One can well imagine the lion tamer, who is as certain of life as the sexton is of death and equally as optimistic about the result, having decisive qualms for the safety of Ben Hecht, who was an acrobat in a midwestern circus in one of his early incarnations. Hecht was probably as incorrigible then as he is now. One can imagine him doing ten swift rotations with his left foot on the trapeze, and bringing down the tent with applause and admiration as he does a screw somersault landing upright on the glossy back of a pink-eyed white horse.

Ben Hecht has brought to his books many of the trapeze tricks he learned at the sawdust tracks. He has remained the performer in his novels. He can probably do more tricks with a sentence than any man of the Chicago group of writers, among whom he was looked upon with awe and admiration. Take any simple sentence, submit it to Hecht and he will impart to it the velocity of a pin wheel. Chicago may have something to do with that.

Ben Hecht was a journalist de luxe in Chicago for several years before his first novel, Erik Dorn, appeared in 1921; but with the publication of that book his reputation flew beyond the “Loop,” hurdled Lake Michigan, defied the dunes of Indiana, spanned the oasis of Ohio, pierced the pines of Pennsylvania and assaulted the ears of blasé New York with the tidings that a new Napoleon of western letters had arrived. If the furor that Erik Dorn aroused was a mere press agent's trick then Harold Bell Wright has been wasting his money. But it wasn't. The novel, a romance of a disillusioned man's futile search for ecstatic expression, was one of the most brilliant performances in a year noted for its brilliant work. Excepting Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Atherton, Hecht is possibly the only American writer of the present modern school to have achieved the dignity of the Modern Library classics in which Erik Dorn finds permanent refuge from its prurient assailants and vehement defenders.

It does seem a little incongruous to find Hecht sheltered by the same stately robes that clothe Thomas Paine, Checkov, Strindberg, Anatole France, Samuel Butler, Havelock Ellis, and a host of other acknowledged masters. It is something like a small boy strutting about in his father's outfit. Still, if Erik Dorn doesn't match Frank Norris's McTeague (similarly honored,) it may at least share the shelf with Winesburg, Ohio, without shading Anderson by so much as a jot.

I emphasize Erik Dorn because it is the one book of Hecht's literary work that first accounted for his reputation beyond the Stock Yards, and also because it is virtually the summation of Hecht himself. I can think of no American writer whose work is so definitely a reflection of his own personality. One or two of his later books have brought him notoriety, but they have not materially increased his literary stature.

Hecht was thirty-one years old when he found himself famous in 1921 with Erik Dorn. He became notorious in February, 1924, when a jury in a federal court in Chicago found him guilty of writing an “obscene” book in Fantazius Mallare, an attempt at a scathing attack upon the sexual hypocrisy of society through an extraordinarily shocking fantasy—an analysis of insanity via an inhibited artist, an amorous Gypsy girl, and a black idiot. The court fined Hecht, and the artist, Wallace Smith, who illustrated this weird fantasy, which was privately printed, $1,000 each. There are pages of stark beauty and gorgeous imagery in the story of Fantazius Mallare, to which Hecht supplied, by way of an introduction, one of the most violent assaults upon good taste that could possibly be conceived. The thing must have been deliberately done to “shock.”

From my point of view, Hecht imposed very harshly upon the friends of the uncensored word in his foreword to Fantazius. If what he wrote is the meaning of the freedom of letters, then so are the nasty words scribbled in public places by half-witted adolescents, who have heard from adults only their sordid implications. Heaven forfend that I should acquiesce in the average findings of the average jury, but I do not see why a writer should not preserve good taste and good manners in his books, which is not to pay any tribute to censorship or to the “Old Lady of Dubuque.” He does not have to patronize them, nor even indorse their whims, but to offend them with vulgar writing is as outrageous as kicking a bishop at prayer. I say this, yet despising every social, political, economic and literary headsman and heresy hunter from Torquemada to the most recent tittlemouse.

A second novel, Gargoyles, 1922, followed Erik Dorn. It is feeble as a novel, but it is brilliant reporting of a drab, colorless group of sensual American go-getters, each definitely afflicted with an acute case of complex sexualis, quite simple once the reader comprehends the bed-level mediocrity of the characters that smirk through the pages. There is in Gargoyles a part of an earlier novel that Hecht wrote before he had published anything except fugitive pieces here and there. More than once a man's more competent work has been confounded by his inability to cast aside the juvenilia of his yearning years.

Fantazius Mallare also appeared in 1922 along with 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, a collection of sixty-odd vignettes written for the Chicago Daily News, and as fine a journalistic performance of its kind as was ever done. In this book, gorgeously illustrated with grotesque marginal drawings and full-page designs by Herman Rosse, Hecht happily has forgotten his Dostoiefsky, his Remy de Gourmont and his Huysmans—once the triumvirate of his idolatry—and produced a volume as charming and colorful as could be contrived from the wealth of material at hand in Chicago's streets. There is no similarity between his Afternoons and his novels. Consider this from “Fog Patterns,” one of the sketches:

The fog tip-toes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the air and slowly devours the city. The office buildings vanish leaving behind thin pencil lines and smoke blurs. The pavements become isolated, low roof corridors. Overhead the electric signs whisper enigmatically and the window lights dissolve. The fog thickens till the city disappears. High up, where the mists thin into a dark sulphurous glow, roof bubbles float. The great cat's work is done. It stands balancing itself on the heads of people and arches its back against the vanished buildings.

A street-walker is arrested. A policeman, swaggering in his authority and virtuous in his malehood, drags Fanny before the judge, who wears his so-called virtue as prominently as the policeman wears his badge. He is, however, more magnanimous. He'll give Fanny another chance. Hecht turns the scene.

Now one can follow Fanny. She walks out of the courtroom. The street swallows her. Nobody in the crowd knows what has happened. Fanny is anybody now. Still, one may follow. Perhaps something will reveal itself. Something will add an illuminating touch to the incident in the courtroom. There is only this. Fanny pauses in front of a drug store window. The crowds clutter by. Fanny stands looking, without interest, into the window. There is a little mirror inside. The city tumbles by. The city is interested in something vastly complicated. Staring into the little mirror Fanny sighs and powders her nose.

Of Michigan Avenue he says: “Deplorable street, a luxurious couch of a street in which the afternoon lolls like a gaudy sybarite. Overhead the sky stretches itself like a holiday awning. … A deplorable street, a cement and plate glass Circe. We walk—a long procession of us. It is curious to note how we adjust ourself to backgrounds. … Here the sun bursts a shower of little golden balloons from high windows. … We walk like Pierrots and Pierrettes, like John Drews and Jack Barrymores and Leo Ditrichsteins; like Nazimovas, Patricia Collinges and Messalinas on parole. … This magician of a street has created an illusion in our heads that there are adventure and romance around us. … There are two lives that people lead. One is the real life of business, mating, plans, bankruptcies and gas bills. The other is an unreal life, a life of secret grandeur which compensates for the monotony of the days.”

It is conceivable that a man may do his best writing in the exacting stress of a daily column. He is recording history, time and place and the drift and drive of crowding hours, and making articulate the city's authentic cadences and cacophonies.

In my opinion Ben Hecht wrote literature in his newspaper pieces if he ever wrote it anywhere. Perhaps he won't like that, for anyone who has written novels prefers the epaulets of a novelist to the chevrons of a columnist. But after all, that preference is only one of the craft's many vanities. Good writing, it seems to me, is the sole criterion, regardless of its form. The notion that the covers of a book makes the man who has written between them a writer is the bunk. I know plenty of newspaper men who daily write literature in two or three sticks of type, and repeat the performance half a dozen times a day. They have never seen their names on the covers of books, or even had what is called in a newspaper office a “by” line. There is plenty of trash that gets between the covers of a book. Who that reads does not know that?

Before Hecht was known to the public he had written a dozen or so one-act plays, several of which were produced by small theater groups. After he had acquired a wide reputation he wrote a full length play, Under False Pretenses, also called The Egotist, a comedy of theater life, acted by the late Leo Ditrichstein, first in San Francisco, brought east to Chicago where Hecht's local fame aided it mightily, and then to New York where it went into eclipse after a brief run. The play, like the novels, was in Hecht's first formula. He has not differed from it except in his 1001 Afternoons.

Ben Hecht possesses a cool, cynical intelligence. Nowhere is this displayed to better advantage than in his novel, Humpty Dumpty (1924). The hero, Kent Savaron, is sorting his books and placing them on shelves. Hecht seizes this opportunity to comment about modern authors, indicating how swiftly he runs ahead of the masters. Nietzsche is “like an old Spanish cannon.” Pater is “a good teething ring for embryonic stylists.” Mencken “will last as long as the bookcase at least. He's a noisy guest.” D. H. Lawrence's work is “an amateur blueprint of sexual impulses poorly remembered.” “Three psychoanalysis books are enough for any library. To hell with Sigmund. I begin to dislike him anyway. He's corrupted immorality.” “We'll spotlight Ulysses in the center here. The first herculean effort to disorganize the Wells, Walpole, Galsworthy, Hall Caine school of hammock fictioneers.”

The hero of Humpty Dumpty is a novelist closely patterned after Hecht himself, like Erik Dorn. He has read what the author has read and he has reacted to his reading as Hecht has reacted. Savaron conceives himself to be a superior emancipated intellect, belonging to an iconoclastic group of frightfully erudite fellows with feathers in their hats, who look upon the procession of humanity as an amusing spectacle which concerns them only to the extent of evoking their contempt and derision. Savaron marries Stella Winkelberg as a part of an egotistical debate with himself and the pleasure that it gives him to cut her off from her bourgeois family. For Savaron the end is suicide. It is a terrible book, brilliant and enriched with poetic gift and sardonic wit. Terrific pressures have shaped the mind of Ben Hecht into a blazing white-hot furnace. It needs to cool off. His later novel, Count Bruga, shows a long stride from Gargoyles.

Ben Hecht was born in New York City, but was taken to Racine, Wisconsin, where he attended high school. At the age of eighteen he was an acrobat in Costello's road show in a small western town. He drifted to Chicago and became a reporter. He was one of the best in that city or anywhere else.

In the summer of 1918, I went to Chicago from New York to report a great labor trial involving more than a hundred militant crusaders led by William D. Haywood, then engaged in the fantastic fight for social justice and peace, via the notorious I.W.W.

Never was more drama enacted in an American courtroom, with that whilom prince of American off-stage actors—Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis—presiding. Hecht was at the press table. I sat next to him for about two weeks. He was not famous then. He possessed only a reputation among his fellow craftsmen. Hecht could not possibly write what he saw and felt about that trial.

Many newspapers crucify talent and glorify mediocrity. That is one reason why they are successful. They are the invariable reflectors of the deadly average, and are at the same time almost the one honest public institution here or anywhere in that they do not pretend to be other than mirrors of man's gorgeous failures and his stupid successes.

However, Hecht was more interested in the color of that trial, which lasted five months, than in its social import or in what it might portend. I soon learned from him that he had no interest in changing the form of government here or anywhere; that he was impatient with crusaders. He confessed to “a contempt for the ideas of man, an infatuation with the energies of man, a love for the abstraction of form, a loathing for the protecting slave philosophies of the people, government, etc.; a determination not to become a part of the mind which the swine worship in their sty.”

Still, one finds Hecht working many hours past the union scale to become a determined iconoclast. I surmise that is as arduous a job as trying to be the most affable Rotarian. One imagines Hecht as being influenced more by what he has read than by what he has lived. One day he was discussing his views with a fellow reporter.

“I am at heart a man of peace. I am even a moral man. Why not? A man must be moral to live and preserve contacts under existing conditions; and I have no suicidal notions. Morality is the line of least resistance; and anyway—a shining radical mark is always kinda ludicrous. But these laws, taboos, and conventions that dictate my manners don't reach into my mind.”

Edward J. O'Brien gave Ben Hecht his first recognition outside of Chicago by including one of Hecht's short stories in his 1915 anthology.

With Maxwell Bodenheim, he edited the Chicago Literary Times, a weekly devoted to chanting the praises of the iconoclasts—a sheet of sometimes brilliant satires, mostly negative, and often a bit tiresome. It has long since ceased even to be remembered.

Hecht can turn a phrase as few writers can do it, which proves an agile vocabulary but does not vouchsafe an artist. Hecht is a charming and colorful raconteur. I shall always want to remember the talks I had with him in those Chicago days. If I were entitled to speak to a novelist as a fellow craftsman I would ask Ben Hecht to forget Remy de Gourmont for at least ten years and to please remember that the First Man and the First Woman were supposed to be sexed some millions of cycles before the stars foretold the advent of Freud.

On my walls there is a picture of Ben Hecht, inscribed to “a friendly critic” long before this sketch was written. One could wish that a more searching appraisal than that which brought forth the gesture of good will might enhance its meaning, and not cause to be revoked the felicitous approbation.