The Three Black Pennys by Joseph Hergesheimer

First published: 1917

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Period chronicle

Time of work: c. 1750-1910

Locale: Pennsylvania

Principal Characters:

• Howat Penny, the son of the owner of Myrtle Forge
• Ludowika Winscombe, a woman in love with Howat Penny
• Jasper Penny, Howat Penny’s great-grandson
• Susan Brundon, Jasper’s sweetheart
• Howat Penny, Jasper’s and Susan’s grandson
• Mariana Jannan, Howat’s cousin
• James Polder, Mariana’s lover

The Story

The Penny family was English, except for a Welsh ancestor whose blood cropped out from time to time among his descendants. Those who showed the Welsh strain were called black Pennys by their relatives in an attempt to describe the mental makeup of individuals to whom it was applied. Howat was the first black Penny in more than a hundred years; the last one had been burned to death as a heretic by Queen Elizabeth, long before the family had emigrated to the Colonies.

Living at Myrtle Forge, on the edge of the Pennsylvania Wilderness, Howat Penny was far more interested in the deep woods than he was in becoming an ironmaster. Nor did the appearance of Ludowika Winscombe make him any more satisfied or contented with his life.

Ludowika Winscombe, the young Polish wife of an elderly British envoy, had been left at the Penny home while her husband traveled through the Colonies on the king’s business. Before long, Howat Penny fell in love with her. Ludowika warned him, however, that she was a practical person who felt it was best that she remain married to her husband rather than to run away with a young frontiersman. Howat stubbornly told her that she would have to marry him, for he would permit nothing to stand in the way of their happiness.

Winscombe returned ill to Myrtle Forge, and Howat Penny found himself acting as Winscombe’s nurse. It was an ironic situation filled with tension. Howat Penny waited for the old man to die. Ludowika was torn between two desires. She wanted Howat Penny, but she hated to face a life with him in the wilderness. The climax came late one night while Howat and Ludowika sat by the sick man’s bed while Winscombe made a gallant effort to remain alive. Howat and Ludowika dared not even look at each other for fear of what they might see behind each other’s eyes. Early in the morning, the old man died. As they faced each other in the gray dawn, Howat and Ludowika realized that she was destined to remain with him in Pennsylvania and never to see London again.

Three generations later, the Welsh Penny blood again appeared in the person of Howat’s great-grandson, Jasper. By that time the forge, which had been the beginning of the Penny fortune, had been replaced by a great foundry with many furnaces. Jasper Penny was a rich man, steadily growing richer by supplying the tremendous amounts of iron needed for the new railroads in the United States.

Jasper Penny had never married. Like his great-grandfather Howat, he was a man of great passions whose energies were spent in building up his foundry and fortune. He was still painfully reminded, however, of his earlier indiscretions with a woman who had borne him an illegitimate daughter. The woman hounded Jasper for money, and he found it easier to give her money than to refuse her demands.

He saw very little of Eunice, his daughter, for he assumed that she would be cared for by her mother as long as he paid all expenses. One day in Philadelphia, Jasper decided, on impulse, to visit Eunice. He discovered her, ill-clothed and underfed, in the home of a poor family, and, horrified, he took her away with him. Not knowing what to do with her, he finally placed her in a school in New York.

In Philadelphia, Jasper had also met Susan Brundon, mistress of a girls’ school and friend of a distant branch of Jasper’s family. Jasper fell in love with her and in his abrupt fashion proposed marriage. Being honest, he told her that he had an illegitimate child. Susan refused to marry Jasper because she felt that his first duty was to Eunice’s mother.

Shortly after his proposal, Jasper was involved in a murder. Eunice’s mother had killed another lover and suspicion fell on Jasper Penny. He hated to involve Susan Brundon in the sordid affair, but he found that the only way he could clear himself was through her testimony that he had been with her when the crime was committed.

After the trial, Susan told Jasper that she could not marry him until Eunice’s mother was dead, that she could not have the past intruding itself upon her love for him after they were married. Almost a decade passed before they were finally able to marry.

The last of the black Pennys was also the last of the family name, for the family died out with the second Howat Penny, the grandson of Jasper Penny and Susan Brundon. Howat was a bachelor who lived alone in the country near the site of the original Penny forge. Interested in music and art, he had never married, and the management of the Penny foundries had gone out of his hands. Possessed of a comfortable fortune, he had in the closing years of his life the companionship of Mariana Jannan, a cousin. She was a young woman in her twenties and little understood by old-fashioned Howat.

He did not understand Mariana because he could not understand her generation. Because Jasper’s son and grandson had never had anything to do with that branch of the family descended from Jasper’s illegitimate daughter, Howat was horrified when Mariana told him that she was in love with James Polder, a distant cousin.

Howat thought that Mariana was mad to fall in love with James Polder, who had begun working in the Penny foundries as a boy. The fact that he had worked his way up to a position of importance failed to redeem him in old Howat’s eyes.

Polder finally ran away with an actress. Three years after his marriage, Mariana and Howat Penny called on him and his wife. Polder, unhappy with his slatternly wife, had begun drinking heavily. Howat, at Mariana’s insistence, invited Polder to visit his home in the country. Polder accepted. Shortly afterward, he learned that his wife had deserted him and returned to the stage. He no longer cared; in love once more, he and Mariana realized they should never have permitted family differences to come between them.

Mariana’s relatives, shocked by the affair, protested to Howat. Howat himself said nothing, for he now felt that he was too old and understood too little of modern life to intrude in the affairs of Mariana and Polder. Although he was as much Mariana’s friend as ever, he could not understand how she was able to live with Polder as his mistress while they waited for his wife to divorce him. Howat believed until the end of his life that women should be protected from reality. Even when he knew he was dying, he said nothing to Mariana, who sat reading by his side. The delicacy of his sensibilities prevented him from shocking her with the fact of his approaching death and kept him from saying good-bye to her when he died, the last of the three black Pennys.

Critical Evaluation:

Joseph’s Hergesheimer’s third novel, THE THREE BLACK PENNYS, was published two years after D. H. Lawrence’s THE RAINBOW. Lawrence’s novel, suppressed in England, was declared obscene by the Bow Street Magistrate, who ordered police to seize copies at the bookstores and at the press. Hergesheimer’s novel, on the other hand, was widely popular; together with JAVA HEAD (1919), it established for the author a major reputation during the early 1920’s. Apart from their different publication histories, THE THREE BLACK PENNYS and THE RAINBOW are similar in many ways. Both treat the theme of mating—successful or unsuccessful—of three generations of a family, the Brangwens for Lawrence and the Pennys for Hergesheimer; both examine, almost as a mystique, a special quality of “blood” that distinguishes members of the family; both begin with a marriage involving a “mixed” bloodline from a Polish widow—Lydia Lensky in THE RAINBOW and Ludowika Winscombe in THE THREE BLACK PENNYS—and show its effects upon the indigenous English or Welsh-American stock of the males of the family; both attempt, through symbolism concerning time, place, and character, to record the history of culture for their respective countries; both show, again through symbol and story, the diminishing vitality of the original family stock, from Ursula’s failure in love (she marries in WOMEN IN LOVE) to the last Howat Penny’s feeble bachelorhood that terminates his line; finally, both novels deal with the larger issues of vitality and degeneration, progress and decay.

Yet the novels, despite their remarkable similarities in theme, are markedly different in their effects. Lawrence’s symbols, whether used on a conscious or subconscious Freudian-Jungian level, are worked integrally into the structure of his book; Hergesheimer’s symbols—particularly those concerning the relationship between the men and the iron—are all quite obvious. They add substance to the narrative but do not provide additional levels of significance, nor do they turn the story into myth. Furthermore, Lawrence’s concept of “blood consciousness,” both a psychological and moral argument, is carefully elaborated in the lives of the Brangwens; Hergesheimer’s treatment of the “black” strain (that is, the Welsh ancestry) in the Penny family’s blood inheritance is superficial, a mere plot device with a psychological or moral frame of reference. Whether the “black” Welsh blood represents a behavioral atavism or is an odd coincidence of personality, its appearance over several generations is never fully explained. Finally, Lawrence’s novel treats the partial or complete failures in sexuality as symbols for the disintegration of modern culture; Hergesheimer, however, treats the failures as isolated examples, without moving from the specific instance to the general malaise of American culture. Thus Lawrence’s novel is clearly in the dominant tradition of modern psychological fiction. Hergesheimer’s is a period piece, well crafted and entertaining, but not an innovative work of literature.

Nevertheless, critics in 1917 praised THE THREE BLACK PENNYS for the author’s accurate research into the history of the nation, for his mastery of prose style, and for his ability to create vigorous characters. As a chronicle, the novel contrasts with the popular sentimental romances of the time. In the reconstruction of three periods in America’s past, the late Colonial period (concerning the first Howat Penny), the mid-nineteenth century (Jasper Penny), and the turn of the nineteenth century (the last Howat Penny), Hergesheimer is a Realist with a scrupulous eye for details. Dividing the novel into “The Furnace,” “The Forge,” and “The Metal,” the author shows how the lives of the “black” Pennys and their contemporaries relate to the growth of industrial America.

Before the Revolutionary War, Gilbert Penny establishes in Pennsylvania the Myrtle Forge, a product of his own energy, persistence, and optimism. He and his rebellious son Howat are men of determination; their vision of America is one of struggle leading to power. Three generations later, Jasper Penny, Howat’s great-grandson, inherits a mighty industrial complex built around the family’s original forge. Like his ancestors, Jasper is concerned with power. A business magnate, he is accustomed to getting his way, but his own impetuosity nearly destroys his happiness. Entangled romantically with Essie Scofield, a worthless woman whom he had seduced and made pregnant while he was still a young man, he cannot in his mature years convince his true love, the idealistic Susan Brundon, to marry him. She insists that they wait until Essie’s death. The child born of their middle age comes to represent the languishing vitality of the Penny family. By the time of the last “black” Penny, the effete second Howat, the family’s failure to produce an heir corresponds with its decline from a position of industrial power. The foundry is silent, and Howat, merely the caretaker of the past, has memories of his energetic forebears to remind him of his own impotence.

To re-create a sense of the past, Hergesheimer unobtrusively works his research into the Penny chronicle. Without bogging down in the recital of historical facts, he allows the story to carry the reader forward. As a masterful stylist, he evokes setting with a few selective phrases, rather than a profusion of details. Compared to regional Realists like his contemporaries Ellen Glasgow or Willa Cather, rarely is he able to describe a setting so fully that it comes alive in all its parts. Even the description of the Myrtle Forge lacks a sense of immediacy. However, Hergesheimer does create an impressionistic feeling for the scene—not from the close observation of particulars but the careful choice of meaningful details which linger in the memory.

To be sure, Hergesheimer’s command of style is more impressive than his characterizations. Although his early critics admired the first two romantic Pennys, they appear, in retrospect, deficient in psychological complexity. The first Howat Penny is described, at the beginning, as reclusive and tactless to the point of surliness—a kind of American Heathcliff mysteriously suffering from ambiguous passions. When he falls in love with Ludowika, he changes at once from a sullen misanthrope to an ardent, almost demoniac lover. Jasper, also driven by contradictory passions, is the philandering cad with Essie, the practical-minded and affectionate father with Eunice, and the gentle, diffident lover of Susan. The greatest problem in psychology, however, is the last Howat, the American Victorian. If the strain of “black” Welsh blood is said to distinguish those Pennys “impatient of assuaging relationships and beliefs,” how can the feeble aesthete belong to the same strain as the impetuous first Howat or the ruthless tycoon Jasper? Apart from his inability to relate to the younger generation, particularly to Mariana Jannan, Howat appears to lack the element of violent, contradictory passions that sets the other “black” Pennys at odds with their peers. A touching, pathetic figure, he represents a dying breed. Yet the reader does not understand whether the fault for his failure lies in Howat’s times or in himself. Nevertheless, the portrait of the last Howat, though psychologically blurred, is interesting enough to arouse the reader’s sympathies. More than his cardboard-romantic ancestors, he resembles a Henry James hero, morbidly introspective, sensitive but fastidious, capable of tender emotions but little direct action. With him, the line of the “black” Pennys comes to an end.