ONE
So say they, speak they, and tell they the tale, in “literary gossip,” that Joseph Hergesheimer “wrote” for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into “author’s proof.” And the tale tells how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited.
It is my belief that in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer’s work one should bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he has thus far published.
The actual merit of the writing done during that period of “unavailability” is—here, at least—irrelevant. It is not the point of the fable that he high-heartedly wrote a story to which, when completed, his unbiased judgment could not quite honestly deny such deference as is due to a literary masterpiece; and which, through some odd error, was rejected by a magazine that every month was publishing vastly inferior stories; and which was later declined by another magazine, and by a host of magazines, with a dispiriting bland unanimity not unsuggestive of editorial conspiracy. Meanwhile—of course—he had written another tale, which was much better than the first, and which proved to be an equally faithful chaperon of return postage. So story followed story, each dreeing the same weird....
And he used to wait for the postman, no doubt, and to note from afar that it was a large envelope; and would open the damned thing with a faint hope that perhaps they just wanted some slight changes made; and would find only the neat, impersonal, and civilly patronizing death-warrant of hope. So Joseph Hergesheimer kept on with his foolishness, without any gleam of success, or even (they report) any word of encouragement. And doubtless his relatives said the customary things....
Yet none of these circumstances, either, is the point of the apologue, because in all save one detail the comedy has been abraded into pointlessness by over-constant repetition; and is, of course, being futilely performed at this moment in one prefers not to reflect how many thousand homes. The leading rôle, though, is too unprofitable and irksome for any quite sane person to persist in enacting it for fourteen years. This Joseph Hergesheimer did: and that is the fable’s significant point.