SIX
Which reminds me that for the most part I am rattling very old bones. Those seemingly unfruitful fourteen years are to-day at one with those other fourteen years which brought an elder Joseph into Egyptian publicity. Mr. Hergesheimer has “arrived”: his books have found their proper and appreciative audience; whereas his short stories are purchased, and probably read, along with the encomiums of ready-made clothing and safety razors, by the I forget how many million buyers of the world’s most popular magazine....
Now, here, I think, one finds stark provocations of uneasiness. I speak with diffidence, and am not entirely swayed, I believe, by the natural inclination of every writer to backbite his fellow craftsman. In any event, dismissing Gold and Iron (after some reflection) with unqualified applause, I take up The Happy End; and of the seven stories contained therein six seem to me to display a cornerstone of eminently “popular” psychology, ranging from the as yet sacrosanct belief that all Germans are perfectly horrid people, to the axiom that the quiet and unrespected youngest brother is invariably the one to exterminate the family enemies, and duly including the sentiment that noble hearts very often beat under ragged shirts. And I am made uneasy to see these uplifting faiths—these literary baking-powders more properly adapted to the Horrible Trites and the Gluepot Stews among reading-matter confectioners—thus utilized by a Joseph Hergesheimer.
I am made uneasy because I reason in this way: when Mr. Hergesheimer consciously is writing a short story to be printed next to advertising matter in some justly popular periodical, Mr. Hergesheimer, being rational and human, cannot but think of the subscribers to that popular periodical. I forget, I repeat, how many millions of them have been duly attested upon affidavit to exist, but certainly not many thousands of our fellow citizens can regard Mr. Hergesheimer at his best and purest with anything save bewildered abhorrence. So he must compromise,—subconsciously, I believe,—and must adapt his methods to the idiosyncrasies and limitations of his audience, very much as he probably refrains from addressing his cook in the heightened and consummated English of San Cristóbal de la Habana.
The danger is not that Joseph Hergesheimer will lower his ideals, nor in anything alter what he wishes to communicate; but is the fact that he must attempt to transmit these things into the vernacular and into the orbits of thought of his enormous audience, with the immaculate motive of making his ideas comprehensible. He cannot, being rational and human, but by and by be tempted yet further to endeavor—as he has flagrantly endeavored in the tale called Tol’able David—to convey his wayside apprehensions of life via some such always acceptable vehicle as the prehistoric fairy-tale cliché of the scorned and ultimately victorious third champion. This is with a vengeance the pouring of new wine into a usage-battered and always brazen cup which spoils the brew....
Six of these stories, then, are beautifully written moral tales: although, to be sure, there is an alleviating seventh, in The Flower of Spain, which is a well-nigh perfect and a profoundly immoral work of art. I therefore put aside this volume with discomfort....
But I suspect that here the axiomatic mutual jealousy of all authors should be discounted. As an “outsider” in letters, I cannot be expected quite to view with equanimity the recent installation of Mr. Hergesheimer in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, that august body wherein the other representatives of creative literature are such approved masters as Mr. Nelson Lloyd and Mr. Robert W. Chambers and Mr. L. Frank Tooker. At this port, with appropriate ceremony, has the skipper of The Happy End “arrived.” The fact has been formally recognized, by our most “solid” cultural element, that in artistic achievement Joseph Hergesheimer has but fifty living superiors, and only a hundred and ninety-nine equals at this moment resident in the United States: and I, who have not been tendered any such accolade, cannot but be aware of human twinges when Mr. Hergesheimer as a matter of course accepts this distinction.
So it is quite conceivably the impurest sort of envy and low-mindedness which causes me here to suspect alarming symptoms. I, in any event, put aside The Happy End with very real discomfort; and turn to the reflection that Mr. Hergesheimer has since written Linda Condon, which discomforts me quite as poignantly by exposing to me my poverty in phrases sufficiently noble to apply to this wholly admirable book.