The Hergesheimerian panorama is, thus, if I may plagiarize a little, rather truer than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph Hergesheimer's pages arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that sustained by a myopic person when he puts on spectacles.... And thus, too, is an inoffensive tropic town fore-doomed to be a perennial source of disappointment to all tourists who have previously read San Cristóbal de la Habana,—that multi-colored sorcerous volume, with which I have here no instant concern,—and who, being magic-haunted, will over-rashly bring to rest upon a duly incorporated city, thriftily engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes unre-enforced.
§ 68
Such, then, were, and are yet, this artist's materials: in a world of extraordinary vividness a drama of high questing foiled, a tragedy of beauty sought, with many blunders but single-mindedly, by monomaniacs,—in fine, a performance suggestively allied, in its essentials, to the smaller-scaled and unaudienced drama of the young man with the percipient eyes of a painter, who throughout fourteen years was striving to visualize in words his vision of beauty; and who was striving to communicate that vision; and who—the tastes of the average man being that queer slovenly aggregation which makes the popular periodical popular, and the ostensible leaders of men being regular subscribers to the slatternly driveling host,—was striving in vain.
These things are but the raw materials, I repeat,—the bricks and mortar and the scantlings,—for, of course, there is in Joseph Hergesheimer's books far more than plot or thought, or even "style": there very often is that indescribable element which is magic.
When Linda Condon came to look closely at Pleydon's statue, you may remember, she noted in chief the statue's haunting eyes, and marveled to find them "nothing but shadows over two depressions." Much the equivalent of that is the utmost to which one can lay a crude finger in appraising the best of Mr. Hergesheimer's books. They are like other books in that they contain nothing more prodigious than words from the nearest dictionary put together upon ordinary paper.... But the eyes of Pleydon's statue—you may remember, too,—for all that they were only indentations in wet clay, "gazed fixed and aspiring into a hidden dream perfectly created by his desire." And viewing the statue, you were conscious of that dream, not of wet clay: and you were moved by the dream's loveliness as it was communicated, incommunicably, by Pleydon's art.
Now, at its purest, the art of the real Hergesheimer, the fundamental and essential thing about Joseph Hergesheimer, is just that intangible magic which he ascribes to his fictitious Pleydon. And the dream that Joseph Hergesheimer, too, has perfectly created by his desire, and has so often sought to communicate, I take to be "the old gesture toward the stars ... a faith spiritual, because, here, it is never to be won, never to be realized."
This is, I think, the "gesture" of the materially unproductive fourteen years: and its logic, either then or now, is indefensible. Still, one agrees with Cyrano, Mais quel geste! and one is conscious of "a warm indiscriminate thrill about the heart" and of a treacherous sympathy, which evades reason....
§ 69
It was through distrust of this beguiling sympathy that, when I first wrote elsewhere about Mr. Hergesheimer, I spoke throughout with self-restraint, and hedged with "I think" and "I believe" and "It seems to me," and niggled over Hergesheimerian faults that were certainly tiny and possibly non-existent; because of my private suspicion that all my private notions about Joseph Hergesheimer were probably incorrect. To me, I confess, he did at that time appear a phenomenon a little too soul-satisfying to be entirely credible.
Pure reason did not brevet it as plausible that the Hergesheimer I privately found in the pages of the Hergesheimer books could flourish in any land wherein the creative writer is as a rule condemned to choose between becoming the butt or the buttress of mediocrity; so that I must cautiously refrain from quite believing in this Joseph Hergesheimer as a physical manifestation in actual trousers and waistcoat.... Indeed, his corporeal existence could not well be conceded except upon the hypothesis that America had produced, and was even nourishing, a literary artist who might endure in the first rank. Which was absurd, of course, and a contention not to be supported this side of Bedlam, and, none the less, was my firm private belief.