O'Brien's Last

THE BEST SHORT STORIES, 1941--Edited by Edward J. O'Brien--Houghton Mifflin ($2.75).

The common people must love short stories; they read so many of them. But the late Edward Joseph Harrington O'Brien--who got out his first short-story anthology in 1915, and another every year thereafter--avoided as far as he could the short short stories which the common people read in popular magazines.

A poet, a critic, a tireless student of short fiction who never wrote a short story himself, O'Brien died in February, aged 50, at his home in Buckinghamshire, England. Thus The Best Short Stories, 1941 is his last anthology. The series will continue under the editorship of Martha Foley, co-editor (with Husband Whit Burnett) of Story, which was long a favorite hunting ground of O'Brien's for new writers and new ideas of short story technique.

O'Brien was often labeled arbitrary, faddish, "plot-shy," and he made no secret of his liking for Chekhovian sketches and vignettes with a narrative content approaching zero. One of the stories in this collection--by Arthur Kober, dialectician laureate of The Bronx--is just a monologue by an offensively smug hash-house proprietor. Many are written in the fashionable (since Hemingway) stark-simple style which, slightly overdone, approximates baby talk. Thus John Fante (A Nun No More): "My mother cried and cried night and day. They couldn't stop her. . . . Finally Grandma Toscana called the priest. . . . Right away she felt better. Next day she was better than ever. Next day she was swell. Pretty soon she was able to get out of bed. Then she moved around more. ..."

But some of the best entries have plots. A good one: Mary King's The White Bull, in which a farmer and his family declare war on a magnificent white Brahma bull owned by an uppish neighbor.

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