, criticized O'Brien's literary preferences, writing in 1919, "His volume...should be called The Best

Stories of 1918 As Seen Through Mr. O'Brien's Temperament"

(192). Some, like Dial critic Mary M. Colum, feared that

O'Brien's aesthetic would corrupt the strides already made in the development of the genre as well as the criticism of

12 it: "I am not sure that Mr, Edward O'Brien's 'Best Short

Stories of the Year' will not contribute their own share to the progressive decline of the short-story in America, for he is creating standards which a real criticism should resolutely reject" (345).® Of his ranking by asterisks,

Oliver Herford wrote of "Foreman O'Brien" supervising a

"sweatshop" "where the toiling Asterisks labor in weary shifts of one, two and three, pounding out asinine averages and percentages of permanency with a zeal that would do credit to the framer of the Volstead Act" (128).

Too pedantic for the Dial, too esoteric for The Ladies

Home Journal, O'Brien's series endured early apprehensions that, as the first self-officiated authority on contemporary short stories, the Best Short Stories threatened the divergent opinions about the short story that were catalyzed during the pre-war boom. Such a fear was well-founded, as

O'Brien faced only two major challenges to his authority during the course of his entire career. First, in 1919,

Blanche Colton Williams established a board of judges

(O'Brien was among the first year's board) to edit the first

Prize Stories: O'Henry Awards, an annual series similar in format to O'Brien's but considered more conservative for favoring the well-tailored short story made popular by

0'Henry a generation earlier. (Until today. Prize Stories remains secondary in sales and prestige to the Best Short

Stories.)^° In 1932, story writer and critic Charles Uzzel

13 contracted a book with Harcourt, Brace, a series of annual short story volumes which Uzzel proposed to call "The Best

Short Stories." Houghton Mifflin threatened legal proceedings if the book's title was not changed, and though the conflict would persist for several years, Uzzel changed the name of his series to Short Story Hits, a series which has fallen into obscurity."

Unique to O'Brien's project was his determined promotion of new American talents, men (and occasionally women) who wrote the kind of stories he admired and, as

O'Brien's standards became the standards of short story excellence, those who learned to write the kind of story

O'Brien would select. Of American fiction, O'Brien wrote in his second introduction, "it is still young and requires much fostering in the hands of our native writers" {Best

1916 1). Such "fostering" became, for O'Brien, a life-long vocation; until his death, he sustained a search for

American literary talent, giving precedence to new voices, selecting early in their careers publications of eventual literary legends such as Edna Ferber in 1917 ("The Gay Old

Dog"), Sherwood Anderson in 1919 ("An Awakening"), F. Scott

Fitzgerald in 1922 ("Two for a Cent"), Jean Toomer in 1923

("Blood Burning Moon"), Rudolph Fisher in 1925 ("The City of Refuge"), Dorothy Parker in 1928 ("A Telephone Call"),

Katherine Anne Porter in 1930 ("Theft"), Kay Boyle in 1931

("Rest Cure"), Thomas Wolfe in 1935 ("The Sun and the

14 Rain"), John Cheever in 1938 ("The Brothers"), John

Steinbeck in 1938 ("The Chrysanthemums"), Richard Wright in

1939 ("Bright and Morning Star"), and Irwin Shaw in 1940

("Main Currents of American Thought"). O'Brien told William

Lundell during an NBC radio interview, "I try to pick...the work in which the final impression left by the story is most heightened and memorable and then other things being equal,

I try to give the new writers a preference over the old established figure."" In his posthumous dedication to

O'Brien, Wilbur Schramm provides perhaps the most comprehensive assessment of O'Brien's influence on new writers, stating that "The great American public was never sold on O'Brien. But the young writers were. And this was his particular triumph: the serious young writers came to believe in his discrimination and his integrity. Through them he made his tastes part of American taste" (3-4).

O'Brien was so influential in the beginning writer's career that Martha Foley once described him as "the Saint

Peter guarding the gates to a short story writer's heaven"

(97). In a letter to Bob Linscott at Houghton Mifflin,

Foley said of her new authority as Best Short Stories editor, "I am beginning to feel sorry for that guy called

God! Among the numerous testimonies to O'Brien's influence on young careers, Ernest Hemingway, whose story

"My Old Man" earned him the dedication to the Best Short

15 Stories of 1923, outlines in a letter to Maxwell Perkins the debt he owed to O'Brien:

O'Brien published a story called My Old Man of mine [sic] when it had never been published in a magazine, violating all his rules, it had been turned down by every magazine except Scribner's and The Atlantic and dedicated the Short Story book to m e ....He worked on Liveright to make him publish In Our Time, got Cape to publish it in London, obtained me various offers of great wealth from Hearst and an invitation to be the distinguished American guest of the Pen Club at London last Spring.

As editor and anthologist, O'Brien was driven by more than promoting new talent. Unique to his editorship was his explicit purpose of maintaining a popular audience for the short story while transforming public taste and accepted standards of the short story form— the "meretricious mass of writing"— into a national literary genre. To this end he claimed to have read roughly 8000 short stories per year.

Furthermore, O'Brien devised an elaborate system of evaluation for choosing his stories including extensive bibliographies of published stories and articles about stories included in each issue's "Yearbook," and the section called "Magazine Averages" in which he systematically ranked the numbers and percentages of "distinctive" stories found in each magazine that featured works of short fiction. In short, as editor of the Best Short Stories series, O'Brien assumed the critical role of judging all stories printed within a given year as well as the editorial decisions and literary quality of every American magazine that published short stories. No previous publication claimed such an

16 exhaustive judgement of contemporary short fiction, nor has any since."

For O'Brien, the popularity of the commercial story did not reflect the genuine interests of the American public but a taste imposed on audiences as a result of the modernized life. In Advance of the American Short Story, he blamed

"the daily press and the motion-picture and the automobile, as well as...the short story and the mechanical play and the jazz band" for loss of American individuality, O'Brien set the literary story in opposition to the "apish imitation of the herd" (4). Invoking Stuart Chase and J. A. Hobson,

O'Brien decried the forces of modern capitalism, vilifying the machine as an evil force inflicting a degrading standardization on the American public;

the soulless machine is hypnotizing the masses, and reducing the imagination by which they might evolve into a higher plane of civilization to a least common denominator of sluggish indifference. When this sluggish indifference has sunk to utter spiritual despair...the conquest of the machine will have been complete, and the slave and the master will have changed places, as they have changed places in history before. (5-6)

This "commercial malady," as O'Brien saw it, infected more than the American audience and created the need for a formalized literary short story that was crucial for more than the integrity of American writers. Like the machine, commercialized short fiction standardized emotional expression and threatened the moral fibre of America as a nation:

17 While it is difficult to resist the pressure of standardization in any aspect of American life, no standardization is more fatal to the spiritual existence of a people than a standardization of the emotions. The value of emotion as a contribution to a national culture is in constant ratio to the freedom which emotion claims to explore by-paths of the mind before settling upon its permanent habitation. (2)

Essentially proposing the existence of a national emotion

jeopardized by modern distractions, O'Brien links emotional

freedom with truth, and truth with permanence. Asserting

his faith in the masculine Anglo-Saxon model of the literary

aesthetic, O'Brien concludes that "Such a freedom has been

claimed and won by Hawthorne and Henry James and Sherwood

Anderson, but it is denied to most American writers who are

not sufficiently robust to avoid the dull pressure of

conformity which is materially so well-paid" (2).

Unlike the editors of commercial magazines who claimed

to provide the stories that their readers demanded, O'Brien

encouraged the editorial role as one of enlightening readers

by raising their horizon of expectations, providing them

with models of stories that strove toward O'Brien's literary

ideal. Like James T. Fields and other nineteenth-century

editors who worked to promote "high culture" and "American"

writers, O'Brien appealed to an older form of intellectual

professionalism, his standards relying on a cultural

hierarchy that required of the editor the role not only of

judge but also of educator. In defense of his selections,

O'Brien addressed critics who complained about obscurity of meaning and lack of form, claiming a familiar art-for-art's-

18 sake belief in the organic nature of creativity: "An artist

will always impose adequate form on his material, and as the

new forms become more familiar, their significance and scope

will become increasingly clear" {Best 1931 v). Praising

the editorial policy of Story magazine, O'Brien wrote, "It

was to print, regardless of name or reputation, the best

short stories the editors could find without considering for

a moment what the public was supposed to want." O'Brien

believed that the average editor regarded the public as

"feeble-minded," while he, like the editors of Story,

assumed an intelligent reading public. "They had a healthy

distaste for cliques, coteries, and artiness. Otherwise

their taste was catholic."^®

O'Brien's utopian vision supported a capitalist view of

supply and demand, an interdependent relationship between

writer and reader in which the complementary taste of both

would foster O'Brien's standards and nourish a free market

economy of short stories. "One of the things we should be

most anxious to learn," said O'Brien in the introduction to

his 1920 volume, "is the psychology of the American

reader...how he reacts to what he reads in the magazine, whether it is a short story, an article, or an

advertisement" (xiv). Comparing the public support of short

stories to the listener's encouragement of the story-teller,

O'Brien held the public responsible for its willingness to continue to listen to the same story, and paying "too well"

19 to hear it again. "American writers are weakening their substance by too frequent repetition, and it has helped me to fix the blame where it really lies" (xi). Regardless of their shortcomings, O'Brien's faith in the "great average

American public" was, for many years, a vital element in his theory of progress. In his 1915 introduction, for example, he praised Hiram Greene, editor of the Illustrated Sunday

Magazine, for his success in bringing stories of literary merit to the commercial public. According to "the host of letters" O'Brien had received from Illustrated Sunday

Magazine readers, they no longer feared that such periodicals as Harper's Magazine and Scribner's Magazine were too "high-brow" for their tastes. O'Brien concluded from this correspondence that, given opportunity and freedom from bias, the "untrained reader" would read and support the

"literary " story:

All this serves to illustrate my point that the commercial short story is not preferred by that imaginary norm of editors known as 'the reading public.' If adequate means are employed to allay the average man's suspicions of literature and to introduce him painlessly to the best that our writers are creating, my experience shows absolutely that he will respond heartily and make higher standards possible by his support. (11)

In many regards, O'Brien's anthologies did assist in developing an audience for short stories judged by a standard different from those typically found in commercial magazines. Although the record of sales before Houghton

Mifflin's takeover in 1934 are not available, figures listed

20 by Houghton Mifflin for 1934 through 1940 provide some idea of the circulation of the series:

1934 4 printings totaling 11,000 1935 2 printings totaling 11,000 1936 3 printings totaling 12,000 1937 4 printings totaling 16,000 1938 2 printings totaling 13,000 1939 2 printings totaling 10,000 1940 3 printings totaling 11,000"

Compared to the million or more readers that a single story from McCall's or the Saturday Evening Post could expect for any given issue, these figures are modest, but they reflect a consistent and substantial readership for the type of story O'Brien was promoting.

While it is difficult to determine which readers the

Best Short Stories reached, the publicity generated for the series indicates a well-educated, fairly elite audience inclined toward middle-class liberalism and already interested in the literary genre-fication of the short story. Over the years, for example, O'Brien lectured throughout the United States, appearing before audiences at the New York State House and at Columbia University; a four- month tour in 1937 took him from New York to the West Coast, his audiences primarily consisting of "teachers' associations and others more or less professionally interested in the short story."" In 1933, O'Brien wrote

Houghton Mifflin's publicity agent, suggesting that "an ad in Story would reach a better hand-selected list of my followers than anywhere else."" The same year, the Book of

21 the Month Club carried the Best Shozrt Stories as a bonus book. In 1939, the Literary Guild increased its usual order of 50,000 copies to 60,000/"' O'Brien was a guest on John

Frederick Towner's radio program produced at the University of Iowa as well as William Lundell's NBC radio talk show.

In 1935, he contributed an article to Houghton Mifflin's

What Is a Book, a collection of articles about writing distributed without charge to authors, editors, critics, librarians and booksellers "in the interest of general publicity."21 That year also, he was chosen by his friend,

Arthur T. Vance, as the fiction editor of Pictorial Review, a popular woman's fashion periodical, but one whose readers were likely to be predisposed to a more serious type of story since Vance had begun as early as 1908 to solicit works by such literary figures as Edith Wharton, Booth

Tarkington, Carl Sandburg and Joseph Conrad (Peterson 156).

Although O'Brien's series may not have reached the popular audiences of McClures or Saturday Evening Post, he envisioned the Best Short stories as a means and not an end.

To assist in building readership for his ideal, O'Brien used the Best Short Stories to promote the Little Magazines, encouraging their early efforts with lavish praise in his introductions, and distinguishing their stories with one, two and three stars in his rolls of honor. Significantly, however, if his intention was to disrupt the homogeneity of the formulaic story, to make his series a representative

22 cross-section "of every section of American life,"” the

Little Magazines he chose to support were almost exclusively

those edited and read by elite white readers. For example,

while he promoted struggling editorial efforts of magazines

that lasted only one year, he made no mention of Alain

Locke's 1926 publication Fire I, Wallace Thurman's 1928

Harlem, nor any of the other twenty-five known African

American publications in operation during his time.” Of

the leading African American magazines that supported

literary fiction, O'Brien listed only Charles Johnson's

Opportunity in his annual list of magazine addresses.

Although W. E. B. Du Bois' Crisis ran from 1910 to 1976, it

appeared on O'Brien's list only in 1936; Messenger— which

from 1923 to 1928 published short fiction by Josephine

Cogdell, Thomas M. Henry, Eric Walrond and Theophilis

Lewis— was never listed. Although he promoted the stories

of Rudolph Fisher, and Richard Wright, and published one

story each by Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes, with the

exception of Wright's "Bright and Morning Star" in the New

Masses, the six stories by African-American writers that

O'Brien chose appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic

Monthly and Harper's Bazaar, long known for their established literary standards; the stories and writers of the Harlem Renaissance went otherwise unrecognized by

O'Brien.” A 1933 letter to Whit Burnett, friend and co­ editor with Martha Foley of Story magazine, testifies to

23 O'Brien's willingness to read African American writers, but

betrays a racist view common among white literary figures of

O'Brien's day: "The negro is the only man in America now

living completely in the moment and who can laugh and sing.

These negro writers are, in some respects, pointing the way more than better writers. Their instincts are truer in every way."”

Although O'Brien virtually ignored the readers of

African American magazines, he was more inclined to support those interested in social issues other than race. O'Brien promoted the stories he read in such radical magazines as

Oppenheim's The Seven Arts, Joseph Freeman's New Masses, and

H. L. Mencken's American Mercury. Of the twenty-nine stories printed in the one-year history of The Seven Arts, for example, O'Brien considered twenty-eight distinctive and gave three stars to twenty others. Of the twelve periodicals from which O'Brien published more than fifteen stories, American Mercury was represented for eleven consecutive years with a total of nineteen stories. But as my discussion of O'Brien's aesthetic reveals in Chapter 3 of this dissertation, the stories selected from these magazines reflect themes such as alienation, heartbreak, or guilt, while specific political messages are generally given secondary emphasis, usually couched within the story's setting.

24 O'Brien's political alignment with literary radicals such as Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Prank, and his personal association with such renowned Communists as Mike Gold and

Alfred Kreymborg suggest an interest in social reform that could have easily influenced his thinking about the short story.Indeed, at times, O'Brien's introductions served as lectures for anti-fascism and warnings about the fall of

Europe. But he firmly believed that a writer's ideology could and should be kept separate from his or her work: "I have read too many Catholic poets and Negro short storywriters. A poet is a poet in spite of his creed and a short storywriter is a short storywriter in spite of his race. His distinction is attained through his practice of his art as a human being, and not by reason of his religion or his race or his social views" (Dance 166). Although he admitted that "it is on the left rather than on the right that I have found the most fruitful interpretation of

American life by the short story writer," O'Brien remained adamant about the risk to literary standards when a writer's ideology motivates the content of a given work: "political preoccupation on the part of the writer will limit his art, render it more and more sterile, and eventually extinguish it, unless his social consciousness serves to communicate richness to his perceptions rather than propaganda to his style" (Best 1935 xiii). In 1937, he praised what he considered a decided change in proletarian literature— a

25 move toward subtlety that he had noticed in the preceding two years, saying that, unlike the past, now "you don't feel they're trying to bully you into something."^’

In short, O'Brien's vision of culture and his notion of literature centered around his belief in a timeless and universalized aesthetic; the short story's value was thus distinguished from political matters and existed instead, in what Nancy Armstrong has called, in a different context, "a specialized domain of culture where apolitical truths were told" (27). Ironically, O'Brien's battle against the

"standardized" short story involved the determination of a new standardization of judgement, a definition which O'Brien summarized in five paragraphs for his first introduction and held to so consistently that it was reprinted, with the alteration of only a few words, in each succeeding volume.

Accepting the author's "choice of material and interpretation of it in terms of life," O'Brien tested the story by "the double standard of substance and form."

Claiming that desirable substance was organic— "the fresh, living current" in which "the pulse of life is beating"—

O'Brien granted that "substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than something always present." The test of substance, for O'Brien, was really a test of the artist's "power of compelling imaginative persuasion" to make "selected facts or incidents" into "a living truth." The formal test was of

26 the artist's ability to "shape this living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form."

The dichotomy between substance and form, and the emphasis on "living truth" position O'Brien's critical method within a modernist aesthetic informed by Arnold's theory of "disinterested" criticism. Arguing for the story's ability to express universal emotions, O'Brien wrote that "Human nature is the same everywhere, and when an artist interprets it sympathetically, the reader will respond to his feeling wherever he finds it" (Best 1928 x).

In the thirties, when critics questioned the style of

O'Brien's selections, calling them "anecdotal" and

"formless," O'Brien defended the stories by insisting on the organic nature of the literary short story form:

The American short story stands or falls by its ability to stand in the blood stream of life and to demonstrate its innocent awareness. That implies furthermore that life, experienced disinterestedly, is imposing an individual form and pattern on the art which is rendered in experience, a form or pattern much more flexible than we have previously known. {Best 1934 xv)

O'Brien's preference for stories that were thematically concerned with "universal" emotions was clouded by his own financial privilege and nearly as ensconced as Arnold's in an assumption of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Chapter 2 of this dissertation examines the extent to which the literary model articulated by the Best Short Stories relied on narrow conceptions of the artistic ideal. What seems important to the present discussion, however, is O'Brien's inability to

27 recognize the political implications of his faith in the disinterested point of view, namely the exclusive environment necessary for the leisure of disinterest, whose interests are obscured in the effort to protect the disinterested aesthetic, and why the socially and economically marginalized may find little meaning in

O'Brien's ideal representation of "the bloodstream of life."

For O'Brien, critics of his standard were simply unaccustomed to what he considered an innovative aesthetic:

"This flexibility causes them to doubt the existence of form altogether in these stories. They cannot codify what they find, and they have not learned the principles of the new morphology which the new art presents" {Best 1934 xv).

O'Brien's aesthetic, in effect, de-politicized the range of conflict appropriate as material for the short story. Predictably, O'Brien found the "best" at conveying that aesthetic to be white men ideologically aligned with his sense of the ideal short story form. In the Lundell interview, for example, O'Brien claimed that from the

160,000 stories he had read over the last twenty years, there were only "[a]bout twenty that people would be deeply interested in fifty years from now, " the best three or four decidedly those by Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Whit

Burnett, and Allan Seager— four Anglo-Saxon men born of moderate to exceptional material means. Asked to name a woman writer who had equally contributed to a lasting

28 literature, O'Brien considered only Ruth Suckow, an Iowa writer whose fiction often crossed high and low boundaries, not for her stories but for her novel. Renters.

Like the editors who, as O'Brien wrote, could not

"codify what they do not know," O'Brien himself seemed unable to see that he was speaking ideologically, or to understand the limitations that his own ideology imposed on his perception of the American people and the short story.

In 1936, for example, while America witnessed its largest internal migration, the continued violence of Jim Crow, and the devastating labor crisis of the Great Depression,

O'Brien dedicated the Best Short Stories to Robert Whitehand for his story "American Nocturne," claiming that Whitehand interested him "more than any other writer who has published short stories for the first time this year."^® According to

Whitehand, although "American Nocturne" had been rejected by numerous editors, "O'Brien read the manuscript, wanted it printed so he could include the work in his short story anthology.Whitehand's story lends insight into

O'Brien's vision of the American scene and into his notion of "universal": the two young protagonists canoe through

"Lovers Lane," sharing their last night before Carl leaves for the university and Irene for finishing school. The

"watching shadows" and "undulating shade on the ruffled water" bespeak the sexual tension of the two virgins, who declare their eternal love by undressing in the moonlight:

29 After a moment their bodies glistened white. The moonlight streamed like milk over Irene's young breasts and poured down her long, slender legs into the shadows about her feet. She stood, motionless, looking at Carl's browner body and trying to hide the wonder in her eyes. The tip of his tongue slipped between his lips before he spoke. (310)

Although the story is told in the third person from the dual perspective of both protagonists, the climax relies on the male gaze, the theme of life's fleeting wonders rendered through the emotional appeal of Irene's "white" beauty.

A substantial audience did grow to support the aesthetic established by Best Short Stories— a largely educated, white audience who could afford the leisure of innocence, an elite readership far from the broad audience

O'Brien had envisioned when his series began. Indeed, by the end of the thirties, O'Brien virtually abandoned the idea of the short story's ability to reach a mass audience.

In 1939, he claimed a virtual victory of the literary magazine's influence over the editorial preferences of the mass magazines: "The most successful of these noise makers are still shouting, but their heart is in it no longer. The editor of one of the largest magazines in the country said to me not long ago that he found the greatest difficulty now in procuring short stories by writers for whom his magazine had trained the public to clamor" {Best 1939 xv). In his last introduction, O'Brien's faith in the American public had turned to ridicule reminiscent of Mencken's cultural distinctions nearly two decades before of the homo

30 Americanus and the booboisie. Challenging the American to

"carry on the torch" of interpretation, "a chance which

would not be left to him if England failed," he doubted

"his" intelligence and courage: "For some months London has

been bombed. I have not yet seen the London masses running

away in terror. Two years ago, however, a certain broadcast

led rather more than a million people in the United States

to suppose that they were being invaded from Mars. I seem

to remember that quite a number of people left home" {Best

1941 xx-xxi).

Part II. The Story Generation: Best Short Stories, Story and the Iowa Writers' Workshop

The establishment of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1939

was the culmination of several literary movements and the

efforts of many individuals. The Workshops' inception is

generally traced to 1930 when Norman Foerster moved from

Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to head the School of Belles

Lettres in Iowa and to legitimize Imaginative Writing as an

academic discipline. Throughout the twenties, Foerster had

led the New Humanists in English Departments throughout the country in reconceptualizing American literary history, a movement which culminated in the 1928 publication of

Reinterprétâtion of American Literature, a reassessment of

American literary history of which Foerster played a major role. In Iowa, amidst a community of Midwestern

Regionalists of such national respect as Hamlin Garland and

31 Grant Wood, Foerster insisted on a national scope for his

department and a classical approach to the teaching

curriculum.

Leading historian of the Iowa Writers' Workshop,

Stephen Wilbers attributes the literary atmosphere of Iowa

City during the first decades of the twentieth century to

the Workshop's successful emergence, particularly as it

embodied the "spirit of regionalism." Indeed, if Greenwich

Village was the hub of the Bohemian movement before the

First World War, and Harlem the center of the Renaissance of

African-American literature in the twenties, Iowa City was

the heart of the Midwestern Realism movement that thrived

throughout the twenties and the thirties. Like the

Bohemians of New York, and the "New Negro" of Harlem, the

writers of the Midwest formed societies and clubs that

fostered creativity and solidarity. In the twenties, Iowa

City became the home to a type of regionalism that, like

Grant Wood's American Gothic, relied on images of the

village to suggest social confinement, associations of the

prairie to represent nostalgia and escape, and the sense of

a restrained tone to signify the pathos of the well-

intended, inexpressive Americans. Writers from around the world stopped at lowa City on trips across the country, and

a literary community that spread from Des Moines to Cedar

Rapids flourished. In 1930, O'Brien issued a proclamation

that would be quoted in newspapers across the country: "Two

32 generations ago Boston was the geographical center of

American literary life, one generation ago New York could claim pride of place, and I trust that the idea will not seem too unfamiliar if I suggest that the geographical center today is Iowa City" (xi).

As early as 1916, O'Brien had favored fiction from the

Midwest. In the introduction to the Best Short Stories of

1916, he named Michigan writer Francis Buzzell and Sherwood

Anderson "the most distinctive new writers" and claimed, "It is no mere coincidence that the finest expression of our national life among the younger men is coming out of the

Middle West" (5). Among the Iowa writers who would be recognized in the Best Short Stories, either reprinted or distinguished in the rolls of honor were Harold Groghan,

Allen walker Read, Richard Sherman, Carl Van Vechten,

Josephine Herbst, Raymond Kresensky, Victor Shultz,

MacKinlay Kantor, Susan Glaspell, Dixie willso. Zona Gale,

Ruth Suckow, and Robert Whitehand, who in 1941 was the first student to receive an M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa's new Iowa Writers Workshop.

Before the advent of Story, O'Brien's most ardent support went to John Towner Frederick's Midland, the first literary magazine from the Midwest, published in Iowa City from 1914 until 1931, when Towner moved the publication to

Chicago. For eighteen and a half years, the Midland provided a central channel of publication for Midwestern

33 literature, nurturing a Midwestern audience comparable to

the "caviar sophisticates" who subscribed to the new New

Yorker. Devoting its pages to literature of the small town

and the rural Midwest, Midland began in 1914 with 190

solicited subscribers, mostly writers from the area and

acquaintances of University of Iowa's literary circles

(Reigelman 3-4). with the expertise of John Springer, a

local printer who worked in what Frederick called "the

finest old tradition of the craft," the artistic

presentation of the Midland distinguished it from other

small magazines which were often typed and mimeographed, the

quality of the printing of secondary importance to the

content. Midland biographer Milton Reigelman comments on

the editorial implications that the magazine's quality of

design had for the Midland, stating that "both [Frederick]

and his coeditor in the late twenties, Frank Luther Mott,

interpreted the standard design and cheap production

magazines and books coming from most of the bigger presses

as yet another sign of the movement toward commercialization

and mass culture" (45-46). Among the writers whose stories

O'Brien would select from the Midland were Benjamin Apple,

Marquis Childs, Grace Stone Coates, Albert Halper, William

March, Walter Muilenburg, Benjamin Rosenblatt, and Ruth

Suckow.Although the Midland initially received little recognition outside of Iowa, O'Brien singled it out for

lavish praise in his introduction to the first Best Short

34 Stories, claiming that Midland stories represented "the most vital interpretation in fiction of our national life that many years have been able to show. Since the most brilliant days of the New England men of letters, no such group of writers has defined its position with such assurance and modesty" (Best 1915 9 ).

O'Brien continued his support of the Midland in his introductions for the next eighteen years, listing in the annual Yearbook 324 of the 337 stories published during that time, 105 of which received three stars, a ranking which would be remembered by Frederick J. Hoffman as one of particular prestige: "Few magazines can boast such a high percentage of excellent stories" (147). In his 1930 introduction, convinced of the Midland's leadership in selecting quality literature, O'Brien urged other Midwestern periodicals such as The Frontier, edited by H. G. Merriam at

Helena, Montana, and the Prairie Schooner, edited by Lowry

C. Wimberly at Lincoln, Nebraska, to pool their interests with those of the Midland, and "issue a full-grown national monthly of belles-lettres in which short stories, poems and essays should be given pride of place" (xi). Hoping to unify a Midwestern audience whose numbers would support the type of story published in the Midland, O'Brien continued,

"If The Midland chooses to take the lead in this matter, I am convinced.. .that it has the same opportunity to crystallize the best expression of contemporary national

35 life that The Atlantic Monthly was able to seize upon its

foundation, and the Harper's Magazine enjoyed a generation

ago" (xi).

O'Brien's support of the Midland had provided national

attention for the Regionalist movement in Iowa, but

O'Brien's association with Iowa carried well beyond his

support of Midland stories. He was an invited guest at

Iowa's exclusive "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to

Speakers," a literary club which met privately after the

Time's Club readings and included such noted figures as

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Erskine, Gilbert Seldes, Countee

Cullen and Langston Hughes. A close friend of Jay Sigmund, a central figure in the Iowa literary movement,

O'Brien mentioned Sigmund's Ridge Road in his 1931 introduction (Sigmund had shown drafts of the book to

O'Brien for help), while Sigmund reviewed O'Brien's books for the Des Moines Register

Perhaps most significant to the formation of the Iowa writer's workshop, however, was O'Brien's early support of

Frank Luther Mott and Paul Engle, long-established figures at the University of lowa and two of the central influences in the formation of the Workshop. According to Frank Luther

Mott, the selection for the 1920 issue of his story "The Man with the Good Face" established his career at the University of Iowa. Although Mott went on to become a professor of journalism and a leading scholar of Communications, he was

36 hired in 1921 as the first fiction instructor at the

University of Iowa and, in the late twenties, as the co­

editor of the Midland. In a 1962 article for Palimpsest,

Mott recalls how, on the strength of O'Brien's

recommendation, he was hired at Iowa. With only three

published stories, Mott sent his "Good Face" to a New York

literary agent who rejected it on the grounds that "It has

an unhealthy and morbid theme." John Frederick eventually

published the story in Midland in December, 1920. "Then,"

according to Mott, "Edward J. O'Brien reprinted it in his

Best Short Stories volume for 1921, and anthologies picked

it up from there, and so on" (Reigelman 16).

Paul Engle, whom O'Brien mentored during his days at

Merton College in England, taught the writing of poetry for many years at the University of Iowa, and in 1944, he

succeeded Wilbur Schramm as director of the Workshop, a

position which he held for twenty-four years. Under Engle's

directorship, enrollment in the Workshop grew from roughly

two dozen students to 250 in 1965. In a 1934 letter to Whit

Burnett, O'Brien mentions that in the twenty-four-year-old

Engle, "Everything you and I have been working for in

America has flowered at last." O'Brien went on to praise

Engle's "American Song," a book of poems which was, O'Brien told Burnett, "the greatest American utterance of our generation, the greatest affirmation of America since

Lincoln.Six years later, O'Brien directed his readers

37 to Engle's memorial article on Jay Sigmund in American

Prefaces, calling Engle's tribute "the finest statement I know of what is reasonably to be expected of the American artist in our time" (Best 1940 xiv).

For years, O'Brien campaigned against the teachers of magazine fiction whom, he claimed, were people "hired to teach little authors lies," to instruct students in "what editors like," and who defined truth as "that which pays."

As early as 1918 when J. Berg Esenwein included the Best

Short Stories as suggested primary reading with an informational introduction "dealing with the form" of the short story, O'Brien's theory of the short story provided pivotal references in universities throughout the country, and the Best Short Stories as an annual anthology of contemporary literature was a model source for primary reading in college textbooks and writing handbooks that comprised what Andrew Levy has called the "counter-handbook movement.Frederick and Mott relied on O'Brien's anthologies and his definitions of substance and form in their writing classes, and counter-handbooks written by

Frederick, Mott, and Wilbur Schramm include O'Brien's theories about the short story. O'Brien wrote the Foreword to Douglas Bement's Weaving the Short Story, a textbook whose first chapter, "The Short Story: Substance and Form," relies heavily on O'Brien's definitions. Perhaps most interesting about O'Brien's Foreword is his praise for

38 Bement's idea of the author: "He makes it abundantly plain

at once to every honest student that short story writers are

born, not made. He sends three-fourths of his class home,

because they will never learn anything. Only his promising

pupils are permitted to stay in the classroom" (Bement vii).

Also, in 1935, O'Brien published his own counter-handbook.

The Short Story Casebook, in which he promises "an entirely

new method of study." O'Brien's "new method" offers close

readings of several stories, with running commentary in the

margins that discuss technique and strategy, an approach

imitated by John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks in their

1943 Understanding Fiction.

O'Brien and the Best Short Stories had played a

critical role in the formation of the lowa Writers '

Workshop, influencing its structure in regard to who would

be hired to teach and the type of story that students would

be taught to emulate. O'Brien was also instrumental in the

development of the creative writing pedagogy that was

practiced by the first instructors at lowa and that has become the model used in universities throughout the country today. Committed to O'Brien's aesthetic, the establishment of the Workshop marked the acceptance of the short story as an academic discipline. On September 23, 1940, five months before his death. Time magazine quoted O'Brien as saying,

"Iowa City is the Athens of America."^®

39 while Foerster fought the Regionalists for a writing school that embraced a national scope, O'Brien continued to encourage the idea of a literary magazine that would promote the efforts of new writers and provide a national readership with stories of "literary" quality. O'Brien's suggestion for such a magazine in the introduction to the Best Short

Stories of 1930 inspired the American writers Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, then living in Vienna, to begin publication of Story magazine. O'Brien's support of Story began with the first mimeographed issue which he helped to compile while on vacation in Vienna. Beginning with that issue, he promoted the magazine in his Best Short Stories series through elaborate accolades in his introductions, and by selecting and distinguishing about 90 per cent of its stories published during his lifetime. When Story was near financial collapse, O'Brien was instrumental in gaining the support of Donald S. Klopfer and Bennett A. Cerf of the

Modern Library and Harry Scherman, president of the Book of the Month Club, in order to move production of the magazine to New York. Burnett, who called Foley and himself

O'Brien's "completest debtors," wrote O'Brien in England to acknowledge the impact of his support and to secure further help if necessary: "You have put this magazine over in

America in the solidest possible way....It may be that at some crucial moment in the negotiations some word of encouragement from you might swing things, although your

40 support is now well known and considered of the most extreme

value to both the magazine and the publishers, that is, in

the Modern Library instance, for example. Your word is

still law in America. A few weeks later, when Story,

Inc. was established under the auspices of the Book of the

Month Club and the Modern Library, then a subsidiary of

Random House, an elated Burnett wrote O'Brien, "It [sic]

ought to congratulate you on being the godfather of a new

era in the short story.

Because of its commitment to new talent and the

avuncular relationship between O'Brien and its young editors. Story provided a publishing venue for the

"discoveries" O'Brien encountered in his correspondences but was unable to select for his series until they were published. From his home in Oxford, he wrote to and wired

Foley and Burnett the names and addresses of promising writers, suggesting that they contact them for manuscripts.

In many instances, he included the manuscripts he had in his possession. Dorothy McCleary, Naomi Shumway, Allan Seager,

William Saroyan, John Cheever, and Richard Wright were among the writers that made the thirties known as the Story generation, a name invented by O'Brien ostensibly for the success of the stories published in the magazine, but perhaps more indicative of a system which Burnett summarized in a euphoric letter to O'Brien: "We print 'em, you select

41 'em, the columnists write about 'em and God's in his Heaven and all is right in the world.

When O'Brien died in 1941, Martha Foley left Story magazine to carry on as editor of the Best Short Stories, keeping the editorship until her death in 1978. Foley wrote in the foreword to the 1942 Best Stories, "My own approach to the selection of the stories in this volume has been to follow as closely as possible what O'Brien himself sought: literary distinction, integrity on the part of the author and a freedom from hampering, artificial restrictions"

(vii).

A critical audience has emerged who appreciates and supports the publication of the literary short story which, with the exception of metafiction and other postmodern experimental writing, continues to be modeled after standards of "form" and "substance" that O'Brien idealized.

However, O'Brien's idealized audience is today generally restricted to academicians and writers who have been schooled in graduate writing programs across the country, a dramatic shift in short story readership since O'Brien's day, the loss of their numbers emblematic of the precarious position that the American short story has reached in its rise to literary acceptance. Far from a popular national genre, collections of short stories are now among the most difficult books to publish, considered by publishing houses the highest risk in marketability, often accepted only if

42 the writer's style promises future novels. The number of

commercial magazines that publish the short story has

decreased from forty-two in 1915, to roughly fifteen in

1995. The Best American Short Stories currently draws from

246 magazines; most of these are university publications with circulations under twenty-five hundred. And as the

short story has lost its popular audience, it has also lost

its appeal as a prose form to write; writers who can afford

to devote their careers to the short story genre are more

and more those who hold faculty positions at universities

throughout the country with creative writing departments.

Current thinking about the American short story continues to reflect the thematic and stylistic emphasis of

O'Brien's selections and claims, embracing distinctions between literature and nonliterature as dependent on the

"organic" nature of their form and the "universality" of their themes. Chapter 2 of this dissertation analyzes the thematic and stylistic emphasis of O'Brien's selections, particularly as they pertain to the national claim and, through his advocacy, how they represent O'Brien's ideological interests. This chapter considers the influence of Best Short Stories on the careers of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway and how their consequential success contributed to an institutionalized definition of literary culture.

43 Notes

Abbreviations

HUA Houghton Mifflin Collection Harvard University Library

PUA Story Magazine Archives Princeton Universities Libraries

UIA Jay Sigmund Collection University of Iowa Libraries

1. For extensive discussions on the short story's contribution to the advent of the mass magazine, see Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923); Roland E. Wolsey, Understanding Magazines (Ames: Iowa State UP, 1965); Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century fUrbana: U of Illinois P, 1956); Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics; The Literary Politics of Afro- American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1979); Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993).

2. Chapter Three discusses O'Brien and Braithwaite's long friendship, particularly Braithwaite's influencial Anthology of American Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry and its inspiration on O'Brien, and how the cultural identities of the two men— Braithwaite's father was from British Guiana— influenced their aesthetic over the years.

3. Dodd, Mead and Company maintained the copyright until Houghton Mifflin's takeover in 1934. Houghton Mifflin continues to publish the series today, along with the companion series Best American Poetrv and Best American Essays.

4. Small, Maynard also published several other works by O'Brien: Poems of the Irish Revolutionarv Brotherhood, which he edited with Padraic Colum in 1916; White Fountains (1917); Distant Music (1921); and Hard Savings (1926).

5. "Short Story Czar Born in West End," Boston Evening Globe. 1933; "Short Stories of 25 Years," Christian Science Monitor 15 July 1939; Ralph Thompson, "Books of the Times,"

44 New York Times 26 May 1937, PUA.

6. "People to be invited to the O'Brien party," Febniary 24, 1934, PUA.

7. Wilbur Schramm wrote, "To his most ambitious book. The World's History at a Glance...rulers, statesmen, eminent personages, principal discoveries, inventors... abstracts of Bible History and Greek and Scandinavian Mvtholoav. with Comprehensive Tables of Bioaraphv.. .from 800 B.C. to 1913 A.D.. he was wisely unwilling to sign his name." "The Thousand and One Tales of Edward O'Brien" (4).

8. 28 February 1941, PUA.

10. Ironically, when O'Brien died. The Dial courted Martha Foley to buy rights to the series. Letter from Foley to Ferris Greenslet 4 March 1941 and letter from Foley to Bob Linscott, 15 May 1942.

10. Harry Hansen, who regularly praised O'Brien's books in his syndicated column, "The First Reader," took over the editorship of Prize Stories in 1932. Fred Millet considered Hansen's selections to be more experimental than William's. See Fred B. Millet, Contemporary American Authors. 91.

11. Letter to Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, 3 October 1933, PUA; letter from Ferris Greenslet to O'Brien, 27 January 1933; letter from O'Brien to R.N. Linscott, 8 January 1936, HUA.

12. Manuscript of O'Brien's interview script can be found under 25 October 1934, PUA.

13. 3 February 1941, HUA.

14. Hemingway told Perkins that he was "fortunately" unable to visit the Pen Club, "due to the presence of the English Channel or some other valid excuse"(31 August 1927, PUA). See also Carlos Baker's description of the Hemingway-O'Brien relationship in Ernest Heminowav; A Life Storv. 118-119.

15. Although Martha Foley continued the Yearbook until the end of her tenure in 1978, her version was abridged to a quarter of O'Brien's length, and she dropped the system of asterisks, calling it "a little childish." Bob Linscott, at Houghton Mifflin, agreed. See letters from Foley to Linscott, 14 January 1943, and from Linscott to Foley, 22 January 1943, HUA. Today, the Best American Short Stories

45 lists "100 Other Distinguished Stories" for each year, and "Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories."

16. See "A Word about the Short Story Magazine," Lovat Dickson Magazine. [1933], PUA.

17. Sister M. Joselyn, O.S.B., "Edward Joseph O'Brien and the American Short Story," Studies in Short Fiction 3 (1965): 4.

18. May Cameron, "Edward J. O'Brien, Putting his 23rd anthology to bed full of hope and optimism about short story." New York Evening Post 9 Jan 1937; PUA.

19. Letter to Dale Warren, 10 May 1933, HUA.

23. Letter from Ferris Greenslet to O'Brien, 26 May 1939, HUA.

21. Letter from Dale Warren to Martha Foley, 15 August 1935, HUA.

22. Lundell's interview, 25 October 1934, HUA.

23. See Abby Arthur Johnson and Ronald Maberry Johnson, Propaganda and Aesthetics; The Literary Politics of Afro- American Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Amherst: U of Massachussetts P, 1979).

24. Jean Toomer, "Blood-Burning Moon" (1923), Prairie; Rudolph Fisher, "The City of Refuge" (1925), The Atlantic Monthly; "Miss Cynthie" (1934), Story; Langston Hughes, "Cora Unashamed" (1934), The American Mercury; Richard Wright, "Bright and Morning Star (1939), New Masses; "Almos' a Man" (1941), Harper's Bazaar.

25. Letter to Whit Burnett and Martha Foley, 19 November 1933, PUA.

26. University of Virginia holds the early correspondence of O'Brien and Braithwaite, from 1910 to 1922. O'Brien dedicated the 1928 volume of Best Short Stories to Alfred Kreymborg, "who lets the sunlight in." See Chapter Two for further discussion of O'Brien's Communist affiliations.

27. May Cameron, 9 Jan 1937, HUA.

28. Lundell interview, 25 October 1934, PUA.

29. O'Brien also included "American Nocturne" in his 1939 anniversary publication. Fifty Best American Stories.

46 30. Adeline Taylor, "Oft-Rejected Story Finally Wins Fame for Iowa City Boy in O'Brien Anthology," [1936, Cedar Rapids Gazette], UIA.

31. Walter Muilenburg "Heart of Youth" (1915); William March, "The Little Wife" (1930); "Mist on the Meadow" (1932). Stories of the others were reprinted in Best after their Midland stories were recognized in the Rolls of Honor.

32. Letter to Jay Sigmund, 10 January 1931, UIA.

33. 10 February 1934, PUA.

34. See Andrew Levy, "Handbooks and Workshops: A Brief History of the Creative Writing 'Revolution'" in The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Storv. 77-107.

35. John Crowe Ransom, along with other New Critics such as Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, taught periodically at the Workshop. Over the years, Paul Engle recruited from among these three teachers' "best" students for selective enrollment at the Workshop (Wilburs 98). It also should be noted that as late as the 1960s, students and instructors at the Iowa Writers' Workshop were predominantly male. Wilburs recalls this time fondly, stating, "Because of the proximity in age between the students and faculty and owing to the ambience generated by the predominatly male group, a spirit of friendliness and camaraderie characterized student- facuity relations" (95).

36. Time (September 23, 1940), 43.

37. 14 December 1932, PUA.

38. 26 December 1932, PUA.

39. 9 February 1933, PUA.

47 CHAPTER 2 A DEMOCRACY OF LETTERS; CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND O'BRIEN'S AESTHETIC

There is more than a touch of the Elizabethan in our quest of power, which is sought far less for its own sake than most foreign critics of us seem to realize, and if the American man would link this guest with some form of artistic expression, the result might be surprisingly interesting. As it is, he surrenders his cultural heritage to the American woman, with such effects upon our poetry as well as our fiction as are unknown in any other country. — Edward 0'Brien, Advance of the American Short Storv (1923)

Implicit in this passage from O'Brien's Advance of the

American Short Storv (1923) are his criteria for the ideal

American artist, the short story writer in particular, whose description here epitomizes the cultural values from which

O'Brien's literary aesthetic evolved. Connecting the

American "quest of power" to the Elizabethan, O'Brien essentially approves of British and American imperialism as a model for literary expression. The allegiance directed specifically to the domination of American men fundamentally links O'Brien with the high modernists of his day and an aesthetic based primarily on Anglo-American masculine values/" Moreover, as part of a larger re-conceptualization of American literature of this time, O'Brien's animosity

48 toward American women, both white and of color, is evident here by a misogynistic fear of sublation to female control.

In a chapter titled, "The Short Story and American Life," this passage associates "such effects" American women have had on American literature with the commercial, "machine- made" story, vilified by the usual cliches of sentimentality, predictability, cleverness, and an intransigent appeal to the masses.

O'Brien's support for this aesthetic can be seen in the disproportionate number of stories he reprinted that were written by white men; the vast majority of stories that focus on a central male character, even in those stories written by women; and stories that grapple thematically with conflicts generally associated with the male social position— heterosexual lust, heterosexual guilt, the adolescent passage into manhood, and a character's coming to terms with his own elevated social status. Despite the fact that by 1930, 40-50% of the population of the United States was of non-Anglo descent, O'Brien reprinted a notable majority of stories by writers of Anglo-Saxon heritage.%

Arguing within the rhetoric of the machine, O'Brien joined the legion of modern cultural critics who built boundaries between high art and mass culture and who strove to save the dignity of art from the degradation of mass production. In O'Brien's Dance of the Machines (1928), for example, the futuristic image on the book's cover features

49 the silhouette of three identical women, each with an exaggerated bust line, sitting on iron bleachers and typing from manuscripts on their laps. More like secretaries than authors, the women writers are superimposed against a background of an industrial wheel, equating mass production with the feminine. This apocalyptic image serves as trope for O'Brien, as seen in the jacket insert to emphasize his concern about male submission: "Mass production prevails everywhere and the American short story writer who seeks success is forced to manufacture his product time after time without even the right to exercise literary birth control."

In his 1937 article, "Nonsense and the Short Story,"

James T. Farrell (whose story "Helen, I Love You" was reprinted in the Best Short Stories of 1933) criticizes

O'Brien's short-sighted rhetoric, arguing that O'Brien's polarization of "man and the machine" conceals the central issues involved in his aesthetic ideology: "Obviously the real problem is that of who owns the machine, and for what purpose the machine is put to use" (61). Indeed, not only does O'Brien's dependence on the machine metaphor and his hostility toward mass culture ignore Marxist interpretations of the superstructure, but O'Brien's disinterest in the distribution of power also conceals a significant interest in maintaining the status quo of the modern American society of his day.3

50 His privileging of the empowered elite represents a dichotomy between the artist and the non-artist that engages

in a long history of defining an aesthetic against the

"other." Embracing a view of American nationalism that values a rigid hierarchy of male/female, white/black, serious/popular, autonomous/collaborative, and organic/artificial, O'Brien assumed national unification largely along patrician lines.

O'Brien's conservative ideology aligned him with two conflicting literary forces of the first decades of the twentieth-century: the men of letters, as David Shumway calls the predominantly right-wing professors of American literature and the literary radicals, or journalists and editors like Van Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, who opposed the historical approach to American literature validated by the academy. While O'Brien strove to legitimize the

American short story, the men of letters, comprised mostly of the conservative New Humanists and led in the twenties by

Norman Foerster, strove to establish American Literature as a legitimate academic discipline. Likewise, working outside of the academy, the literary radicals published new writers in their periodicals, contributed social and literary criticism to the public debates, their taste in modern literature determining new literary trends, particularly the stylistically experimental literature of the twenties.

51 stories by African American writers and other people of color, and the proletarian fiction of the thirties.

Neither New Humanist nor literary radical, O'Brien was preoccupied with defining a unified American national culture and thereby embraced aspects from each movement.

Like Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and other literary radicals, O'Brien condemned the nostalgic view of American culture that conservative academics considered part of the

American literary tradition, blaming Puritan restraint for what he considered unhealthy repression and regressive social behavior. As O'Brien put it, "Holding comminatory services over the tomb of Puritanism, or love feasts in anticipation of the barricades, are useless and sentimental critical occupations" (Advance 14).

Like the New Humanists, however, O'Brien looked to the writers of America's past to exemplify his belief in an

"objective" aesthetic of "permanent value." His endorsement of stories by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and

Edgar Allan Poe as the models of American literary short story writers reveals his affiliation with the men of letters, their literary taste, as well as their belief in enduring, universal literature.* O'Brien's choice to champion Melville— as "one of the greatest visionary artists the world has had since William Blake" (163)— reveals his predilection for the masculine. New England tradition, but also his affiliation with the literary academics in terms of

52 defining and representing the American national culture as

Anglo, imperialistic, and exploitative of "other" cultures against which Anglo-Americans can establish superiority and domination. As Paul Lauter and Donald Pease have articulated, during a time when the popularity of women authors continued to threaten male dominance and the social and literary interest in the "primitive" rekindled the struggle to sustain Anglo-American values, the construction of Melville's authorship in the 1920s reasserted the hegemony of male Anglo-Saxon society.® O'Brien's role in that construction involved not only ideological support; in his 1923 Advance. O'Brien wrote a striking appeal for the forgotten Melville in which he praised the stories in "The

Piazza Tales" as major contributions to the American short story (62-63). His support continued into the thirties as he included "Benito Cereno" in The Twentv-Five Finest Short

Stories, praising it as "the noblest short story in American literature" (507).

In 1940, Fred Millet acknowledged the contribution of the Best Short Stories in developing a literary genre distinct from the commercial "machine made stories," saying of O'Brien that "no other person has made American writers and critics so conscious of the eternal conflict between tradition and experiment in the American short story" (85-

97).* Dedicated to both tradition and experiment, O'Brien's anthologies incorporate stories that represent a range of

53 stylistic and thematic variety. On one hand, O'Brien was

known for spotlighting immigrant writers to express the

American experience, while on the other his position

throughout the twenties and early thirties was that the

Midwest was the most representative region of American life.

Despite his staunch opposition to literature written for

explicitly political purposes, O'Brien published proletarian

literature in the same volume as more blatantly esoteric pieces. The result was a developed aesthetic by the end of the thirties that could embrace stories that reflect diverse

ideologies, but that could also be interpreted according to the modernist doctrine of universalism and endurance.

The contradiction of O'Brien publishing proletarian fiction and stories by immigrant writers along with works that reflect a high modernist aesthetic should not be read as anathema to the modernist aesthetic of exclusion.

Indeed, my argument in this chapter attempts to add to the growing body of criticism that insists that capitalist modernization and the exclusivity of the modernist aesthetic depended on the objectification of the "other" as a means of defining the American national culture, one ultimately integrated into a conservative ideology of art. Andreas

Huyssen, for example, questions the exploitation of the

"other" to reveal the risk inherent in modernism's position of cultural authority: " [T]his nostalgia for the past, the often frenzied and exploitative search for usable

54 traditions, and the growing fascination with pre-modern and primitive cultures— is all of this rooted only in the cultural institutions' perpetual need for spectacle and frill, and thus perfectly compatible with the status quo?”

(185). Modernism's inability to be defined outside of a hegemonic Anglo-American world view was a privilege necessary to ensure the perpetuation of classical literary modernism, a privilege perpetuated and maintained by O'Brien and the Best Short Stories.

According to Shumway, the American literary tradition was established during the years between the two wars by the

"triumph of the New Humanists over the literary radicals, a shift which enabled the emergence and acceptance of John

Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and the

New Criticism which played a major role in determining the

American literary canon, critical theory, and the legitimazation of American literature as an Academic discipline" (137). The literary short story aesthetic was influenced by and informed the same ideological conflicts that divided the academic right and the literary left.

Based on the same ideas of authorship and concerned with similar attitudes about the American connection to the

English literary tradition, O'Brien's aesthetic forged a common ground among the academics and the literary radicals, his series providing an ideological space for the short story that shaped the short story into an austere "high

55 modernist” expression advanced by the New Critics and other guardians of m o d e m culture.

II. The Aesthetic: Substance and Form

Characterizing the two most crucial elements of the short story as "substance" and "form," O'Brien described in his first introduction an aesthetic that was simultaneously linked to the nineteenth-century Romantics as it anticipated what was normally associated with the high modernist movement. As Joseph Conrad's Preface to The Niaaer of the

"Narcissus" extended the Wordsworthian view of the universalist claims for poetry,^ O'Brien's criteria for the literary story modified Coleridge's principle of "organic form," claiming that the only valuable substance is

"organic" and the only valuable form "beautiful."® Conrad's

Preface, remembered particularly for its emphasis on seeing, and therefore as a forerunner of the modernist claim of universal existential truth, also incorporated these terms:

"It is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance... that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour" (146).* In a statement repeated every year in the introduction to each volume, O'Brien placed substance and form at the center of his aesthetic, writing about substance: "No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating."

56 And about form: "The true artist will seek to shape this

living substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form

by skillful selection and arrangement of his materials."

Like Coleridge and the British Romantics, O'Brien linked

organic substance with the imagination and both with truth:

Substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a story only obtain substantial embodiment when the artist's power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. (Best 1916 2-3)

O'Brien's distinctions between form and substance reflect

Henry James's definitions of realism as an exression of the

truth. For example, O'Brien's language that links truth

with form and substance is similar to that found in James's

criticism of Walter Bessant in "Art of Fiction": "In

proportion as in what he offers us we see life without

rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in

proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that

we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and

convention" (441).

To O'Brien, "organic" realism expressed the truth, that

is, the moral, psychological, and sociopolitical concerns

that preoccupied James: "What has interested me, to the

exclusion of other things, is the fresh, living current which flows through the best American work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it" (Best 1916 2). The universal appeal

57 of a story was derived from the emotional response the story was able to achieve in the reader through the revelation of a psychological truth. Since it is in its universal appeal that a story achieves permanent value, not in its novelty of form or its ability to shock, O'Brien privileged substance over form, stating that the "test of organic substance is the most vital test, to be sure, and if a story survives it, it has imaginative life" (Best 1916 3).^°

O'Brien's preference for psychological drama emphasizes the importance of characterization to his aesthetic. As early as 1916, O'Brien spoke in favor of character over plot; whereas substance is "natural" or "organic" and associated with the imagination, form is mechanical or artificial and, as O'Brien claimed, most persuasive in terms of "the most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization" (Best 3). While Virginia

Woolf dedicated "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924) to the crucial role of character in the novel, O'Brien's emphasis on characterization predates this early statement by nearly ten years, representing one of the first critical statements to recognize its significance in any fiction genre.”

Initially in response to the plot-driven structure of the magazine story, O'Brien's emphasis on characterization grew in relation to his understanding of plot. In 1916, he wrote; "Our artists are beginning to think of life wholly in terms of the individual, and to substitute the warmth of the

58 individual in place of the generalized and sentimentalized

types to which our American public has been so whole­

heartedly accustomed" (Best 1-2). Most significantly,

O'Brien's conception of plot evolved into an emphasis on the

psychological and the imagistic over the sequential

narrative line of the plot-driven story, making it possible

for him to develop a concept of the short story that

expanded the limitations of the plot-driven structures that

depend on causal interactions between event. Describing

plot in 1935 as "a sequence of happenings strung along in

chronological order, or...a group of pictures set against

one another for contrast, or...the same event as pictured

from different angles of narration and points of view by

several observers," O'Brien acknowledged chronological

sequence so as to allow for a traditional concept of plot while simultaneously permitting a wider range for the story

form than previous definitions set forth primarily by

Brander Matthews, Bliss Perry, and Henry Seidel Canby.’^

O'Brien's notion of plot distinguishes his aesthetic from the accepted notion of causal relationships established by E. M. Forster and aligns him more closely with Poe and his emphasis on effect.O'Brien first expresses his idea of plot as effect or impression in 1920 when he attributes

Sherwood Anderson's stories as models of craftsmanship, awarding to him dedication that year for "An Awakening," and lauding him repeatedly for his innovation with image and

59 plot:

Almost for the first time, an American artist had attempted in his fiction to present a picture rather than to write an ephemeral play. The pictorial values of Sherwood Anderson's work were not at first apparent, because his pictures lacked colour. He was much more concerned to present significant form than to dazzle the eye with colour. In this his instinct was profoundly right. (Best 1933 xvi)

O'Brien's admiration of the "pictorial values" in Anderson's

style demonstrates his preference for the imagistic over the

causal, and the expressive power of tableau and epiphany,

endorsing a more experimental form for the genre.

By 1935, O'Brien was answering criticism that he

promoted a "plotless" story. And indeed, particularly in

the second half of the thirties, his selections included many stories that experimented with narrative voice and

traditional form. At the same time, however, O'Brien's

sense of organic substance embraced stories in which the narrative framework imitated oral story-telling traditions, or stories that appeared to be told and not written. For example, O'Brien praised Seumas O'Brien's stories based on

Irish folklore: "At first, one is struck with their utter absence of form, and then one realizes that this is a conscious art that wanders truant over life and imagination"

(Best 1915 XX). Konrad Bercovicci, a Rumanian writer who immigrated to the United States via Montreal, wrote many stories about the difficulties of the Jewish poor in Canada, but it was his tales about gypsy villages, often based on

60 Rumanian folk legends, that O'Brien republished and praised

in this collections. Of Manuel Komroff's stories, which

were often framed by a traveller who stumbles upon a village

and recounts the stories he hears, O'Brien wrote:

They are improvisations in which a theme is chosen, and variations are woven about this theme somewhat circumstantially and, in accordance with the mood of the tale-teller and his auditors, they unite in a happy marriage a kind of laughing fantasy and a grave circumstantial realism. They are not written. They are told. (Best 1926 ix)

In a statement that summarizes the two major aspects of

fictive technique most important to O'Brien, his praise for

Komroff continued: "The only addition which he has made to

the old folk-tale is a modern consciousness of psychology

and a patrician irony of statement" (Best 1926 x).

In addition to these writers, O'Brien published others

who drew psychological portraits from traditional materials.

Christina Chambers, for example, whose literary works are a

forerunner of contemporary Chicano/a literature, relied on

Mexican folklore to tell "John of God, the Water Carrier" which O'Brien republished in 1928. Edita Morris who, along with her husband Ira Victor received the annual dedication

in 1937, retold standard Swedish folktales in contemporary

English lexicon. O'Brien prized his "discovery" of William

Saroyan whose stories often involved extensive, uninterrupted dialogue or interior monologue as well as a handful of stories written in imitation of the Southern

Black vernacular, some framed in the story-telling technique

61 of plantation stories made popular by Charles Chesnutt and

Joel Chandler Harris.

O'Brien's distrust of sentimentalism and clever plots linked his taste with a morbid, American malaise that many writers and critics considered regressive if not anti-

American.'® Zona Gayle, an Iowa writer whose stories were reprinted twice in Best Stories ("The Biography of Blade,"

1924; "Evening," 1926), complained of the predictable nature of O'Brien's selections, telling Meridel Le Sueur and

Margery Latimer that she could not understand why so many of the younger writers "liked to play in the gutter" (Derleth

136). In 1929, popular humorist John Riddel burlesqued what

O'Brien was most known to support, "The Gloomy Mid-West

Story." In a short piece printed in Vanitv Fair. Riddel's distant, third-person narrator recounts a day in the life of a farm woman, whose routine is so monotonous that "she breaks her arm at the elbow just to hear it snap.In

"The Contemporary Short story" published in the Winter, 1938 issue of The Southern Review. Howard Baker criticized

O'Brien's belief in the short story as merely an

"expression" of American life, a shortcoming. Baker complained, that prizes local color, anecdote of scene, characterization, and overlooks "a criticism of life";

Specifically he seems to have been devoted to naturalism, either to the doctrinal naturalism of Sherwood Anderson and the others or to the practical

naturalism of innumerable writers who have made stories on the formula of sex on a warm night. (61)

62 A list of the writers most often selected by O'Brien provides further insight into the expressions of his aesthetic. Six or more stories were reprinted in the Best

Short Stories between 1915 and 1941 by the following writers: Sherwood Anderson (6) , Konrad Bercovici (6) , Whit

Burnett (6), Erskine Caldwell (7), Morley Callaghan (14 consecutively from 1928-1941), Irvin S. Cobb (6), William

Faulkner (B), Fanny Hurst (6), Manuel Komroff (11), William

March (6) , and Wilbur Daniel Steele (10). The short stories of this list of eleven writers fairly represents O'Brien's stylistic preferences. Like Wilbur Daniel Steele, Erskine

Caldwell, and Manuel Komroff, about a third wrote in a fairly traditional, romantic style, breaking tradition not so much in form as in choice of character and subject matter. Steele, Caldwell, and Irvin S. Cobb also enjoyed tremendous popular support in the United States, as did

Morely Callaghan in Canada. By mid-career, Callaghan declared himself a disciple of Hemingway's; as Jeff Metcalf points out, many Canadians believe the disciple excelled the master, and O'Brien, no doubt, recognized the influence"

(113-145). Along with Callaghan, Whit Burnett and William

March wrote in plain, understated prose. To the stories of

Wilbur Daniel Steele and Manuel Komroff, O'Brien did not attach the word sentimental, although both wrote most of nostalgia and emotional loss, often rendered in melodramatic situations.’^ Like Sherwood Anderson and William March, the

63 writers associated by many for their leftist politics would be chosen by O'Brien for their stylistic innovations and for their rural subjects and settings. With the exception of

Bercovici, the majority of stories selected from these writers were set in small towns or on farms, either in the south or in the Midwest.

This list represents the cultural diversity of

O'Brien's selections as well as the various forms that his aesthetic took. Of the writers to whom O'Brien awarded prizes, about ten percent were, like Konrad Bercovici, first- (and second-) generation immigrants to the United

States. Like Fanny Hurst, about ten percent were Anglo-

American women, many of whom O'Brien discredited as he praised. Of Hurst, for example, he wrote: "Her style suffers from every conceivable vice,— diffuseness, shrillness, sentimentality, rhetoric,— and yet many of her stories are difficult to forget" (Advance 227) . The rest, including Jean Toomer, Arthur Huff Fauset, Langston Hughes,

Rudolf Fisher, and Richard Wright, the five African-American writers whose stories O'Brien reprinted, were men ensconced in the Anglo-Saxon establishment.

More than individual writers, an exploration of narrative trends and story types most often characterized by

O'Brien's selections helps to reveal the nationalist values inherent not only in his selections, but in his readings of them. In praise or contempt, O'Brien's selections were most

64 generally associated with four seemingly disparate groups:

1) those written by first- and second-generation immigrants to the United States; 2) stories from the Midwest, particularly as represented by Sherwood Anderson; 3) the

Proletarian story; and 4) stories originally appearing in

Story magazine, or the Story story. My argument is that an aesthetic unique to the literary short story can be traced according to the development of these trends, the selections

O'Brien chose from Story representing the culmination of his aesthetic— one that embraces a degree of cultural and political diversity, but one that also elides political positioning and fits neatly into a New Critical hermeneutics of ahistorical themes.

III. Immigrant Voices

That America was uniquely positioned for the production of the short story was a common belief among many critics and editors of O'Brien's time, most holding that the genre provided the best form of expression for the emerging

American culture.’® In 1912, in his foreword to Elias

Liebermann's The American Short Story. Archibald L. Bouton of New York University's Department of English wrote about the connection between a unified national culture and the emergence of a national literature:

A few years ago the expectant critic used to scan the horizon for the coming of the 'American novel,' in whose pages the wonder of our new nationality was to find a worthy elucidation. From that moment of

65 achieved national consciousness our real literature was to begin. (7)

Liebermann and Bouton held the accepted notion among

conservative academics that American fiction was mainly "an

affair of localities"; "This interest of locality has made

the decisive opportunity of the short story, which, as a

literary type, with its characteristic emphasis upon

'situation,' is thus far the distinctive contribution of

American literature" (ix). Liebermann's conclusion is

representative of the academic consensus regarding the short

story, that the culturally diverse populations of the

country's varied geographical regions are the most unique

and essential characteristic behind the short story's

potential literary value. Bouton wrote that the

contribution of locality to the development of the American

short story was the primary influence of American life, and

consequently the most significant factor "in making the

short story the most typically American form of our fiction"

(xi).

O'Brien recognized the diverse cultures living in the

geographical regions of the United States, but he preferred

representative stories, ones that expressed the dominant

forms of American national identity, not those that distinguished themselves from it. Writing bitterly of local colorists, O'Brien once characterized them as writers who are "generally Anglo Saxon" and who reap "a harvest of esteem for their indulgent and usually uncomprehending

66 chronicles of what they regard as alien quaintness" fAdvance

16). To O'Brien, the emergence of a unified national culture was the distinguishing factor that delineated a need for a national literature; unity— not alienation— was his greatest concern.

Paradoxically, at least during the first ten years of the Best Short Stories. O'Brien explicitly equated the unifying element of American culture with its racial diversity. In 1918, lamenting the numbing effect of the war on most writers' imaginations, O'Brien invoked Van Wyck

Brooks, "the keenest of the younger critics," and what he perceived as the need for Americans to make their war experience "the beginning of a usable past," not sentimentalized nor denaturalized, but one that serves as a foundation from which to express a common experience: "Let us endeavor to understand the transition period, and plot out a usable future with the knowledge which we have thus acquired" (Best 1918 xiii). O'Brien shared with Brooks a basic acceptance of the primacy of racial and national categories, though O'Brien's understanding of a "common experience" began with a recognition of diversity that ultimately required assimilation into the Anglo-American dominant culture. In 1917, he acknowledged the potential that cultural diversity could contribute to a national literature:

Setting aside the question of whether our cosmopolitan population, with its widely different kinds of racial

67 heritage, is at an advantage or a disadvantage because of its conflicting traditions, we must accept the variety in substance and attempt to find in it a new kind of national unity, hitherto unknown in the history of the world. (Best xvii)

A few years later, O'Brien extended this idealized vision of the American melting pot into what Andrew Levy has called "a gentle vision of American cultural manifest destiny": "Such a culture, which would have deep and abiding contacts with all races, if it had a faith and an ideal, could impose that faith and ideal peacefully and almost unconsciously upon the world" (Advance 17).

Despite his emphasis on racial diversity, O'Brien clearly and repeatedly identifies the American as the Anglo-

Saxon to whom varied racial experience was offered as a sort of gift of enlightenment. In 1921, for example, O'Brien wrote that the Anglo-Saxon "was beginning to absorb large tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and

Italian, of Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic" (Best xiii).

The effect of this cultural positioning on his theory of the short story was obvious: from his first introduction until his last, O'Brien was concerned with "reaffirming the significant position of the American short story as compared with the English short story" (1915). The "England of Queen

Anne," as O'Brien wrote in Advance. provided, "[t ]he germ of the short story" (23) , and until his last collection, the

68 point of literary comparison. That the American short story had reached a superior place to the British story was a comment O'Brien made repeatedly in his introductions in

1915, 1921, 1934, and, as if to settle an old account, in the 1923 Best British Short Stories.

Like the nineteenth-century literary critics and the early twentieth-century academics, O'Brien consistently held the British tradition as the model from which America's progress might be distinguished. By the mid-twenties, based on this tradition, conservative academics provided the foundation for Norman Foerster's reconceptualization of

American literary history. The Reinterpretation of American

Literature (1925) in which Foerster outlined the three areas with which he believed the student of American literature should be concerned: 1)"In what sense is our literature distinctively American; 2) in what ways does it resemble the literatures of Europe; and 3) What are the local conditions of life and thought in America that produce these results?"

(Shumway 134) . Foerster's Reinterpretation replaced the regional approach to literature established during the late nineteeth century and introduced a new tradition of literary history which presented four historical categorizations that classified American literature in relationship to more nationalistic themes: the Puritan tradition, the frontier spirit, romanticism, and realism.

Conflating the literary events of Foerster's re­

69 interpretation, particularly the Puritan tradition and the frontier spirit, with his notion of American innocence and novelty, O'Brien's sense of national culture was based less on a New Humanist claim of excellence than on a sense of perpetual revitalization instantiated by a continuum between pilgrim and modern immigrant. "Stop humiliating the immigrant and the artist," he wrote in 1924, "and with their aid we may begin to discover America. For Columbus was only a prophet and not a discoverer, and the America we may build is well worth discovery" (Best xiv). In fiction, American

"innocence," according to this formula, was expressed in dynamic characters struggling against change, or in situations that forced recognition or change upon central characters. As he had stated earlier, American

national literary development, our newly conscious speech lacks the sophisticated technique of older literatures....It does not take the whole of life for granted and it often reveals the fresh naivete of childhood in its discovery of life. (Best 1917 xvii)

O'Brien would later term this blend of naivete and discovery

"innocent awareness," and find its most authentic expression in the short stories of Ernest Hemingway.

Among the many unknown writers recognized in Best Short

Stories. O'Brien remained interested in stories written by foreign-born Americans throughout his twenty-six years, defining "Americans" until his death as "those who choose to make their home in America." Over the years, O'Brien published thirty-six stories by first-generation immigrants,

70 and nine by those who identified themselves as children of

immigrants. Twenty of these stories, or nearly half, were

by writers from Eastern Europe, and fourteen of these from

American-Russians and Roumanians. In 1932, seven of the

twenty-five stories were written by immigrants, the highest

number during O'Brien's tenure; the five-year periods from

1922 to 1926 and 1937 to 1941 were the most representative

of immigrant voices, with seventeen stories by immigrants

appearing during each of those two periods.

O'Brien's interest in stories by recent immigrants drew

early criticism from Herbert S. Gorman who, commenting on

such "suggestive" names as Konrad Bercovici, John Cournos,

Henry Goodman and Ruth Suckow, complained in 1923 that "the general atmosphere [of the collection] is... disintegrated

....There is distinctly lacking a circumscribed sense of nationality. A much smaller proportion of the American tales is occupied with the intimate revelation of native spirit."^® Oliver Herford of the Ladies Home Journal criticized O'Brien's rhetoric, particularly his description of American cultural diversity as the "ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict." Herford called for de- romanticizing what O'Brien described as "the contributory elements...to a new potential American culture by the

dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many

71 races" (1921):

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? (228)

During the first five years of the publication, O'Brien dedicated volumes to two first-generation immigrants, both

from Russia: Benjamin Rosenblatt for "Zelig" in 1915, and

Anzia Yezierska for "The Fat of the Land" in 1919. Besides these stories, in 1915, O'Brien reprinted Irish-born Seumas

O'Brien's "The Whale and the Grasshopper" and Ben Hecht's

"Life"; in 1916, O'Brien reprinted Rosenblatt's "Menorah"; and in 1918, from Afghanistan, Achmed Abdullah's "A Simple

Act of Piety."

Given the fact that of the 100 stories reprinted by

O'Brien in the first five years only six were written by immigrants, the appearance of diversity that angered critics like Gorman was probably due to the large number of stories written by Anglo-American writers that represent some version of the immigrant experience, most generally that of

American patriotism and assimilation. In 1915, Will

Levington Comfort, W. A. Dwiggins, Virgil Jordan, and Mary

Boyle O'Reilly wrote about European characters in the war in

Europe; in 1916, Gertrude Atherton wrote about a French colony in San Francisco, Gordon Arthur Smith of an American in Paris, and Wilbur Daniel Steele of the Portuguese living in Provincetown. In 1917, Charles Caldwell Dobie's

72 "Laughter" featured Suvaroff, the Russian, and Flavio

Minettie, the Italian, in San Francisco; H. G. Dwight's "The

Emperor of Elam" explored the moral choices of a German and a Swiss adventurer in Persia at the dawn of World War I, their lack of courage and moral fortitude finally determined by the decision of their British associate to go dutifully to the war front; Katherine Fullerton Gerould's "The

Knight's Move" involved Havelock the Dane; and Fanny Kemble

Johnson's "The Strange-Looking Man" imitated a German fable.

The notable number of stories centered around characters new to American citizenship reflects the demographic shift in the United States during the immigrant wave of the first two decades of this century. It also exemplifies O'Brien's sense of the new America as different from the old. In his first introduction, O'Brien boasted of

America, stating, "A spirit of change is acting on our literature. There is a fresh living current in the air"

(5). Contrary to the opinion of his early critics, however, rather than representations of diverse voices and multi­ cultural attitudes, O'Brien chose stories that did represent a well-defined "sense of nationality," one very much rooted in the conservative assimilationist sense of the Melting

Pot— that is, a patriotic assimilation to the Euro-Anglo ideology.

For O'Brien, the appeal of the immigrant experience was

73 rooted less in the real experience of life in the United

States than in the idealized realization of the American

Dream. A dramatic example of this vision can be found in one of O'Brien's earlier selections, James Francis Dwyer's

"The Citizen," (1915) a melo-dramatic story of Ivan and Anna

Berloff who flee persecution from the "Great Czar" of

Beresnia to follow Ivan's "Dream" of freedom. The characters in Dwyer's story are types: Big Ivan of the

Bridge is honest and singly driven to freedom; Anna, his

"little wife," is submissive and so oppressed she cannot utter the word "freedom" aloud; even Ivan's hope for freedom is a characterized type— his "Dream" always in capital letters. One of many dialogues between Ivan and Anna suggests a global belief in Ivan's Dream of unqualified opportunities in the United States: "That is what we want!

You and I and millions like us want it, and over there,

Anna, over there we will get it. It is the country where a muzhik is as good as a prince of the blood!" (61).

Benjamin Rosenblatt's "Zelig" (Best 1915) offers a more complicated look at immigration and the personal sacrifices that accompany the financial opportunities of the United

States. "Zelig" is the story of a miserly Russian-Jewish farmer who is emotionally broken when his widowed son and twelve-year-old grandson migrate to the United States, leaving him to grapple with his decision "to stay in his native village at all hazards, and to die there" (220).

74 "Zelig” presents the miserable old man whose soul is lost in

his move to the United States in opposition to his grandson

"in whom he saw the formidable foe," who is young enough to

benefit from the freedoms available in the new country;

"Your grandson Moses goes to public school. He is almost an

American; and he is not forced to forget the God of Israel"

(220). In Zelig, the glorification of religious freedom

simplifies American patriotism, but at the same time, the

story complicates simple notions of American nationalism,

its ending haunting and ironic as Zelig, on his deathbed,

reaches for his grandson, shouting, "You hate to look at

Grandpa; he is your enemy, eh?" (225).

Although it presents a dazzling portrait of the

American Dream, Anzia Yezierska's "The Fat of the Land"

(Best 1919) is one of the few stories chosen by O'Brien to also depict the inevitable ghetto life of the urban

immigrant. The irony inherent in its title is dramatized through Hanneh Breineh's inability to adjust to life in the

United States, either as a young destitute mother on Delaney

Street or as a wealthy matron on Riverside Drive. In one of the story's most quoted passages, Yezierska expresses the paradox and sacrifice familiar to many first-generation immigrants during the first few decades of the United

States: "It is I and my mother and my mother's mother and my father and father's father who had such a black life in

Poland; it is our choked thoughts and feelings that are

75 flaming up in my children and making them great in America.

And yet they shame themselves from me!" (271).

Despite his initial support, by 1923, O'Brien's enthusiasm for both Rosenblatt and Yezierska mellowed to disappointment. Although Yezierska was praised by some for her deliberate use of a highly emotional tone, of her ensuing success in Hunarv Hearts and Lonely Voices. O'Brien wrote that she "voices the smoldering idealism of the Jewish immigrant in a vibrant and nervous idiom which tends to rhetoric and false sentiment." With Yezierska as model of the failed Jewish immigrant writer, O'Brien criticized

Benjamin Rosenblatt, whose collection of short stories The

Metropolis and other Stories was translated into Chinese in

1947, as "less sure than Anzia Yezierska of the exclusive value of Anglo-Saxon American culture, and equally sentimental as a racial figure" (Advance 217-218).

Although O'Brien republished many stories that featured

Jewish immigrants new to the United States, his 1916 account of the Jewish literati in New York in The Pagan reveals blatant racism toward this particular group. He expresses contempt for the intellectuals who try to "pass," who want to be considered "pure Americans" but who cannot escape their accent, "who scoff at Judaism but cannot outgrow their early ghetto training. Who sneer (covertly) at their Jewish language, and write wretched English," who "dream of "a snob-paradise, and depend for their living on near-paupers.

76 An ugly lot...rank with malice, stupidity, ill-nature, pettiness, and what not.

This expression of anti-semitism explicitly underlies the racism implicit in O'Brien's interest in immigrant stories and in what lies at the heart of his aesthetic, the assertion of white, male supremacy. Of the fifty stories included in the Literary Guild's twenty-five year anniversary publication, 50 Best American Short Stories

1915-1939. four were by writers who immigrated to the United

States and three of these reinforce white male hegemony.

The exception, Benjamin Rosenblatt's "The Menorah" (1916), is set in a secluded town in Russia, "The Menorah" is the story of poor Lea Reb Kalman, who sells her husband's famed menorah for a dowry for her daughter, reducing the two from their aristocratic status. A story about class and the oppression of certain Russian Jewish traditions, this story does not explore issues of American nationalism or white supremacy. Konrad Bercovici's "Fanutza" (1921), one of what

O'Brien characterized as "warm-blooded gypsie tales" and included in his 50 Best, is the story of a Roumanian gypsy chief, Marcu, who bargains for a higher price than love for the hand of his youngest daughter, Fanutza. The ending provides a double surprise as Fanutza, in order to marry the man of her heart, returns to her father the highest bidder's purse (a man, like her father, who is convinced that "all women are alike") ; and the discovery in the last sentence of

77 Fanutza's white heritage: "'All save those with blood of

Chans in their veins,' said Mehmet Ali, who had put himself between the girl and the whole of her tribe. And the

Tartar's words served as a reminder to Marcu that Fanutza's own mother had been a white woman and the daughter of a

Tartar chief" (174). The other two stories by immigrant writers in 50 Best represent women in two stereotypical extremes: Peter Neagoe's "The Shepherd of the Lord" (1932)

features the family of a Roumanian priest, the beauty amongst them Elizabeth, repeatedly distinguished by her violet-blue eyes; Allan Marshall's "Death and

Transfiguration" (1934) is a gruesome account of the death of a poor Scottish woman whose illegitimate pregnancy (and promiscuous nature) causes her death.

Stories selected by O'Brien that feature the immigrant experience but are written by Anglo-Americans generally portray immigrant characters as national types or as foils to the white, focal characters. For example, in a letter to the author, O'Brien praised Wilbur Daniel Steele's "Ching,

Ching, Chinaman" (1917) for which he dedicated that year's volume, writing: "Why did you do it? Confound it, there's nobody else in the running with you anymore, not even Mrs.

Gerould who is audibly panting" (Bucco 37). One of the eight stories from Urkev Island. "Chinaman" is, like the other stories in the collection, narrated retrospectively by

Peter Means who sees himself and life on the island through

78 romantic sensibilities. Featuring a Chinese launderer. Yen

Sin, who cracks a love triangle between Minister Malden,

Mate Snow, and Sympathy Gibbs, the story is thematically reminiscent of the Scarlet Letter; Yen Sin's character is analogous to Hester Prynn's Pearl— wild, cunning, non-

Christian if not pagan. In a stereotypical idiom of dropped r's and substituted I's, Yen Sin exposes the crime of the jealous Snow who has engineered an elaborate blackmail scheme involving the exchange of letters for money:

This man go night-time in Chestnut Stleet; pickee out letta undah sidewalk, stickee money-bag undah sidewalk, cly, shivah, makee allee same like sick fella. Walkee all lound town allee night. Allee same like Chlistian dlunk man. No sleepee. (462)

Although Sin exposes the hypocrisy of his Christian townsmen, his own symbolic name suggests a racist sentiment toward the Chinese, if not all Asians. Feminized by his occupation of launderer throughout the story, on his deathbed a silk pillow serves as metaphor of his native country, extending the feminization of the character to all of China.

As the enigmatic foreigner. Sin is Peter Means' foil as he moves through childhood into manhood, a companion to the boy despite the vast age difference. Sin's role in the

United States is to provide not only clean collars for his customers but a moral mirror in which American men can grapple with the desuetude and guilt of their lives. His last words to Peter Means conclude the story, dramatizing

79 distorted respect between the American boy and the Chinese

man, as well as the biased, Anglo-centric limitations of

O'Brien's aesthetic: "This velly funny countly, Mista Boy.

Mista Yen Sin go back China way" (467). Now that the boy

has learned his lesson. Yen Sin is superfluous, and he dies

on his scow unmoored and facing east.

With the exception of Maria Christina Chambers from

Mexico, in the twenties, all the stories that O'Brien

selected by immigrant writers were written by first- or

second-generation Europeans. From England: Ben Adams and

Llewellyn Hughes, and Ivan Beede whose parents were Dutch

and English. From France: James Hopper. Robert McAlmon,

Robert Mullen, and Barrett Willoughby were all children of

parents of Irish or Scotch-Irish descent. From Poland:

Tupper Greenwalk and Nathan Asch. From Rumania: Konrad

Bercovici, Bella Cohen, David Freedman, Henry Goodman, and

Ben Hecht. From Russia: Rose Gallup Cohen, John Cournos, and A. B. Shiffrin. From Armenia: Leong Srabian. From

Serbia: Milutin Krunich. With the exception of Konrad

Bercovici, whose stories were included six times throughout the twenties, O'Brien republished only one or two stories by each of these writers. The only American immigrant to receive a dedication throughout this decade was British-born

Charles Chaplin, to whom O'Brien dedicated the 1924 volume without comment or justification, although in the penultimate paragraph of Advance of the Short Storv. O'Brien

80 honors "the detached Shakespearean humor" of Chaplin which, translated into terms of the short story, "may best reveal to America its soul":

For we have an aged youth in us to-day that is a different thing from a young old age, and it is this aged and cynical youth which it must be the chief task of our artists to destroy. Let us keep our nonchalance. Yes. But let it be the nonchalance of an indestructible faith, the nonchalance of a knight who rides on a holy quest. (285)

The "holy quest" at the heart of O'Brien's aesthetic presumed the kind of expression which would validate Anglo-

American exclusivity as necessary to the cultural

"unification" of the country. As early as 1922, Oliver

Herford interpreted O'Brien's version of the melting pot as one which gives the greatest authority to the "White Headed

Boy of the Western World." Comparing the "straight-from- the-farm chaos" which he claimed that O'Brien preferred in his 1922 volume, Herford wrote: "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" (128).

IV. The Gloomy Mid-west Story

O'Brien continued to search for and promote writers new to American citizenship, but his explicit support for immigrant voices gave way in the early twenties to a preference for stories from the Midwest by writers often

81 classified as Regionalists but differentiated from the local colorists by a perceived shift away from sentimentalism and exaggeration in characterization. Many of O'Brien's Midwest selections are similar to those written by immigrant writers, particularly in the use of irony to express subversion: subversion of cultural heritage in the immigrant experience; subversion of sexual desire in the village experience.

The debate about terms like local color and regionalism has exposed the political implications of such classifications and the ways in which cultural authority was revoked from or denied marginalized writers who were assigned these labels.I am interested, however, in how

O'Brien's support for stories from the Midwest coincides with the issues central to the Agrarians' support of stories from the American South, and how a writer like Hemingway, not generally classified as regionalist, could be admired by

O'Brien because of the similarities between his style and the typical style of the writers of the Midwest.

Although H. L. Mencken claimed credit for "discovering"

Sherwood Anderson, O'Brien considered his early endorsement of Anderson's stories proof of his own claim. In 1932, he wrote, "I found Sherwood Anderson. A little later I found

Ernest Hemingway." The following year, O'Brien wrote, "It is from Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway that the contemporary living American short story derives." In 1932,

82 O'Brien said that Anderson and Hemingway "released American youth and helped it to find itself. Their reward is a generation of young writers of which America will some day be as proud as it should be now" (Best x) .

In 1920, O'Brien dedicated the Best Short Stories to

Sherwood Anderson for "The Door of the Trap," "I Want to

Know Why," "The Triumph of the Egg," and "The other Woman," which he reprinted in the volume and praised as "among the finest imaginative contributions to the short story made by an American artist during the past year" (xx). Ranking

Anderson with Hawthorne, Poe, James, Balzac, Maupassant, and

Chekhov, in the ten years between 1919 and 1929, his stories were among O'Brien's best eight times.^

Uninterested in their political implications, O'Brien liked Anderson's stories because they appealed to his taste for Midwestern stories as representations of the essential

American experience. As Anthony Channell Hilfer describes in The Revolt from the Village. "The village represented what Americans thought they were, what they sometimes pretended (to themselves as well as others) they wanted to be, and if the small town was typically American, the

Midwestern small town was doubly typical" (4). Although

Anderson considered the stories in Winesbura. Ohio the most revolutionary of his works, O'Brien wrote of Anderson and the experience depicted in these stories as though they were common to all Americans regardless of economic disparities;

83 he "is uncovering the soul of America reverently, and liberating it and curing it by giving it knowledge of itself. And so he would heal America, as he healed himself, by faithful discovery and impersonal compassion."*'

Although he claimed that Anderson never completely achieved his ultimate style, O'Brien considered Anderson's simplicity of prose, his use of imagery and his focus on the psychological to be his major contribution to the American short story:

The revolt against mechanical technique, so far as Anderson is concerned, is only a sign of a much more profound revolt in him.. .against a dull conformity which custom has staled, a conformity based upon the principles of leveling down rather than leveling up, a conformity of negation rather than of healthy growth. (Advance 247)

Thematically, Anderson's stories reflect what Hilfer calls

"the buried life," or the spiritual isolation and emotional repression central to the vision of America shared by Van

Wyck Brooks and Waldo Frank, and recognized first in poetry in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. "Anderson's stories," O'Brien wrote in Advance. "are studies in the sensitivity of a tired people stirring with the first hints of a new and freer life" (28). O'Brien was drawn to

Anderson's stories mostly for the subtlety with which they addressed issues of repressed sexuality, a subject of which

O'Brien encouraged more treatment by American writers and

what he considered a metaphor for the suppressed American

84 psyche. Anderson's characters, he wrote,

live in a world of unformulated, but keen, desires. They have a smoldering lust of the flesh and a smoldering lust for power, and the drab smoke of their choked desire suffocates their souls with undying longing... The flame of this freed desire is an unbounded conflagration that transforms time into an

eternal moment, sweeping all life with its fire and consuming the very soul. (257-258)

Given Anderson's involvement with the Communist party

and his commitment to the struggles of the working class,

O'Brien's interest in his stories for their universal appeal

is particularly ironic. Moreover, while O'Brien lauded

Anderson's stories for their keen representation of

repressed human sexuality, he chose only those that dealt

with central male characters, and whose sexual fulfillment

is derived largely at the expense of women. Among the eight

republished Anderson stories, for example, O'Brien chose

"The Return" for inclusion in the 50 Best American Short

Stories 1915-1939. In the collection's Biographical Notes,

O'Brien assessed Winesbura. Ohio, stating that it "shares with Hemingway's first book the distinction of being one of

the two chief landmarks in the American short-story writing

of our time." Like most of the stories in In Our Time and

Winesbura. Ohio. "The Return" is told in a detached third- person point of view from the perspective of a man coming to terms with a social conditioning he now finds constraining

if not degenerative. The story of John Holden, a native

Ohioan who, after eighteen years, returns from New York City

85 to visit his hometown of Caxton, "The Return" is primarily about the restrictions of class: Holden rejects his high school sweetheart Lilliyan because of class— "Her father owned a retail shoe store in Caxton and was a good, respectable man; but the Holdens— John's father had been a lawyer" (209); his passionless marriage was chosen because of his wife's social connections; his final assessment of his high school friends is based, tragically in terms of character development, on their social status— "Joe was a trouble-shooter. He worked for the International Harvester

Company, a swell mechanic. Herman was a drayman. He had five kids" (224). John's repressed sexuality operates as the dramatic metaphor for the general repression of his life; despite the story's continual reference to his wealth, it is to this characteristic, we must assume, that O'Brien found the "unbounded conflagration that transforms time into an eternal moment," or the universal appeal of Anderson's story.

As they appeared in the Best Short Stories. Anderson's stories offer a good example of how the ideological concerns of the anthologist can affect a reader's impression of anthologized stories. For example, despite obvious issues of class and gender, "The Return" can be embraced in a New

Critical context as a story about the "universal" experience of repression and isolation. The role of anthologies, particularly O'Brien's Best Short Stories, in influencing

86 the reader toward specific interpretations will be explored more thoroughly in Chapter Five of this dissertation.

Although Sinclair Lewis' Main Street had inspired a deluge of Midwestern novels popular among the general readership, short stories that offered similar views of the

Midwest went largely unpublished by large periodicals and were generally printed in the few Little Magazines that specialized in literature of the Midwest.Like the "main street" novels, the short stories of Midwestern fiction writers such as Edna Ferber, Willa Gather, and Zona Gayle were set in fictionalized versions of the villages of the authors' childhoods, and through the poignant stories of their characters, these writers criticized the middle-class

American dream of pastoral nostalgia, the hypocrisy and sexual repression of a close-minded society.

Significantly, it was the work of Hemingway, not

Anderson, that embodied the elements of short fiction that

O'Brien idealized most. Although Hemingway is not generally considered a Midwestern writer, what O'Brien "found" in

Hemingway, and what he looked for in other new writers was a sense of something distinctly American, a representation in form and substance akin to the American life he had "found" in Sherwood Anderson. O'Brien described Hemingway's style as the epitome of "organic fiction." Acknowledging a similarity between Anderson's and Hemingway's prose, for example, O'Brien praised the Anderson influence, but

87 distinguished Hemingway's work as superior in its ability to transcend artificial form:

he learned much from Anderson, but he learned much more from life. He never allowed form to impose its pattern on life. He respected life too much for that and preferred to let life shape the pattern of his work. ..In his work at its best there is a new poise, a

dynamic poise which no earlier American artist had ever achieved. (Best 1933 xvii)

The "buried life" that Anderson expressed in simple, everyday prose, Hemingway refined into "understatement," what O'Brien considered "affirmations and acts of faith, realistic in their integrity and profound in their quite unstressed implications (Best 1933 xvii)."

Throughout the twenties, O'Brien considered Hemingway's stories models of excellence for their use of understatement and their preference for everyday characters— "the little man in America." In a mild rebuke to a previous generation of writers who wrote about immigrant characters and communities (Wilbur Daniel Steele, in particular, who wrote about Portugese fishermen in his hometown of Provincetown),

O'Brien praised Hemingway's portrayal of his own "blood knowledge": "If they stayed home and wrote about their village, they sought for what seemed to them to be quaint and unusual in their surroundings. If they lived in

Provincetown, for example, they were not concerned with their own blood knowledge, but wrote romantically and artificially about the Portuguese fishermen whose emotions seemed to them foreign and strange.In Advance. O'Brien

88 claimed that the stories appearing in Hemingway's 1923

pamphlet Three Stories and Ten Poems "may almost be said to

mark the complete coming of age of the American short story"

(269). (From this pamphlet, O'Brien reprinted "My Old

Man.") Sixteen years later, in the twenty-fifth anniversary

issue of the Best Short Stories. O'Brien's praise for

Hemingway's use of understatement remained unqualified:

"While Ernest Hemingway's stories are superficially

colorless, they are actually charged most subtly with

emotional and intellectual perception. Nowhere is the

emphasis of understatement carried further more successfully

than in these stories.

Robert McAlmon called Hemingway's style "falsely naive"

and his tone "the hurt-child-being-brave" in which all

conversation "is reduced to lone words or staccato phrases."

McAlmon attests to the widespread imitation of Hemingway's

style as he criticizes the "emotional attitude" from which,

he says, it originates:

It's difficult to say who started the attitude in writing which one finds in 'My Old Man' and most present American work. It isn't so much a style or an approach as an emotional attitude: that of an older person who insists upon trying to think and write like a child; and children in my experience are much colder and more ruthless in their observations than the child characters in this type of writing. (176)

McAlmon was a harsh critic of Hemingway's, but his analogy

of the "falsely naive" style with the tone of a hurt child

testifies to the trend advocated by O'Brien and promoted through the large number of stories he selected that feature

89 either a detached narrator as voice of the repressed, or stories about child protagonists, a trend that reviewers of the Best American Short Stories remarked about throughout the forties and fifties and that short story theorists analyze today.O'Brien's penchant for these stories can be traced to his glorification of American innocence. As he explains in his introductions, O'Brien considered the relationship between innocence and awareness representative of the American experience; the tension of the stories told by detached narrators or about children is built on the reader's knowledge of what the character is only beginning to understand.

In 1934, in a statement that summarizes the relationship between American innocence and his aesthetic,

O'Brien defined what he considered a common element of the

"better new American short stories":

they embody in a simple, free, happy way the life- current of all that is new and vigorous and promising in American society. What is new in American society is obviously young, and it is young men and women who are chiefly expressing it. It abounds in innocent energy.... The innocence of these men and women is not an innocence untouched by experience. On the contrary, life has touched that innocence profoundly, and that innocence has been in contact with most of the muddier forms of life, (xiii)

The paradox inherent in O'Brien's concept of America's

"innocent awareness" speaks to his romanticization of the

Midwest, and by extension of America as well, an idealization that informed much of the short story writing in the thirties and most of the stories that O'Brien chose

90 during that decade. The ambivalence between nostalgia and revolt that was expressed by Midwestern writers and implied in Hemingway's stories led to the same tension that informed the proletarian stories that O'Brien chose in the thirties as well as the stories he selected from Storv magazine. As

Hilfer points out, by the thirties, "the village was idealized by some of the same spirits who had led the twenties' attack— a switch that did not so much result from new attitudes as from a reordering and change in emphasis of the old" (4).

For O'Brien, however, the "innocence" of Anderson and

Hemingway and those who modeled their aesthetic after them expressed a national emotion that, throughout his introductions, he equated with democratic idealism. Andrew

Levy argues that structural aspects of the short story, particularly its length, combined with economic flexibility and publishing opportunities, have allowed the twentieth- century short story to be interpreted as "a new and radically democratic form of literature, a mouthpiece for the inheritor of the revolutionary energies of the American political project" (70). Although O'Brien considered these extrinsic factors elemental to the story's widespread appeal, he was most interested in what was intrinsically democratic about the genre— its "organic" potential which, in his rhetoric, serves as a metaphor for the democratic possibilities of the American society. For example, in

91 1915, a year when the United States was bracing for World

War, O'Brien's vision of the American short story was steeped in the language of democratic idealism:

We have scarcely begun to build our democracy of letters....[T]he democratic future of the American short story is something by no means ephemeral...It is my wish annually to dedicate whatever there may be of faith and hope in each volume to the writer of short stories whose work during the year has brought to me the most definite message of idealism. (Best 11)

O'Brien's definition of idealism involves a direct analogy between democracy, literature, and truth in which he conflates social idealism with literary idealism. As

O'Brien figured it, lasting literature expresses the truth and represents it meaningfully, just as democracy, in its dedication to freedom permits the expression of human truth and meaningful existence. O'Brien's reading of Waldo

Frank's "Our America" helps to clarify his definition of

American idealism:

Briefly put, [Frank] finds that our failure lies in not distinguishing between idealism in itself and idealization of ourselves....What we call our idealism is rooted in materialism and the goal we set ourselves virtuously is a goal of material comfort for ourselves, and, that once attained, perhaps also for others. (Best 1919 xi)

Clearly, O'Brien's intention is to understand the modern influence on American society, a nation he considers unified by a common ideal based on democratic tenets of freedom and opportunity that was gradually and mutually

formulated by the whole nation. Again, the connection to

92 the short story genre is one of unification:

[A]lmost of necessity the American people has adopted the short story as its particular form of art; not the sketch nor the episodic tale, but a fairly long and systematically constructed piece of writing in which primarily it liberates its own feelings, and by which secondarily it tells a tale. The American short story therefore, has an immense and peculiar interest and value. One feels in it the striving of a nation to express itself and thereby to come to a knowledge of its own character in order completely and consciously to follow an ideal which it hopes to set before itself. (Best 1925 xvi)

Where he had once credited the "wave of vague imperialistic

feeling which ushered in the twentieth-century" as the

beginning of a new American era, by the time that Lindbergh

made his historic flight across the Atlantic, O'Brien

extended the "peculiar interest and value" of the short

story to America's global duties as a protector of

democracy. This time, he did not allude to military

strength to defend the world from anti-democratic forces,

but to "American innocence," a national characteristic made

even more endearing in connection to Lindbergh's historic

flight:

It is imperative that the organized campaign of certain central and eastern European figures with Oriental backgrounds should be combated by American innocence, for America is innocent, even when Europe laughs. The American eye can stare all colleges of wisdom down, and the American eye which sees in a a straight line must be followed by the American mind and heart flying in a straight line, if young America is to save old Europe and itself from young Russia and old Asia. There is still time for that. (Best 1928 x)

V. Proletarian Stories and Story

93 Throughout the 1930s, O'Brien dropped explicit support

for cultural diversity in his introductions, generalizing

instead about America's English heritage. The appeal of

understatement to the American audience, for example,

O'Brien explained as a trait left over from the first

British settlers; "As grandchildren of pioneers we...have

inherited a certain taciturnity from our English tradition,

and therefore we are inclined to mask our feelings even from

ourselves" (Best 1933 xxii). O'Brien's earlier enthusiasm

for the influence of various national cultures on the

American short story was replaced with a loyalty to the

European— particularly the English— tradition: "Europe is

old life: America is new life. New life always springs from

the old. America's debt to Europe is in no danger of being

forgotten" (Best 1933 xxii).

Given the Anglocentric rhetoric of his introductions,

it seems incongruous that O'Brien dedicated the 1932 volume

to Jose Garcia Villa, a young poet from the Philippines, whose distinction foreshadowed O'Brien's return in the thirties to reprinting stories written by recent immigrants to the United States. But like the first- and second- generation American writers whom O'Brien reprinted during the first seven years of the series, the majority of the

immigrant writers that O'Brien reprinted in the thirties expressed similar themes of American patriotism— though now, freedom of expression was often manifested in the story's

94 artistic form as well as in a character's religious

affiliation or career opportunities.

Villa founded and edited Clay in 1933, a literary

magazine that O'Brien claimed as a rival of Story. Villa's

prize-winning "Untitled Story" is a love story about a

college student coming to terms with his anger against his

father. Villa's style is novel in that the ten-page story

is told in seventy-four numbered sections, each an anecdote

or incongruous perception that acquires meaning as it tells

the story of a young Filipino artist who rejects his

father's dream to become a doctor. Villa's heavy use of

symbolism, as well as his innovative form and disjointed plot development, ushered in a higher tolerance for

formalistic experimentation in O'Brien's anthologies, as well as more interest in the lyric, in the telling over the

tale, and in a story that may be about the "little man of

America," but one that is most original because of its

innovative form.^

Besides Villa's 1932 dedication, O'Brien dedicated the

1934 volume to Alan Marshall from Scotland, the 1937 volume to Edita and Ira Victor Morris, both second-generation

Swedes, and the 1938 volume to Pietro Di Donato, born in

Brooklyn to Italian parents. Along with these dedications,

O'Brien reprinted stories by Robert Ayre from Ireland;

George Slocombe from England; David Cornel de Jong from the

Netherlands; Andra Diefenthaler, Frederic Prokosch, Walter

95 Schoenstedt, and Bernard Johann Tuting from Germany; Felicia

Gizyeka from Austria; Louis Adamic of Yugoslavia; Peter

Neagoe from Roumania; Vladimir Cherkasski, John Cournos,

Alexander Godin, Nahum Sabsay from Russia; William Saroyan whose parents were Armenian; Michael Seide from Poland;

Pietro Di Donato, P. M. Pasinetti, and Emilio Lussu from

Italy; and Prudencio de Pereda of Spain.

With the exception of three women, Edita Morris, Andra

Diefenthaler, and Felicia Gizyeka, the remaining twenty foreign-born writers whom O'Brien published throughout the thirties were men. Of these twenty-three writers, nine published first in Story. Like Sherwood Anderson, Ayre,

Marshall, Slocombe, Cornel de Jong, and Bernard Johann

Tuting write of the American Midwest. Ira Morris writes about professional Swedes in New York City, Frederick

Prokosch about young lovers on a rural estate in Russian, and Walter Schoenstedt about young lovers on a horse farm in

Germany. Like Villa, Saroyan's style is famous for its break with convention, but the writer's persistent allusions to Arian supremacy, though ironically portrayed, suggest strong authorial bias. Vladimir Cherkasski's "What Hurts Is

That I Was in a Hurry" (1938) is a bitter story of economic hardship but one driven by the main character's blatant misogyny, an insidious hatred that results in the death of a young homeless woman. As in Nabokov's Lolita, however, the story asks that we sympathize not with the victimized woman,

96 but with the guilty protagonist who, after the woman's

death, is left to live a life haunted by regret. P. M.

Pasinetti's story is reminiscent of Hemingway in tone,

particularly the "innocent awareness" of the central

character, the emotional pitch of the story revolving around

his conflicted feelings toward a woman of a lower class.

Prudencio de Pereda masks the political details of this

story of a Spanish bullfighter whose brother has just been

killed by "the resistance" in order to emphasize the theme

of the will to live.

With the advent of Story magazine in 1932 and New

Stories the following year, made-to-order stories appeared

in the Best Short Stories. At least one writer, William

Saroyan, one of O'Brien's proudest "finds," admitted to shaping his aesthetic according to the stories he read in

Best Short Stories. In his autobiography Sons Come and Go.

Mothers Hana in Forever. Saroyan writes about his respect for O'Brien's influence: "Edward J. O'Brien— the very name in print, to my eye, means the Short Story." Saroyan recalls the well-documented story of how he strategized to maximize his chances for publication, approaching O'Brien at Best

Short Stories and Foley and Burnett at Story with two different Armenian names, one his own, the other a pseudonym. His biographers, Lee and Gifford, are more glib about his intentions:

The truth is that Saroyan arranged for his own discovery. He remained as avid a reader as ever of the

97 latest books and authors winning praise, and he scanned Edward J. O'Brien's annual of the Best Short Stories for clues to taste-making editors as well as to that powerful editor's own tastes. (212)

After 1932, O'Brien selected so many stories from Storv that in the introduction to the 1936 volume, a methodical defense against "base insinuations about [O'Brien's] critical integrity," O'Brien denied any charges that he had financial interests in the magazine. The charges were egregious— O'Brien received no money from Foley and

Burnett— but O'Brien's claim of a "disinterested attitude" was naive at best. Stories from Storv that O'Brien republished throughout the thirties were a culmination of his literary aesthetic, one identifiable by a recognizable degree of character detail, a lack of political detail, a well-polished form, and adherence to a handful of themes generally derived from the psychological influence of the twenties: innocence and initiation, sexual or emotional repression, and alienation from the dominant culture by members of that culture.

Both Storv and New Stories published several stories by writers whose work generally appeared in leftist publications. O'Brien wrote in 1935 that "during the past four or five years, it is on the left rather than on the right that I have found the most fruitful interpretation of

American life by the short story writer" (Best xiv). But the same year, O'Brien warned against "literary fascism," or

"the automatic expression of a machine mind" (Best xiv).

98 O'Brien's interest in stories of innocence, or stories with ahistorical, "universalized” themes that did not foreground social issues brought conflicting charges about his own political orientation:

As a fascist I am supposed to flee from reality and to exhibit a preference for stories of romantic escape in which events are seen through the eyes of a child. As a communist, it is supposed that my interest in the short story is limited by my strong preference for rude brutal slices of life....To the fascists and to the communists, however, I say frankly, 'A plague on both of your houses!' (Best 1936 xiii)

As the war escalated in Europe, O'Brien's patriotism for the American short story revealed a global purpose for the story— defender of democracy against imperialism. In the 1939 introduction, he wrote:

our European colleagues are beginning to look toward us to interpret their world as well as our own, even if, and perhaps because, there is a special American way of looking at things. Several European cultures have died in the past few years...It looks as if it were our turn now...The Storv generation sees clearly enough but hesitates to interpret and to build. I think it ought to undertake the responsibility. If it does not, it will soon be displaced. As Europe crumbles, the responsibility of interpretation in the near future becomes more and more swiftly ours. (Best xii)

Charles Hoffman describes the liberal supply of left wing stories in Storv and New Stories as an "accident of the times," stating that O'Brien, Foley, and Burnett "were not established to furnish exempla for Marxist sermons, they were willing to accommodate left wing writers because these were the literary pace-setters of the moment...But this is more an accident of the times than it is a demonstration of

99 any definite editorial policy” (161).

Marcus Klein lists the following as writers of the proletarian canon: Benjamin Appel, Thomas Bell, Robert

Cantwell, Jack Conroy, Mike Gold, Albert Halper, Josephine

Herbst, Josephine Johnson, A. B. Magil, Albert Maltz,

Clifford Odets, Myra Page, Isidor Schneider, Herman Spector,

Clara Weatherwax, and Leane Zugsmith (139). According to

Klein, proletarian writers usually had a direct party bearing while they wrote, but they were also driven to create a new and experimental basis for art: "What was at issue was an aesthetic, founded upon and warranted by a recognition, under the impress of current circumstances, of a sustaining, even joyous, vitality in the lower depths, down there where the social actuality of America was" (130).

Of these writers, O'Brien republished stories by

Benjamin Appel and Robert Cantwell. Although he had known

Mike Gold during their days with the Provincetown Players,

O'Brien never recognized any of his fiction. He republished three stories by Albert Halper; "I Hear You, Mr. and Mrs.

Brown" by Josephine Herbst (1931); three by Albert Maltz; and one by Leanne Zugsmith. Other writers generally associated with the left in the thirties, O'Brien published significantly earlier in their careers. Among these writers were Nathan Asch, Edna Ferber, Floyd Dell, Mary Heaton

Vorse, Meridel LeSueur, and Kay Boyle.

Given the Depression and the now "universal" experience

100 of poverty, the immigrant poor were in a position of literary authority for the first time, and O'Brien was forced to recognize more socially brutal themes than he had in the past. As Klein puts it, "With the general canceling of expectation of reward for private initiative, the poor were transformed from a rabble into a class. They were no longer assorted Rumanians and Poles and blacks and Sicilians and Lithuanian Jews, but 'the people'"(36-37).

As editor of the Best American Short Stories 1984. John

Updike compared his selections to O'Brien's fifty years earlier. In the 1934 volume, Updike found a "surprising number" of stories with rural or small-town settings, and he considered the earlier volume ethnically more heterogeneous than his 1984 collection. Attributing the cultural and geographical variety of stories to O'Brien's bias in part,

Updike described O'Brien's selections as "less homogenous than today's America," asserting that the "1934 feels more consciously democratic, in the range of types and accents that authors felt empowered to bring to life" (xii-xiii).

As I have tried to articulate in this chapter, the appearence of heterogeneity in the 1934 volume (indeed, in

O'Brien's volumes throughout his twenty-six years) is deceptive; that Updike judged these stories according to writers' names and "accents" indicates that the superficial

"heterogeneity" that O'Brien endorsed was still accepted as

101 genuine in 1984. Because O'Brien's sense of nationalism was

inextricably bound to his acceptance of the myth of American

innocence, he was unable to see that his concepts of racial

integration were in fact more like fashionable explorations

of the "Other" than actual expressions of difference.

According to his introductions, it was in this spirit that

he selected stories by and about immigrants to the United

States as well as stories by writers usually associated with

leftist politics. "New York is not America," he wrote (Best

1933), and he sought stories that were not about the urban

sophisticates, nor the majority of immigrants who settled in

the large eastern cities, but about the rural American

folk. "Discovering" Hemingway and promoting his fiction as

model of American innocence was one of O'Brien's most

dramatic means of infusing his taste onto the story form.

Formally, Hemingway's realism reinforced the paradox of

coexistant innocence and awareness; thematically it seemed

to explore traditional codes of masculinity and

heterosexuality as it celebrated particularly male-centered

sub]ect matter. His focus on a universal image of human

nature determined the "final impression" he looked for a

story to convey; the Storv story adhered to his formal

standards, and the effect of the image was one that was politically "acceptable" to an increasingly elite audience.

O'Brien's insistence on innocence precluded the angry

102 voices of the proletarian writers and the bitterness of

women and people of color who wrote, implicitly or

explicitly, about social oppression. In other words, and

perhaps most significantly, O'Brien's brand of innocence

determined whose America may be written about. O'Brien's

attempt to find new writers and a variety of voices to

express the American experience does make his list appear

"less homogenous" than the familiar names that comprise the

1984 table of contents. Ideologically, however, whether he

chose stories by Pietro DiDonato or Ernest Hemingway, the

"difference" that O'Brien promoted was, for the most part, a

variety in name only.

Chapter 3 of this dissertation provides a systematic

discussion of the exclusivity of O'Brien's aesthetic. This

analysis reveals how O'Brien's ideology excluded stories

that did not conform in subject or in perspective,

contributing to a discourse that considered literature by

African American writers, particularly those who wrote

before Richard Wright, aesthetically inferior. Examining

the acceptable representation of racial conflict in selected

stories by nonblack writers and the seven stories by African

American writers reveals the ways in which O'Brien's

aesthetic insists on definition from within a hegemonic

Anglo-Saxon world view.

103 Notes

1. My understanding of the modernist aesthetic is in communication with Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide; Modernism. Mass Culture. Postmodernism, and Linda Wagner- Martin, The Modern American Novel. 1914-1915; A Critical HiSteEy.

2. For statistics, see Marcus Klein's Foreigners. 35.

3. In her memoirs of storv magazine, Martha Foley recounts her first visit with O'Brien, in which she asked him why he made his home in Oxford, England. "In Boston," he answered, "I am below the salt with the Beacon Hill Yankees and above the salt with the South Boston Irish. There's no place for me" (99) .

4. Chapters II, III, and IV of Advance of the American Short Storv are, respectively, "The Forerunners: Irving, Austin, and Others," "Hawthorne and Melville," "Poe."

5. A more detailed discussion of the construction of Melville's authorship and its relationship to the modernist aesthetic can be found in "Melville Climbs the Canon," in which Lauter writes, "the rise of Melville's reputation in the 1920s may be taken to represent the ascent of the ideology we call 'modernism' and of the academy and its adjuncts in the hierarchy of cultural authority" (3). See also Donald Pease, "Melville and Cultural Persuasion," in Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essavs.

6. In "The Little Magazine," published in Vanitv Fair (October, 1934) O'Brien claimed that the "distinctly rebellious" nature of Margaret Anderson's The Little Review, "was fortunate for America. " He praises the imagists and mentions the short story by T. S. Eliot in the May issue, 1917: "I was so stupid that I did not recognize its value." (PUA)

7. See Ian Watt's "Conrad's Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus".

8. In "Biographia Literaria," Coleridge distinguised between the mechanical form that a writer consciously imposes upon materials and the organic form that grows out of the nature of the materials themselves.

9. Conrad's Preface appeared in the United States first as "The Art of Fiction" in Hamer's Weeklv (May 1905) and later as Joseph Conrad on the Art of Writing in a 1914 publicity

104 pamphlet by Doubleday.

10. O'Brien's statement about the "psychological and imaginative reality" of American short fiction and "organic substance" as indication of "imaginative life" was first printed in the introduction to the 1916 Best Short Stories and was repeated every year after that until his last issue.

11. James wrote in "The Art of Fiction," "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?" (438-439).

12. In Brander Matthews' "The Philosophy of the Short-Story" (1885), Bliss Perry's "The Short Story" (1902), and Henry Seidel Canby's "On the Short Story" (1901), all three critics agree that plot is the most crucial element of fiction. "If its plot be sufficiently entertaining, comical, novel, thrilling, the characters may be the merest lay figures and yet the story remain an admirable work of art (Perry 310).

13. In Aspects of the Novel. Forster defines plot as "a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. 'The king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot. The time-sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it" (86).

14. Seumas O'Brien's "The Whale and the Grasshopper appeared in the 1915 Best Short Stories.

15. For example, William Chenery's "Picking Popular Fiction," criticizes O'Brien's. "The explanation of the preference for happy endings is, I think, base. It is to be found in the history of the United States. For better or worse we are a sanguine and optimistic people. We hope and expect that our personal affairs will turn out well. We like to read about people who [bet]ter their difficulties. If our history were a record of frustration, as is that of the Russian people, we, too, might incline toward bitter defeat in our fiction. Our experience is different and so are our short stories."

16. This piece is qtd. in Dance of the Machines (Appendix).

17. In 1938, F. Scott Fitzgerald advised a scholar against including Steele in a projected survey of contemporary literature: "Why Wilbur Daniel Steele, who left no mark whatever, invented nothing, created nothing except a habit of being an innocuous part of the O'Brien anthology?" (Bucco 6).

18. See Andrew Levy, 27-58.

105 19. For a full discusion on Norman Foerster's role in the development of American Literature as an academic discipline, see David Shumway's Creating American Civilization: A Geneoloov of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. 134-138.

20. The Literary Digest. February 23, 1924.

21. Qtd. in Daniel Aaron's Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Criticism. (418). Aaron claims that O'Brien is himself Jewish, though I have not been able to find any other evidence of this.

22. Especially feminist critics who are interested in revisionist approaches to 19th-Century American literature have complicated once unquestioned literary classifications and cultural authority. Key works include Judith Fetterley's Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women; Jane Tompkins's Sensational Designs; The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860; Joyce Warren's introduction to The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Centurv American Fiction and "Canons and Canon Fodder," in The (Other) American Traditions.

23. "An Awakening" (1919), "The Other Woman" (1920), "Brothers" (1921), "I'm a Fool" (1922), "The Man's Story" (1923), "The Return" (1925), "Another Wife" (1927), "The Lost Novel" (1929).

24. See Daniel Aaron's discussion of Anderson's Why I Believe in Socialism in Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. 194.

25. For full discussion, see Hilfer's Revolt of the Village. 54.

26. 50 Best Short Stories, viii.

27. O'Brien, 50 Best American Short Stories. 856. "My Old Man" (1923), "The Undefeated" (1926), "The Killers (1927), "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1937), "Under the Ridge" (1940). Originally, O'Brien requested "Fifty Grand" for the 1927 volume, though taking the advice of A. M. Chase at Scribners, Men Without Women.

28. See discussion of Yoli Tannen's "Is a Puzzlement" in Chapter Five. See also, Valerie Shaw's discussion about "frontier" subject matter (195), and Mary Louise Pratt's remarks in "The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It," in which she links the tendency to judge the short story as a marginal genre in comparison to the novel to subject matter. The greater tendency for story writers than novelists to write about childhood is often, according to Pratt, reduced

106 to the logic that "a child's perspective is too naive, too thin, too unrevealing to sustain 'full-length' novel treatment" (106).

29. Martha Foley recalls Villa's courage to weave his story with numerals, comparing "Untitled Story" to Oelmore Schwartz..."After giving me permission to reprint his story in The Best American Short Stories, Oelmore wrote asking me to delete the numerals because students at Harvard, where he taught, chanted the numbers after him when he passed them on campus" (The Story of Storv Magazine, 151).

107 CHAPTER 3 BEST SHORT STORIES: AN a e s t h e t i c o f EXCLUSION

Uncle Remus is the typical negro of the Georgia plantation, kindly, humorous, imaginative, and sententious. He is the embodiment of all that the negro has contributed to American culture. — Edward O'Brien, Advance of the American Short Storv (1923)

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the exclusivity of O'Brien's aesthetic by examining how the

Best Short Stories affected the production of literary short stories by African American writers during the twenty-six years of O'Brien's editorship. The first part of this chapter examines the stories written by nonblack writers that feature African American characters or that otherwise foreground issues of race. The second part analyzes the seven stories written by African American story writers that

O'Brien reprinted in the Best Short Stories. Identifying ways in which O'Brien's standards demanded limited and often racist representations of African American characters provides insight into the ways in which Best short Stories, as one of various literary and ideological institutions of its day, promoted African American texts that reproduced its literary values. I am particularly interested in looking at

108 ways that these stories, as realist texts, express O'Brien's ideal of innocent awareness. A story that could express innocence that "has been in contact with most of the muddier forms of life" was, to O'Brien, an expression of American nationalism, that is, a spirit that reflected "the" American identity as one that, in comparison to the British, is vigorous and new— socially, psychologically, and intellectually evolved beyond the restrictive morality of the Victorian age. Although O'Brien's nationalism is not the explicit focus of this examination, understanding how the stories that he selected promoted his cultural views clarifies the social pressures that still exist today and influence the production of the genre.

Throughout this discussion, I also focus on some of the writers and stories that O'Brien excluded, particularly those stories published in magazines that O'Brien disregarded when selecting his "best." My intention is to inform our understanding of the publishing opportunities for certain marginalized voices during the 1920s and 30s, and to examine the stories of popular African American short story writers during that time. As departures from the emerging literary ideal established by such institutions as O'Brien's

Best Short Stories, these stories provided the foundation for divergent forms of the short story today, a divergence that may provide important insight for a more inclusive understanding of the story form.

109 I. O'Brien and the Harlem Renaissance

O'Brien linked the genesis of his literary career to

his friendship with poet, critic, and anthologist William

Stanley Braithwaite, whom he met while working as a reporter

for the Boston Evening Transcript, and assisted in 1913 in

editing a poetry magazine inspired by Harriet Monroe's

Poetry. Braithwaite and O'Brien published one issue of

their magazine. Poetry Journal, before Braithwaite launched

his annual anthology of magazine verse, The Anthology of

American Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.^

Although O'Brien rarely acknowledged Braithwaite's

influence, the two maintained a lifelong correspondence in which O'Brien repeatedly sought literary advice. Most

significant, however, the inspiration for Best Short Stories

can easily be traced to Braithwaite's annual review of magazine poetry in the Transcript, which ran from 1906 until

1913 before growing into the first volume of his annual

anthology. A year after Braithwaite dropped his column in

order to work on the anthology, O'Brien began his Transcript

column, which led the following year to the Best Short

Stories and Yearbook of the American Short Stories. Not

only did Braithwaite pave the way for the publishing

opportunities for Best Short Stories, but as Kenny J.

Williams points out, he was also instrumental in creating an

audience for that type of book (Harris 12).

110 Influenced by his British Guiana heritage,

Braithwaite's passion for British literature was formulated

at an early age. Like O'Brien, his literary interests in

the early American avant-garde poets complemented his taste

for Elizabethan verse and determined the selections for his

influential anthology, which he edited until 1929.2

Braithwaite's "The Negro in American Literature" was

included in Alain Locke's The New Nearo (1925), a collection

of literature, history, art, and criticism of African

American cultural history published by O'Brien's associates,

Albert and Charles Boni. In "The Negro in American

Literature," Braithwaite traces African American literary

tradition to slave spirituals and folk tales, recognizing it

as part of a larger cultural tradition influencing and

influenced by the dominant Anglo-American literary trends;

"During more than two centuries of an enslaved peasantry, the race has been giving evidence, in song and story lore,

of an artistic temperament and psychology precious for

itself as well as for its potential use and promise in the

sophisticated forms of cultural expression" (29) . Speaking of the poetry of James Weldon Johnson, Braithwaite categorized the "racial experience" as a vehicle for the universal: "through the racial he made articulate that universality of the emotions felt by all mankind" (38).

Braithwaite particularly valued Johnson's stylistic commitment to the European tradition, a dedication that

111 linked Braithwaite's aesthetic interests to the conservative vanguard such as Locke and Du Bois, as well as to the Anglo-

American cultural nationalists like O'Brien. "Here a new literary generation begins; poetry that is racial in substance, but with the universal note, with the conscious background of the full heritage of English poetry" (38).

Despite his literary conservâtivism, in many ways,

Braithwaite challenges the European essentialism inherent in the modernist "universal" aesthetic, anticipating late twentieth-century literary scholars like Toni Morrison whose theories on literature and racial discourse illuminate current thinking about the production of cultural meaning.

Like Morrison, Braithwaite acknowledged that African

Americans were in American literature for centuries before they were regarded as its creators and that the representation of African American characters in American literature provides crucial insight into cultural and intellectual domination, or, in Morrison's words, into "how knowledge is transformed from invasion and conquest to revelation and choice" (8). Braithwaite's criticism of sentimentalized plantation literature speaks directly to the revelations and choices of which Morrison writes: "It must be sharply called to attention that the tradition of the ante-bellum Negro is a post-bellum product, stranger in truth than in fiction" (New Negro 31). Indeed, Braithwaite articulates what O'Brien never recognized, that literature

112 is a social institution which reproduces codified values and conventions that help to perpetuate the dominant social structure.

If O'Brien read his friend's essays, there is no evidence of corroboration in his own writings about literature and the discourse of race. In 1923, for example, comparing the contribution to American literature of Joel

Chandler Harris and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, O'Brien declared that Harris' Uncle Remus is "the typical negro of the

Georgia plantation, kindly, humorous, imaginative, and sententious. He is the embodiment of all that the negro has contributed to American culture." O'Brien conceded that

Dunbar's The Strength of Gideon (1900) "achieved a certain synthesis in the interpretations of negro character."

However, he wrote, "While the volume is of hardly more than historical interest, it should be mentioned here as the only direct negro contribution to American fiction, with the exception of Chesnutt's faithful realism" (Advance 160-

161) .3

Braithwaite objected to the "primitive" representation of African American culture, or to the perception that the primitive is an essential characteristic of the race.

Although in its association with African American nationalism, many glorified the strength and freedom inherent in the notion of the primitive, Braithwaite considered even the work of the early protest writers

113 "doubtful formula of hereditary cultural reversion." Of the sympathetic white writers such as Eugene O'Neill, who provided such prominent (and deranged) literary characters as Emperor Jones, Braithwaite's criticism was cordial but clear: "in spite of all good intentions, the true présentai

[sic] the real tragedy of Negro life is a task still left for Negro writers to perform" fNew Nearo 35).

Unlike Braithwaite, O'Brien preferred stories that are generally classified as "primitive." Most of O'Brien's selections featured what Toni Morrison calls "Africanist" characters, or the expression of "American Africanism": "the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany

Eurocentric learning about these people" (7). Incapable of logic and motivated by primeval instincts, most of the

African American characters depicted in O'Brien's selections were defined according to Eurocentric perspectives of difference and otherness. These characters' obsession with music and sex was portrayed as an essential characteristic of the race, their intellectual inferiority to white characters conveyed through the use of denigrated idioms.

None of O'Brien's selections featured educated, middle-class

African American characters. Neither did they focus on passing, or the complications of racial categorization.

During a period when the "mulatto" went from "tragic" to

114 "fashionably" commonplace, O'Brien published only three stories with mulatto characters; in each, the actual character was largely abstracted within the story so that the personal reality of the character's experience was reduced to a symbol of the political implications inherent in mixed heritage.* Despite the plethora of stories written by black and white writers that featured characters who are t o m about "passing" or otherwise complicate clear distinctions of color, O'Brien chose only stories that maintained evident dichotomies between the races, that presented whites in the position of authority or privilege, usually abusive, and blacks in inevitable defeat.

O'Brien may not have been interested in finding stories that portrayed the "the real tragedy of Negro life," but he was certainly interested in "true présentai." Regarding who could best render this truth, again he disagreed with

Braithwaite. Although he included Charles Johnson's

Opportunity in his list of magazine addresses, O'Brien published only two stories from that magazine: Arthur Huff

Fauset's "Symphonesque"(1926) and Harold Garfinkle's "Color

Trouble" (1940). Written by a white graduate student in the school of sociology at the University of North Carolina,

"Color Trouble" is a remarkable story about a young couple traveling from Washington to Durham, North Carolina, who refuse to sit at the back of the bus. "Color Trouble" is unusual for an O'Brien selection in that it features a

115 strong, intelligent woman protagonist, doubly unusual in

that the woman is black. However, Garfinkle's story is

representative of the stories that O'Brien chose that deal

explicitly with issues of race; written from a white

character's perspective, a white passenger who narrates the

story from a distanced perspective, the story's theme

centers around the discomfort, shame, and absurdity of

legalized segregation.

The last page of the Thurman-Hurston-Hughes publication

FireI ! (1926) consisted of an ad for Opportunity with

O'Brien's request to reprint "Symphonesque," but there is no

evidence that O'Brien was a friend of Opportunity's editors.

In fact, O'Brien was not chosen to judge the first

Opportunity literary contest, an event which catapulted Zora

Neale Hurston into the Harlem literary scene and into the

pages of The New Nearo; instead, Blanche Colton Williams,

editor of Prize Stories. The O'Henrv Award, made the

selections, a propitious choice for Hurston, given that

O'Brien never selected a Hurston story for his series,

despite support for her from Foley and Burnett at Story.®

Of the three leading African American magazines that

supported literary fiction, O'Brien listed only Opportunity.

Messenger, which ran successively from 1917-1928, was never

included in O'Brien's annual list of magazine addresses;

W.E.B. Du Bois' Crisis appeared on O'Brien's list only in

1936 though it ran from 1910 to 1976, and though his friend

116 Braithwaite served repeatedly as judge for Crisis poetry contests. Ignoring Messenger and Crisis. O'Brien thus overlooked many of the stories of Jessie Redmon Fauset,

Nella Larsen, Marita Bonner, Alice-Dunbar Nelson, Dorothy

West, John P. Davis, John Henrick Clarke, Carl Ruthven

Offord, and John Caswell Smith, among others. The contribution that these writers made to the Harlem

Renaissance, to the African American literary tradition, and to the development of the American short story has subsec[uently been overlooked, though through the efforts of literary historians who have critical interests in the loss or marginalization of these writers, most are being reintroduced today.

Compared to the fashionable "primitive" stories associated with the Harlem Renaissance, stories that appeared in Crisis were considered more conventional, even

Victorian, in their thematic emphasis on moral integrity.

Jessie Redmon Fauset, widely considered the editorial authority of Crisis, chose stories that emphasized not traditional or primitive "folk" characters, but mainstream, middle-class characters struggling with everyday issues, including what George Hutchinson calls "The Americanness of the American Negro" (154), or the process by which African

Americans learn what it means to be "black" and the variety of strategies necessary to negotiate that category.*

Although O'Brien's stated interest was to represent "every

117 cross-section” of American life, to embrace Fauset's

literary objective would have meant accepting blackness as a

social construction rather than as a characteristic that defines essential racial qualities. Such an acknowledgement would have required an acceptance of blackness as legitimate grounds for the creation of literature, blackness as a

"springboard,” as Henry Louis Gates states, "to write about the human emotions that African Americans share with everyone else, and that they have always shared with each other, when there were no white people around" (Loose Canons

147) .

Even if O'Brien did not pay serious attention to the stories printed in magazines edited by African Americans, he did not have to look far for other publications that printed stories by many of the same writers. The little magazines edited by the literary radicals whom O'Brien chose from most often were the most frequent publishers of fiction by

African American writers (Hutchinson 347-350). In a letter to Rudolph Fisher, Walter White attested to the visibility of black short story writers, saying, "I was talking with

[Mencken] a few days ago and he told me that he had more material...by and about Negroes and other non-Nordics than by Nordics" (Lewis 139). Moreover, Dodd Mead, Alfred A.

Knopf, and Boni & Liveright, publishers with whom O'Brien associated regularly, were the predominant book publishers

118 of African American authors, most of whom gained a critical reputation through magazine publications.

Clearly, O'Brien did not agree that "the real tragedy of Negro life is a task still left for the Negro writers to perform." Indeed, it is striking that, of the 386 writers whose 632 stories O'Brien reprinted between 1915 and 1941, he chose only five writers and seven stories to represent the African American voice— Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes,

Arthur Huff Fauset, Rudolph Fisher, and Richard Wright.

Conspicuously absent from O'Brien's selections are stories written by women who were popularly read during the two decades of the Harlem Renaissance. For example, he never selected a Hurston story among his "best" despite the fact that "Gilded Six-Bits" appeared in the second issue of Storv magazine, a publication from which O'Brien selected 90% of its stories for distinction in his series. Nor did he acknowledge Anita Scott Coleman, whose story "Three Dogs and a Rabbit" won a Crisis third prize in 1925 and whose "The

Dark Horse" won second prize in the 1926 Opportunity magazine award also published in Half-Centurv. and Southwest

Review. Like many of the stories by black women writers of the twenties and thirties, these stories focus on the identity and agency of their female characters, a subject in which O'Brien never expressed interest. Although many of these stories are concerned with the conflicts that O'Brien promoted, they explore these conflicts within black

119 communities and among black women and men; they are not concerned with interracial conflict, nor with an examination of the dominant culture. For O'Brien, these stories did not contain the "substance" of what he considered literary fiction; their exclusion from O'Brien's series marked the beginning of a long critical oversight for black women short story writers of the twenties and thirties, many who have been lost or who are just now being reintroduced.^

Although the stories by African American writers that

O'Brien selected vary in significant ways, they share many rhetorical strategies with most of O'Brien's selections written by Anglo-American writers. First, five of the seven foreground racial antagonism, dramatizing situations that emphasize African American characters as the objects of racism rather than creating "articulating subjects" who, though aware of ingrained American racisms, lead individuated lives. Second, all link freedom with manhood and oppression with the feminine in a manner that is always implicitly derogatory toward women. Third, as realist expressions of "innocent awareness," they claim an authority that is not bound to political accuracy, but valorizes a form of the short story that remains outside of social responsibility. Finally, these elements combine so that, intentionally or not, these stories emphasize otherness— of both gender and race— and, through this othering, work to

120 reaffirm, even as they critique, white male hegemonic domination.

The following two sections overview O'Brien's selections that focus on racial conflict and issues of social injustice. The first section analyzes representative stories by white writers. This section examines ways in which literary "whiteness" and literary "blackness" are constructed in stories and demonstrates how white representations of black characters perpetuate cultural and intellectual domination that reinscribe the myth of Anglo-

Saxon male superiority. This discussion is intended to give an understanding of how these images were received by a literary audience and the social forces that mask the racist messages that are hidden in a "universalist" interpretation.

The second section examines the seven O'Brien selections that were written by African American writers. O'Brien's choice to select only those stories written by African

American men whose characterizations and use of language in many ways reinscribe the racist and sexist implications inherent in his nationalistic view suggests that what he considered universal was in fact what was politically and socially acceptable to an elite audience.

II. American Africanism in the "Best" Short Storv

Like the Anglo-American writers O'Brien chose to represent the immigrant experience in the United States,

121 stories by white writers comprised the vast majority of those written about the American "Negro" experience. These

stories provide examples of the kinds of racial representations acceptable to O'Brien as part of the

American experience and as legitimate literary subject matter. While most of the stories with a thematic emphasis on race center around the oppression of black Americans in a white society, they generally speak more to the moral fabric of that white society than to the situations of the individual black characters. In Playing in the Dark. Toni

Morrison demonstrates the various means by which white writers incorporate African American characters to imbue their white characters with cultural meaning. Morrison proposes four topics for exploring Africanism in American literature, arguing that through a close look at literary

"blackness," we can learn crucial information about the nature and cause of literary "whiteness"; 1) the presentation of the Africanist character as "surrogate and enabler"; 2) use of the Africanist idiom to establish difference and to signal modernity; 3) use of Africanist characters to "limn out and enforce the invention and implications of whiteness"; and 4) the appropriation of the

Africanist narrative as "a means of meditation on one's own humanity" (51-53). These topics help to theorize difference and to reveal the high stakes of representation for the white literary world: "American Africanism makes it possible

122 to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and

engage, to act out...it provides a way of contemplating

chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for

testing the problems and blessings of freedom” (Morrison 7).

As a framework for analysis, Morrison's categories help to

dramatize the ways in which O'Brien's selections by nonblack

writers reinforce his cultural perspective.

One of O'Brien's most often reprinted writers was Irvin

S. Cobb, whom George Hutchinson calls the "champion of

Dixie," and whose popular Saturday Evening Post "darky"

stories "were the antithesis of New Negro fiction" (347) .

All five of the Cobb stories that O'Brien considered the

"best" include racial epithets and Africanist characters in

subservient roles that reinforce a white character's social

status, superior wit, or cultural power.® Of these five

stories, however, "The Chocolate Hyena" (Best 1923)

illuminates the nature of Cobb's racism most clearly, and dramatizes that what is at stake for Cobb himself in maintaining "realistic" misrepresentations of African

American characters is maintaining the privileged position

of white authorship.

Set in an African American community of minstrel performers in Harlem, "The Chocolate Hyena" is itself an extended minstrel show, its characters unreflective embodiments of minstrel stereotypes, the story an arrangement of slapstick and minstrel jokes. The narrative

123 voice, ironie in that it treats seriously what is meant to

be comic, focuses on the playwright, Roscoe Conk Fugate; a

parody of black authorship, Fugate is a plagiarist who has

forty-eight hours to sell his script before the "dignified

professional author, with an office and a slogan and a pair

of shell-rimmed glasses" returns to "an ex-flat janitor, out

of a job" (153). A parody of the minstrel show, the story

features the straight man, J. Earl Purdue, and the low

comedian. Happy Rastus Mingle, who buy Fugate's script on

the contingency that Chocolate Hyena, "the easies' laffer

they is anywheres" accompanies them on stage and laughs his

"contagious," "gurgling," "whooping" laughter at each

performance. Straight from Virginia and predisposed against

work that puts "any strain on yore pusspiration pores,"

Chocolate Hyena accepts the offer, and the show is a long­

standing hit on the vaudeville circuit, making all but the

bitter Fugate rich men.

"The Chocolate Hyena" presents itself as light-hearted

humor, a fictive form of the minstrel show, a parody of a

parody. Like the minstrel show, however, the story's humor

relies on racist assumptions that degrade the "Other" for

the sake of definitive comparisons. In a nod toward the validity of his characters, Purdue explains to Mingle that a white audience will find their humor as funny as a black one; "'An w'en it comes to laffin', w'ite folks ain't no diff'ent from cullid ef you gives 'em the right kind of a

124 excuse” (166). The reverse of this sentiment is what is

crucial to Cobb's story; that is, if he can prove that a

black reader would find his own story as humorous as a white

one, the realistic depiction of his characters (regardless

of license for humor) and his claims about black authorship, will be validated. Reprinted in the same edition as

Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon," "The Chocolate Hyena" not only offers a racist story in the guise of comedy, but it also challenges the talents and genius of the first African

American fiction writer to receive national acclaim in ten years.

The Africanist character in Lowry Wimberly's "White

Man's Town" (Best 1931) is rendered in terms of the Other, as a cultural symbol of the victims of racial hatred. Told from the jail cell where the narrator is waiting trial for an unspecified crime, his narrative pieces together the ethnicity of his best friend and brother-in-law, Lum Zither, whose African descent is clarified for the townsfolk (and, presumably, the reader) through obvious stereotypes; Lum's laziness, his open-hearted nature, and his fondness for

"singing nigger tunes." When the narrator discovers the truth about Lum, he kills his pregnant sister to protect her from the disgrace of giving birth to Lum's child, at which point the purpose for the trial— and the narrative— is clarified.

"White Man's Town" is presented as the story of the

125 narrator's coming to terms with the result of his racial

hatred, but it is really the story of Lum Zither, a man who

was adopted into a local family as a kid and who, when a

white mob chased a black carnival act out of town, felt

himself chased as well, and followed the two men to the

river where the three of them were shot and left for dead.

Lum's rejection, his fear and disappointment, are

subordinated to the narrator's confusion, making this story

a discourse on ethics, a story of white guilt and hypocrisy.

As the black character's suffering is appropriated by the

white character, the relevance of the Lum's pain diminishes.

The manipulation of Lum's narrative, as Morrison

suggests about much white fiction, is a means of meditation

on the narrator's humanity and on the humanity of the white

reader. In "The People vs. Abe La than, Colored" (Best

1940), Erskine Caldwell employs a similar narrative

strategy. The story of the African American Uncle Abe

Lathan who is sent to the chain gang for vacating too slowly

from the land he had sharecropped for forty years, "The

People" personalizes white domination through the portrayal

of humble characters hopeless against the inhumanity of

institutionalized Southern racism. The story's

sentimentalism culminates in the final image of Uncle Abe,

alone in his cell, crying, an image that evokes an emotional response meant to address white guilt, not to cast deeper

insight into Abe's hopeless situation.

126 Of all of O'Brien's selections, Sarah Haardt's "Little

White Girl" (Best 1935) conveys the "liberal" Eurocentric expression of innocence and white guilt most intentionally.

Dramatizing the moment when two southern friends, one white and one black, recognize that their friendship is doomed to a structure of difference beyond their control, "Little

White Girl" purposefully concentrates on the shame of the white character, who bitterly accepts her position of privilege and power over her best friend. The story evokes sympathy for both girls that is problematic given the disparity of opportunities that they will face in their prospective roles. Moreover, Pinky as representative of freedom and unrestrained innocence stereotypes the black child of the Jim Crow South, and her willingness to serve

Susie as a means for the two to stay together implies a degree of complicity in this subservience. This reconciliation to subservience is meant to signal tragedy for Pinky as well as for Susie. But "Little White Girl" is ultimately, as the title suggests, about Susie, about the loss of her innocence, and her awareness of that loss. In her role as willing black servant. Pinky herself remains unaware of the ramifications of her final gesture; as

"enabler," her narrative purpose is to assist the white

child in her initiation into young womanhood and the complexities of privilege that accompany that position.

127 As troubling as is Pinky's representation in "Little

White Girl," the placement of Emma Godchaux's "Wild Nigger"

(Best 1935) immediately before it offers a thoroughly

demoralizing portrait of a Southern African American

community. The story of Zula, "the little humpback nigger

girl" with lucky blue gums, is about a young woman who

hypnotizes a man with her hoodoo powers, then kills him with

a straight-edge razor when her magic wears off and he turns

his attention to another woman. Like Van Vechten's Niaaer

Heaven (1926), "Wild Nigger" exploits the use of primitivism

so that it exoticizes its characters, objectifying them as

the Other in an obvious appeal to a modernized, middle class

white reader. Zula's voracious appetite for sex, her

violent temper, and her "wild" magic are accented by an

idiom that is deliberately degrading. Told from Zula's

perspective, her interior monologues reveal unintentional

contempt for her neighbors that inadvertently expresses the

author's own racist sentiments. Zula's sexuality, the

"exotic" element of hoodoo, and the emphasis on the physical— particularly the female body— is conveyed through

Zula's idiom, a mixture of Standard English and a vernacular

fabricated to establish difference as it reaffirms racist

stereotypes.

Prized as an acceptable portrayal of African American culture, O'Brien's selection of Godchaux's story sanctioned racist representations as realistic and advocated for the

128 short story exploitative images of difference that place

truth in fashionable stereotypes and dramatize the

perspectival limitations of "realism." Pernet Patterson's

"Conjur" (Best 1929) relies on similar uses of the "exotic"

to appeal to his audience. The story of Aunt Runa, head

servant at Kennon Hills plantation, and the magic, or

"conjur" she successfully uses to drive the new butler,

Charlie, an "Eddicated nigger," crazy. A story that centers

around the suspense of Aunt Runa's destructive powers,

"Conjur" relies on a similarly pejorative essentialism to

build character and to progress the plot. To emphasize

Runa's unusual abilities, the narrator informs us of

Charlie's own powers of persuasion: "Even before going to

'college' he had been able to sway uneducated negroes darker

than himself. The blacker they were, the easier to handle— particularly women" (223) . Runa is motivated by strictly

selfish ends, and the story attempts to reveal nothing more

about human "truth" than a perceived threat of "black" magic to the established order: the good, fair-skinned Charlie ends up in the " 'sylum, " or succumbs to the wicked, dark

Runa.

Some of O'Brien's selections complicated the issues of race in more successful ways. Despite the sensational title, Richard Paulett Creyke's "Niggers Are Such Liars"

(Story 1938) is the portrayal of two white boys who learn the workings of the justice system as their fathers persuade

129 them, against their instincts, that they are not at fault

for the death of the black cook at the summer camp.

William Faulkner's ’’That Evening Sun Go Down" (1931) ,

"Smoke" (1932), and "Gold is Not Always" (1941) attempt to

develop personal histories and family influences for the

African American characters that move the plot and deepen

the emotional effect behind his representations of white,

male-defined culture built on the control of black women and

men.

Likewise, Katherine Anne Porter's "The Old Order"

(1937) portrays two elderly women, white Grandmother and

black Nanny, both figures of independent mind and authority.

The feminist themes inherent in Porter's nostalgic critique

of the white southern tradition draw parallels between the

two women: their complementary memories and their parallel

child-bearing experiences. Although the nostalgic tone of

"The Old Order" relies on both women's satisfaction with

their roles, a premise that deeply complicates the racial messages of Porter's story, it also assumes the white and

black women's mutual dependence, a theme that is unique to

O'Brien's canon of stories. Indeed, dramatizing the women's mutual dependence. Porter provides one of the boldest images

of the time of reversed social roles between white and black women of the antebellum South: Grandmother as a young mother nursing Nanny's black infant.

Even O'Brien's selections that specifically present a

130 critical view of oppression promote literary myths about whiteness and blackness that reflect the cultural values surrounding these myths. In "Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-American Critical Practice," W. Lawrence Hogue addresses the need for a critical approach to African

American literature and other minority texts that considers how established literary institutions affect the production of these literatures. "Missing is a discussion of the various literary and ideological forces and institutions that promote those Afro-American texts that reproduce the literary values, conventions, and stereotypes of the dominant literary establishment and exclude and subordinate others" (Mitchell 338).

The last section of this chapter focuses on the seven stories by African American writers that O'Brien selected for his series. All of the seven stories he reprinted present unique, revolutionary voices of the American literary tradition; however, they also use mainstream conventions and stereotypes promoted by O'Brien's aesthetic as they define the African American historical experience.

Close analysis of these stories demonstrates how Best Short

Stories. as one of the major literary and ideological forces, promoted African-American texts that reproduced mainstream American literary myths and values. Selected by

O'Brien as representative of his standards, they reproduce the values of the dominant literary establishment and reveal

131 how their inclusion in his series necessitates the exclusion

and subordination of other stories by contemporary African

American writers.

III. Reading Representations of the Folk: Toomer. Fauset. Fisher. Hughes and Wright

Throughout the entire decade of the twenties, O'Brien published only three stories that were associated with the

Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon"

(Prairie 1923), Rudolph Fisher's "City of Refuge" (Atlantic

Monthly 1925), and Arthur Huff Fauset's "Symphonesque"

(Opportunity 1926). In the following decade, he reprinted three stories by African American writers as well: Fisher's

"Miss Cynthie" (Atlantic Monthly 1934), Langston Hughes'

"Cora Unashamed" (American Mercury 1934), and Richard

Wright's "Bright and Morning Star" (New Masses 1939).

Although O'Brien was known to choose up to thirteen stories by the same writer, his enthusiasm for the work of Fauset,

Toomer, Fisher, and Hughes was less emphatic. Between 1925 and 1934, Fisher published twelye stories, all but one printed in magazines from which O'Brien regularly drew; yet

O'Brien chose only "Miss Cynthie" and "Cora Unashamed" for inclusion in his series. "Cora Unashamed" was the only one of thirty-one stories that Hughes published during O'Brien's editorship to be considered "best." Of the fiye writers

O'Brien chose to represent the African American literary voice, only Richard Wright impressed O'Brien enough that, in

132 1939, his "Bright and Morning Star" earned the dedication of that year's volume, which he shared with the young white

Kentucky writer Jessie Stuart.’ "Bright and Morning Star" was also included in O'Brien's 50 Best American Short

Stories (1939), noted by Stephen Vincent Benet, who gave

O'Brien three stars for ending the volume with this story,

"where Richard Wright displays gifts that ought to take him a long, long way."’° O'Brien also included Wright's "Aimes' a Man" in his last volume of Best Short Stories in 1941, indicating a continued interest in Wright's naturalist, protest prose.

Toomer, Fisher, Fauset, Hughes, and Wright provided strong voices among the new writers of the twenties and thirties. Toomer, Fisher, Fauset, and Hughes were part of the talented tenth of Locke and DuBois who promoted their literary careers. At one time, Hughes and Wright were both benefactors of Charlotte Mason's financial largess, and

Fauset was enthusiastically encouraged by Columbia

University anthropologist Franz Boas.’’ A young talent of the Harlem Renaissance, Arthur Huff Fauset is better remembered as an anthropologist than as a writer, though his literary career enjoyed an ostentatious beginning as his essay "American Folk Literature" was included in Locke's The

New Negro (1925), his essay "Intelligentsia" appeared in

Firel!. and "Symphonesque" won the April 1926 Qpportunitv

133 prize for short fiction before O'Brien chose it for the Best

Short Stories of 1926.

Among the most visible of the African American literary modernists, Toomer, Fisher, and Hughes wrote in styles that ranged from experimental to conventional, their settings from rural South to urban North, their characters representing a variety of regions and influences, from southern, African-American folk tradition to the educated, urbanized, middle class. Despite this variety, O'Brien's selections emphasize Southern rural values and rural or working-class characters. Even the two stories that take place in Harlem feature central characters whose adjustment to the city dramatizes the conflicts and continuum between the old and the new, and the traditional and the modern.

Less about celebration and opportunities than about disappointment and restrictions, these stories (with the exception in many ways of "City of Refuge") represent a limited perspective of African American experiences.

In 1923, the year that he "discovered" Hemingway and declared Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus the voice of

African-American folk culture, O'Brien selected among the

"best" Jean Toomer's "Blood-Burning Moon," first published as an unsolicited manuscript in the March-April 1923 issue of Prairie (later Prairie Schooner.) Although O'Brien demonstrated that a fully-developed African American cultural history was outside his conception of the "kindly,

134 humorous, imaginative, and sententious" black Southern folk

culture, the stories in Cane differ dramatically from

Harris' nostalgic antebellum folktales. Toomer's connection

with writers and editors of the white left— specifically,

writers of The Seven Arts. The Nation. New Republic. The

Liberator. and The Modern Review— made him a visible figure

among the American literary professionals. Toomer's

association with Waldo Frank is well-documented, as is his

disappointment over Frank's clarification of Toomer's racial

heritage in the introduction to Cane. Letters of Toomer's

include one from O'Brien's friend and protege, Manuel

Komroff, asking for consistency of punctuation in Cane

before publication with Boni and Liveright.’^

Like "Blood-Burning Moon," all of the stories in the

first section of Cane, as well as "Seventh Street" from Part

II and sections from Kabnis. were published in journals that

O'Brien noted in his yearbook. In other words, Cane in its

entirety was considered for inclusion in the Best Short

Stories of 1923. From Part I of Cane. Toomer's "Carma" and

"Fern" were reprinted in Alain Locke's The New Nearo as

literature representative of the "folk-expression and self- determination" that defined the New Negro. O'Brien

recognized "Fern" with two stars in the Roll of Honor, along with "Esther" and "Kabnis," but he chose "Blood-Burning

Moon" for the 1923 volume of Best Short Stories.

All of the stories in Part I of Cane explore themes

135 common to Midwest stories of Sherwood Anderson and Waldo

Frank, two of Toomer's professed influences and two writers most revered by O'Brien. Thematically and stylistically,

Toomer's stories share with Frank and Anderson preoccupation with the spiritual isolation and emotional and sexual repression of the buried life. Unlike the white, Midwestern townspeople that populate the stories of Anderson and Frank, however, Toomer's focal characters are African American

Georgian sharecroppers, domestic workers, and prostitutes who, according to most critics of the day, represented a new and uniquely authentic portrayal of the Southern rural

African American experience. The first book-length publication by and about black Americans since James Weldon

Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ten years earlier. Cane was embraced by most critics as an original and exciting work of art. Sherwood Anderson praised

Toomer's treatment of his subject, writing, "Your work is of special significance to me because it is the first Negro work I have seen that strikes me as really Negro" (42-43) .

William Stanley Braithwaite called Toomer "the very first artist of the race" for his ability to portray his characters objectively, "without the surrender or the compromise of the author's vision.

The first six stories of cane are titled after the women on whose lives they focus. Unlike the four stories of

Part II, whose characters are modernized, educated, and

136 middle class, the stories in Part I take place in the South and center around the lives of the most rural and most impoverished. All focus on women classified as "primitive"; physically strong, sexually driven, and uncorrupted by the modernized world. Described in naturalistic terms, each woman is defined according to her relationship with the land; Louisa, for example, is identified by her skin, "the color of oak leaves on young trees in fall" (30). Writers like Claude McKay glorified what he considered the primitive sexuality of the African race and, as Robert Bone points out, Toomer was "perhaps the most authentic exponent of

Renaissance primitivism" (72) .

Like the other women characters in Part I of Cane.

Louisa of "Blood-Burning Moon" is defined by her sexuality; motivated physically, she is compelled by youth and sexual desire. Toomer's representation of Louisa's sexuality comes at the expense of her intelligence and moral integrity, however. Not only is she unable to decide between black Tom

Burwell and white Bob Stone, but she is unable to distinguish their differences: "Separately, there was no unusual significance to either one. But for some reason, they jumbled when her eyes gazed vacantly at the rising moon" (30) . As the primitive female other of both Burwell and Stone, Louisa's role is reduced to a sexual metaphor.

Her primitivism is not a trope to demonstrate the artificial imposition of the color line so much as it is a prototype of

137 African American modernism, a symbol of African heritage and its lingering manifestation in Southern rural black culture.

The only story not titled with a woman's name, "Blood-

Buming Moon” is in fact about men. Though the story begins from Louisa's perspective, the point of view shifts in Part

Two to Tom Burwell, foreshadowing violence and diminishing

Louisa's dilemma so that the story of a domestic servant who is loved by the white son of her employer and by the black field hand is soon trivialized into a catalyst for the unfolding plot. As the tension increases, beautiful Louisa plays out the role of the tragic mulatto in its most real sense, as the living reminder of white male oppression, or in thematic terms of "Blood-Burning Moon," as symbol for the ultimate dominance of white men over black men.

The last of seven stories in Part I, "Blood-Burning

Moon" differs from the first six in that, unlike these nostalgic and celebratory stories of the fading of the

Southern folk ancestry, "Blood" foregrounds difference and racial antagonism. More than the other stories in Cane.

"Blood-Burning Moon" lays greatest emphasis on Otherness.

Indeed, the white and black characters who present the central conflict are defined against the Other. And like

O'Brien's selections by white writers that foreground issues of race, "Blood" insists on defeat. Both men suffer violent deaths. Stone's as a result of physical aggression, Bob's as the inevitability of the lynch mob. As Henry Louis Gates

138 has pointed out, the bifurcated existence in the world of

Cane demonstrates if not acceptance of the dominant, at least the "reality” of it and the desire to assimilate:

Toomer's use of the privileged oral voice... is not without its ironies, since Toomer employs the black oral voice in his text both as a counterpoint to that standard English voice of his succession of narrators but also as evidence of the modernist claim that there had existed no privileged, romantic movement of unified consciousness, especially or not even in the cane fields of a rural Georgia echoing its own swan song. fSianifvina Monkev 178)

In "Blood-Burning Moon," opposition of standard English and

Southern black vernacular emphasize Otherness, as well as binaries of black and white, male and female, South and

North, life and death.

Like the Africanist characters in O'Brien's selections by white writers, Tom Burwell exemplifies a type, the innocent, well-meaning and shy field hand. Burwell's journey to manhood is directly linked to his sexuality.

When his love for Louisa is challenged, as when his manhood is jeopardized, he rises to violence; when Manning alludes to Bob Stone's attraction for Louisa, he "whipped out a long knife and would have cut them to shreds if they hadn't ducked into the woods" (31), an act he completes when confronted by Stone's demand for Louisa's love. Indeed,

"Blood-Burning Moon" is about domination and rebellion, about the inextricability of sexual desire and racial hatred and the price that both extol. With its emphasis on two men torn by rage, "Blood-Burning Moon" is less about folk

139 culture than it is about the sexual dimension of the racial tension between white men and black men, particularly as it was manifested in the lynching and castration of the Jim

Crow era. The plot of "Blood-Burning Moon" plays out the paradigm of racial relations and male heterosexuality, a commonality of sexuality that binds the two men in mutual opposition to the woman. As the attraction of a white man and a black man to the same woman inevitably leads to violence— if not death— the story's emphasis on mutual desire is blurred while it maintains distinct lines between race, between the self and the Other.

The thematic concerns of "Blood-Burning Moon" reflect

O'Brien's preference for themes of alienation and masculinity, particularly male heterosexuality as defined by the Other. A story about manhood, its naturalism universalizes this male experience of sexual rivalry and an atavistic need to defend one's sexual expression. Bob's blind rushing toward Louisa, for example, brings on the yelping of a hound. "Answering yelps came from all over the countryside. Chickens cackled. Roosters crowed, heralding the bloodshot eyes of southern awakening" (35). Ending in a doomed showdown between Stone and Burwell, Stone commands

"Big Boy" Burwell to "Fight like a man, Tom Burwell, an I'll lick y." As a result of his aggression. Stone is gruesomely killed. For slashing Stone's throat, Burwell is burned at the stake by a mob of angry townsmen, their rage also

140 described in naturalistic terms: "White men like ants upon a

forage rushed about...they poured down on him. They

swarmed" (35-36).

In "Some Implications of Womanist Theory," Sherley Anne

Williams points out that unlike most classic and popular

literature written by and about white American males, physical aggression was not valued in black male literature before 1940. "The degree to which, and the basis on which, the hero avoids physical aggression was one means of establishing the hero's noble stature and contribution to the hero's intellectual equality with— not dominance over— the collective white man" (Reading Black. Reading Feminist

71). Black male violence seen in novels by African American writers before that time, according to Williams, was mostly self-defensive, not aggressive, the type of tragic violence that occurs at the end of "Blood-Burning Moon." Williams asserts that Native Son marked a shift in the aims of the black male's heroic quest from largely introspective, family- and community-oriented, to an increasingly externalized self-portraiture, one that evolved into the late 1970s by portraying black women in "often no more than demeaning stereotypes" (73). Williams' point, that the twentieth-century black hero has been portrayed in opposition to accurate representations of black women, suggests that to read these stories might be to enhance our understanding of how the desire for patriarchal authority

141 ultimately created a bond between black and white men that perpetuated the oppression of black women.

Like Toomer's "Blood-Buming Moon,” Arthur Fauset's

"Symphonesque” is about male heterosexuality and exemplifies O'Brien's belief in the male heterosexual experience as representative of the "universal.”

"Symphonesque" may be the only short story that Fauset published during his lifetime. It is certainly the first, and no record of any other literary publications by him exists. Fauset wrote two anthropological books. Soiourner

Truth: God's Faithful Pilgrim (1938) and Black Gods of the

Metropolis: Nearo Religious Cults of the Urban North (1944).

As Hurston biographer, Robert Hemenway, has pointed out,

Fauset's "Intelligentsia" in Fire!! speaks to the literary theory behind that publication and the younger writers of

The New Nearo such as Hurston, Hughes, and McKay, who advocated literature that represented the folk, art that did not, as Locke and Du Bois preferred, propagate racial uplift, but instead expressed an aesthetic supposedly free from political motivation. In his essay, Fauset wrote: "the contribution of Intelligentsia to society is as negligible as gin at a Methodist picnic," a sentiment that sheds light on the aesthetic expressed in "Symphonesque."

Among the first stories connected with the cult of the

"primitive," "Symphonesque" predates "Conjur" and "Wild

Nigger" and, read in relation to these later stories,

142 provides a good example of the dangers that many in the

Harlem Renaissance literary world feared as a result of the

representational risks inherent in the style. The story of

seventeen-year-old Cudjo who discovers the greater power of

sexual over spiritual desire, "Symphonesque" is told in

naturalist terms that collapse the sexual and the spiritual.

For example, struggling to understand new sexual feelings.

Cudjo exclaims, "Somepin mattah wid mah soul right now an'

ah knows it...wonder what's eatin' me?" (99).

Set in Gum Ridge, Texas, "Symphonesque" is the story of

ridges. Cudjo likes to stand on the edge of the hills to

look down at the villages below "and pretend he was God."

His African name signals a meeting of two cultures.

Describing himself as "diff'ant" from the community of

Ebenezer Baptist Church, the protagonist teeters on the edge

of sanity, religious transcendence, and, in the final scene,

sexual violence. More a critique of Christianity than an

explicit protest against white domination, Fauset

establishes in the story's first section Evangelical

religion as a personal balm; "Mek yo' feel like yo'

treadin'on soft cushions in Gawd's he'b'n. But it ain't

gittin' nobody nuffin', ain't gittin' me a damn thing" (99).

As Cudjo sees it, religion is a dangerous opiate for society

as well; "Where was their God when White Man came along at

the end of the harvest season and told the niggers they hadn't made enough cotton to pay for their grub to say

143 nothing of their shelter, their clothing, their very

liberty!" (100).

The second section of "Symphonesque" dramatizes a baptism described as a cross between an orchestral composition and a primitive ritual. As the exhorter excites the congregation by chanting spirituals, the emotional fervor is depicted in African images: "Their voices rent the sizzling air like screaming sirens in the black of a starless night" (104). Blended with musical terminology, the fervor rises until "the air rang with melody," and "the singing became hysterical," rising to "Crescendo, crescendo crescendo" (104). To mark the beginning of the actual baptisms, the preacher "emits a shrill laugh whose fiendish notes resound on the stifling atmosphere like the midnight cry of a panicky jungle cat" (106).

Despite his cynicism, Cudjo is enraptured by the crowd's energy, what is paralleled by the imagery used in the third section to describe Cudjo's desire for his friend,

Amber Lee. Kicked out of the baptism, Cudjo approaches

Amber Lee's cabin, as the imagery of the swaying bodies of the baptism connect the Christians to the earth and Cudjo's sexuality to the same natural forces:

Warm bodies swaying like tall sugar cane in an evening breeze. The earth seemed to be swaying beneath him. Unconsciously his own body commenced to sway. A tongue of flame shot from beneath a hidden soul-cloud and set his whole body on fire. Desire possessed his body. He felt an outpouring of white hot desire. (109)

144 Were his audience to miss the connection, Fauset follows this description with a narrative that connects the music of the baptism with jungle animal imagery and to Cudjo's sexual desires:

Like a starved beast of the forest who scents game Cudjo sprang erect and poised himself for the leap to the goal of his desire. Savage music tingled in his hot blood. His feet danced away to the mad strains and carried him on and on through the dry grass in long rapid strides. (109)

Amber Lee is described in equally sexual and equally naturalistic terms:

Pity...sadness...hunger...warmth...Amber Lee...Two warm golden brown breasts soft like young birds' feathers... flaky...soft... Amber Lee...Pale straw face brown Amber Lee. Limbs full and graceful like apple boughs in spring....It is warm, it is hot, it is smoldering...She is warm...she is hot...she is smoldering. (110-111)

And as Cudjo nears Amber Lee, the predatory imagery increases:

He lay in the grass like a panting beast, his mouth watering for the distant prey. He could contain himself no longer. Like a tricky savage he quietly bestirred himself. Like a sneak thief in the night he stole his way towards her. (112)

Amber Lee does not recognize her long-time friend in his sexually heightened state, but sees instead "some fierce demon...with frightful eyes like Satan's" (112). Through his animal desire, Cudjo sees the fear in Amber Lee's eyes, and his desire is softened to tenderness. By not attacking her, Cudjo proves his love for her; indeed, in yet another play on a Christian trope, Amber Lee proclaims that Cudjo

145 has rescued her, "just like you saved me in the lakei "

Humbled before him, she "buried her head in her own bosom"

(113).

"Symphonesque" ends with Cudjo back at the hill top where he sat "on a ledge" dropping symbolic stones onto the village below. Unlike the Christians from Ebenezer Baptist church, Cudjo is free of the blinding powers of religion, aware of his sexuality, his manhood likened to a jungle predator, his innocence, as represented in his unconsummated respect for Amber Lee, intact.

Fauset's adherence to the primitive essentialism of the

New Negro asserted a black or "neo-African" essentialism in opposition to what had been identified as European or

Western essentialism and understood as "universal.

O'Brien's interest in representing the repressed sexuality of the folk links Fauset's aesthetic concerns with

O'Brien's. Ironically, Fauset's oppositional essentialism reaffirmed the racial stereotypes of the Africanist characters in most of O'Brien's stories while it explored what O'Brien would consider a "universal" sexual passion and repression. In other words, O'Brien's ideal audience could identify with Cudjo's journey while maintaining preconceived notions of difference. According to bell hooks, this type of essentialism perpetuates a privileged group's false sense of identification with people of difference and otherness.

An example from hooks is the one-time white churchgoer moved

146 to tears by the passion of a gospel choir. According to hooks, this identification "takes the form of constructing

African-American culture as though it exists solely to suggest new aesthetic and political directions white folks might move in" (hooks 21) . One need only compare Fauset's

"Symphonesque" to Whitehead's "American Nocturne" to understand the disparity between representations of white and black characters acceptable to O'Brien. "American

Nocturne" depends on a plot line that is similar to that of

"Symphonesque" in that two seventeen-year-olds are drawn passionately together, but out of respect and fear, they maintain their innocence.

Like "Symphonesque," Rudolph Fisher's "City of Refuge" is told from a black character's perspective and set within an African American community. Unlike Fauset's Ruffinton, however, the Harlem of Fisher's story does not exist as a self-governing community, but emphasizes the pernicious presence of white society. Like "Blood-Burning Moon," "City of Refuge" is the story of a black man defined by his race.

Like Tom Burwell, he has killed a white man and this action has determined his destiny. Unlike Burwell, Gillis is able to escape immediate repercussions, but as the story's ironic title implies, even Harlem cannot provide a safe haven from the injustices of white institutionalized power structures.

The story of the arrival in Harlem of King Solomon

Gillis of Tennessee, "City of Refuge" provides an inside

147 perspective on the African American community in Harlem, a view of the cultural diversity, the employment opportunities, and its famed nightclub scene, but also the community's destructive side, its crime and its violence.

Like "Blood Burning Moon," "City of Refuge" is about male domination and the high stakes between white and black men for the freedom to express their sexual domination over women. Like Tom Burwell, freedom and manhood for King

Solomon Gillis are mutually contingent, collapsed into the first two images he sees as he emerges onto Lenox Avenue: a black traffic cop, who comes to represent his hopes for economic and social freedom, and a beautiful woman, metonymically rendered as green stockings which symbolize his sexual desires. In the final cabaret scene, Gillis tells his hometown neighbor, Uggam, "'Ain' but two things in dis world. Mouse, I really wants. One is to be a policeman.

Been wantin' dat ev'y sence I seen dat cullud traffic cop dat day. Other is to get myse'f a gal lak dat one over yonderl" (14) . Ironically, both the woman and the cop come together at the story's end to crush Gillis's desires for social, economic, and personal fulfillment.

First printed in the February 1925 Atlantic Monthly.

"City of Refuge" was included in Alain Locke's November issue of The New Nearo (1925) . Like his novels, Fisher's short stories deal with Harlem's seamy side, largely

148 concerned with characters at or below the servant class, a

literary focus that Zora Neale Hurston bemoaned twenty-five

years later in "What Whites Won't Publish." Fisher's

fiction tells the stories of characters who were among the

millions to migrate from the south to the north, or from the

West Indies to the U.S., specifically to Harlem. Like all

of Fisher's fiction, "City of Refuge" is told from a

conventional third-person narrator who focuses on the

diversity of cultural consciousness of black Harlem.

King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of "City of

Refuge," is a type: the "quaint," flat-footed southerner

whose gullibility functions as signifier of traditional

values and, like Twain's framed narratives, as voice of

moral disintegration and the corruption of modern

capitalism. Fisher's trademark use of diverse forms of

vernacular English highlights the contrast in voices between

King Solomon and Mouse Uggams. Their first encounter, for

example, dramatizes the significance of functioning within

this diversity as it portrays innocent and simple Solomon manipulated by the polyphonic Uggams:

"See that second corner? Turn to the left when you get there. Number forty-five's about halfway the block." "Thank y', suh." "You from— Massachusetts?" "No, suh, Nawth Ca'lina." "Is 'at so? You look like a Northerner. Be with us long?" "Till I die," grinned the flattered King Solomon." (107)

George Hutchinson claims that "City of Refuge"

149 expresses new forms of impressionistic description and methods of rendering varied forms of black "dialect," folded within what could be called a blues plot. According to

Hutchinson, "City" is "a story saturated in paradigmatic motifs of the African American folk tradition, translated to m o d e m New York. It looks forward to further development of black urban fiction and explorations of the formal possibilities offered by jazz and blues motifs."

Furthermore, Hutchinson praises Fisher's story for its attention to the diversity of Harlem racial consciousness and idiom, its indictment of white supremacy that "emerges from the characters' everyday ruminations and activities; it does not come across as propaganda" (403-404).

Hutchinson is not the only critic whose praise for

"City of Refuge" incorporates criteria on which O'Brien insisted. Hutchinson's distrust of "propaganda" is echoed in Henry Clarke's evaluation of "City of Refuge": "The message of his comic realism was more profound because he was skillful enough to weave it into the design of his stories without destroying any of their entertainment value"

(Transition 362). It is probable that O'Brien chose "City of Refuge" not for its use of paradigmatic motifs of African

American folk tradition but for its rhetorical finesse, its political message embedded so deeply into the story line that it is subordinate to the story's ability to entertain, the politics made ambiguous through this subordination.

150 As an indictment of white supremacy, "City of Refuge,"

like "Blood-Burning Moon," is about the emasculation of black men. Like "Blood-Burning Moon," it exposes the sexual tension of interracial relationships and the sexual dimension of racial hatred. The sight of Green Stockings moving to kiss a white man stirs Gillis to fight the white cop, but in the story's most ironic twist, a black policeman arrests Gillis: Gillis is stunned, relaxes, and finally stands "erect" as an "exultant" grin spreads over his face.

Although this ending has been interpreted as a moment of empowerment for Gillis, it can also be read on a literal level as one of defeat: defeat of the traditional moral integrity of the South by the impersonal capitalism of the modernized North. Not only is the city of refuge not what it claims to be, it is a place of betrayal of tradition,

Uggam against Gillis, and the ironic inversion of justice, where a black man arrests a black man for being swindled by a third black man and for showing offense at a black woman's affections toward a white man. Power— economic, sexual, and political— is portrayed in the context of an unfair white system of justice, but it is a struggle between three black men, the parting image of Gillis one of a buffoon.

Hutchinson praises "City of Refuge" for Fisher's portrayal of the diversity of Harlem racial consciousness and idiom. For example, the Italian grocer represents the number of southern European immigrants to settle in New York

151 and to take up business in Harlem. His Jamaican assistant represents one of the two million to immigrate from the West

Indies to New York during the economically prosperous years of the 1920s. However, unlike immigrant characters in other

Fisher stories who are fully developed and rendered with sensitivity, "the Jamaican" in "City of Refuge" provides comic relief, a slapstick complement to the buffoonery of

Gillis' southern innocence. He is treated as Other, objectified as a foreigner, literally thrown into the street where he stands before the store, "jabbering shrill threats and unintelligible curses" at Gillis, his antagonist. "City of Refuge" is, in fact, less concerned with issues of diversity than other Fisher stories. In the Harlem of "City of Refuge," the colors are black and white and, as Gillis knows, black is still black and white is still white.

O'Brien's choice of "City of Refuge" over the other two

Fisher stories published in the same year reveals the limitations of O'Brien's commitment to diversity. "High

Yaller" was first published in Harper's, then in Crisis where it won the Amy Spingarn prize for fiction the following year. The story of Evelyn Brown and Jay Martin,

"High Yaller" is very much about the tensions of color, white and black, but it features a beautiful female protagonist whose decision to pass for white at the story's end is made tragic by a series of events in which the

152 cultural sacrifices she makes for her new status are revealed.

Three months after "City of Refuge" appeared in

Atlantic Monthly. "Ringtail" was published in the same magazine. Perhaps the portrait of a diversified Harlem in

"City of Refuge" appealed to O'Brien, but more than any other Fisher story, "Ringtail" foregrounds the issue of immigration, not just of African Americans from the south to the north, but particularly the large migration of West

Africans who fled to Harlem during the economically promising twenties. The story of Cyril Sebastian Best, a

British West Indian who "became fond of denying that he was

'colored,' insisting that he was 'a British subject'" (18),

"Ringtail" is the story of the love triangle between Cyril

Best, Punch Anderson— an "American Negro"— and Hilda Vogel from Bermuda. Best's love for Hilda is challenged by Punch

Anderson, who reassures the worried Vogel that he does not care about which country she comes from; "I'm more interested in where you're going," he tells her, in the phone conversation that, overheard by Best, leads to his tragic revenge. "Ringtail" involves no significant white characters and is contained within the African and African

American communities of Harlem, where the characters debate

Garveyism, and where Black Americans reveal their prejudices toward Black West Indians; in short, it provides a fuller portrait than "City of Refuge" of the diversity of cultures

153 in Harlem of the 1920s, complicating simple beliefs of black and white as the tensions between the African American and the West Indian force the action of the story exclusive of white society.

According to John McCluskey, Jr., Fisher's stories demonstrate the importance of the integration of the rural past with the urban present and future, or with tradition and modernity. McCluskey divides Fisher's stories into two categories: "The Quest" and "The New Land," grouping stories

in the first category that portray characters who are new to

Harlem. Like Solomon Gillis in "City of Refuge" and Miss

Cynthie, central character in the story of the same name, the traditional values of these characters distinguish them most from the conniving, modernized types they encounter in the city. The second category consists of stories whose characters are more familiar with Harlem. According to

McClusky, "The struggles of these characters often involve salvaging personal integrity from a corrosive cynicism," a struggle antithetical to O'Brien's notion of innocent awareness.

Among the fourteen stories that Fisher wrote between

"City of Refuge" and "Miss Cynthie," O'Brien chose two that deal with characters new to Harlem, that emphasize innocence— not a nostalgic respect for the past as much as a hope against disappointment that the past (South) symbolizes. Fisher's "Miss Cynthie" dramatizes this hope in

154 significant ways. The characters in Hiss Cynthie operate within the African American communities of Harlem and the

South, represented in the unspecified "back home" from which

Miss Cynthie arrived. Far from a story of defeat, "Miss

Cynthie" is a celebration of Southern black tradition and its ties— culturally and personally— to the economic and cultural innovations of the modem African American culture emerging in Northern urban centers like Chicago and New

York.

Published first in story, "Miss Cynthie" offers a hopeful portrayal for a new community in the urban north.

"Like City of Refuge," the Harlem of this story is set in bustling contrast to the rural South, but unlike the first encounters of Gillis, Miss cynthie is greeted by a kind Red

Cap, a young man whose resemblance to her neighbor back home establishes race in this story but not conflict: "Her little brown face relaxed; she smiled back at him." This pride and comfort associated with race extends throughout the story, as seen, for example, in this description of Harlem: "Not a change of complexion. A completely dissimilar atmosphere.

Sidewalks teeming with leisurely strollers, at once strangely dark and bright— the warm 1ife-breath of the

tireless carnival to which Harlem's heart quickens in summer" (110).

Miss Cynthie, the story's central character, is the

155 culmination of what McCluskey calls the "grandmother figure"

in Fisher's short stories. A symbol of the past, she comes

from the South to visit her nephew in Harlem, her presence

in the hustle of the scene a physical contrast between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern. A representative figure. Miss Cynthie has "the same ideas as all old folks" (111) . One of the strongest Grandmother figures among Fisher's fiction, she is an emblem of innocence, idealism, love, and, because she is convinced of the value of David's success, moral judge of the Harlem entertainment scene and the modern values it represents.

"Miss Cynthie" reflects O'Brien's belief in literature as expressing the secular human struggle, particularly as the major cultural disparities Miss Cynthie must reconcile are the religious and the secular. As Harlem in panorama is revealed through Miss Cynthie's eyes during her initial drive through the streets, her interest is solely in the churches, revealed through his belief that the churches' independence 'was a gift from on high'" (110). Later, Miss

Cynthie is led into the Lafayette Theatre like "an early

Christian martyr." She considers a talking picture "A miraculous device of the devil" and the burst of the orchestra "ungodly rumpus." To Miss Cynthie, "the theatre had always been the antithesis of the church. As the one was the refuge of righteousness, so the other was the stronghold of transgression" (113) . The crowd was a "mob of

156 sinners," the show an "exhibition of sin" (115). David introduces his grandmother by drawing a biblical analogy between himself and the first human being: "I'm sump'm like

Adam— I never had no mother" (116). And in the story's climactic scene when, in a gesture of acceptance Miss

Cynthie holds petals from the roses tossed at David from adoring fans, the religious and the secular are collapsed as

David tells the crowd that the flowers symbolize the reward for following his grandmother's advice: "Do like a church steeple— aim high and go straight" (117).

In "Miss Cynthie," freedom is equated with manhood, though the sexual component is replaced with professional success. Danny and Ruth succeed, but Miss Cynthie's very disappointment in Danny's choice of profession, though overshadowed by her final acceptance of her grandson's talent, emphasizes the fact that he succeeded professionally as an entertainer: he did not become a doctor or an established part of the middle class. Like the characters in the rest of the stories by African American writers that

O'Brien selected, Danny may be portrayed as a man, but he does not pose a threat to the established white male order.

O'Brien chose "Miss Cynthie" for the Best Short Stories of 1934, along with Langston Hughes' story "Cora Unashamed."

Both stories are about strong, outspoken female characters.

As dynamic characters, their personal transformations signify symbolic thematic events. Neither Cora nor Miss

157 Cynthie, however, represents an immediate challenge to a white male world view. Both stories feature older women who

are nonsexual, maternal, and who offer portraits of traditional ideals. Moreover, both are matriarchal types;

Miss Cynthie the Southern grandmother— feisty and certain of her beliefs; Cora, the primitive turned earth mother, the hard-working "wench" who, after challenging the hypocritical behavior of her white employer, lives out the rest of her life on the front porch, a threat to no one.’®

Hughes had been on the literary scene for eight years before he published his first collection of stories. The

Wavs of White Folks, with Knopf in 1934, the same year that

O'Brien chose "Cora Unashamed" from that collection as among the Best.’* By the time he'd published White Folks. Hughes had sold three collections of poetry, The Wearv Blues

(1926), Fine Clothes of the Jew (1927), and The Dream Keeper

(1932) ; one novel, Not Without Laughter (1930); and his landmark essay on the New Negro Movement in the twenties,

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain Top" in the Nation

(1926). Popo and Fifina. his children's story about Haiti written with Arna Bontempts, was also published in 1932. As contributing editor of The New Masses, he was well-respected by leftist editors, among them Michael Gold, Max Eastman,

Floyd Dell, Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul

Rosenfeld. Walt Carmon of New Masses spoke for the white left when he wrote that Not Without Laughter was "not

158 Marxist enough," but still "a definite contribution to both

Negro and proletarian literature in America....It is the first definite break with the vicious Harlem tradition of

Negro literature sponsored by Van Vechten and illustrated by

Corrubias" (Lewis 252). Not Without Laughter, which New

Masses embraced as "our novel," won Hughes the 1930 Harmon gold medal. His first three stories appeared in The

Messenger between April and November of 1927, "Luani of the

Jungles" in Harlem the following November. Throughout the thirties, Hughes published twenty-one short stories, mostly in periodicals that O'Brien listed in his index (Esquire,

The New Yorker. Scribners) . Of these, "Cora Unashamed" was the only story by Hughes that O'Brien reprinted.

Influenced by Hughes' reading of D. H. Lawrence, the stories in Wavs of White Folks employ a stark, minimal prose that satirizes liberal whites' views of African American culture, an approach that white (and some black) reviewers criticized as overly cynical and bitter. Like Miss cynthie,

Cora is a matriarchal figure— the most prevalent female character type in African American literature. A maid for a middle-class white family in Melton, Iowa, Cora is strong and dignified. Like Miss Cynthie, her militancy provides the central tension of the drama; Jessie's death provides the story's turning point, Cora's outcry at the funeral the climactic moment and emotional catharsis.

In many ways, "Cora Unashamed" can be read as a rural

159 version of the urban "Miss Cynthie." The grandmother figure of Miss Cynthie is equivalent to the primitive earth mother of Cora in that both appeal to the audience's sense of justice— moral and social— and both represent sympathetic portrayals of poor elderly African American women: where

Miss Cynthie represents the traditional values in conflict with the modern corruption of the city, Cora represents innocence in conflict with the corruption of white, racist materialism.

In contrast to Miss Cynthie, however, Cora's values are cut from a different moral cloth. Where Miss Cynthie is horrified by the blatant sexuality of the Lafayette Theatre show, Cora wears her sexuality on her sleeve, "humble and shameless" about her relationship with the one lover she ever knew and the child that she did not go away to give birth to. When young Jessie Studevant becomes pregnant with the Greek ice-cream maker's son, Cora breaks what she considers good news to the girl's mother:

"No trouble having a baby you want. I had one." "Shut up, Cora!" "Yes, ma'am....But I had one." "Hush, I tell you." "Yes, m'am." (193)

Self-assured and courageous, Cora accepts her economic disadvantage as she considers with pride her ability to love. A blend of the primitive of the modernist literary ideal and the mammy of American experience and myth, as a symbol of social reform Cora represents the two stereotypes

160 that black women bore as literary figures during the first few decades of the twentieth century.

The depiction of the younger Cora relies on the type of essentialized sexuality of "Symphonesque," but in "Cora

Unashamed," Cora's sexuality is also symbol of the possibility of racial harmony. Cora's one lover was a blond-haired man, "some kind of foreigner," their baby "a living bridge between two worlds." Cora's affection for her lover and their child dramatize the inclination to ignore social taboos of race and class. Furthermore, the use of natural imagery to depict Cora's sexuality universalizes her experience within a racially essentialized context. For example, as a young woman, "Cora waits" for love among

"meadows and orchards and sweet fields stretched away to the far horizon." Among the insects, the bright moon and the fresh grass, when young Joe becomes a part of this fertile environment, "Love didn't take long." When her child dies,

Cora rides in Pa's wagon between "green fields and sweet meadows that stretched away to the far horizon," where her child and her sexual past are buried.

Cora and Mrs. Studevant deliver children at the same time, Cora nursing both. When Cora's baby dies, she transfers her love to Jesse and in so doing, establishes within the narrative the conventional relationship between mammy and mistress. Recalling the outline of the old mammy- mistress relationship, to Jessie, Cora guarantees love and

161 comfort: "In that big and careless household it was always

Cora who stood like a calm and sheltering tree for Jessie to

run to in her troubles" (192) . In her role, Cora attempts

to guide Jessie through her adolescent love, and to shield her from the judgement of her family and the outside world.

"[E]verybody's mother and nobody's woman" (Lee 36)— Cora is the typical mammy, responsible for the maintenance of the

Studevant household:

Like all the unpleasant things in the house, Jessie was left to Cora. And Cora was happy. To have a child to raise, a child the same age as her Josephine, gave her a purpose in life, a warmth inside herself. It was Cora who nursed and mothered and petted and loved the dull little Jessie through the years. (192-3)

Cora's love for Jessie shows that she can operate between the two worlds of white and black. Jessie's returned love extends the possibility of racial harmony.

The parallels between Cora and Jessie also suggest that differences that appear along racial lines may be economically, not biologically, determined. Both women take foreign lovers, Jessie's love bringing a similar disgrace to her family as Cora had brought a generation earlier. Both women are socially "undesirable." Jessie lacks intelligence and prefers Cora's kitchen to school or the complexities of society: "With Cora, everything seemed so simple" (192) .

Although these similarities suggest connections between the races, they also establish differences between the two

"humble characters" and the other women in the story, for it is the women who are responsible for Jessie's death, the

162 conflict around which the story revolves. When Mr.

Studevant is away in Des Moines, for example, Cora wishes he were home, stating, "Big and gruff as he was, he had more sense than the women. He'd probably make a shot-gun wedding out of it" (194) . And it is women as well who cover up the cause of Jessie's death for the sake of social expectations.

The contrast between Cora and Jessie and the other women in the story points to a problem of representation and difference beyond issues of race: women, in "Cora

Unashamed," are either hysterical hypocrites or simple, undesirable misfits.

The most significant difference between Miss Cynthie and Cora is economic. The success of Miss Cynthie's grandson elevates her status from a humble farm woman to guest for a famous, wealthy nephew. Although the picture of

Uncle Jake's old Ford and Miss Cynthie's straw suitcase imply that hers is a modest, rural lifestyle, the story focuses on her attachment to her grandson, whose wealth is depicted throughout the story, here in the description of his uptown apartment: "Rooms leading into rooms. Luxurious couches, easy-chairs, a brown-walnut grand piano, gray- shaded floor lamps, panelled walls, deep rugs, treacherous glass-wood floors" (73) . Miss Cynthie's ability to embrace her nephew's talent transform her world view. At least for the moment that she holds the rose petals. Miss Cynthie accepts her nephew's world and becomes a part of it.

163 "Cora Unashamed" begins with a description of Cora's economic status and her one professional option— domestic maid to a white family. Like the description of Cora's sexuality, naturalistic images convey her social positioning: "Cora was like a tree— once rooted, she stood, in spite of storms and strife, wind, and rocks, in the earth." In "The Practice of a Social Art," Maryemma Graham asserts that race is an important element in "Cora

Unashamed," but secondary in the face of economic exploitation. Indeed, the story explicitly links Cora's troubles to her economic options, as in the following description of her relationship to the Studevants:

The Studevants thought they owned her, and they were perfectly right : they did. There was something about the teeth in the trap of economic circumstances that kept her in their power practically all her life— in the Studevant kitchen, cooking; in the Studevant parlor, sweeping; in the Studevant backyard, hanging clothes. (189)

But the relationship between Cora and Jessie complicates this issue of class, keeping it intricately bound to color. Emphasizing the antagonism of the other white women who are demonized through their cruel and calculated priorities, the Cora-Jessie bond offers a relationship "friendly" to liberal whites. Indeed, it is the death of Jessie, the tragedy of their shared exploitation by the Studevants, that stirs Cora's militancy at the end of the story, causing her outburst at the funeral that exposes the Studevant's hypocrisy: "'They preaches you

164 a pretty sermon and they don't say nothin'. They sings you a song, and they don't say nothin'; But Cora's here, honey, and she's gone tell 'em what they done to you. She's gone tell . . . They killed you, honey" (196). Although she is aware of her exploitation, Cora has no self to resist her

"mammy" self. When Jessie dies, without her to love, Cora returns to her alcoholic father and ailing mother.

Although Cora's stance against the Studevants at

Jessie's funeral has been read as a moment of independence and her return home to her father and mother as a break from indentured servitude, the story's ending offers a grim alternative to a grim existence, a reminder of the limited options available to uneducated, black women like Cora in the deep south of the 1930s: "on the edge of Melton, the

Jenkins niggers. Pa and Ma and Cora, somehow manage to get along" (197).

"Cora Unashamed" exposes the hypocrisy of white culture. No matter how shocking this portrayal was to many white readers, for those who were unable to grasp the satire, it offered a bleak picture of cruel whites and poor blacks unable to rise above the condition of basic subsistence. As types, the white characters were dismissed by some white readers as two-dimensional figures with whom they could not identify. In his review of The Ways of White

Folks. for example, Sherwood Anderson told The Nation that

"The Negro people in these stories of [Hughes] are so alive,

165 warm, and real and the whites are all caricatures, life,

love, laughter, old wisdom all to the Negroes and silly pretense, fakiness, pretty much all to the whites....Mr

Hughes, my hat off to you in relation to your own race but not to mine” (Langston Hughes; Critical Perspectives 19).

One need only compare Anderson's criticism of White Folks to his praise for Cane to understand how racial representation was circumscribed by (white) literary tradition and culture, or, as Addison Gayle states, "the extent to which [white critics] have been allowed to define the terms in which the

Black artist will deal with his own experience” (Mitchell

212) .

Although O'Brien dedicated the 1939 volume to Richard

Wright for "Bright and Morning Star" and included that story in his collection of 50 Best American Short Stories (1939), he wrote nothing about Wright's fiction in his introductions or in any of his other published articles. O'Brien's only comments about Wright and his work are in the brief biographical note included in the 50 Best, in which the editor states: "He is a Negro and the most distinguished writer his own people have so far produced....Bright and

Morning Star is his best short story" (868). Even though

O'Brien wrote very little about Wright, it is easy to see how his fiction expresses many of O'Brien's ideals.

Stylistically, his straight forward prose was often compared to Hemingway's. Wright's naturalism emphasized the power of

166 external forces to shape personality, yet his social realism relied, in part, on the psychological assumptions that determined, along with economic and social forces, his characters' motivations. In "Blueprint for Negro Writers,"

Wright reduces the African American literary tradition prior to his own work to "humble novels, poems, and plays, prim and decorous ambassadors who went a-begging to white

America" (Mitchell 97). Although the violent protest in

Wright's fiction created a distinct departure from literature by African American writers before him, Wright's prose style has come to be regarded as integrationist. His work is particularly associated with the realist prose of the Midwestern renaissance naturalists such as Dreiser,

Anderson, and Lewis. Arthur P. Davis includes Richard

Wright (along with Ann Petry, the first woman African

American writer to be reprinted in the Best short Stories for her story "Like a Winding Sheet" ; Petry was the only

African American woman writer to be included in the series until Alice Walker in 1974) as a "major Negro writer" because of his determination to "merge into the mainstream of American life," to write "in the forms evolved in English and American literature" (Mitchell 335, 336)

Wright concentrated on impoverished, rural characters who, brought to the most extreme physical conditions, are forced to confront the choice of freedom, even if, as it usually does in Wright's fictive world, it means choosing

167 death. Edward Bland, as quoted in Ralph Ellison's "Richard

Wright's Blues," defined Wright's characters as "pre­ individual," describing the essentialized condition of this state of mind:

In the pre-individualistic thinking of the Negro the stress is on the group. Instead of seeing in terms of the individual, the Negro sees in terms of "races," masses of peoples separated from other masses according to color. Hence, an act rarely bares intent against him as a Negro individual. He is singled out not as a person but as a specimen of an ostracized group. He knows that he never exists in his own right but only to the extent that others hope to make the race suffer vicariously through him. (316)

According to Ellison, "This pre-individual state is induced artificially....The primary technique in its enforcement is to impress the Negro child with the omniscience and omnipotence of the whites to the point that whites appear as ahuman as Jehovah, and as relentless as a Mississippi flood"

(317). But Wright's fiction does not examine the process by which a child acquires "pre-individual thinking," nor does it involve self-reflexive recognition of individuality.

Instead, as James Baldwin commented, Bigger fights for his humanity when he needed to accept it.’® The stories in Uncle

Tom's Children, from which "Bright and Morning Star" was chosen, represent the pinnacle of O'Brien's expressed understanding of African American culture and the struggles among individuals against the hegemonic antagonism of the white dominant culture.

Wright's male perspective is rendered at the price, as many have noted, of the believability of his female

168 characters. Sherley Anne Williams has pointed out that even the heroic Sue is symbolic of "the reactionary aspects in

Afro-American tradition." Furthermore, focusing on the extent to which racism constitutes "an affront to the masculinity of black men," Wright reveals his inability to appreciate fully the pervasive nature of the sexism that is so deeply implicated in the oppressive patriarchal social order in the United States.

written while Wright was still actively involved in the

Communist party, "Bright and Morning Star" is the last story in his first collection of stories. Uncle Tom's Children.

Like "Cora Unashamed" and "Miss Cynthie," "Bright and

Morning Star" features a female protagonist who is a strong matriarch. Indeed, of all of the female characters in the five stories collected in Uncle Tom's Children. Aunt Sue is the most complex and fully realized, called by Sherley Anne

Williams, "one of the most deft and moving renderings of a black woman's experience in the canon of American literature" fAmerican Novelists Revisited 398) . Like Cora and Miss Cynthie, her narrative worth is contingent on her love for her child, in this case her son, Johnny-Boy.

Though it functions on several levels— first and foremost as an indictment against white supremacy and violent oppression of southern blacks— the story of Aunt Sue's love for her son moves the plot line of "Bright and Morning Star," revealing

169 Wright's Marxist message of collective action by the proletariat.

Like "Blood-Burning Moon," "Bright and Morning Star" ends in a double death. Johnny's gruesome death is avenged by the death of Booker, the stool pigeon who has tricked

Aunt Sue into telling the names of the party members. Shot by Aunt Sue with a gun concealed in a winding sheet to take her son's body home, his death provides a cathartic moment for Aunt Sue; she has rescued the other members of the party, delivered meaning to her son's death, and chosen her own moment of death.

Although the story affirms Sue's suspicions of whites, through the loving Reva, it also provides an idealized relationship between a black woman and a white one that depends on both fulfilling traditional roles. The relationship between Aunt Sue and Reva parallels that of

Cora and Jessie in many ways. Through her whiteness, Reva is, like Jessie, a symbolic mistress. Through her love for

Johnny-boy, she is also, like Jessie, a surrogate daughter.

This relationship extends the one between Cora and Jessie, in that while Cora and Jessie accept their exploitation by the Studevants, Aunt Sue and Reva consciously work to overcome the system that oppresses them. As Williams states,

the Sue-Reva relationship represents the ideal solidarity possible between black and white workers and the sisterhood between women workers....Reva's love for Sue, her faith in the old black woman, represent for

170 Sue the promise of the party made real in a genuine human relationship. That love is likened to the light from the airport beacon in far-off Memphis that in the story becomes a metaphor for the new day that communism will bring. fRBRF 401)

The Sue-Reva relationship provides another important dimension to "Bright and Morning Star," one that helps explain the popular response to Uncle Tom's Children, what

Wright lamented in "How 'Bigger' Was Born" (1940); "When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized that I had made an awfully naive mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about" (ix). In "Bright and Morning Star,"

Reva is the so-called "bankers' daughter." Her character personifies the white liberal in whose trust lies the possibility for social reform: "In Reva's trust and acceptance [Sue] had found her first feelings of humanity ;

Reva's love was her refuge from shame and degradation"

(188) . But Reva is protected from the reality of Johnny-

Boy's danger and the gruesome experience of his death. As an agent of change, however, she is, in fact, sleeping while

Aunt Sue gives her life for the sake of the cause. As

Williams points out. Aunt Sue insists that Reva rest while she faces the mob. Like the antebellum mammy figure, Aunt

Sue protects Reva from the reality of white privilege and all that must be sacrificed to maintain it:

Reva is fast asleep to Johnny Boy's fate, to Sue's frailty, Sue's humanity, to the dark realities and

171 hardships of black life. Despite the exigencies of life in the party^ nothing has happened to disturb Reva's faith in human nature, the party, her belief in the perfectibility of the world. And it is as much to keep this white world intact as it is to redeem her own self-esteem that Aunt Sue sets out to hunt down the informer. (Williams 402)

The white reader can leave "Bright and Morning Star" with a sense of exhaustion and grief, but like Reva asleep in Sue's cabin, his or her reality has not been shaken by the atrocities described in the cruel world of Aunt Sue's story.

O'Brien's omission of African American voices in Best

Short Stories set a trend for Best American Short Stories.

Martha Foley dedicated the 1943 volume to Ann Petry for

"Like a Winding Sheet." James Baldwin's "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" was printed in 1968, Eldridge

Cleaver's "The Flashlight" in 1970, and Alice Walker's "The

Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff" in 1974. In Foley's thirty-six years, she reprinted these four stories. The number of stories written by African American writers since 1978 since guest editors took over the anual selection process has not shown a marked change.

The trend is equally representative among literary magazines as well. As Terry McMillan wrote in her introduction to Breaking Ice. "How many African American stories have you ever seen in The New Yorker? The Atlantic

Monthly? Grand Street? Q? Redbook? And even many of the prestigious literary quarterlies?"

172 In 1996, John Edgar Wideman became the first African

American writer to edit the series. Ironically, he had never had a story of his own reprinted in the series. In his introduction, Wideman addresses the issue of editorial objectivity. "Once the protective mask of objectivity is scuttled or scuttles itself, a simple fact remains: the stories in this book are stories I like" (xvi). In direct opposition to O'Brien's authoritative editorial stance,

Wideman insists that the stories he selected, "are not the best stories, but the ones that have survived" a series of editorial biases. In his remorse that the short stories published today continue to be told from a familiar voice of privilege, Wideman attests to my assertion that O'Brien's literary concepts and the pressures that formed them exist today and continue to shape the production of the American short story:

Our fear and distrust of fiction reflect America's unfinished business of coming to terms with difference, our national reluctance to give full and equal credit to the other story— the woman's story, the black story, the immigrant story, the homeless story, our own story reimagined, the daunting freedom and responsibility that a reimagined self would demand. (xvii)

To better understand how this "fear and distrust" continues to affect who publishes short stories and what subject matter is given serious attention. Chapter 4 examines O'Brien's influence on the development of short story theory.

173 Notes

1. In "The Little Magazines" published in Vanity Fair. O'Brien claims credit for The Poetry Journal: "Harriet Monroe and I had the same idea at the same time...we both conceived the idea of founding a magazine for poets in the spring of 1912." He acknowledges his collaboration with Braithwaite on Poetry Journal but makes no other reference to Braithwaite's influence. "In October, 1912, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse appeared in Chicago under Miss Monroe's editorship, and in December, 1912, The Poetry Journal came out in Boston under Braithwaite's editorship. I was to be his assistant. We were both rather vague editors, I should judge, and the magazine didn't prosper." (PUA)

2. Braithwaite influenced the career of James Weldon Johnson and some of the Harlem Renaissance poet, though he is best known for his support of Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson,and Vachel Lindsay. For his preference for Elizabethan- influenced verse, Harlem Renaissance scholar David Lewis calls Braithwaite "one of Afro-America's severest critics" (59) .

3. What strikes me as particularly narrow-minded/provincial about O'Brien's assumptions here, is that seven years after publication of the first edition of Advance (1923), O'Brien did not remove this statement for the 1930 edition. In the chapter he added for the 1930 edition, "The New Generation," O'Brien reviews writers he never featured in his collections, such as Kay Boyle, Glenway Wescott, Janet Lewis, but he makes no mention of either Jean Toomer or Rudolph Fisher whose stories he had reprinted in 1923 ("Blood-Burning Moon") and 1925 ("City of Refuge").

4. Louisa of Jean Toomer's Blood-Burning Moon (1923) ; Lum of Lowry Wimberly's "White Man's Town" (1931); "the mulatto" in Roy Flannaghan's "The Doorstop" (1936) .

5. The second Opportunity Creative Writing Awards, in which Arthur Huff Fauset won first place for "Symphonesque" (and Zora Neale Hurston won second place for "Muttsy") was judged by Iowa writer and two time Best Short Storv recipient Zona Gale.

6. Today, Jessie Fauset, not Arthur, is the writer of note.

7. Nellie Y. McKay's anthology The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories bv Women recovers stories by women who are remembered as poets, forgotten stories by writers like Hurston and Nella Larson, and stories that were never

174 published. In her forward to the collection, McKay acknowledges the need for more books like hers "if black women in the arts during the Harlem Renaissance and later, including writers, are to receive their just due in the critical literature of our time" (xiv).

8. "The Great Auk" (1916), "Boys Will Be Boys" (1917), "Darkness" (1921), "The Chocolate Hyena" (1923), "No Dam* Yankee" (1928).

9. O'Brien had split the award twice before: in 1935 it went to Allen Seager, short story writer, and Charles Angoff, editor; in 1937, to Edita and Ira Victor Morris

10. "O'Brien's Choice," Saturday Review July 8, 1939.

11. Zora Neale Hurston also received financial support from Charlotte Mason, and she worked with Boas, proving to be the anthropologist of her time who would successfully record traditional Southern Blackk folk culture in Mules and Men.

12. Toomer's autobiographical writings describe his sense of betrayal and disappointment when Horace Liveright asked that Toomer feature himself "as a Negro" for advertising purposes. Toomer's contributor's note in Best Short Stories describes his as "of Negro extraction."

13. For discussion of connections between Anderson and Toomer, see Robert Bone's "Jean Toomer's Cane,"

14. I am borrowing here from Henry Louis Gates' explanation of the Black Arts movement of the mid and late sixties in Loose Canons. 102.

15. For their use of poorly educated, unsophisticated character types to distinguish "Negro" from "white" American art, Fisher and Hughes were considered "Van Vechtenites" by Allison Davis in "Our Negro 'Intellectuals'" (120).

16. First published in American Mercury. September, 1933.

17. See also Henry Louis Gates' comparison between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright in "Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text," Signifying Monkey.

18. See Baldwin's "Poor Richard."

175 CHAPTER 4 THEORIZING THE SHORT STORY: BEYOND THE NEW CRITICAL MYTH

I conceive it to be my essential function to begin at the bottom and record the first signs of grace, rather than to limit myself to the top and write critically about work which will endure with or without criticism. If American critics would devote their attention for ten years to this spade work, they might not win so much honor, but we should find the atmosphere clearer at the end of that period for the true exercise of literary criticism. — Edward O'Brien, Best Short Stories (1917)

Ten years after he issued the challenge to American critics in the epigraph that opens this chapter, O'Brien had, indeed, cleared the ground for a new form of short story criticism. His Advance of the Short Story (1923) located the development of the literary short story within a conservative trajectory of American literature, naming Poe,

Hawthorne, and Melville as early models of short story excellence.1 Advance stressed the English heritage of the

American short story and provided one of the first critical analyses of contemporary story writers. O'Brien's Dance of the Machines (1929) extended the theories formulated in

Advance. particularly the dichotomous assumption that the

"true" literary model of short story excellence stands in

176 opposition to those created by and for the masses. In

Dance. O'Brien equated short story production with the military-industrial complex, arguing against the formulaic

"machine-made" story and advocating instead a view of the literary story as an autonomous expression of the creative genius.

O'Brien's annual discussions of the short story as a function of form and subject privileged close textual analysis over any other approach, a theory put into practice in his Short Story Case Book (1935). O'Brien's Case Book demonstrated his interest in close, apolitical readings to support "universal" interpretations through formal evidence.

In his introduction to the Case Book. O'Brien identified his audience as aspiring short story writers, suggesting that one should read

slowly and carefully, studying how each effect, from line to line and from paragraph, is obtained by the writer of the story, and also examining carefully the general structure and proportions of the story, as well as its characterisation, plot, action, and atmosphere. (15)

In addition to these elements of fiction, O'Brien discusses setting, point of view, beginning, and ending, then explicates the collected stories paragraph by paragraph according to the approach outlined in his introduction.

In her review of The Short Storv Case Book ("Taking Stories

Apart" Saturdav Review 6 July 1935), Tess Slessinger praises

O'Brien's "almost infinitesimal analysis," then concludes her review by commenting on what she perceives to be an

177 extreme privilege of form over subject: "Apparently Mr.

O'Brien is almost unconcerned with the relative importance of a writer's choice of subject matter. By implication his chief point seems to be that any story, well-told, is a good story."

When O'Brien died in 1941, he was remembered more for his role as editor than as critic. As an exploration of

O'Brien's influence on the scope of short story literary criticism, however, this chapter reveals that his impact on the development of short story theory was in many ways as dramatic as his influence on the development of the form itself. Exploring the ways in which O'Brien influenced New

Critical thought— arguably the most influential theory of literature since WWII— this chapter discusses how short story theory developed during the years after O'Brien's death, and how the relative absence of critical attention to the short story has contributed to a misunderstanding of the story as a form best suited for the disenfranchised. In the first half of this chapter, I argue that although the story is accessible to a wide range of writers, to claim that it is particularly appropriate to marginalized voices contributes to the myth of the genre instigated by O'Brien and other modern thinkers, a myth that conceals the exclusivity of short story production in this country. The second half of this chapter demonstrates how, despite current trends in critical theory that have taught new ways

178 to read fiction, most contemporary short story theorists

have not moved far from the New Critics. Their emphasis on

formal analysis and their acceptance of ahistorical

universels as the appropriate substance for the literary

story perpetuates O'Brien's innocence myth and an exclusive

understanding of the short story canon.

The year of O'Brien's death and those years immediately

following were critical in literary history. With the

deaths of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1940) and Sherwood Anderson

(1941) , two of the most distinct voices of American

modernism were silenced. In 1942, Richard Wright left the

Communist party and, according to many, the demise of an

active leftist influence on American literature soon

followed. William Stanley Braithwaite who, in 1936, had

taken a position with Atlanta University, retired in 1943.

After these years of working with the black intelligentsia

in the South, Braithwaite rejected the literary world of

Boston, his home for fifty-seven years and, returning north,

settled instead in Harlem.

O'Brien's critical emphasis on close readings and his

insistence on the story as an expression of human genius that exists outside of cultural and political influences was

institutionalized into a formal literary theory by the publication of John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism (1941) which shaped the direction of literary theory for the next

179 twenty-five years. O'Brien's critical emphasis on the component parts of the short story and the use of irony as the distinguishing feature of literary short fiction was reiterated in another significant publication associated with the New Critics: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn

Warren's Understanding Fiction (1943).%

The New Criticism and Understanding Fiction reflect

O'Brien's most ardent concerns for the short story, but a third book, F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941), ensured that the strides O'Brien made toward defining and institutionalizing the literary short story would go unchallenged for several decades. Although Matthiessen's interests were not in short fiction, his critical support of

Hawthorne and Melville secured a place in literary history for O'Brien's models of short story excellence.

Matthiessen's endorsement of the writers whom students would read and the cultural questions that would preoccupy critics for thirty years further institutionalized a Eurocentric perspective and the myth of American nationalism that informed O'Brien's standards of the "best" American short stories. Finally, O'Brien's belief in lasting literature,

"work which will endure with or without criticism," is dramatized by the ideology inherent in Matthiessen's prescription of American literary excellence.

The influence of Matthiessen's American Renaissance on the twentieth-century perception of early American

180 literature and the long-lasting influence of New Criticism provide dramatic examples of how literary theorists affect the ways that literature is taught and how it is understood.

In Sensational Designs. Jane Tompkins stresses the significance of criticism in the formation of literary canons: "[C]riticism creates American literature in its own image because American literature gives the American people a conception of themselves and of their history" (199).

Of the impact of Matthiessen's American Renaissance.

Tompkins asserts that it influenced our assumptions of

"what kind of person can be a literary genius, what kinds of subjects great literature can discuss, our notions...of what constitutes heroic behavior, significant activity, central issues" (199) .

Before the publication of American Renaissance. O'Brien had done for the twentieth-century American short story what

Matthiessen did for nineteenth-century American literature: that is, he had defined the Anglo Saxon male as the most likely candidate for literary genius (indeed, he had identified which of these men wrote lasting literature); explicitly and through his selections, he had staked out a short list of appropriate subject matter and central themes for great literary stories, namely innocence and initiation, sexual or emotional repression, and alienation from the dominant culture by members of that culture; by focusing on these themes, he had influenced the scope of short story

181 theory* Perhaps by studying O'Brien's immense influence, a new awareness of the class-oriented theory that he promoted will help to open short story theory to consideration beyond form and substance and otherwise formalist conventions and ultimately contribute to expanding the means of short story production in the United States.

The Storv Myth; O'Brien and The Lonely Voice

Charles May's Short Storv Theories (1976), the first of eight major studies of the short story written or compiled in the last twenty years, provides a comprehensive annotated bibliography of short story criticism and theory ranging from Poe's "Review of Twice Told Tales" to current symposiums on the genre.^ May's bibliography supports the consensus among contemporary theorists that, historically, writers of the form have contributed most prolifically to the body of short story criticism. Particularly during the twenty years following O'Brien's death, the increase in creative writers holding academic positions contributed to the growth in Little Magazines which, in turn, provided a publishing venue for critical discussion of their craft.

Some of the criticism written during this new era of short story theory, like William Carlos Williams' A

Beginning on the Short Storv; Notes (1950) and Flannery

O'Connor's "Writing Short Stories" (Mysteries and Manners

1969) were refined from actual workshops the writers had

182 taught. Others, like Randall Jarrell's often anthologized

"Stories," Nadine Gordimer's "The Flash of Fireflies," or

the many essays by Eudora Welty mark a trend in short story

criticism that continues today with books about the craft

geared toward an audience of aspiring writers.* Used in

fiction writing workshops across the country, these analyses

of the craft of short story writing provide a foundation of

criticism that emphasizes the elements of fiction as it

strives to define the genre and the impression it creates on

the reader.

The few book-length studies of the American short story

to appear after O'Brien's death and before Charles May's

Short Storv Theories, were Kenneth Payson Kempton's The

Short Storv (1947), which focused on the technique of the

short story for aspiring writers, and a handful of studies

that discussed historical developments and major trends in

the short story.® Of these works, Frank O'Connor's The

Lonely Voice (1963) proved most influential. An acclaimed

writer of short stories, O'Connor's study marks a partial

departure from earlier criticism by short story writers in

that O'Connor's concentration is less on craft than on

theme. Defining the story as a genre for a "submerged

population group," an accessible genre for marginalized writers who exist in spiritual isolation from the dominant

society, he explores this theme in the stories of a select

group of writers, among them Turgenev, Chekhov, Maupassant,

183 Kipling, and Joyce. In the following often-quoted passage,

O'Connor strikes a chord that has reverberated in the pages of every serious study of the genre since The Lonelv Voice was published:

Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society. . . . As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel— an intense awareness of human loneliness, fShort Storv Theories 87)

With the exception of Julie Brown's introduction to

American Women Short Storv Writers, short story theorists have embraced O'Connor's idea of the short story as the genre of the socially disenfranchised. Brown associates

O'Connor with what she calls the "first wave" of short story critics. Of O'Connor and the first wave of critics, Brown writes: "Predictably, these critics focus on the lives, texts, and theories of white male practitioners of the short story form" (xvi).* Brown's criticism of O'Connor is contrary to the majority of short story theorists, however.

For example, in Re-reading the Short Storv. Clare Hanson provides a typical revision of O'Connor's description: "the short story has offered itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks— writers who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling 'narrative' or epistemological/ experiential framework of their society" (2). Valerie Shaw collapses O'Connor's description with V. S. Prichett's definition of the creative writer as "a man living on the

184 other side of a frontier" to provide a metaphor for what she considers typical subject matter of the short story.

Suggestive of O'Brien's ideal of innocent awareness, Shaw specifies adolescence and old age as frontier subjects: "to the extent that childhood and old age can be seen as threshold periods which are nevertheless entire unto themselves, they are 'frontier subjects' ideally suited to treatment in short stories" (195). In May's recent collection. The New Short Story Theories (1994), Mary Louise

Pratt claims that "Just as it is used for formal experimentation, the short story is often the genre used to introduce new (and possibly stigmatized subject matters) into the literary arena" (104).^

Although critics have claimed the short story as the genre most accessible to historically marginalized writers, little evidence exists that this is indeed the case. The argument is sometimes made that the short story gave a voice to black women writers of the seventies and eighties; the success of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gloria Naylor is used to support this claim. Though these writers achieved unusually large readerships

(attracting audiences beyond the elite readers of New York slicks or academic literary journals) and made narrative breakthroughs within this genre, four writers over a twenty- year period hardly constitutes a trend. As she has documented in her introduction to Breaking Ice. Terry

185 McMillan's frustrated attempt to fill the void of

anthologies of short stories written by African American writers since the seventies led, after months of search, to a compromise. Breaking Ice consists of fifty-seven works of

fiction by "seasoned, emerging, and unpublished" writers, many of them not stories published as such, but novel excepts. "[T]here apparently aren't as many short story writers as I thought," she writes, a discovery that she attributes to limited publishing opportunities for African

American story writers and to the perception that writing novels ensures more serious critical attention than writing short stories (xxii).® In an interview with Selwyn R.

Cudjoe, Jamaica Kincaid speaks of the extent to which the short story is only in theory the ideal genre for the expression of marginalized voices in American life:

I'm not a white American, and I don't have the same experience. I don't have the luxury of longing to be a displaced person, that is, a person who doesn't fit into his parent's life, or a person who doesn't fit into the town he grew up in. I don't have the luxury of wanting that: it actually did happen to me. That I couldn't fit in was a real pain for me. It wasn't an act, so I couldn't write like that. fCallaloo 402)

Paradoxically, a near consensus about the short story as the genre of the "marginalized" has not led to cultural approaches to the story form nor to an opening for the formation of an overtly politicized theory of the genre. On the contrary, the critical concentration on subject and form has continued to perpetuate the myth of the short story as expressive of American heterogeneity while paradoxically and

186 significantly working to maintain values of the dominant

culture. In 1976, Charles May called for a unified theory

of the short story "which would help us understand the

unique kind of experience the short story deals with and the

unique way it imitates and creates that experience" (10).

May's New Critical approach to the story assumed that it is

a stable entity, a category whose outlines and contents are

not variable. Concerned not with the social relevance of

literature, but with "the correct" means of evaluating it.

May, like O'Brien, searched for ways in which to define and

describe the genre in order to recognize lasting expressions

of short story literary excellence.

The Leaacv of Form and Substance

Despite a moderate movement beyond some of the conventions established during O'Brien's day, for the most part, short story theorists continue to focus on issues of definition— particularly the distinction between the short story and the novel— and the impact of the epiphany on the modern form, issues that largely revolve around form and substance. For example, in his introduction to Short Storv

Theories (1976), May argues that the criteria of literary judgement depends not on historical conditions, but on a firm understanding of the story form; "Although these same three complaints about the short story— lack of plot, lack of social concern, lack of ideology— have continued up

187 through the sixties, in the last thirty years the critics have recognized that the short story is closer to the lyric than the novel and must be judged accordingly" (6). In The

New Short Story Theories (1994), May concedes that a unified definition of the short story can be only as unified as

"family resemblance."

Published seven years after May's first anthology,

Valerie Shaw's The Short Storv; A Critical Introduction

(1983) and Susan Lohafer's Coming to Terms with the Short

Storv (1983) are the second and third major studies of the short story. Both provide extended, formalistic approaches to the genre. In her introduction, Lohafer identifies the audience of her study to be primarily fiction writing students who attend the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the

University of Iowa where she teaches. "These students want to know how short fiction works, and they are not so much interested in a scholarly theory as in a practical poetics.

It is at this point that I have most gladly met them" (5) .

Rather than critical approaches to the short story, Lohafer has taught classes on "the lyric short story" and courses on individual short story writers, instructing her classes in various approaches to close readings or, to use her language, "a gauging of attention to prose behavior on the level of the sentence" (5).

Lohafer's study of the "art of short fiction" concentrates on the sentence unit as resistance to closure

188 and as the characteristic that distinguishes the short story from the novel. More interested in the form than in any one critical discipline, Lohafer's approach considers the

"density and intensity," "texture," "linearity," and

"spaciality" of individual sentences within a story, as well as story beginnings and story endings. Her stated purpose is to show that "an approach based on an aesthetics of the form can help to sort out if not resolve contradictions among other critics using other approaches" (5). Applying her theory to stories by Hawthorne and Kate Chopin, Lohafer

"comes to terms" with these short stories by providing a sentence-by-sentence interpretation that "proves" intentionality as it evaluates (in this case, praises) the writers' individual styles and accomplishments. Although her approach is based more formally in theories of linguistics, on a more complex level it replicates the exact approach that O'Brien took in his Case Book to stories by

Balzac, Merimee, Maupassant, and Chekhov.

Like Lohafer, Shaw is interested in formal analysis of the short story, but she focuses on genre formation, particularly the connection between photography and the short story. Arguing for the short story's changing nature and its ability to resist certain "kinds of unity over others," Shaw contends that the form is always changing and that it contains an infinite number of uses to express human experience. This emphasis on instability leaves Shaw's

189 approach open to the exploration of various voices. Indeed,

her reading of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the

Pointed Firs is intended to provide "a certain amount of

permanence to less familiar writers." Concentrating on the

collection's structure, its description, setting, tone,

character, and themes, Shaw praises Jewett's technique of

creating intimacy between the reader and a small group of

characters. Although she considers this technique

relatively unique to Jewett, Shaw misses the opportunity to

explore this contribution to the short story and focuses

instead on a universal function of the story and how it is

expressed in Jewett's stories: "The form of the short story

favours the principle of revealing the strange in the

actual, an illumination which frequently depends on detaching the seer from the seen" (170). Despite her

interest in securing Jewett's place in literary history,

Shaw's central concentration is on the literary techniques and the narrative strategies of Robert Louis Stevenson,

Rudyard Kipling, and Guy de Maupassant, and her chapters, divided according to the elements of fiction— narrator, characterization, setting, subject, and organization— remain ensconced in a New Critical understanding of the story form.

since the publication of these two studies, Lohafer has been elected President of the Society for the Study of the Short Story (SSSS), an organization founded by Mary

Rohberger in 1992, "to promote the study of the short story

190 and to host conferences for the exchange of views among

scholars, writers, and readers." Currently headquartered in

the Department of English at the University of Northern

Iowa, SSSS is the only university-sponsored organization in

the country focused on the short story. The sponsor of four

international conferences on the short story in English, it

provides the principal source of funds for further

conferences. Additionally, it sponsors an annual short

story writing contest; winning stories are published in

Short Storv (founder and editor, Mary Rohrberger), one of

two university journals dedicated to scholarship on the

short story in the United States.’ On a panel called "The

International Short Story— The Critic," Rhorberger selected

Lohafer, May, and herself as the representative critical

voices of the United States.

Although the Iowa Writers* Workshop is now one of

hundreds of university writing programs thoughout the

country and no longer the hub of short story production, in

some regards, the formation of SSSS has re-centered the production of short story theory in Iowa. Rohrberger*s position of Executive Director of SSSS positions her in the center of critical exchange on the short story, and in many ways, her ideological interests seem to reflect the conservative traditions that comprise much of that discourse. Printed in Susan Lohafer*s second book. Short

Storv Theorv at a Crossroads (1989), a collection of essays

191 co-edited with Jo Ellyn Clarey, Rohrberger's essay "Between

Shadow and Act, Where Do We Go From Here?" exemplifies her

position in regard to the function and future of short story

theory. Rohrberger's argument centers around the important

question of how meaning is derived from reading the short

story, and how various interpretations of the same text determine individual critical approaches. According to this argument, meaning is derived either "from plot or from patterning, which includes plot" (40). Reviewing a number of contemporary short story critics, Rohrberger agrees and disagrees with their various concerns about the structure and definition of the genre. For example, she agrees with

Austin M. Wright that "the greater the recalcitrance in a story, the more the story is epiphanic; the lesser the recalcitrance, the more the story is mimetic" (41). Unlike

Ferguson and Shaw who, she claims, are reluctant to distinguish between the short story and the novel,

Rohrberger asserts that the distinctions between "the simple narrative" and "the short story proper" are founded mainly on "the presence or absence of symbolic substructures" (43).

Rhorberger concludes that we are "still circling around

Poe's original articulation of "unity of expression." "I do not, however, find this possibility at all bothersome," she states, considering "how long we have been circling around

Aristotle" (45) . Rhorberger's nonchalanct acceptance of

Aristotelian logic, it seems to me, is resonant of O'Brien's

192 belief in the "nonchalance of an indestructable faith"

(Advance 285). For, like O'Brien, Rohrberger appears to rest comfortably in her belief in theoretical absolutes: "As long as we articulate and exchange information, we live, continuing to define ourselves and our creations in the only ways we can. We have no options. We simply go on from where we are" (45). What Rohrberger seems to be suggesting is that one can approach a text only from his or her own critical interests; the danger of this thinking lies in the assumption that one has no responsibility in coming to terms with the critical interests of others or in accepting responsibility for the consequences of our own interests.

Like the essays in May's first collection, those in

Crossroads continue to work toward a unified approach to short story criticism by addressing issues of definition, distinctions between the short story and the novel, and the impact of the epiphany on the modern form. However, Lohafer and Clarey also include two essays that address cultural influences on the construction of the form. Under the heading "How Has Story Evolved," Suzanne Ferguson's "The

Rise of the Short Story in the Hierarchy of Genres" and

William O'Rourke's "Morphological Metaphors for the Short

Story: Matters of Production, Reproduction, and Consumption" discuss the historical production of the genre in conjunction with its formal development. Suzanne Ferguson emphasizes the acceptance of the short story as a "prestige

193 genre," arguing that the modern short story, as fragmentary and elusive, and as a suitable form for foregounding the epiphanic moment, was more susceptible to and expressive of the modern sensibility than the longer, "more experiential" modern novel. The modern short story, she claims, was by definition of its size, more modern than the modern novel.

O'Rourke describes the literary story as "fashionable" and distinguished from more popular forms of fiction, claiming, as I do, that the story is "audience-driven." In a problematic equation, O'Rourke compares the reader of the

Romance novel, or those who want to "kill time," to the typical reader of the short story, explaining that the story is fashionable because:

it is produced and consumed by those whose time is valued— thus used sparingly. Time is conserved and capital investment (education, formal training) increases in the production (and consumption) of the densely structured, written short story. (202-3)

Though O'Rourke's classist assumption about values of time is simplistic, and he wrongly claims that the production of short stories is "capital-intensive" for the story writer, his focus on the market-demand for the story form, along with Ferguson's thesis about its inherent modernness break new ground for the emergence of a more culturally oriented short story theory. Unfortunately, that ground remains relatively unutilized.

Of the eight major studies of the short story, Clare

Hanson's Re-reading the Short Storv (1989) takes the first

194 step toward a feminist critique of the genre as she posits that "the short story has been from its inception a particularly appropriate vehicle for the expression of the ex-centric, alienated vision of women" (3). However, her collection of essays does little to provide cultural approaches to interpretation and evaluation of the form.

Even Mary Eagleton's "Gender and Genre," a summary of feminist literary theory, speaks to the novel, not the short story."

Providing the first detailed study of the social, cultural, and economic influences on the development of the twentieth-century short story, Andrew Levy's The Culture and

Commerce of the American Short Storv (1993) asserts that the publishing trends that supported the short story and the nationalist claim that the short story is a uniquely

American genre have determined its definition. In a chapter titled "Handbooks and Workshops," he explores the development of academically sanctioned short story writing pedagogy, and the relationship between pedagogy and production of the genre. Although Levy's study is less concerned with the exclusivity of the developed form, my project is in dialogue with his account of the historical influences on that development.

In his analysis of Bobbie Ann Mason's short fiction,

"Back Home Again; Bobbie Ann Mason's 'Shiloh,'" Levy explores the formal elements of Mason's celebrated story

195 such as character, symbolism, language, and epiphany, but his examination goes beyond a New Critical discussion to

include analysis of external conditions of meaning, particularly the relationships between author and character

and audience and character. Levy combines elements of a

formalistic analysis in order to determine not only the

cultural meaning of the story, but the political

responsibility of the author as well. Through this analysis, he concludes that what is typically regarded as

Mason's detached narrative voice is indeed a complex narratology calculated to convey the impression of

innocence— political and artistic— an impression that seems to relieve the author of social responsibility in the creation of and in the marketing of her work.

In many ways, Levy's formalistic approach does not really depart from O'Brien's principles. Levy begins by defining the cultural distance between Mason and her characters and concludes that Mason's stories "add another chapter to the long and thriving history of one class of

Americans writing about another" (110). His analysis of

"Shiloh" focuses on its two protagonists, Leroy and Norma

Jean, and on their inability to control and comprehend the external forces in their lives. Through Leroy's epiphany in the cemetery, the opportunity for action and change is revealed.

Moreover, Levy focuses on Mason's use of ambiguity as

196 her primary strategy. Her third-person narrator speaks in

the same minimal language as her characters and from the

same sense of partial comprehension. "Superficially, at

least, Mason refuses to appear any more in control of the

narrative than her characters are in control of their lives"

(115). It is a strategic narratology that Levy calls

"playing dumb";

The inference of Mason's poetic is that worthy fiction is not produced by individuals who control the resources of their fiction and the circumstances of its reception, but by individuals who respond "innocently" to a mixture of external and subconscious forces. (117)

This innocence is, according to Levy, intentionally

sustained, if not artificially contrived.

Levy is ultimately concerned with the historical precedent in Mason's narrative strategy, the connection between Mason's fiction and Poe's goal to compose literature that would "suit at once the popular and critical taste"

(124) . As Levy states, "Bobbie Ann Mason is Poe turned

inside out: Playing dumb where Poe placed smart" (124) .

Implicit in Levy's analysis, however, is another historical precedent, that is, the trend toward innocence established during O'Brien's tenure, and its ramifications for short story interpretation and evaluation.

Julie Brown's recent American Women Short Story

Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995) offers a range of approaches that discuss a variety of story writers and their work. Like the other essays in Brown's

197 collection, Dolan Hubbard's essay on stories in Alice

Walker's In Love and in Trouble includes consideration of form. Moving beyond the thematic concerns associated with the New Critics, however, Hubbard does not examine form and its relation to the individuation process of particular characters, but instead explores Walker's uses of figurative language, borrowing from Houston Baker's "vernacular theory of African American literature" and what Molefi Kete Asante describes as "symbolic boundaries" and "iconic signposts" of

Afrocentric texts, or the ways that Walker's motifs are oriented in African American culture.Through this approach, Hubbard demonstrates that these stories are not self-enclosed texts that portray the struggles of an autonomous individual, but are instead interested in emerging subjectivities; analyzing how Walker reinserts the black woman's voice into a male-dominated discourse, Hubbard demonstrates how Walker's female character's "inward turn to the self" ultimately leads to the deconstruction of an exploitative ideology of the domination of African American women by African American men.

Because Hubbard focuses on Walker's recovery of the female self, particularly on how that recovery entails situating her in history— "telling (her)story"— his analysis shows how those characters' resist the sex and gender roles that have historically governed the oppression of black

American women. Hubbard begins with a discussion of "To

198 Hell with Dying," a story that expresses "the very best in the black experience" (211) . His concern with the formation of the individual consciousness incorporates equal consideration for that individual's relationship to her community. In "To Hell With Dying," for example, he demonstrates how the story of a young girl coming to terms with death is ultimately linked to the well-being of society and self. Using Houston Baker's term, "the economics of slavery" (defined by Baker as what "signifies the social system of the Old South that determined what, how, and for whom goods were produced to satisfy human wants" [212]),

Hubbard interprets the character of Mr. sweet— who "learned to live with the dominant society's definition of him even as he fashioned a life that permitted him to live with the day-to-day reality of that oppression"— as metaphor for the resiliency and durability of the black community.

Interpreting Walker's use of the blues motif to provide symbolic meaning of Mr. Sweet's guitar, Hubbard illustrates how Sweet's role as artist/creator makes him a "vehicle for consciousness." The narrator's acceptance of Sweet's guitar can be subsequently regarded as an act of agency, symbolizing that "she is willing to sing the blues" (213), that by bonding with Mr. Sweet, and through him with her community, she has learned to love herself (and accepted the role of creator for her own life) .

199 A close look at Hubbard's analysis of the narrative structure of "Roselily" reveals that Walker's juxtaposition of the traditional wedding vows and Roselily's interior monologue is "emblematic of her divided self." His analysis of this "call and response" motif extends Hubbard's interpretation beyond Roselily's individual character, and focuses on the theme of black womanhood during the civil rights movement of the 60s and 70s. Portraying the evolution of Roselily's "self" in relation to the evolution of African American society, Roselily's cross-cultural marriage provides Walker with the pretext to enter into a larger context— her critique of the male-dominated civil rights movement. The wedding vows— "equally interpreted as song of love and song of lament"— combined with the metaphors of confinement that appear throughout the story, demonstrate how Roselily must reinvent love as she reconstructs herself in this new marriage.

Hubbard's methodology allows him to explore the formal and thematic interaction between Walker's stories, affirming the necessity for black women writers to draw upon their literary foremothers, extending textual connections beyond the covers of Walker's collection to the history of the

African American literary tradition. For instance, his reading of "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff" demonstrates how the character of Hannah Kemhuff interacts with the other female characters in the collection in ways that constitute

200 a discourse for the black American woman that asserts her

"right to be" (223) . As a paradigmatic figure, Kemhuff metaphorically represents the community as a whole; her (story) speaks to the desire of the black community "to free itself from the presence of the other" (223) . In

"Revenge," voodoo represents a mode of resistance against the exploitations of the dominant ideology. According to

Hubbard, Hannah's visit to the local conjure woman;

negates the white woman's representational truths in order to represent the undecidability that undermines all acts of understanding. The demystification of the white woman's belief system allows a new kind of demystified reading to occur. Hannah Kemhuff, therefore stands independent not as a reified person, but as a heterogeneous and paradoxical form of forces. (223)

Whereas Roselily's marriage signals her entry into another level of silence, Hannah Kemhuff breaks through her years of silence to redefine her relation to community and self, asserting most affirmatively in this collection, a celebratory process of agency. Like Zora Neale Hurston,

Kemhuff "will not permit a racist/sexist discourse to suppress [her] artistry": linked to black women "smothered under layers of clothing," Kemhuff is "emblematic of the thwarted black female" (225).

Hubbard's approach relies on some principles and assumptions that are anathema to the New Critical understanding of the short story. First, he assumes that literary texts are not self-enclosed verbal constructs; they refer to and are referred to by things outside themselves.

201 Second, Hubbard advocates a New Historical belief in referentiality by demonstrating the reciprocal relation between the story and the reader who can productively interpret it, thus revealing that subjectivity is neither autonomous from community nor entirely dependent on it, but influenced by and a factor of influence in shaping the morals and values as the text and the reader interact.

Third, Hubbard demonstrates how short stories such as those in In Love and In Trouble are necessarily enlightened by understanding the interconnections among the individual stories and how they interact with discourse of the African

American women writers' literary tradition.

New Approaches to Short Story Theorv

The perpetuation of the myth of innocence in short fiction is perhaps most compellingly dramatized by Queer

Theorists who reveal ways in which homoerotic bonds play important but covert roles in American literature. In her analysis of Henry James' "A Beast in the Jungle," for example, Eve Sedgwick examines how heteronormality infiltrates the story in epistemological ways, and how heterosexual panic necessitates the "innocence" of the character and, by extension, the reader. Unconcerned with a

New Critical emphasis on structure, Sedgwick's analysis of

"A Beast in the Jungle" provides a cultural interpretation that focuses on the political exigencies that may be

202 inherent in a short story, though concealed by a formalistic reading. Sedgwick argues that Marcher's "Beast" was not his inability to embrace May Bartram's heterosexual love, but the presence of homosexual desire and the "secret of the secret" of this desire. According to this reading of the story. Marcher's final epiphany at Bartram's grave does not indicate the tragedy of lost opportunity, but is, instead, expressive of heterosexual panic, or Marcher's turning his back to the possibilities of homosexual desire for the irredeemable "self-ignorance" of Marcher's ultimate acceptance of compulsory heterosexuality.

Sedgwick incorporates several schools of criticism to reveal the "cyclonic epistemological undertow that encompass power in general and issues of homosexual desire in particular" (7). Drawing especially on Foucault's historiography of sexuality and Derridean deconstruction,

Sedgwick demonstrates the instability of culturally constituted binary oppositions and the identity-bound understandings of sexual choice.

Sedgwick's reading of "Beast in the Jungle" challenges the assumption of O'Brien and the New Critics that stories express "the truth," bringing into question the ability of any particular critic to reveal it. Indeed, she brings into question O'Brien's notion accepted by the New Critics of who can be considered a genius, or who is entitled to "create"

203 short stories, as well as the accepted notion of appropriate subject matter and theme.

Although contemporary theories are teaching us new ways to read and are advocating a more inclusive canon, most short story theorists have not moved far from the principles established by O'Brien. In light of this political uninterest on the part of today's short story theorists, it seems important to question why short story theorists continue to limit understanding of the genre to formalist concerns. Is it that, like O'Brien, they are culturally invested in maintaining structuralist interpretations?

Is it, as John Edgar Wideman suggests, that in coming to terms with the short story, they have yet to overcome a fear and distrust of difference? Or, could it involve Mary

Rohrberger's unsettling conclusion, that they believe they

"have no choice"? Until these questions are answered, it seems to me, short story theory may remain lodged in the nonchalance of O'Brien's indestructable faith.

204 Notes

1. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," and Melville's "Benito Cereno" are reprinted in The Twenty-five Finest Short Stories (1931), along with stories by Bret Hart and Mark Twain. Indicative of O'Brien's male-oriented aesthetic, of the twenty-five finest stories, he included only one that was written by a woman— Katherine Mansfield's "The Fly."

2. Brooks had stressed the value of irony in Understanding Poetrv (193 ) , but O'Brien had begun to advocate this literary technique in the twenties in his praise of Anderson and Hemingway.

3. May's second collection, New Short Storv Theories, extends this bibliography to 1995. In chronological order, the eight major studies that I have identified are; Charles E. May's Short Story Theories (1976), Susan Lohafer's Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983), Valerie Shaw's The Short Storv: A Critical Introduction (1983) , Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey's Short Story Theory at a Crossroads (1989), Clare Hanson's Re-reading the Short Storv (1989), Andrew Levy's The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (1993), Charles May's The New Short Storv Theories (1994), and Julie Brown's American Women Short Storv Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays (1995) .

4. R.V. Cassil's Writing Fiction (1975), John Gardner's The Art of Fiction (1986), and Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative craft (1995) are examples of the most popularly read books of this type in the last three decades.

5. Kenneth Payson Kempton's The Short Story (1947) focuses on technique. The following provide analyses of historical developments and trends: William Peden's The American Short Storv: Front Line in the National Defense of Literature (1964); Danforth Ross, The American Short Story (1961); Ray B. West, Jr., The Short Storv in America: 1900-1950 (19??); Austin Wright's The American Short Storv in the Twenties (1961). Robert Bone's Down Home: A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. William Peden's The American Short Storv: Continuity and Change. 1940-1972 is the only study to devote a chapter of discussion to black writers. Although Peden briefly discusses Toni Cade Bambara, his primary focus is on Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry [I have to check on this— Peden's approach to these writers, but my assumption is that he regards them as successful in the

205 mainstream because they have integrated mainstream techniques and themes]. To date, Robert Bone's Down Home; A History of Afro-American Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance (1975) provides the only book-length study of short fiction by African American writers. An important study of the period. Bone addresses the literary forebears of the African American short story tradition; his first section, "The Masks of Slavery; 1885-1920," addresses the black abolitionists, the local colorists and the plantation stories, anticipating Houston Baker's formulation of mastering minstrelsy in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, the mastery of form and deformation of mastery that. Baker asserts, "constitute a primary move in Afro- American discursive modernism" (71). Establishing a trend among scholars of African American literary fiction. Bone focuses exclusively on the male writers, including discussion of only one woman writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston. Predictably, Bone's focus does not involve Hurston's exploration of female identity, nor does it acknowledge the breadth of her anthropological interests and their influence on her story telling. This trend of exclusion is broken by Nellie Y. McKay's collection The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women, which includes an introduction by Marcy Knopf that provides significant synthesis of feminist revisionist thinking of the time period; however, no extended study of stories by African American writers since the Harlem Renaissance currently exists.

6. Brown includes in this group Poe's review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales (1842), Brander Matthew's The Philosophy of the Short Storv (1901), Robert Wilson Neal's Today's Short Stories Analyzed (1918), Fred Lewis Pattee's The Development of the American Short Storv (1923), and Roger Penn Cuff's An American Short Storv Survey (1953).

7. Pratt's essay, "The Short Story, The Long and the Short of It," demonstrates how even critics who are normally dedicated to cultural interpretations of literature and multicultural approaches to literary criticism tend to adopt formalistic interests when discussing the short story.

8. Julie Brown's essay "The Great Ventriloquist Act: Gender and Voice in the Fiction Workshop" explores the tendency for beginning women writers in university workshop settings to write from the perspective of men, either in first-person narratives or in stories with centralized male characters,

9. The other journal is Studies in Short Fiction. Actually, I need to check on this to varify and to find out where The Short Story in English is published.

206 10. Kenneth Ramchand, University of the West Indies-Trinidad moderated. Also on the panel were Susana Jimeniz from University of Santiago, Edward Baugh (University of the West Indies-Mona, and Susan Rochette-Crawley (University of Northern Iowa, "Celebrating Diversity; Uses of the Exotic in the Short Story."

11. Baker's "Criticism in the Jungle" and Asante's "Locating a Text: Implications of Afrocentric Theory."

207 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION: O'BRIEN'S CANON

I want to be told my own story, too, so that I can see myself as other people see me. — Edward O'Brien, Best Short Stories (19201

This dissertation has demonstrated how Edward J.

O'Brien's Best Short Stories has held substantial influence over the production of the American short story and has seeimingly limited its audience to those generally in the academic arena. This study has also traced the effect of

O'Brien's thematic preoccupations on the kinds of stories written during his twenty-six years as editor and critic.

For the past five decades since his death, critics of Best

American Short Stories have continually recognized the same themes that O'Brien promoted; particularly those stories with an emphasis on isolation and innocence continued to be the center of short story production after O'Brien's death, and are among the most common today. For example, in his review of the Best Short Stories of 1944 in The New

Republic. Isaac Rosenfield discusses the thematic trends that he recognized among that year's collection, among them, alienation of the intellectual from society and his

208 disintegration in a hostile environment" ("Year of the Short

Story" The New Republic 1944).

The following year, Rosenfield's review asserts that, among the most central themes in the new Best American Short

Stories were "childhood sustaining a shock of revelation from the adult world; a miscellany of sexual conflict, the war as a topic of current events touching on the anxieties of the civilian front, actual fighting not included." That year, Rosenfield complained of predictability and mourned the loss of originality: " [T]hough the range of subject matter is wide, the treatment is in most cases almost identical. Loose as it is, the short-story form is highly conventional.... [It] has settled down to a middle-aged conservativism of thwarting the imagination"("The Great

American Desert" 1945).

Fourteen years later, Yoli Tannen's review of the Best

American Short Stories of 1958 notes an emphasis on isolation and innocence. Tannen writes that "Six stories out of the twenty-one are about children," a number that he considers "quite a high proportion." Remarking that Foley's selections reflect the content of the stories from which she has to choose, Tannen recalls, "In her foreword to the 55

Best Miss Foley writes that she was about to mail her list to the publisher when she noticed that almost every story she had selected was about a child or an aged person." (17).

209 Not only did critics recognize the same themes, they approached the stories with the kind of literary objectivity, or "disinterest," that O'Brien advocated and that I argue, limits critical consideration of the story to formalistic explorations. When Tannen points to the thematic emphasis on race in the 1958 collection, for example, he states that "Nine of the stories in the current collection deal with minorities or inter-racial relations; almost half." Perhaps most significant, however, is the critical detachment from which Tannen analyzes this trend:

Perhaps it's because minority and racial problems, though complex, are relatively clear and sharp. They're knobby, they have elbows that a writer can take hold of. The oppression of the Negro character, for example, is such an elbow.

It seems to me that the kind of "disinterest" (as I discussed in Chapter 2) that informed O'Brien's aesthetic and his critical perspective limits full appreciation of the cultural complexities that the short story is capable of expressing. Instead of questioning the pressing need to write about issues of identity, O'Brien's faith in

"universal" truths and the "disinterested" aesthetic reduces social issues to simple metaphors: knobby elbows.

Predictably, Tannen does not acknowledge that all nine of these stories are written from white characters' perspectives that, like the immigrant experience of the teens and the African American experience of the twenties

210 and thirties, the "minority” experience at issue is articulated from the voice of the dominant culture.

In his tribute to O'Brien in American Prefaces. Wilbur

Schramm wrote that the development of the Best Short Stories series from its early years to the later stories of

Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck rose "like an Algers plot" (11). Schramm's analogy says as much about his own critical perspective as it does about O'Brien's particular canon. According to Schramm, like Algers' Ragged Dick.

O'Brien's Best Short Stories delivers a happy ending, transforming riches out of rags. In this dissertation, I have attempted to complicate the notion that literary canonization is a simple process, that unlike the American belief in self-reliance that assured prosperity for Dick

Hunter, hard work and determination have not guaranteed success for the short story writer. O'Brien's editorial practices dramatize that what was and still is guaranteed the American short story writer is a position within a complex system, "circles within circles within circles," as

John Edgar Wideman puts it.

O'Brien's selections represent a canon of early

American short stories of the modern era that exemplify as well as defy categorizations of modernist fiction. Among the lasting names that O'Brien promoted, he also provided a national forum for writers who were publishing in regional journals, introducing writers to the American reading public

211 that it may otherwise have overlooked. For readers of this canon, Best Short Stories preserves writers who tell an entirely other story than Anderson's and Hemingway's about the development of the American literary short story. For example, O'Brien reprinted early stories of Meridel LeSueur and Edna Ferber along with the late stories of Theodore

Dreiser; stories by Josephine Herbst and Fannie Hurst, Ellen

Glasgow and Susan Glaspell; Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle.

Although these writers are generally remembered today, their stories in Best Short Stories record the changing voices of these individual artists and supplement their list of currently anthologized stories.

In Sensational Designs. Jane Tompkins begins the discussion of the influence that anthologies have on interpretation of certain texts. Tompkins argues, for example, that Hawthorne's "Maypole of Merrymount" as it appears in the 1932 Century Readings in American Literature must be read differently than when it is included in Hershel

Parker's 1979 Norton anthology. O'Brien's series provides a dramatic example of how the interpretation of stories depends in part on their historical moment and the context in which they are presented. For example, in his

Introduction to the Best Short Stories of 1920, O'Brien made the following statement about style and realism: "Sloppy sentimentality and slapstick farce ought to bore us frightfully, especially if we have any sense of humor: Life

212 is too real to go to sleep over it. " And yet, five years later, he reprinted Irvin S. Cobb's "The Laughing Hyena," presented, within the context of the anthology, as a realist text.

O'Brien began his series with intentions toward inclusion— to preserve the popular audience for the short story. I contend that his narrow understanding of

"universal" truths is at the heart of why he lost that very audience. Fortunately, contemporary readers are equipped with new ways to understand stories that are preserved in

O'Brien's canon, stories that O'Brien likely included because he interpreted their messages according to his circumscribed notions of truth. Dorothy McCleary's

"Something Jolly" (1940), for example, is the story of two hometown friends, Jessie Downs and Bertie Quade, reunited after several years when Jess visits Bert in New York city.

Letting go of her small town inhibitions, Jess is inspired to extend her visit after the live theater production that

Bert convinces her to see, the extravagance of cake and cognac, and a taxi ride. As their indulgent evening unfolds, the two friends articulate why they have never married, Jess visibly more concerned about this social

"misfortune" than Bert. The story ends with the women lying in bed, "a faint smell of camphor and toothpowder in the air," and Bert attempting to comfort her old friend:

Miss Quade reached an arm over and worked it compassionately under Jessie's head. "I do wish I was

213 somebody nice lying here— not just your old Bertie." "Oh I don't suit me!" said Jessie, kicking her feet out angrily against the soft covers at the foot of the bed. "I don't suit me a little bit!" (213)

Despite obvious textual evidence of sexual intimacy between these two friends, O'Brien's interest in "Something Jolly" would most likely suggest a reading of the repressed heterosexuality of two women; Bertie read as an asexual career woman; Jessie as a hen-pecking old maid. This reading overlooks the richer complications of McCleary's characters, the continued presence of sexual desire between the two women, the cultural reasons for resisting a life­ long bond, and the personal tragedy of Jessie's inability to reject heterosexuality.

In the third edition of the Norton Anthology of Short

Fiction (1994), editor R. V. Cassill divides the collection into four sections obviously influenced by Norman Foerster's

Reconceptualization of American Literature (1925): "The

Search for Form," "Regionalism and Realism," "A National Art

Form," and "The Short Story Today." His choice of writers to represent these categories clearly reflects O'Brien's influence: Under "A National Art Form," Cassill includes stories by Stephen Crane and Edith Warton that were published before O'Brien's series began. The others, with one exception, were all featured in O'Brien's series: stories by Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest

Hemingway, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora

214 Welty, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Wright. Only Zora

Neale Hurston, added in the third edition, was not included in O'Brien's canon. Clearly, O'Brien's influence over the

American short story canon and his impact on short story theory remain with us today. Moreover, as a key component of the American system of short story production, it appears that O'Brien's aesthetic will continue to be considered the

"best" for some years to come.

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