Yes, it is the boy’s illogical pertinacity that is the fable’s point,
because it so plausibly 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 at every instant of their
mimic lives. These men but variously reflect, I take it, that younger
Hergesheimer’s “will to write,” that 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 his own life has been 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 bedtime
arrives and the undertaker tucks them in.
It explains to me the Hergesheimer women, too, those 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 dispatched, maintaining their own thoughts inviolate, even
in the instant of comminglement wherein the strongest man abates
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 literary artist is (when luckiest) at silent feud with his
women, because the two are perpetually irritated by the failure of
their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks necessarily as an
avocational interest.