Joseph Hergesheimer, an essay in interpretation

by James Branch Cabell

What, though, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually unproductive “writing”? Those earlier stories have never been printed, so that one perforce advances on a bridge of guesswork. But certainly, in all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer’s creative feats—with one exception duly noted hereinafter—there is a patent negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance, of any aiming toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young Hergesheimer labored toward the applause and cheques of a “best seller,” is to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well have been a motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the maker of reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick returns where the artist battens on immediate rejections.

No, Mr. Hergesheimer’s monomania, one estimates, was then, just as it seems to be to-day, to write for his own delectation—in large part because he could not help it, and in part with the hope of, somehow and some day, obtaining an audience with the same or, at any rate, a kindred sense of beauty.... This, to be sure, is always a vain aspiration. That which, in effusions such as this, we loosely talk about as “beauty” probably does not exist as a vital thing save here and there in the thoughts of not too many and not to be too seriously taken persons. In life, rather frequently, one appears to catch a glimpse of something of the sort just around the corner or over the way, but it is rarely, and perhaps never, actually at hand. Sometimes, of course, one seems about to incorporate the elusive thing into one’s daily living; and, striving, finds the attempt a grasping at an opalescent bubble, with the same small shock, the same disrupting disillusionment.

“Beauty,” thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable thought, not even quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly never nicely nor with any self-content to be communicated via the pages of a book, wherein are preserved, at best, the faded petals and the flattened crumbling stalks of what seemed lovely once to somebody who is as dead as are these desiccated relics of his ardor and of his disputable taste.

In brief, it may be granted—and by Mr. Hergesheimer most cheerfully of all persons—that during these fourteen years Mr. Hergesheimer was attempting the preposterously impossible.

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....