SEVEN
Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories, writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but when you have applied it without any grave reservation to Mr. Tarkington and Mr. Hergesheimer, and have given Mrs. Wharton a deservedly high rating for as many merits as seem possible to a woman writer, of what other American novelists can this pardonably be said by anybody save their publishers? No: the remainder of us, whatever and however weighty may be our other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing, to select and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary ingredients acceptably enough every now and then: and that is the utmost which honesty can assert.
But Mr. Hergesheimer always writes really well, once you have licensed his queer (and quite inexcusable) habit of so constantly interjecting proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer’s, pronoun refers.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise upon brick-making. Even so, I cannot but note in this place how discriminatingly Mr. Hergesheimer avoids the hurdles most commonly taken with strained leaps by the “stylist,” through Mr. Hergesheimer’s parsimony in the employment of similes; and how inexplicably he renders “anything from a chimneypot to the shoulders of a duchess” by—somehow—communicating the exact appearance of the thing described without evading the whole issue by telling you it is like something else.