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 five novels varies from this formula.
Anthony Ball, of _The Lay Anthony_, strives toward the beauty of
chastity—not morally concerned one way or the other, but resolute 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 there is in
_Mountain Blood_ 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 foredoomed) 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 be
sought; 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.