Joseph Hergesheimer, an Essay in Interpretation

Joseph Hergesheimer, an Essay in Interpretation

James Branch Cabell interprets Joseph Hergesheimer’s work through the reported fourteen years in which Hergesheimer wrote without finding magazine acceptance. Cabell considers this persistence the key to Hergesheimer’s imagination: his men are driven by a single, consuming desire toward a definite but unattainable end, while his women are remote, ornamental, and often valued as embodiments or trophies of beauty rather than as intimate companions. Cabell attributes this separation partly to the lonely artistic vocation, which leaves little room for a woman’s equal participation. Hergesheimer’s central aim, Cabell argues, was never popularity but the attempt to write for his own delight and to find readers responsive to a kindred sense of beauty. Since beauty is elusive, impossible fully to embody or communicate, this aspiration is inherently vain; yet its futile grandeur becomes the pattern of the novels. In The Lay Anthony, Anthony Ball seeks chastity for the sake of a dead girl. In Mountain Blood, Gordon Makimmon pursues atonement and dies broken before attaining it. The three black Pennys follow a destructive passion. In Java Head, several people seek differing forms of beauty, suffering bodily and spiritual ruin. These novels repeat the drama of high striving defeated by Age or Death, much as Hergesheimer’s early efforts met rejection. Cabell judges Linda Condon Hergesheimer’s finest and loveliest novel. Linda lacks deep attachment to mother, lover, husband, children, and ordinary life, but possesses extraordinary physical beauty. She treats her body as a sacred temporary dwelling of beauty, a divinity demanding sacrifice and indifferent to ordinary morality. Time destroys her beauty, but Pleydon’s bronze statue preserves her youthful perfection. Linda can therefore accept age and insignificance, knowing that beauty has endured through art. Cabell sees her as shrine, priestess, martyr, and abandoned sanctuary of beauty. Cabell is disturbed by most of the stories in The Happy End, except The Flower of Spain. He finds six stories dependent on popular moral formulas: wicked Germans, noble hearts under ragged shirts, and the overlooked youngest brother who defeats family enemies. He fears that writing for a mass magazine audience may lead Hergesheimer to express his perceptions through familiar clichés, as in Tol’able David. Yet he admits that envy may color this judgment, especially after Hergesheimer’s public recognition and admission to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Gold and Iron receives unqualified applause, while Linda Condon restores Cabell’s admiration. Whatever his occasional concessions to popular psychology, Hergesheimer always writes well. Cabell praises his exact handling of language, his relative avoidance of similes, and his ability to convey the precise look of objects directly. Hergesheimer’s art is intensely visual and sensuous: people, clothing, furniture, bric-à-brac, weather, interiors, colors, and textures are rendered with minute clarity. This concentration on surfaces may be unlike ordinary perception, but it gives his work a heightened reality, “a little truer than truth,” like the sharpened vision of a myopic person wearing spectacles. His background as a painter survives in this vivid external world. For Cabell, however, Hergesheimer’s achievement exceeds plot, thought, and style. His essential quality is an intangible magic, like the dream suggested by Pleydon’s statue though it consists only of clay and shadows. Hergesheimer repeatedly creates “the old gesture toward the stars”: a spiritual faith in an ideal that can never be won or realized. Cabell admires the audacity of that gesture, while cautiously refusing final certainty about Hergesheimer’s future. He believes Hergesheimer may endure among the first rank of literary artists if public success and the friendly advice of Philistia do not induce compromise.

By James Branch Cabell · First published 1921 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Critical Essay, Author Study · 10 chapters · 5,334 words

First lines

So say they, speak they, and tell they the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into "author's proof. " And the tale tells how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.

It is my belief that in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer's work 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 thus far published.

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literary criticism · author study · American modernism · early twentieth-century literature · aestheticism · the pursuit of beauty · unattainable ideals · artistic vocation · creative perseverance · literary rejection · public success and artistic compromise · the artist versus mass culture

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More by James Branch Cabell