Now this non-employment of time-approved devices seems even the more
remarkable when you consider how intensely Joseph Hergesheimer realizes
the sensuous world of his characters and, in particular, the optic
world. He is the most insistently superficial of all writers known to
me, in his emphasis upon shapes and textures and pigments.
His people are rendered from complexion to coat-tail buttons, and
the reader is given precisely the creasing of each forehead and the
pleating of their under-linen. Mr. Hergesheimer’s books contain whole
warehousefuls of the most carefully finished furniture in literature;
and at quaint bric-à-brac he has no English equal. It is all visioned,
moreover, very minutely. Joseph Hergesheimer makes you observe his
chairs and panelings and wall-papers and window-curtains with an
abnormal scrutiny. The scenery and the weather, too, are “done” quite
as painstakingly, but these are indigenous to ordinary novels.
Now of course, like virtually every other practise of “realism,” this
is untrue to life: nobody does in living regard adjacent objects as
attentively as the reader of a Hergesheimer story is compelled to note
them. For one, I cannot quite ignore this fact, even when I read with
most delight: and I sometimes wonder if Mr. Hergesheimer premeditatedly
sits down to study an andiron or a fan for literary use, or whether his
personal existence is actually given over to this concentration upon
externals and inanimate things. But he was once a painter; and large
residuals of the put-by art survive.
All this results, of course, in a “style” to which the reader is never
quite oblivious. The Hergesheimer dramas—dramas wherein each of the
players has a slight touch of fever—are enacted, with a refining hint
of remoteness, behind the pellucid crystal of this “style,” which
sharpens outlines, and makes colors more telling than they appear to
everyday observation, and brings out unsuspected details (seen now for
the first time by the reader, with a pleasurable shock of delight), and
just noticeably glazes all.
The Hergesheimerian panorama is, if I may plagiarize, a little truer
than truth: and to turn from actual life to Joseph Hergesheimer’s pages
arouses a sensation somewhat akin to that sustained by a myopic person
when he puts on spectacles...
And thus is a quite inoffensive tropic town foredoomed to be a
perennial source of disappointment to all tourists who have previously
read _San Cristóbal de la Habana_,—that multi-colored sorcerous
volume, with which we have here no immediate concern,—and who, being
magic-haunted, will over-rashly bring to bear upon a duly incorporated
city, thriftily engaged in the tobacco and liquor-business, their eyes
unre-enforced.