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Novels and Novelists

The Luxurious Style

page 227

The Luxurious Style

Linda Condon — By Joseph Hergesheimer

If a novel is to have a central idea we imagine that central idea as a lusty growing stem from which the branches spring clothed with leaves, and the buds become flowers and fruits. We imagine that the author chooses with infinite deliberation the very air in which that tree shall be nourished, and that he is profoundly aware that its coming to perfection depends upon the strength with which the central idea supports its beautiful accumulations.

But in the case of ‘Linda Condon’ we have the impression that the author has planted something that never has time to take root, for he cannot resist the temptation to deck it with immediate branches, to clothe it with a multiplicity of exotic splendours. These are all very well in the first part of the book to gaze upon, to smell, to compel our astonishment; but at the end, at the moment when the harvest is to be gathered—ah, then—at that final moment which should be all compact of richness, we are confronted with a little dried-up, withered skeleton. Linda Condon, a small, grave young person aged ten, with ink-black hair, blue velvety eyes, cheeks like magnolia petals and lips carnation-red, is the embodiment of Mr. Hergesheimer's conception. There is that in her circumstances and in her behaviour which puts us in mind very vividly of Mr. Henry James's little Maisie. Like her, for all her appearance of being adequate to the strange situation, Linda is innocent of all evil; with the same touching and confiding air of understanding everything, she accepts her surroundings. Life is a drifting from one odious hôtel de luxe to another, from one odious gentleman de luxe, who is mamma's friend of the moment, to another. For Linda's mother is a gay, golden-haired woman of pleasure, whose days are divided between the page 228 mirror, eating, and railing against men, and whose nights are devoted to getting what she can from ‘the beasts,’ and keeping her spirits up with drink. She is a vivid representation of the warm-hearted, vulgar, over-blown animal with whom contemporary fiction has made us as familiar as we wish to be, and the touch or two of strangeness which is apparent is due to the author's precision of detail. Until the age of fourteen Linda is her blind, adoring handmaid, but then, on an afternoon when her mother speaks to her ‘sensibly’ on the subject of marriage, she has for the first time a vague intimation of feelings which she cannot account for or explain away. These feelings recur, and the author reveals what we have called his central idea at a studio orgie, where in the contemplation of a cast of the Winged Victory side by side with a leering Chinese God it is explained to her that the one stands for the world of spirit and the other for lust. This time Linda is troubled with a rushing of wings and a feeling as if she were up among the stars.

‘I have left Lao-tze for Greece,’ said the sculptor to whom she confessed her vision, and she is his inspiration forthwith. It is through him that Linda discovers that she is not a living woman; she cannot love. It is as though, while she walked in the midst of those dangers that thronged her childhood, an icy finger had touched her, chilled her, so that she would always in experience and feeling remain a child. ‘This child I to myself shall take.’ But the Spirit of Beauty, in claiming her, has taken its revenge on life as well. True, the child (and now we mean that mystical child whom life is for ever threatening) has been saved, but only at the cost of keeping her a child for ever. This takes one hundred and fifty pages to tell—half the book. The scene has been any sumptuous hotel, and after the marriage of Linda's mother, the house of a wealthy New York business man. There is no important difference between these settings. Either is equally rich in descriptive matter, and it is his passion for registering every pink-silk box of black page 229 chocolates, every cocktail, bath extract, perfume, sugared fig, quilted bed cover, web of lingerie, that in our opinion at first obscures, and finally smothers, Mr. Hergesheimer's central idea. Great brilliant chunks of this repulsive world of the very rich are hurled at us until Linda is scarcely visible, is pale as a pocket-handkerchief. And then, with the second half of the book, which tells of Linda's marriage and later life, we have the uncomfortable sensation all this does not matter. It is not as though the author has anything more to tell us about Linda; he can only prove, with her marriage, her absence of feeling for her children, her lack of response to her husband, her vague repetition of the old dream of stirring wings, that thus it is and ever shall be. It is a great pity that Mr. Hergesheimer has not faced the difficulties of a more reluctant and a more precious harvest.

(July 23, 1920.)