§ 63
What, though, the dull may wonder, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually unproductive "writing"? Since those first stories have not ever been printed, one may here seem to advance on a bridge of guesswork. Yet really, to the considerate, the answer is plain. In all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer's earlier creative feats—with one exception duly noted hereinafter,—you observe perforce an overt 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" becomes to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well, indeed, 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 perceives, was then to write for his own diversion. He was then playing all the while at the game the artist must always play: and doubtless he also, like the most of his confrères in diversion, devised extremely imposing titles for his self-indulgence. But the point is that here, for fourteen years, the one possible incentive for the boy to go on writing was that he enjoyed doing it. The point is that Joseph Hergesheimer, whatever his voiced pretexts or his actual intentions, gave over these fourteen years to an attestation of the fact that the main and the all-absorbing purpose of literary art is to divert the literary artist.
Some by-products in the way of minor gains, he, questionless, might look for as he went about his playing with words, and gave all to the game which he played 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 a kindred sense of beauty.... This hope, to be sure, seems always a vain aspiration: and that which we loosely talk about as "beauty" perhaps 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. And "beauty," thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable thought, never quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly not ever 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 young Joseph Hergesheimer diverted himself by attempting the self-evidently impossible.
§ 64
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 Hergesheimer novels has varied from this formula, from the first published of them to the current Balisand....
Anthony Ball, of The Lay Anthony, strives toward the beauty of chastity,—not morally concerned one way or the other, but bent 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, in Mountain Blood is 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 fore-doomed) 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 become one's diversion from all other interests; 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....
Nor does the dénouement differ, either, in any of these novels: the postman comes with the plethoric envelope which signals from afar that the result of much high-hearted striving is not quite suited to the present needs of this world's editor; and sometimes the postman is Age, but more often he is Death.