MR. HERGESHEIMER

Balisand. By Joseph Hergesheimer. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) (All Mr. Hergesheimer's English editions are published by Messrs. Heinemann.) Tim time has come when one cannot very well review a new book by Mr. Hergesheimer- without comparing it with the

general body of his work. If Balisand came on one out of the blue, one would probably say it was an excellent novel and leave it at that. But when one compares it with his earlier work, and still more, with what the reader of his earlier work

expected him to come to do, a little elaboration is necessary. Mr. Hergesheimer has one quality which still distinguishes him from the ordinary competent novelist. It is a quality at first sight unimportant, at first sight simply a trick of

technique, but one which seems curiously more significant than its face value would • suggest. I mean, the power of actual sensory manipulation of the reader's mind, combined with a certain, though by no means faultless, sense of mental rhythm. The author's material is no more words than the artist's is paint : form cannot be abstracted, there must be material. In the case of the painter it is space and colour ; in the case of the writer, the poet, it is sensory image and idea. Before one can create literary form one must have the power of creating vivid and diverse sensory impression and idea ; and having that power, one must have, too, areanum illud—a pregnant (as opposed to a merely dis- ciplinary) sense of form ; by which I do not at all mean that tape-measure 'practice commonly called construction.

Now, the first essential, you might say, is just a trick of technique. It can almost be formulated. Keats says

" I found Was as merry, That the ground That a cherry

Was as hard, Was as red,

That a yard That load Was as long, Was as weighty, That a song That four-score was as eighty,"

i.e., that to create a vivid sensory impression one must attack all the senses at once, not just sight or sound alone : give it dimension, as it were. It sounds an easy rule to follow ;

but it is a curious fact that it is a rule no one seems able, to learn. They either have it by nature, or their attempts to follow it are clumsy and ineffectual.

And, when one comes to form, one sees the same thing. One can analyse the construction of a work, but one cannot analyse its form. Form is composed of spacial relations too intricate, too multi-dimensional, and too progressive for calculation. If one cannot ultimately formularize vividness, to formularize form is even more obviously impossible.

I call mental rhythm " multi-dimensional " because it reacts - and interlocks in all the different planes (or I should say, dimensions) of mental process. There must be no contra- diction ; taking a section in any direction, as it were, there

must be no fault fundable. This is a consummation in itself organic, and can only take place outside the actual conscious mind. It lies largely, of course, in the innumerable impli- cations of words which the artist sub-consciously appreciates and which makes words as lively to him as young birds in his hand. This power seems at present possessed by a very few of our younger poets, but by practically- no living prose writers ; for prose is a complicated and protracted business, and it is almost bound sooner or later to break down, even

if it has ever been present ; and most of them have no inkling of

Now, this power Mr. Hergesheimer showed to a certain extent in one of his earliest novels, Mountain Blood. It was in many ways a bad novel ; but it showed signs that the author had in him this essential power, both of the creation and correlation of vividness. In Balisand his general technical ability has immensely increased ; it is, as I said at the beginning, in the ordinary sense an excellent novel. But in the essential quality of artistry the improvement is very slight, and almost overshadowed by the more workaday sort of improvement. It is still only at times, that Mr. Hergesheimer's work is, in the sense I have indicated, art. He can still be vivid :- " It must be nearly five,' he calculated. There was the beginning of dusk in the cornet s of the room. Outside, the gnus was chemically green. A hound whimpered in his sleep. Then the dogs moved uneasily : they rose one after the other, and stocd in attitudes-of attention, their muzzles lifted."

He does that again and again ; but it is only here and there that one finds evidence of a really creative sense of form. It is shown, for instance, at the beginning of Part IH., where the description of Richard Bale's quiet family life is fully significantly correlated to what came before and after. But elsewhere, though the construction is good, the form is weak.

Meanwhile, there have been such books as Linda Condon —which not only lacked form and vividness, but was badly' constructed too. For in this book (although he- plainly struggled against it) Mr. Hergesheimer obviously lost his head at the spectacle of a young growing girl and her clothes and reactions : he let his mind wander among thew loosely, and finally added the story of the next thirty, years of, her life,as a. rather colourless and uninteresting afterthought. In Java Head and The Three Black Pennys, probably the most famous of his books, the construction is very much better ; but Tara Head, the better of the two, shows his ultimate weakness most. In it he has bitten off a great deal more than he can chew ; a

brilliant theme is wasted through a lack of strenuousness in his imagination. He has not, and therefore cannot reproduce, a really convincing conception of the character of Gerrit's Chinese wife, Taou Yuen, and so the whole thing, when weighed, is found wanting.

Cytherea is a book of much the same quality as Linda

Condon, though lacking the slight element of suppressed hys- teria in the latter. It is a quiet, psychological study of middle- aged erotics, of no particular moment except to the ordinary reader. The Lay Anthony is also somewhat similar : it is a study in sexual psychology, technically efficient and readable, but also markedly lacking in those gleams of Mr. Herges- heimer's peculiar excellences. The Bright Shawl, on the other hand, is more of the same kind of book as Beim d in its merits ; but its chief defect is the same as the defect of Java Head. Its theme is of a sensitive young American, used to a life of security, being plunged into a life of perpetual political conspiracy and acute perpetual physical danger. There again, as in Java- Head, the theme is admirable .; but it just fails because Mr. Hergesheimer has not quite enough imagination fully to realize the implications of the theme. He shows his young man getting gradually more and more efficient, callous of danger in the light of his idee fixe of Cuban Independence ;, what he does not show is the full effect that this would have had on the young man's mind—the inevitable losses, tempera- mentally, as well as gains. (Indeed, this question of the effects of physical danger has probably never been quite properly treated.) The defect in The Bright Shawl is not so noticeable as in Java Head, because he is at least dealing with a man of his own nation and nature ; but it is the same lack which makes Charles Abbott a little thin that made Taou Yuen a mere puppet.

But to come back to Balisand. It is, as I have said, in many ways a most excellent novel ; it is only the expectation which Mr. Hergesheimer aroused in his earlier works of being a great man in the poetic sense that makes one a little disappointed in it. Those who simply sum up Mr. Hergesheimer as a local- colourist, and laugh at his foible for the description, in season and out, of dress, grossly underrate him. He is a writer of very great ability, and, at times, of something more. But it now looks as if, however much his technique improves, he will never attain any really new extension of spiritual power ; his future work will be admirable, but calculable. He is likely' to be a better novelist, but not a greater one.

RICHARD HUGHES. -