The Borzoi 1920

by Inc. Alfred A. Knopf

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

By Wilson Follett

I

When Mr. Knopf asked me to pay my brief respects to Joseph Hergesheimer, he must have been aware that I had not the material for an intimate portrait. He and my other readers must forgive me, then, if what I shall have to say tallies rather better with the exigencies of formal public criticism than with the more delightful convenances of this altogether jolly family party. After all, there is a certain advantage—especially for a person of amiably weak will—in knowing an author’s public aspects better than his private and personal. I cannot profess to be of those austere souls who can criticize the book of a friend as if he were not a friend, or, knowing and liking a man, can read or appraise his books uninfluenced by a charm which would still exist even if the books did not. Because of this distrusted weakness of my own temper, I insist on being glad that I never met or even saw Joseph Hergesheimer until “The Three Black Pennys” had become a solid part of my awareness of things—the things that do most richly signify. I never had any reason to think well—or ill—of this author until the Pennys and “Gold and Iron” had exerted their swift effortless compulsion. Even now, I can lay claim to no more than what the biographic essayist calls, in his standard idiom, a “literary friendship”—meaning thereby the occasional exchange of abysmally polite letters on purely impersonal subjects or personal subjects impersonally dealt with.

II

Yet even I have my one sufficiently quaint, sufficiently spicy reminiscence. And meet it is I set it down—partly because it seems too precious to die, even more because otherwise, as time shuffles the cards of our mortal anecdotage, it will be sure to turn up, with only the substitution of one name for another, as part of the mythos surrounding the late Jack London, or Richard Harding Davis, or some still flourishing nominee for an epitaph and an official biography.

It was three o’clock of a rainy summer morning in 1918. Hergesheimer and your present scribe were sleeping—or rather we were not—in the twin beds of a guest-room at San-Souci, in Hartsdale. A Nox Ambrosiana had been put behind us, and, we fatuously supposed, a few hours of ambrosial sleep lay ahead. It had been a great night, dedicated to much fine talk of Art, and as free from “the posings and pretensions of art” as Conrad’s Preface to “The Nigger.” But that is not the story.

Somewhere in the blackness under our opened windows, vocal in his forlornness, was Bistri, the flesh-and-blood original of the borzoi whose mere inadequate outline appears on a really amazing proportion of the most distinguished books now being published in These United States—or, if your literary capital be Arnold Bennett’s, Those United States. This Bistri, a perfectly incredible yet perfectly actual milk-white creature of enormous size, decorative as a dryad, but possessed of something less than half a gill of brains within his extremely dolichocephalic head, was frank to assert—and reiterate—his disapproval of the pelting rain and his cynical disillusionment in respect to the kindly graces of humankind. The sound was like the ululating whimper of a punished child, only it hinted no promise of subsiding, ever.

Genius, supine in the dark across the room, grew first restive, then indignant, then furious, and thence, passing round the circle of exhausted emotions, came back by the way of despair to a disgusted silence. Not so Bistri: silence was the last thing to fall within the orbit of his intentions, so long as the Master and Maker of dogs vouchsafed him breath and being. Gradually the silence of genius, there across the room, acquired a subtly grim texture. When next the voice of genius spoke, it was tensely, with suppressed ferocity, as through clenched teeth. What it said was this: “I’ll bet Scribner has got no such damned dog.”

The rest, after Gargantuan laughter, was silence.... Ah, but was it, quite? Or did the speaker of these words, also deeming them too precious to die, retail them at late breakfast to the mistress of the borzoi, even as their sole hearer presently reported them at earlier breakfast to the borzoi’s master? It would be interesting to know—and not very surprising either way.

III

So far the record of a personal and temperamental susceptibility, of some incidental interest, perhaps, to the curious. What remains to speak of is the deeper susceptibility of which Mr. Hergesheimer’s books are the record, and which runs through all his public work, a determining law and a binding continuum; that enormous and delicate susceptibility to sights, sounds, forms, colours, movements, aspects, which is at once his purpose and his effect, his unconscious excuse for being and his conscious claim to self-justification. He might say, in the words of a document already referred to, and important in the history of fictional art: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”

We can all see now, with the glib wisdom of after the event, that Mr. Hergesheimer’s career before its one sharp early break is—comparatively—all promise, and after that break—comparatively—all performance. In “The Lay Anthony” and “Mountain Blood” one finds a slight uneasiness or unevenness of recital, the result, I think, of a subconscious attempt to make the manner dignify and sanction two performances not, in matter, quite good enough to receive that ultimate sanction, style. With and after “The Three Black Pennys,” and very specially in “Java Head” and “Wild Oranges,” which remain thus far the masterpieces of perfect formal integrity, this discrepancy is lost from the reckoning. The artist has an exigent discrimination of that which is good enough for him to touch, and his touch upon it is exquisite.

But in one respect, the betrayal of a born artist’s susceptibility, the works of promise are at one with the works of performance. The man who could not help going out of his way, in “The Lay Anthony,” to allude to “Heart of Darkness” as “the most beautiful story of our time,” was simply predestined to write a book of which susceptibility to beauty should actually be the theme—as he did in “Linda Condon.” And the man who, in “Java Head,” achieved so supreme a saturation with the aromas and essences of loveliness, had prefigured his own future when, in “Mountain Blood,” he wrote: “The barrier against which he still fished was mauve, the water black; the moon appeared buoyantly, like a rosy bubble blown upon a curtain of old blue velvet.”

Just here, in the crystallization of his own sensitivity into the objective forms of beauty, lies the peculiar distinction of Hergesheimer. It is an aristocratic distinction. It is, if you go by the counting of tastes, a distinctly un-American trait. This fact it is, rather than any less fundamental consideration, which explains—even if it does not justify—those critics who even before they discover how to divide his name properly into syllables, discover that there is something slightly exotic about him. Exotic or autochthonous—what does it matter? The point is, Mr Hergesheimer’s power “to make you hear, to make you feel ... before all, to make you see” is the condition of his success as a coiner of beauty. It is also his way, whatever way another artist may take, to reveal to us those glimpses of deep truth for which we may, indeed, have forgotten to ask, but for which, once they are opened to our sight, we can never forget to be grateful.

ON DRAWING[^[1]]

By A. P. Herbert

It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing as well as it can be known.

The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials. An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much artistic pleasure—except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.

Much the best committees from the point of view of material are committees about business which meet at business premises—shipping offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.

Fig. 1

When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away, the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.

Fig. 2

As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. 1).

When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where the eye goes. If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye (Fig. 2).

Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a gamble. Personally, I go in for strong heads (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads; they make it so difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck.

The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4).

I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you can’t go back; not unless you are on a very good committee which provides india-rubber as well as pencils.

Fig. 4

Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy and black, or lightish and thin. It depends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up better (Fig. 5).

Until one draws hair one never realizes what large heads people have. Doing the hair takes the whole of a speech, usually, even one of the chairman’s speeches.

Fig. 5

This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place. And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.

I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing. Sometimes I draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is always a dud.

There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a low forehead and beetling brows—a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a powerful face. The one on the left was meant to be another Bolshevik, arguing with him. But he has turned out to be a lady, so I have had to give her a “bun.” She is a lady solicitor; but I don’t know how she came to be talking to the Bolshevik.

Fig. 6

When you have learned how to do Men, the only other things in Drawing are Perspective and Landscape.

Fig. 7

PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).

I have put in a fence as well.

LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most amusing, especially fluffy trees.

Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8

Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.

But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like this through.

There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a man front-face. It can’t be done.

A NOTE ON THE CHINESE POEMS TRANSLATED BY ARTHUR WALEY[^[2]]

By Joseph Hergesheimer

It is the special province of poetry, as of charming women, to delight rather than afford the more material benefits. Nothing could be vainer than putting either of them to the rude uses of life; they are the essence of aristocracy; and the indifference, the contempt really, with which the mass of people regard poetic measures, and conversely, the disdain of charm for the whole common body of opinion, show clearly the wide separation between prosaic fact and fancy. The former has the allegiance of the mob, as it should, since, without imaginative sensibility, the mechanical process of existence is a stupid multiplication of similar instincts; while fancy, poetry, beauty, the properties of delicate minds and aspirations, are, by the very qualities necessary to their being, limited to a select few.

There were ages, long submerged now by the obliterating tide of progress, when poetry was, generally, a force in men’s lives; and then, as well, women’s beauty was held above their mere animality; but the levelling democracy of Christian religions, lending a new power to the resentment and suspicions of congregations of the inferior, ended perhaps for ever reigns of distinction. Yet, ironically, while sects vanished over night and fanatics were denied even the final distinction of martyrdom, while great empires sank leaving no ripple on the surface of memory, stray lines of wanton poetry, the record of lovely bodies, remained imperishable.

They were deathless—such frivolities as the Trojan Helen and the words Sappho strung from her loneliness—because they were the inalienable property of the heart ... the clamorous dogmas were nothing more than the pretentions of anthropomorphic vanity. But that, with its tinsel promises and brimstone threats, a sentimental melodrama, gathered the audiences, the credulity, of humanity, and left unattended the heroic performance of naked beauty. This, at its best, was a sheer cool cutting of marble; but there was another beauty, hardly inferior, where embroidered garments and carmine and jade, both hid and revealed less simple but scarcely less significant emotions.

For this reason, while Ionic Greece is no longer a part of modern consciousness, the poem written by the sixth emperor of the Han dynasty, perhaps two thousand years ago, is identical with the present complex troubled mind: an autumn wind rises and white clouds fly, the grass and trees wither, geese go south—sadly he remembers his love and the pagoda-boat on the Fēn River. That, particularly, is the singular validity of the Chinese poems translated by Mr. Waley; page after page they are the mirror of the splintered colours, the tragic apprehensions and sharp longing, of a later unhappiness. Already, then, China was old and civilized, its philosophers had analysed hope into maxims of stoical and serene conduct; and its poetry was written in an unsurpassable dignity of repression.

The latest imagery, nothing in the world if not visual in perceptions of utmost fragile truth, is not so acute in observation and artifice as the song, in the second century, of Sung Tzu-hou. (She sees the fruit trees in blossom and, forgetting about her silkworms, begins to pluck the branches.) And no contemporary, it may be no Western, poet has approached the reflective cadences, the refrain of memory steeped in longing, that gives the lines of Po Chü-i their magic semblance to the wistful and fleet realities of mind. He has, but in greater degree, Verlaine’s power to invest lovely frivolities with permanence; an ability Arthur Symons occasionally brushed. His Old Harp, of cassia-wood and jade stops and rose-red strings, neglected for the Ch’iang flute and the Ch’in flageolet, vibrates with a tenderness of ancient forgotten melodies beyond any evocation of the Fêtes Galantes.

The poetry of those dynasties and men, however, aside from everything else, is made timeless, for us, by the celebration of its women, the wives, the concubines, the dancers of Hantan. They were, objectively, inconceivably different from the woman of today; yet the passions, the fidelity, they inspired, a little attenuated by the dust of centuries, are precisely the same which the heart retains. The Chinese women have always served an ideal of personal beauty, of correct formality, transcending any other: in May their satins are worked with the blossoms of spring and in October with chrysanthemums. Socially they occupied the women’s gardens—a position now regarded with contempt—but they were not, because of that, inferior. They dominated the masculine imagination and provided, together with music, the recompense of existence checkered by the dark squares of fate.

There are, too, as many wives praised as dancers summoned, as much constancy as there is incontinent pleasure. An emperor sends to all parts of China for wizards, hoping that they may bring back the spirit of his mistress. The General Su An, absent on service, begs the woman with whom his hair was plaited not to forget the time of their love and pride. Indeed, on the other side, in the poetry there is a marked restraint: the dancers are a stiff frieze in peacock blues and orange and gold behind the fragrant vapours of incense.

All is tranquillized, even the battle pieces are softened as though in distance, and the satire, often pungent and universal, is subdued by the realization of its uselessness. There is wine, in cups and jars, and drunkenness: Po Chü-i returns home, leaning heavily on a friend, at yellow dusk; but there are no raised voices or disturbance; and, soothed by the swallows about the beams, a candle flame in the window, the moon crowning the tide, he hears only the music of flutes and strings. There are roc and phoenix and red jungle fowl, ibis and cranes and wild swan along the river; women with bright lips sway to the silver tapping of their bells, ladies, long of limb, enter with side glances under moth eye-brows, and after them others with faces painted white, their deep sleeves reeking with scent. But they are only momentary; they are left, plucking vainly at the coats of those who will not stay, and the pure dawn holds a mango-bird singing among flowers.

They are poems that dwell on the green of mulberry trees and fields of hemp, on the oxen in the village streets, the burnished pools of carp, the lotus banks and rice furrows and glittering fret of snow. And there, equally, they are completely in the mood, or, rather, perfections of the attempted mood, of the present. In English lyrical poetry alone, and that, except for John Masefield, the beauty of yesterday and not today, have the settings of life been so beautifully refashioned. An ability of long habited lands; for its power is not in described nature, but the love of a particular soil—feathery bamboo at the door, a hollow of daffodils, are symbols not so much of recurrent seasons as of a deep-rooted passionate attachment for the city of Lo-yang or for the Devon sod. Without sincerity of human emotion words are no better than broken coloured glass.