JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
By Wilson Follett
I
When Mr. Knopf asked me to pay my brief respects to Joseph Hergesheimer, he must have been aware that I had not the material for an intimate portrait. He and my other readers must forgive me, then, if what I shall have to say tallies rather better with the exigencies of formal public criticism than with the more delightful convenances of this altogether jolly family party. After all, there is a certain advantage—especially for a person of amiably weak will—in knowing an author's public aspects better than his private and personal. I cannot profess to be of those austere souls who can criticize the book of a friend as if he were not a friend, or, knowing and liking a man, can read or appraise his books uninfluenced by a charm which would still exist even if the books did not. Because of this distrusted weakness of my own temper, I insist on being glad that I never met or even saw Joseph Hergesheimer until "The Three Black Pennys" had become a solid part of my awareness of things—the things that do most richly signify. I never had any reason to think well or ill—of this author until the Pennys and "Gold and Iron" had exerted their swift effortless compulsion. Even now, I can lay claim to no more than what the biographic essayist calls, in his standard idiom, a "literary friendship"—meaning thereby the occasional exchange of abysmally polite letters on purely impersonal subjects or personal subjects impersonally dealt with.
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