half the world, and produced a thousand words a day.
And the burden of his literary output was an infantile romanticism under
which he deliberately hid his own despair. Since the reality of the
world he had come up through was barred to his pen, he wrote stories
about sea-wolves and star-gazers: he wallowed in the details of bloody
combat. If he was aware of the density of human life, of the drama of
the conflict of its planes, he used his knowledge only as a measure of
avoidance. He claimed to have found truth in a complete cynical
dissolution. 'But I know better,' he says, 'than to give this truth as I
have seen it, in my books. The bubbles of illusion, the pap of pretty
lies are the true stuff of stories.'"

You may say that this is a hard saying. Perhaps it is. But as I was
writing this morning, I received a letter from which I shall quote as a
living human document. It came to me from an American short story writer
whose work I have not had occasion to mention previously in these
studies. This artist has done work which ranks with the very best that
has been produced in America, but it very seldom finds its way into
print for the very reasons that Mr. Frank has mentioned. There is no
compromise in it. It offers us no vicarious satisfaction of our self
esteem. "I have only a blind, consuming passion of ideas. And this blind
passion of ideas drove me and hounded me till I had to tear loose from
everything human to follow it. For two years I lived in savage
isolation. I thought myself strong enough to live alone and think alone,
but I am not. What writes itself in me is too intense for the light
weight American magazines. My last story took me months to write and I
had to ruin it by tacking on to it a happy ending or starve."

Now you may say that the writer of this letter should not have isolated
himself from humanity. But in reality he did not. His stories are
instinct with the very pulse of humanity. The American editor fears
their reality, and so the writer really found that humanity had turned
from him. Meanwhile, the unpublished work of this writer, who is dying,
is America's spiritual loss. In the same way America lost Stephen Crane
and Harris Merton Lyon and many another, and is losing its best writers
to Europe every day. This annual volume is a book of documents, and that
is my excuse for quoting from these two writers. You will find the
indictment set forth more fully by a master in a recent novel, "The
M