FOUR
Now, to my thinking, there is something curiously similar to that unreasonable endeavor to be found in all the Hergesheimer novels. Here always I find portrayed, with an insistency and a reiteration to which I seem to detect a queer analogue in the writings of Christopher Marlowe, men laboring toward the unattainable, and a high questing foiled. No one of the five novels varies from this formula.
Anthony Ball, of The Lay Anthony, strives toward the beauty of chastity—not morally concerned one way or the other, but resolute to preserve his physical purity for the sake of a girl whose body, he finds at last, has long ago been ravished by worms. Again there is in Mountain Blood no hint of moral-mongering—for Mr. Hergesheimer is no more concerned with moral values than is the Decalogue—when Gordon Makimmon toils toward the beauty of atonement, to die in all a broken man, with his high goal yet gleaming on the horizon untouched. The three black Pennys flounder toward the beauty of a defiant carnal passion, which through the generations scorches and defiles, and burns out futilely by and by, leaving only slag where the aspiring lovely fire was. And through the formal garden ways of Java Head pass feverishly at least five persons who struggle (and fretfully know their failure to be foredoomed) toward the capturing of one or another evincement of beauty, with the resultant bodily demolishment of three of them and the spiritual maiming of the others.
That which one, for whatever reason, finds most beautiful must be sought; it is a goal which one seeks futilely, and with discomfort and peril, but which one seeks inevitably: such is the “plot” of these four novels. Such is also, as I need hardly say, the “plot” of the aforementioned fourteen years wherein not anything tangible was achieved except the consuming of youth and postage....
Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the present needs of this world’s editor; and sometimes the postman is Age, but more often he is Death.