The Best Short Stories of 1917 Part 92

THE ETERNAL HUSBAND AND OTHER STORIES and THE GAMBLER AND OTHER STORIES by _Fyodor Dostoievsky_ (The Macmillan Co.). These two new volumes continue the complete English edition of Dostoievsky which is being translated by Constance Garnett. The renderings have the same qualities of idiomatic speech and subtly rendered nuance which is always to be found in this translator's work, and although both of these volumes represent the minor work of Dostoievsky, his minor work is finer than our major work, and characterized by a pa.s.sionate curiosity about the human soul and a deep insight into its mysteries. It is idle to argue as to whether these narratives are short stories or brief novels. However we cla.s.sify them, they are profound revelations of human relations.h.i.+p, and place their author among the great masters of the world's literature. Nor is it pertinent to discuss their technique or lack of it. Their technique is sufficient for the author's purpose, and he has achieved his will n.o.bly in a manner inevitable to him.

BILLY TOPSAIL, M.D., by _Norman Duncan_ (Fleming H. Revell Co.). In this posthumous volume Norman Duncan has woven together a selection of his later short stories, in which further adventures of Doctor Luke of the Labrador are chronicled. They represent the very best of his later work, and in them the stern physical conditions with which nature surrounds the life of man provide an admirably rendered background for the portrayal of character developed by circ.u.mstance. Norman Duncan can never have a successor, and in "Billy Topsail, M.D." the reader will find him very nearly at his best.

MY PEOPLE by _Caradoc Evans_ (Duffield & Co.). "My People" is a record of the peasantry of West Wales, and these chronicles are set down with a biblical economy of speech that makes for a noteworthy literary style. I refuse to believe that they are a truthful portrait of the folk of whom Mr. Evans writes, but I believe that he has created a real subjective world of his own that is thoroughly convincing. H. G. Wells has written eulogistically of the book and also of the author's novel, "Capel Sion."

I appreciate the qualities in the book that have won Mr. Wells' esteem, and the book is indeed memorable. But I believe that its excellence is an artificial excellence, and I commend it to the reader as a work of incomparable artifice rather than as a faithful reflection of life.

IN HAPPY VALLEY by _John Fox, Jr._ (Charles Scribner's Sons). Of these ten new chronicles of the Kentucky mountains, gathered from the pages of Scribner's Magazine during the past year for the most part, "His Last Christmas Gift" is the most memorable. But all the stories are brief and vivid vignettes of the countryside which Mr. Fox knows so well, told with the utmost economy of speech and with a fine sense of atmospheric values. These stories are a happy ill.u.s.tration of the better regionalism that is characteristic of contemporary American fiction, and like "Ommirandy" will prove valuable records to a later generation of a life that even now is rapidly pa.s.sing away.

THE WAR, MADAME, by _Paul Geraldy_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). The delicate fantasy of this little story only enhances the poignant tragedy that it discloses. Somehow it suggests a comparison with "Four Days" by Hetty Hemenway, although it is told with greater deftness and a more subtle irony. In these pages pulses the very heart of France, and it is compact of the spirit that has made France a mistress to die for. The translation is admirable.

COLLECTED POEMS by _Wilfrid Wilson Gibson_ (The Macmillan Co.). In these n.o.ble studies of English social life among the laboring cla.s.ses Mr.

Gibson has collected all of his stories in verse which he wishes to retain in his collected works. He has already become an influence on the work of many of his contemporaries, and the qualities of incisive observation, warm humanity, and subtle art which characterize his best work are adequately disclosed in his poems. I am sure that the reader of short stories will find them as fascinating as any volume of prose published this year, and the sum of all these poems is an English _Comedie Humaine_ which portrays every type of English labor in rich imaginative speech. The dramatic quality of these stories is achieved by virtue of a constant economy of selection, and a nervous singing speech as authentic as that of Synge.

OMMIRANDY by _Armistead C. Gordon_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). In this collection Mr. Gordon, whose name is so happily a.s.sociated with that of Thomas Nelson Page, has collected from the files of Scribner's Magazine the deft and insinuating chronicles of negro life on a Virginia plantation which have attracted so much favorable comment in recent years. This collection places Mr. Gordon in the same rank as the author of "Ma.r.s.e' Chan," as a literary artist of the vanished South. These transcripts from the folk life of the people are told very quietly in a persuasive style that reveals a rich poetic sense of human values. The mellow atmosphere of these stories is particularly noteworthy, and Mr.

Gordon's instinctive sympathy with his subject has saved him from that spirit of condescension which has been the weakness of so much American folk writing in the past. "Ommirandy" will long remain a happy and honorable tradition in American literature.

THE GRIM 13, edited by _Frederick Stuart Greene_ (Dodd, Mead & Co.), is a collection of thirteen stories of literary value which have been declined with enthusiastic praise by the editors of American magazines because of their grim quality, or because they have an extremely unhappy ending. The collection was gathered as a test of the public interest, in order to remove if possible what the editor believed to be a false editorial policy. It is interesting to examine these stories, and to pretend that one is an editor. The experiment has been extremely successful and has produced at least one story by an American author ("The Abigail Sheriff Memorial" by Vincent O'Sullivan) and one story by an English author ("Old f.a.gs" by Stacy Aumonier), which are permanent in their literary value.

FOUR DAYS: THE STORY OF A WAR MARRIAGE, by _Hetty Hemenway_ (Little, Brown & Co.). Of this story I have spoken elsewhere in this volume, I shall only add here that it is one of the most significant spiritual studies in fiction that the war has produced, and that it is directly told in a style of sensitive beauty.

A DIVERSITY OF CREATURES by _Rudyard Kipling_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.) is the first collection of Mr. Kipling's short stories published in several years. I must confess frankly that there is but one story in the volume which seems to me a completely realized rendering of the substance which Mr. Kipling has chosen, and that is the incomparable satire on publicity ent.i.tled "The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat." In this volume you will find many stories in many moods, and some of them are postscripts to earlier volumes of Mr. Kipling. I cannot believe that his war stories deserve as high praise as they have been accorded. This volume presents Mr. Kipling as the most consummate living master of technique in the English tongue, but his inspiration has failed him except for the single exception which I have chronicled. The volume is a memory rather than an actuality, and it has the pathos of a forgotten dream.

THE BRACELET OF GARNETS AND OTHER STORIES by _Alexander Kuprin_, translated by _Leo Pasvolsky_, with an Introduction by _William Lyon Phelps_ (Charles Scribner's Sons). This collection of stories is based on the author's own selection for this purpose, and although the translation is not thoroughly idiomatic, the sheer poetry of Kuprin's imagination s.h.i.+nes through the veil of an alien speech and captures the imagination of the reader. Kuprin's pictorial sense is curiously similar to that of Wilbur Daniel Steele, and it is interesting to study the reactions of similar temperaments on widely different substances and backgrounds. Kuprin achieves a chiselled finality of utterance which is as evident in his tragedy as in his comedy, and in some of these pieces a fine allegorical beauty s.h.i.+nes prismatically through a carefully economized brilliance of narrative.

THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER AND OTHER STORIES by _D. H. Lawrence_ (B. W.

Huebsch). The twelve short stories collected in this volume are full of the same warm color that one always a.s.sociates with Mr. Lawrence's best work, and the nervous complaining beauty of his style makes him the English compeer of Gabriele d'Annunzio. The warm lush fragrance of many European countrysides pervades these stories and a certain poignant sensual disillusionment is insistently stressed by the characters who flit through the shadowy foreground. It is the definitely realized and concrete sense of landscape that Mr. Lawrence has achieved which is his finest artistic attribute, and the sensitive response to light which is so characteristic an element in his vision bathes all the pictures he presents in a rich glow, whose gradations of light and shadow respond finely to the emotional reactions of his characters. He is the most sophisticated of the contemporary English realists, and has the sense of poetry to a high degree which is conspicuously absent in the work of other English novelists.

A DESIGNER OF DAWNS AND OTHER TALES by _Gertrude Russell Lewis_ (Pilgrim Press). I set this volume of allegories beside "Flame and the Shadow-Eater" by Henrietta Weaver as one of the two best books of allegories published in 1917. These seven little tales have a quiet imaginative glow that is very appealing and I find in them a folk quality that is almost Scandinavian in its navete.

THE TERROR: A MYSTERY, by _Arthur Machen_ (Robert M. McBride & Co.).

When this story was first published in the Century Magazine in 1917, under the t.i.tle of "The Coming of the Terror," it was at once hailed by discriminating readers as the best short story by an English writer published in an American magazine since "The Friends" by Stacy Aumonier.

It is now published in its complete form as originally written, and although it is as long as a short novel, it has an essential unity of incident which justifies us in claiming it as a short story. I suppose that Algernon Blackwood is the only other English writer who has the same gift for making strange spiritual adventures completely real to the imagination, and the author of "The Bowmen" has surpa.s.sed even that fine story in this description of how a mysterious terror overran England during the last years of the great war and how the mystery of its pa.s.sing was finally revealed. The emotional tension of the reader is enhanced by the quiet matter-of-fact air with which the story is presented. The volume is one of the best five or six books of short stories which England has produced during the past year.

THE SECOND ODD NUMBER: THIRTEEN TALES, by _Guy de Maupa.s.sant_, the translation by _Charles Henry White_, an Introduction by _William Dean Howells_ (Harper & Brothers). It is reported in some volume of French literary memoirs that Guy de Maupa.s.sant regarded the first series of "The Odd Number" as better than the original. Be this as it may, the thirteen stories which make up this volume are admirably rendered with a careful reflection of the slightest nuances. As Mr. Howells states in his introduction to the volume: "The range of these stories is not very great; the effect they make is greater than the range." But this selection has been admirably chosen with a view to making the range as wide as possible, and I can only hope that it will serve to influence some of our younger writers toward a greater descriptive and emotional economy.

THE GIRL AND THE FAUN by _Eden Phillpotts_ (J. B. Lippincott Co.). These eight idylls of the four seasons are graceful Greek legends told with a modern touch in poetic prose. They have a quality of quiet beauty which will commend them to many readers to whom the more realistic work of Mr.

Phillpotts does not appeal, and the admirable ill.u.s.trations by Frank Brangwyn are a felicitous accompaniment to the modulated prose of Mr.

Phillpotts.

BARBED WIRE AND OTHER POEMS by _Edwin Ford Piper_ (The Midland Press, Moorhead, Minn.). As Grant Showerman's "A Country Chronicle" is an admirable rendering of the farm life of Wisconsin in the seventies, so these poems are a fine imaginative record of the pioneer life of Nebraska a little later. I believe this volume to contain quite as fine poetry as Robert Frost's "North of Boston." Here you will meet many men and women struggling against the loneliness of prairie life, and winning spiritual as well as material conquests out of nature. The greater part of this volume is composed of a series of narrative poems ent.i.tled "The Neighborhood." Their lack of literary sophistication is part of their charm, and the calculated ruggedness of the author's style is a faithful reflection of his barren physical background.

BEST RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES, compiled and edited by _Thomas Seltzer_ (Boni and Liveright). This is the first anthology of Russian short stories which has yet been published in English, and the selections are excellent. There is a wide range of literary art represented in this volume, and the translations are extremely smooth and idiomatic. As is only fitting, the work of Tolstoi, Dostoievsky, Turgenev, and other Russians, whose work is already well known to the American reader, are only represented lightly in the collection, and greater s.p.a.ce is devoted to the stories of Chekhov and other writers less familiar to the American public. Nineteen stories are translated from the work of Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, Saltykov, Korolenko, Gars.h.i.+n, Chekhov, Sologub, Potapenko, Semyonov, Gorky, Andreyev, Artzybashev, and Kuprin, and the volume is prefixed with an excellent critical introduction by the editor.

A COUNTRY CHILD by _Grant Showerman_ (The Century Co.). This is a sequel to Professor Showerman's earlier volume, "A Country Chronicle." The book is an epic of what a little boy saw and felt and dreamed on a farm in Wisconsin forty years ago, told just as a little boy would tell it. It will help you to remember how you went to the circus and how you stayed up late on your birthday. You will also recall the ball game the day you didn't go home from school, and how you went in swimming, and about that fight with Bill, and ever so many other things which you thought that you had forgotten. I think all the boys and girls that used to write to James Whitcomb Riley should send a birthday letter this year to Grant Showerman, so that he will get it on the 9th of January. Let's start a movement in Wisconsin to have a Showerman Day.

FLAME AND THE SHADOW-EATER by _Henrietta Weaver_ (Henry Holt & Co.). In these fifteen short allegorical tales Henrietta Weaver has introduced with considerable skill much Persian philosophy, and presented it to the American reader so attractively that it is thoroughly persuasive. Akin in a measure to certain similar stories by Jeannette Marks, they have the same prismatic quality of brilliance and impermanence. I do not believe that the reader who enjoys the poetry of the mind will find these allegories specially esoteric, but I may commend them frankly for their story value, irrespective of the symbols which the author has chosen to attach to them.

THE GREAT MODERN FRENCH STORIES edited by _Willard Huntington Wright_ (Boni and Liveright), MARRIED by _August Strindberg_ (Boni and Liveright), and VISIONS by _Count Ilya Tolstoy_ (James B. Pond) have reached me too late for extended review. I list them here as three volumes of permanent literary value.

VOLUMES OF SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED DURING 1917

NOTE. _An asterisk before a t.i.tle indicates distinction. This list includes single short stories, collections of short stories, and a few continuous narratives based on short stories previously published in magazines._

I. AMERICAN AUTHORS

ADAMS, SAMUEL HOPKINS.

*Our Square and the People In It. Houghton-Mifflin.

BAIN, R. NISBET.

*Cossack Fairy Tales. Stokes.

BANGS, JOHN KENDRICK.

Half Hours With the Idiot. Little, Brown.

Ba.s.sETT, WILBUR.

Wander-s.h.i.+ps. Open Court Pub. Co.

BEACH, REX.

Laughing Bill Hyde. Harper.

BEND, REV. JOHN J.

Stranger than Fiction. Sheehan.

BOTTOME, PHYLLIS.

*Derelict, The. Century.

BRADLEY, WILLIAM ASPENWALL.

*Old Christmas, and Other Kentucky Tales in Verse. Houghton-Mifflin.

BRADY, CYRUS TOWNSEND.

Little Book for Christmas, A. Putnam.

BROOKS, ALDEN.

*Fighting Men, The. Scribner.

BROWN, KATHARINE HOLLAND.

*Wages of Honor, The. Scribner.

BRUBAKER, HOWARD.

Ranny. Harper.

BRUNTON, F. CARMICHAEL.

Enchanted Lochan, The. Crowell.