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Joseph Hergesheimer's Germany: A Radical Art of Surfaces
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
In the summer of 1931 Joseph Hergesheimer, author of more than a dozen books of fiction, returned to Germany for a visit, his first since 1907. This very American trip is recounted in his Berlin (1932) forgotten book by a well-nigh forgotten writer. It is surely one of the most curious volumes of a literary type which, for all its vigorous and perceptive judgements, is itself something of a curiosity. By now, I suppose, it is a commonplace mat the travel book, the elegant bastard of genres, invariably reveals more about the traveller than about the geography he supposedly describes. This is true certainly for modern examples which come to mind – James's The American Scene (1907) Hemingway's The Green Hills of Africa (1935) or Steinbeck's Travels with Charley (1961). And whatever other defects mar, say, Truman Capote's Local Color (1950) or John Knowles's Double Vision (1964), the failure to impose personality on the scene –to let voice and stance, even with their inadequacies, shape and experience – is in large measure the source of our disappointment in those books. Hergesheimer's Berlin does not fail for this reason. Like Local Color, it is mannered, and like Double Vision, it is thin; but it is not merely mannered and thin.
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References
1 Berlin (New York, Knopf, 1932)Google Scholar. Page references are noted only for extensive quotations. Berlin is a misleading title, since Hergesheimer records his visits to several other central European cities. But ‘Berlin I’ and ‘Berlin II’ – the first and last chapters – indicate something of his preference. Passages in this paper are also drawn from ‘Berlin Remembered’, an essay written probably in the early 1940s but never published. The essay is now part of the Joseph Hergesheimer Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. I wish to thank Mrs Mary M. Hirth of the Academic Centre Library and the Faculty Committee of the University of Texas Library and Mr Dallett Hemphill of West Chester, Pennsylvania, for permission to quote from this unpublished material.
2 The only recent critical study of Hergesheimer is Martin, Ronald E., The Fiction of Joseph Hergesheimer (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Napier, James J. has compiled ‘Joseph Hergesheimer: A Selected Bibliography, 1913–1945’, Bulletin of Bibliography, 24 (11–12 1963), 46–8Google Scholar; (January–April 1964), 52, 69–70. A charming and valuable treatment of Hergesheimer's literary context in the 1920s is Langford, Gerald, ed., Ingénue Among the Lions: The Letters of Emily Clark to Joseph Hergesheimer (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1965).Google Scholar
3 Despite his being named by American literary critics in 1922 as the most significant writer to emerge in the previous decade, his reputation was to go no further, and that of O'Neill, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis was rising. See ‘America's Literary Stars’, Literary Digest, 74 (22 July 1922), 28–9, 44–50.Google Scholar
4 Or, to move into the revealing peripheries of that age, one is reminded of The Last of Mr. Norris, not of the narrator but of Mr Norris himself, who confesses breathlessly to being somewhat awash in the new vulgarity. Like Isherwood's hero, the American writer is also awash.
5 Harrison, John R., The Reactionaries (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), p. 33.Google Scholar
6 Barea, Ilsa, Vienna (New York, Knopf, 1966), p. 366.Google Scholar
7 Blankenship, Russell, American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind (New York, Holt, 1931), p. 699.Google Scholar
8 In certain passages in San Cristóbal the Hergesheimer ‘ manner’ is more pronounced than in the much later Berlin, but the pattern of recording an impression followed by an ethical generalization is common to all of Hergesheimer's non-fiction. In such a pattern the free play of contradictory impulses supplies often the only energy, and that generated not so much by content as by style: the elliptical and appositional syntax, the slightly eccentric inversions, the loose causal coherence of floating clauses and phrases. This rhetorical manoeuvre, carefully cultivated, itself absorbs and reconciles tension.
9 Thunder Over Europe (New York, I. Washburn, 1931), pp. 24–5.Google Scholar
10 Holman, C. Hugh, ‘Thomas Wolfe's Berlin’, Saturday Review (11 03 1967), p. 69.Google Scholar