Yet Mr. Hergesheimer, even in the least worthy of his magazine stories,
writes really well. The phrase has an inadequate ring: but when you
have applied it without any grave reservation to Mr. Tarkington and
Mr. Hergesheimer, and have given Mrs. Wharton a deservedly high rating
for as many merits as seem possible to a woman writer, of what other
American novelists can this pardonably be said by anybody save their
publishers? No: the remainder of us, whatever and however weighty may
be our other merits, can manage, in this matter of sheer writing,
to select and arrange our adjectives and verbs and other literary
ingredients acceptably enough every now and then: and that is the
utmost which honesty can assert.
But Mr. Hergesheimer always writes really well, once you have licensed
his queer (and quite inexcusable) habit of so constantly interjecting
proper names to explain to whom his, Hergesheimer’s, pronoun
refers.... Perhaps I here drift too remotely into technicalities, and
tend to substitute for a consideration of architecture a treatise
upon brick-making. Even so, I cannot but note in this place how
discriminatingly Mr. Hergesheimer avoids the hurdles most commonly
taken with strained leaps by the “stylist,” through Mr. Hergesheimer’s
parsimony in the employment of similes; and how inexplicably he
renders “anything from a chimneypot to the shoulders of a duchess”
by—somehow—communicating the exact appearance of the thing described
without evading the whole issue by telling you it is like something
else.