TWO
Yes, it is the boy’s illogical pertinacity that is the fable’s point, because it so plausibly explains why nearly all the men in Mr. Hergesheimer’s books are hag-ridden by one or another sole desire which spurs them toward a definite goal at every instant of their mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger Hergesheimer’s “will to write,” that unconquerable will. To Mr. Hergesheimer, even to-day, it probably seems natural that a man’s whole living should be devoted to the attaining of one desire quite clearly perceived, because his own life has been thus dedicated. The more shrewd mass of practical persons that go about in flesh are otherwise; and comfortably fritter through the day, with no larger objective at any time in mind than the catching of a car, the rounding off of a business transaction, the keeping of an engagement for luncheon, and the vesperal attendance to some unmental form of recreation, with one small interest displacing another in endless succession, until bedtime arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
It explains to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those troublingly ornamental odalisques. They are fine costly toys, tricked out in curious tissues: and, waiting for the strong male’s leisure, they smile cryptically. They will divert him by and by, when the day’s work is dispatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in the instant of comminglement wherein the strongest man abates reserve: but their moment is not daylit, for the Hergesheimer women are all-incongruous with what is done during office hours, nor are they to be valued then. Sometimes they are embodied ideals, to be sure, remotely prized as symbols or else grasped as trophies to commemorate the nearing of the goal: but for the most part they rank candidly as avocational interests. I find nowhere in Joseph Hergesheimer’s stories any record of intimacy and confidence between a man and a woman.... And this too, I think, reflects that all-important formative fourteen years wherein, whatever may have been Mr. Hergesheimer’s conduct of his relatively unimportant physical life, his fundamental concernments were pursued in a realm, of necessity, uninhabited by women. Indeed, no woman can with real content permit the man whom she proprietorially cherishes to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and she cannot but secretly regard his visits thereto as a personal slight. So the creative literary artist is (when luckiest) at silent feud with his women, because the two are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks necessarily as an avocational interest.