As Foreman O’Brien warms up to his subject he will describe in vitally pulsating phrases that would drive a movie writer mad with envy, the convulsion of Nature that attended the birth of the American Short Story. “_The ever-widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races_.”
All of which speechifying translated into plain talk conveys the astounding information that the hooch of American Fiction is being brewed in the much-advertised Melting Pot! Well, why couldn’t he say so and be done with it?
Speaking of the Anglo-Saxon he says: “_The Anglo-Saxon was beginning to absorb large tracts of other racial fields of memory and to share the experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian and Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic._” The Melting Pot again! What did I tell you! Continuing, Mr. O’Brien describes the process of fermentation as a new chaos set up by tracts of remembered racial experience interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen and eager civilization. He doesn’t explain exactly how a thing so completely lacking in the elements of design as a chaos should be “set up” to get the best results. All he tells us is that fresh chaos is good material for American literature, and that our Mr. Anderson and others are very busy in a half unconscious way, trying to make “worlds” out of it.
By “worlds” I take it Mr. O’Brien means something vast and vague and “_vitally compelling_” and “organic” that our Mr. Anderson and others will fuse into American Fiction “_in artistic crucibles of their own devising_.”
On the whole, things look pretty bright for the American Short Story, what with the “fresh living current which flows through the best American work, and the Psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it,” and the “seething maelstrom of cross currents,” and the “dynamic creative energies,” and above all the _chaos_, the great American Chaos—fresh—unlimited—inexhaustible—ripe for the “artistic crucible,” in which it is soon to be fused into a new cosmos of “organic fiction” by the White Headed Boy of the Western World.