What, though, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually
unproductive “writing”? Those earlier stories have never been
printed, so that one perforce advances on a bridge of guesswork. But
certainly, in all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer’s
creative feats—with one exception duly noted hereinafter—there is a
patent 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,” is to
the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well 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 estimates, was then, just as it
seems to be to-day, to write for his own delectation—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, at any rate,
a kindred sense of beauty.... This, to be sure, is always a vain
aspiration. That which, in effusions such as this, we loosely talk
about as “beauty” probably 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.
“Beauty,” thus, is by the judicious conceded to be an unembodiable
thought, not even quite to be grasped by the mind; and certainly never
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 Mr. Hergesheimer was
attempting the preposterously impossible.