Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back, when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become—within the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between creative writers,—rather intimate....
But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.
It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer's writings, one should bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he has ever published.
The actual merit of the writing done during that period of "unavailability" is—here, at least—irrelevant. It is not the point of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile—of course—he had written another tale, which was much better than the first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....
And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made; and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing death-warrant of hope. And Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary things....
Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue, because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for fourteen years. Here I speak with curt decision as to a subject upon which I protest myself an authority.... This rôle, then, Joseph Hergesheimer did enact for fourteen years; and that is the fable's significant point.
§ 62
Yes, it is the boy's illogical pertinacity which is the fable's point, because that pertinacity at once 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, through every instant of their mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger Hergesheimer's "will to write," that wholly selfish and 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 once his own life was 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 bed-time arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
Those fourteen years explain to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those somewhat 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 despatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even in that treacherous instant of comminglement wherein the strongest of men must abate 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 artist remains (when luckiest) at silent feud with his current wife, because both are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks as an avocational interest. And the creative artist remains, at bottom, an anchorite whose actual living is given over to his diversions in a withdrawn and not over-wholesome country whereinto no other person can ever enter; and whence he, tired out for the while by his playing, deviates now and then into four-square existence—should it be only, we will say, to come down to his supper,—as a talking and laughing and amorous and blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons wander off into their dreams.