It all started with an odd find in a thrift store. While spending time with my family this summer, I decided to visit an old shop I used to go to in high school. Back then I often found knickknacks that baffled my mother because, well, they were baffling. Things were different now: I was moving in with my girlfriend and we needed kitchenware.
Roaming through the small aisles created by stacked furniture, orphaned shelves and tilted lamps, I sashayed to the literature section. I had no room for more books, but here, on a two foot by six foot shelf, was a city of paperbacks. Titles weren’t always legible as most of the books had spinal ridges that were so thick you could shave with them. The inventory included better-known writers like John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Faye Kellerman, Michael Connolly, and Jane Austen along with a host of tomes on cooking, religion, life-betterment and really just whatever.
Beside this bookshelf was a gallon size zip-lock bag filled with 8 little red-hardbound books with gold titles on the binding that read: “THE WORLD’S 100 BEST SHORT STORIES.” I looked closer at one item—this was Volume I. With a light touch, I pulled the bag off the shelf and slowly removed this first volume worried that the slightest judder or plastic crinkle might set off an alarm. Judging from the subtitle, “ADVENTURE,” and the publication date, 1927, I thought the book carried with it tales of swashbuckling and daring-do. In another world Errol Flynn would’ve graced the cover in some vibrant multicolored and embroidered dusk jacket.
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| The collection assembles! |
The ten adventurous stories were by colonialist fantasists and frontier romanticists like Robert Louis Stevenson, Stewart Edward White, and Richard Harding Davis. I skimmed the table of contents and didn’t recognize too many titles other than that middle school literature staple "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell. I recalled little other than its name and the central conceit of a bored rich man who found fun in hunting human beings. Perhaps that was where "adventure" was to be found for Overton: in life-on-the-line masculinist desire for competition.
The bag of books was reasonably cheap, and I was alittle dehydrated so I purchased this adumbrated collection. When I got home, I saw some of the companion volumes: “GHOSTS,” “WOMEN,” “COURAGE,” “ROMANCE,” and “HUMOR.” The stories were mostly by men and the editor was a man whose name, Grant Overton, I didn’t recognize. What kinds of categories were these?
Genres are almost always conditionally drawn from a plethora of problematic strains of dominant ideology. This appeared no different. But it also seemed weird. Overton's categorization appeared somewhat arbitrary, as though each descriptor vaguely indicated elements of a set of stories that might be shared. But what linked them wasn't clear.
In 1933 Edith Ronald Mirrielees, an influential literature professor at Stanford, noted that “to the twentieth century, annual collections of short stories are as familiar as 'keepsakes' or 'tokens' were to the nineteenth.”1 Most older collections I’ve seen have always found themselves back on the shelf as quickly as I picked them up. Overton’s taxonomy interested me; this was neither an annual overview nor was it a scholarly reference text. It might not even be very good. It was, however, peculiar and I was hooked.
I let the books hang out in the plastic bag for about a month. Though I still hadn’t moved into a new apartment I continued to worry about this silly collection of little literature that slid around in the bag. It was like an old toy from my childhood that I kept thinking I’d return to but never did.
Then I made a set of moves that I still don’t understand. I went to a used online bookseller, in the middle of the day, purchased the missing volumes of the collection (fulfilling my residual cinephilic completist tendencies), and then promised myself that once I moved I would read one story a day. This was a stupid promise.
There is only but so much time in this world and reading is already a major part of my professional life. Time to read “for fun” is all the more limited. Why choose this collection—one most likely to be filled with stories that echoed a world which more openly celebrated American racism and imperialism?
In part, I was motivated by the challenge of sustaining a long-term project that could still be completed in a few months. By the beginning of 2018, if the country could get through 2017, I would be able to read 100 stories that one editor felt were top tier, 90 years ago. It was silly, and it was a project defined by qualifications, sure, but it felt feasible.
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| More dust jackets! |
I was also eager to learn about the construction of a fiction anthology just before the Great Depression. What would this collection set as its task in adjudicating and organizing the world’s best stories in English? In this blog I hope to explore this question story by story. So, why these stories?
The first volume of the collection opens with a four page introduction by Overton, who was most famous for serving as the fiction editor of the turn-of-the-century weekly magazine Collier's. He begins his introduction with twin questions, one ontological and the other more criterial: "What is a short story? What—or why—are the 'best' short stories?"
The answer is generally an affective one circumscribed by length; short stories are less than 15,000 words and the best are those that “stand out” like a “memorable experience” in life. To read one of the greatest short stories is to feel that it is “in some sense, happening to us as we read.” Overton relies on the words of Booth Tarkington, describing the greatest short stories as those that leave you like a hard day of work in which you can only exclaim at the end: “Well, hasn’t this been a day!” For the firmness of the word count, the value judgment of the world’s best writing is left loose: the best stories would feel presently alive and yet yield a feeling of past accomplishment.
Ultimately, for Overton, there is “only one test of a story—the test of what it makes you feel.” (I am curious what contemporary fiction editors think about this simple directive—surely there are more complicated versions of this but would many disagree that an editor’s feeling is fundamental to the choice? What would it mean to disagree?) Overton’s system and collection was all a couple decades before Monroe Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt would give name to and attack the “affective fallacy.” Here feeling determined worth.
As much as Overton relies on his status as an editor who served million of readers, he does not place himself out of time. In fact, the timely nature of the stories distinguishes this collection. After explaining his criteria and the different volumes, Overton attacks the propensity of short story collections to rely on fiction from the distant past. Here elapsed time is not an indication of literary merit. It is this troubling “feeling that time has put its stamp of approval on the work of these writers of the past” that Overton shies away from, finding many collections “highly tedious and largely unreadable.”
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| One critic's complicated views re: Overton from The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life (Nov/Dec 1919) |
I can’t help but admire this line of thinking. I remember being at a bar once where an older white man had been discussing what he saw as the downfall of popular music. He dismissed Beyoncé with a disdainful tone, asking, “who will be listening to her in forty years, anyway?” While there will certainly be a whole chorus of people listening, the man’s imagination failed to even conceive of a world outside his own corporeal-auditory being.
I was also dumbfounded by the peculiar logic which drove that question. It was as though the man wanted to align his taste with a view that would look back at time, and through some historical gesture, authenticate his musical loves as the most appropriate. Taste turned into a game where one competed with history. This is not Overton’s interest.
Despite the claim to omniscience in the collection’s title, the brief introduction embraces the contingencies of taste. Overton is clear: this collection “cannot be the World’s 100 Best in 2027 any more than a collection made in 1827 could prove satisfactory now.” To assemble this collection is to make a statement about the contemporaneous time and culture.
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| Another view on Overton from The Hartford Courant (September 15, 1929) |
Culture is, as the scholar Stuart Hall describes, the “dialectic between conditions and consciousness" and thought we may share a few conditions of 1927, I'm not sure literary sensibility is one of them. I hope that in reading the collection now I can see what that kind of contingency looks like 90 years later.
Overton’s Overture will be a space to give quick and brief impressions on each of the stories as they are read on the day they are read. I will strive to write one post each weekday as I read these stories. Along the way I'll explore the structure behind the collection, the placement of each of these tales, and the frustration or exuberance of reading them now.
This will not be a hermitic space and it will not be a vestibule to life in 1927. Posts will not be concerned solely with what is in the text (as though the text wasn't already the result of a long process of creation, informed by politics, culture, and identity). This will be a place to reckon with these stories as they are organized. Overton’s Overture is a somewhat cheeky title but this blog will be a sort of blank notepad to work through this assembly of tales and try to figure out, “what it makes [me] feel.”
This will not be a hermitic space and it will not be a vestibule to life in 1927. Posts will not be concerned solely with what is in the text (as though the text wasn't already the result of a long process of creation, informed by politics, culture, and identity). This will be a place to reckon with these stories as they are organized. Overton’s Overture is a somewhat cheeky title but this blog will be a sort of blank notepad to work through this assembly of tales and try to figure out, “what it makes [me] feel.”
Whether Overton’s overture will work, we’ll just have to see and hear.
1 The Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn 1933 Vol 9 No 4↩
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