I

“Ben Hecht is an iconoclast,” says one, “a smasher of idols”; “Ben Hecht is an intellectual mountebank, an insincere fiddler,” says another. “Ben Hecht tramples on that which men have built up through the centuries and hallowed with their tears,” says one; “and destroys shams and that which is foul and diseased,” says another. “Ben Hecht is a combination of street urchin and skeptical intellectual,” says a poet; “he is the incomprehensible lover,” says his friend, “the man who hovers always between ecstasy and disillusionment; who welcomes the dawn with a sneer and folds away the twilight with a caress.” “Ben Hecht is—”

But let me add a line of mine own. It is as Ben told me. At the age of eighteen or thereabouts, Ben Hecht was an acrobat in Costello's road show in a Wisconsin country town. … Make of that what ye will!

Incomprehensible acrobat! Incomparable mountebank of the emotions! Unexplained dreamer and poet, scorner and critic, philosopher and friend.

And so he comes into our view, a lad just passing the twilight zone of youth, with the face of a man who dreams at times, and at other times plans; a round face, which will be chubby, or florid, at fifty; the face of a Balzac, or an Alexandre Dumas. A man with a certain careless air about wearing clothes that hang loosely upon him, and a certain recklessness in knotting his tie, and yet making occasional overtures to fashion in the manipulation of a heavy cane; a man with soft, dark hair often disheveled, falling loosely over his forehead; brown eyes soft, kindly; the mouth, most expressive of all, sensitive with a touch of the sensuous, and on either side two deep furrows that come out sharp and clear when the lips part in disdain, or mockery, or sarcasm, or mild, quiet invective.

When first I saw him he was reading Burton's Arabian Nights—their spell has been upon him ever since. The next day it was Gautier, and then Dostoievsky's The Idiot, which he urged upon me as the greatest novel of modern times. And finally Penguin Island, and Spiritual Adventures. And so my earliest memories of him are associated with books, and when I take down these treasured volumes from my shelves I think also of the man who first enlisted my interest in them, and the occasions that called it forth. Not so long ago it was, either, by human reckoning, for he has just turned thirty at the most and I, who indite these memories, am still hovering on the sunny side of a certain meridian despite my palsied hand and furrowed brow. Those were days that seem ages gone now—days when we waged war upon the city hall, or held monotonous vigil in some undertaker's drab rooms, or sat in noisy hotel lobbies waiting for the passing celebrity to come down and give us the platitude for the hour. He could talk then as he talks now—volubly, incessantly, fascinatingly—holding all who came within hearing by his subtle innuendoes, his philosophical observations, his penetrating irony, his vehement indignation, his gentle persuasiveness, his dubious facts. And so to-day.

When I ask newcomers now: “Well, what do you think of Ben?” the answer is ever the same: “An amazing man. Such words! Such conceptions! Such enthusiasm! Such facts! Such facts!”

Ben Hecht has published in the last two years: 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, a series of sixty-two journalistic sketches chosen from over four hundred written originally as a daily task for the Chicago Daily News; Erik Dorn, a romance of a disillusioned man's vain search for an ecstatic outlet, written in the manner of an expressionist; Gargoyles, a drab, colorless, fairly objective dissection of hypocrisy and the sex life of dried up, illy-nurtured Americans; Under False Pretences, also known as The Egoist, a comedy of stage life prepared for and acted by Leo Ditrichstein; The Florentine Dagger, a detective story; Fantazius Mallare, a strange, wayward, biting analysis of society under the pretext of a study of insanity, published in a limited edition and withdrawn at the request of the federal government. He has in preparation and not yet published—but lack of space forbids a detailed chronicle.

Keith Preston and I had wandered rather aimlessly to Ben's room in an ancient building that ran back to the days of the great fire. A strange, Dickensian sort of pile, like those that appear in the funereal prints of the sixties and seventies, a place in which the appearance of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas even to-day would not seem out of harmony. Quaint, old-fashioned mahogany elevator cages, still propelled by a tug at a cable; a great wide court roofed over with a skylight and surrounded by heavy mahogany balustrades. Offices that permit a glimpse of old, high-backed secretaries with pigeon holes stuffed with musty, yellowing papers; of men, bearded and unkempt, bent over wide blue blotters frayed and covered with inkstains. Insurance; real estate; steamship agencies; the law. Two doors at the right—the second door is his—through the first one discerns a tailor in shirt sleeves industriously applying a steam press to pantaloons. His workshop—a strange anachronism. Across the street the false Corinthian pillars of a modern city hall, and just beyond that the thousand glowing candles of an office building encased in terra cotta. But here, within his walls, great hangings of green burlap depending from the ceiling, and soft mats of thick, green wool just underfoot, and deep enveloping chairs and soft lights and hours for idling. And Ben Hecht, sunk down within the generous arms of a deep leather chair, saying in a melodious monotone: “I've got something to read to you boys. My first act. Yes, I'm doing another play for Leo. We stayed up until daybreak to try it out, and here it is. Quattrocento this time. Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan; swords, loves, swashbuckling, romance. Leo likes that sort. Gives him a chance to make love gracefully and swashbuckle all over the place.”

And then he reads. A play on the life of Benvenuto Cellini, as revealed by himself in his incomparable memoirs. A swashbuckler with a soul. A mountebank with a heart. An acrobat with love and laughter and hope and tears. And an artist. Thus Ben Hecht has captured him and portrayed him. He reads on, and we listen.

And how he reads! You are attracted by his fecundity, his versatility, his humanness, his shifting aims. You wonder, as you listen: What next? Where? And how? Already at thirty he is the most talked about, the most praised, the most reviled of the Chicago group. Already at thirty he defies analysis. Stay away from him and you will judge him harshly. Come close to him and his gentleness, his knowledge of human motives and acts, his kindliness, robs you of an objective judgment. His acerbic criticism, on paper, stings; spoken, it amuses. To-day, condemned by some, vilified by others, praised by those who know him best, he stands as a strangely aloof, irreconcilable figure in American writing, an example of the new, uncompromising spirit born with Dreiser, of the new unassimilated spirit that has bade defiance to the New England tradition within the last twenty years. And yet he is one of us, born on our soil, nurtured in our middle west, educated in our public schools; the product of living in a crowded, rude, tempestuous city, a representative of the shifting, restless, uncatalogued writers of the new age.

II

Ben Hecht was born in New York City, acquired a high school education at Racine, Wis., and then came to Chicago to work as a newspaper reporter. College never beckoned him, and to-day all that it stands for is hateful to him. No doubt this attitude is partly protective; on the other hand he is so thoroughly out of sympathy with classicism, puritanism, the didacticism of college English courses and the lack of modernity in college reading, that much of his feeling is sincere. Many of the books exalted in high school gave him a distaste for further reading in the conventional English and American novel. He had always read much on the outside and on coming to Chicago found himself drifting toward the authors who dominated the latter part of the nineteenth century. Sometimes he would merely skim through a book, catch an idea here and there, and hold on to it; at other times he would become profoundly impressed with style and method and read a book again and again.

Of the three men who are so closely related in the young Chicago group—Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Ben Hecht, Hecht was more influenced by his reading than the other two. Sandburg's reading was desultory, and largely to acquire information; Anderson's reading, or the lack of it, reveals his naïveté. But Hecht read omnivorously, and soon found unusual merit in those authors whose books agreed with his views, his habit of thought, his own innate iconoclasm. “We cannot be sincere in our own work and admire the very opposite to ourselves,” writes George Moore somewhere. Ben Hecht's reading tastes reflect his mind, just as everything he writes reflects his mind. Moreover we find that the two things coincide, that Ben Hecht has written, or tried to write, exactly the sort of work that he most admires in others. The predominant traits are a fondness for realism, naturalism, and iconoclasm; a leaning toward sex psychology and neuropathic and psychopathic studies; a love for glittering phrases and word combinations that arrest eye and ear; a dominant preoccupation with the mind and especially psychiatrics. He is the exact opposite in his thinking from Sherwood Anderson, for where Anderson sees in the liberation of our unconscious a relief from the repressions, conventions, and inhibiting laws that bind our conscious life, Ben Hecht thinks entirely in terms of our conscious life, and while despising the shackles man has laid on himself looks for liberation solely in breaking them and beating them down without taking the subconscious into consideration.

Thus very early Hecht found himself drawn toward the color, the romanticism, the paganism, and anti-puritanism of Théophile Gautier and the verbal gorgeousness of Huysmans. He bought Gautier in a set and consumed him. The Red Lily came across his path and he knew that Anatole France must be his; out of his meager earnings as a reporter he captured the whole set of red-bound volumes and was in debt to the bookseller for months. Arthur Symons' Spiritual Adventures made a deep impression on him, and George Moore likewise interested him in the French modernists; he thereupon read Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Baudelaire, and talked Baudelaire weeks on end to attentive friends. His dislikes are also characteristic. “I could not stomach Victor Hugo and Balzac,” said Ben. “I was bored to tears by Balzac. Rousseau I considered a great big thumping fool, especially in his Confessions. But for action and romance give me Dumas; I have just bought a fine leather set of his books. At that I think I got more out of Huysmans than anybody else.”

When Ben Hecht mentions Huysmans it is as if he had found a choice morsel for the tongue. Huysmans impressed him particularly with his intensity, his fire, his beauty in expression. He read En Route and The Cathedral in translation and then went around searching for a translation of Là Bas, to no avail. Finally an obliging friend made a free translation and night after night Hecht sat by and listened to the rippling prose. His views on Huysmans reveal his intense preoccupation with decadence in the French, and his fondness for verbal acrobatics. In contrast the writers of America seemed tame and colorless. “The culture which loves the cadence of line, the sparkle of words, the piquant acrobatics of phrase, is still unborn in America,” said Ben. And in Erik Dorn no doubt he sought to capture some of this beauty and color. He has put his admiration for Huysmans into an enthusiastic panegyric that is characteristic of him:

Huysmans is the rajah of writing, his brain the splendid macaw of all literatures. He illumines the fin de siècle of his Europe like some effulgent and exotic Napoleon of words. His work, from beginning to end a fulgurating panorama of phrases, forms the rarest and most precious pages in the thought of France. To him may all stylists be compared—Verlaine, Mallarmé, De Gourmont, Barres, Nietzsche, Louys, Pater. For beside the flame of his strange genius the Salome of Wilde, jewel-phrased courtesan that she is, pales to a shadowy bawd. … Huysmans' decadence is the most virile and furious manifestation of beauty in any language. It is the apocalypse of imagery, the tortuous hallelujah of style. His vision is of a demonical intensity. His eye, turned critically upon life, upon canvas or upon any other of the arts, kindles with unholy lights. He can present in his matchless cataracts of words the beauty of Chopin, the sataniques of Rops, the splendors of Moreau. All color and movement he can evoke by the mellifluous devices of phrase and clause which impale upon their rapturous points the soul of beauty. His Certains and A Rebours remain the apotheosis of verbal splendors, of volcanic nuances. His trilogy, Là Bas, La Cathédrale, and En Route, inspired by the exotic loveliness of medieval Catholicism, contain the vivisections of Dostoievsky, augmented by a lyricism which rises, page after page, to unearthly harmonies.

Ben Hecht is still devoted to Huysmans and only recently, when the subject came up, he remarked that he would like to obtain a good translation of Là Bas so that he might submit it for publication—if the boobs and brahmins would permit. His love for the decadents as well as his fondness for beautiful writing early made him admire The Hill of Dreams and The House of Souls. When he reached London in 1918 he had in mind two pilgrimages that meant much more to him than the Abbey or the Tower—the first to the humble home of Arthur Machen, the second to the rooms of Ezra Pound. For Machen he had conceived a strange personal fondness, wholly out of keeping with his usual disgust at hero worship. It must have been an odd experience for Machen, at that time still unpublished in America, to find himself venerated and his books intimately known and understood by this cool, sophisticated youth from Chicago, and no doubt Machen can, if he will, tell an arresting story of how Hecht sat at his feet wide-eyed and plied him with questions and examined the yellowing manuscripts that Machen pulled from out an ancient cabinet, among them the book that has since been published in America as The Secret Glory.

Of the early American writers Hecht approved Poe and Hawthorne, for he liked the excitement and movement in Poe and the activity that Hawthorne projected into the essay, together with the latter's freedom from prudery. Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, and the other New England authors bored him; he saw in them only an echo of English literary currents, nothing that was American, and felt that most of them wrote down to the level of high school boys. When he reached Stephen Crane, however, he recognized a new note in American literature. Crane was at once a realist and an artist; all the reporter's admiration for clean, straightforward story-telling and for the genuine human element went out to his tales. But he found in Walt Whitman little to hold his interest. Moreover Whitman had become a sort of god to persons who had no other literary traits to recommend them; this immediately offended Hecht, and he deprecated the sentimentalism which had become a pose among certain American intellectuals. There is still recounted the story of a dinner of the Walt Whitman fellowship of Chicago which Hecht chanced to attend with a friend. Clarence Darrow, Dr. Preston Bradley, and Llewellyn Jones delivered addresses; Ben Hecht, nauseated by the adulation, went from the dinner to his typewriter and wrote an indignant screed which was printed later in the Little Review under the title “Slobberdom, Sneerdom and Boredom.” He inveighed against “saccharine drool at the expense of a great man,” and asked: “Leave justice to the graybeards? Why should a soul which has the capacity for inspiration quibble in prejudices?” Some of those who had attended the dinner were angered; others professed to be amused; Ben was happy at having relieved himself of an outburst at the expense of the “mob”; the Whitman dinners continued year after year, even until now.

In his views on American culture Hecht is one with H. L. Mencken. He has always read Mencken and agreed with most of his opinions, but it is doubtful whether he derived from Mencken at all. Hecht esteems him highly. He said once: “Mencken is what you might call a healthy force. His attacks on our brahmins are delightful. Of course he is no judge of literature. His approval means less than that of any critic in America—it means simply that you have good literary manners. Mencken is unable to fix the type of the artist he examines. He is America's soapbox orator, street corner shouter and table thumper. He has no feeling for moods, rhythm, or style. He could not see Sherwood Anderson at first, in fact called him one of the imitators of Dreiser, and got nothing at all out of Bodenheim's best early work. But he has always been helpful to me. When I first began to examine novels critically I saw that most novelists appeared to suffer from obsessions, like programs and propaganda that they wanted to put over. I wrote Mencken that I had no program in me, nothing to tout. I just had a skepticism that was born of nothing; it simply existed and wanted to get out. Mencken replied: ‘Go ahead anyhow. That will be a new start for a novel.’”

Hecht has not imitated Mencken, and yet some of his strictures on American writing read strangely like Mencken. Take this excerpt from an essay of several years ago:

Beautiful writing in America is regarded with the usual American sneer for all manifestations beyond our aboriginal appetite, stupidity, and morals. This sneer, which is the highest critical expression of our highest critical classes is in its own way a low and baleful thing. It is a blight which has stunted American literature with the exception of such decadents as Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman, to the weedy level of mediocrity. More than this, it has asphyxiated the taste of an English reading people, and without taste, without pudding. There are some pathetic exceptions. For instance, the heavy jocundities of Chesterton, the sizzling platitudes of Shaw, the profound banalities of Masters, the garrulous flapdoodle of Mackaye, the petty journalism of O. Henry, the walla walla of Henry James are a few of the white cows of conventional fame. But even concerning them there is still a stubborn yokelry abroad in the land which objects to them because they sometimes write in epigram, because they sometimes essay to relieve the monotony of thought with the word adroit, the phrase polite, the clause colored. For it is the unwritten law of American almanac culture that any wight who scribbles cleverly is by the Zodiac and all the sacred rumble bumble of our professors a superficial fellow, a mere juggler of words, a low backstairs Andrew. Likewise and by the same fascinating tokens is it the unwritten law of this almanac culture that any Rollo who writes stupidly, whose style is that of the mail order catalogues, whose phrases are full of “good old Anglo-Saxon English and simplicity”—that such a yawn brewer is automatically an Honoré Balzac, Marcus Aurelius, a creature and philosopher whose fingers rest shrewdly upon the pulse of life.

In the matter of technique, then, he also drank deep at the fount of Wyndham Lewis of Tarr, and James Joyce. Both the Portrait and Dubliners impressed him, and he sympathized immediately with Joyce's amazing irreverence and his disregard of the sacred cows of conventional life and thought. When Ulysses began to appear in the Little Review he became deeply interested. Other books that left a more or less lasting impression were Homo Sapiens, Taras Bulba, and The French Revolution of Carlyle. He saw in the latter an admirable way of handling large masses and playing with big canvases—and practically all his many references to the revolution are inspired by this one book. He read most of the Irish writers—the coming of the Irish players and the popularity of William Butler Yeats led him to read Synge, Yeats and Stephens, but only the latter aroused his enthusiasm with The Crock of Gold.

But a most profound influence in Ben Hecht's work was Dostoievsky. He had read a sprinkling of the Russians—Tchekov, Gogol, Andreyev and Turgenev, although for some reason or other he always thought of the latter as a Frenchman. He had never liked Tolstoi. When he came to Dostoievsky he recognized a fellowship that went below the surface. “There is only one plot in the world after all and that is the human mind,” Hecht had said, and Dostoievsky had believed that. Dostoievsky hated life, hated the humiliating groveling that human beings performed in their interpretation of certain ideals, inspirations, dogmas, and systems of faith; he was intensely interested in abnormal and subnormal mentalities; he dealt with people who suffered intensely, mentally and physically, because of the indignities that they inflicted on themselves or that were inflicted on them by others; he saw humankind nailed to a cross of its vices and its virtues, sinning despicably more often through infirmities than through volition; again and again he came back to the mental struggle and dissolution of an individual caused largely by his attempt to overcome an abstraction, to surmount a new intellectual obstacle. Hecht found himself drawn to this strange, powerfully equipped writer as to no other. Certain passages in The House of the Dead captivated him. He preferred particularly the passage relating to human crucifixions in Siberia. But The Idiot held him spellbound. He regarded it as a masterpiece and spoke of it as the greatest novel ever written.

There is much more similarity between Ben Hecht and Dostoievsky than meets the eye. Hecht's makeup is such that he and the Russian are kin. Hecht, like Dostoievsky, is an intellectual rebel, fighting against life. Hecht sees life through the same lenses—he views human beings as distorted and perverted by their adherence to false ideals, shams, taboos, complexes, laws in which they do not believe and which fail to liberate their mortal souls. He understands sensuality and its relation to the simple acts of life as Dostoievsky understood it and pictured it in The Brothers Karamazov. Hecht's definition of the artist might have been that of Dostoievsky, put into American prose: “The mob taboos, censorships, fatuous idealizations, and doltist tyrannies eternally designed for the comfort of the feeble-minded and for the propagation of the illusions which contribute to their feeble-mindedness, are phenomena under which the egoist of every age finds himself struggling to exist. It is his inability to annihilate the obscene realities that turns him toward the minor anarchy of evading them or denouncing them or weeping over them or sometimes merely hopelessly cataloguing them; in short, which causes him to transform himself from a natural into an unnatural animal—the artist.” Where Hecht differs from Dostoievsky the difference is a matter of physical makeup; in many other things they are alike. Dostoievsky was an epileptic, a border-line case mentally, a man who had suffered intensely, physically and mentally, and who had been persecuted; whose ill health was continuous, even while he wrote, and who had a tendency toward inflicting suffering on himself in minor ways for the sake of the sensation it produced. He was a mystic and deeply concerned in abstract arguments on God, religion, immortality. He wrote intuitively of insanity and morbidity, without any research whatever in medical history. … Ben Hecht is a man of tremendous physical energy, who was known at one time as an excellent boxer and ball player, whose health has always been good and whose mental reactions are normal. He is able to judge men intuitively, but much of his knowledge is acquired not from an analysis of himself, as in the case of Dostoievsky, but from close observation and reading. He therefore lacks Dostoievsky's sureness of touch, and often offends with his journalistic mannerism of overstatement. His characters are more sharply defined in their vices and in their aberrations than those of Dostoievsky, and there are fewer persons of mixed and jumbled emotions and action in his books. He has had to reinforce his “hunches” on psychology and neurotics by much reading of medical lore. He is strongly egoistic and intensely subjective, but he lacks Dostoievsky's mysticism and religious faith, although he has a deep curiosity about exotic religions and tribal forms and ceremonies. The tendency to inflict suffering, Hecht, however, shares, but it is not on himself that he practises. Making no compromise with conventional taste or feelings, his principal characteristic is to say and write what will be most effective and to send an arrow unerringly to the sore spot where it will give the most intense pain to his victims. To make an audience writhe, to bring to a reader sharply the consciousness of physical and mental lacks and defects, to plunge a dart home with the most intense mental pain is so thoroughly characteristic of Hecht that it is always mentioned as part of his make-up. That he can do it so much more forcefully and effectively than Dostoievsky did in his milder and smoother manner is proof that Hecht enjoys health and vigor far superior to that of the Russian he so earnestly admires.

III

Ben Hecht is in revolt against the forms in which life has become crystallized, but he is thoroughly a part of it and in love with life itself. He plays the game whole-heartedly, and apparently gets a great deal of fun out of it. In spite of his strictures on the world, he has no program for remodeling the world. He would like to destroy a great many conventions, but he has made no effort to formulate an ideal program of living to take their place. He says of himself that he is simply possessed of a skepticism, and that he was born perversely. Not long ago, when Samuel Rudens asked him for a paragraph about himself, Ben typed the following and sent a copy to me. It was written almost immediately after the federal government had sequestered his book, Fantazius Mallare, which was the signal for a number of sycophantic friends to desert him:

Born perversely. Out of this perversity, a sentimental hatred of weakness in others, an energetic amusement for the gods, taboos, vindictiveness and cowardice of my friends, neighbors and relatives; 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 protective slave philosophies of the people, government, etc., a determination not to become a part of the mind which the swine worship in their sty. A delirious relief in finding words that express any or all of my perversities. Out of this natal perversity I have written Erik Dorn, Gargoyles, Mallare, some of my 1001 Afternoons, three dozen stories. I have only one ambition; to get away from the future caresses of my friends, from the intimidated malice of their praise, from the grunts of my enemies, and live in a country whose language is foreign to me, whose people are indifferent, and where skies are deeper.

Much of this, of course, is a reaction against the proscription of his book. There is small reason to believe that Ben Hecht would be contented in a foreign land, among indifferent persons who spoke another language. His whole career so far contradicts that. Indifference is the last thing he would hope for; even in foreign lands he would need an audience. He might find a much more sympathetic and intelligent one than in America, and a larger one at that, but he would also discover that the seas do not wipe out the foibles and weaknesses of humankind. It is likely also that he might find himself even more misunderstood than in America, for after all he has developed an American method. “I consider myself thoroughly American,” he told me once. “All my work is American; my ideas are the result of my living in Chicago alone. Except for my search for better writing in foreign authors I have not been influenced by them.”

And one might write voluminously of his infatuation with the primal energies of the American people, and with the material results and symbols of that energy; buildings, streets, houses, fire escapes, chimneys, bridges, railroad trains. He has interpreted streets as no writer before or since. Windows, umbrellas, hats, street cars—all these have become symbols in his mind. He often speaks of his affection for city themes. “Why do artists always disregard streets?” he asked once. “No one paints streets and yet these streets are very close to the people. The earliest art was entirely a part of the life around it. I like Madison street and I always look for a building to come down and a new one to go up. I watch people walking up and down these streets. What's in their minds? Success? Money? Power? Yes, if they are up and coming. Amusement, for some of them.”

He has always used city themes. His earliest writings grew out of his experience as a reporter. He was a part of the group that included Sherwood Anderson, Maxwell Bodenheim, Margaret Anderson, Stanislaus Szukalski, Alexander Kaun, and others. When Margaret Anderson started the Little Review Ben was one of its first contributors. He wrote some of his best sketches for this magazine, expressing a certain tendency toward subconscious elements and abstractions that he has since buried under an avalanche of objective writing. He first met Maxwell Bodenheim in the office of the Little Review and was attracted by the poet's attempts to capture nuances in colorful phrases. Soon the Hecht-Bodenheim debate, formal and informal, became a legend.

“Nobody really knew what the Little Review was aiming at,” said Ben, “in fact I doubt whether Margaret knew. Everybody had an idea of his own and we all wrote what we pleased. I recall talking with Margaret about imagist poetry when she was living on the beach at Glencoe. The Little Review had been running articles on the imagists for about three quarters of a year and Margaret exclaimed: ‘Ben, you tell me what these imagists are all about.’ I wrote some of my best sketches for the Little Review. Among them were ‘Broken Necks,’ ‘The Yellow Goat,’ ‘Lust,’ ‘Decay,’ ‘Nocturne,’ ‘Fragments,’ and ‘Black Umbrellas.’ I also wrote ‘Laughter’ for them but recalled it. It was published in the Milwaukee Arts Monthly in September, 1922.”

Of the sketches that are well remembered was one called “The American Family,”which appeared in August, 1915, and in which Ben tried to satirize the typical American home. It was one of his first investigations into sex aberrations. He pictured the mother as having suppressed joy and life within her to attain social goals, the daughter as trying for self-realization. Of the man he said that “honor toward his woman expired when the mysteries of her sex paled.” The family thinks of virtue in terms of legs and always “plays safe.” Hecht also wrote twelve sketches of Chicago life called Dregs. Of these, three were used in the Little Review. They included “Life,” the story of a beggar with vermin in his beard, and “Sorrow,” the story of an outcast in a café weeping because her pal had died. The first was selected by Edward J. O'Brien for inclusion in his anthology of the American short story for 1915. It was the first outside recognition that came to Hecht. He was then twenty-two.

Some of his views are included in sketches that he ironically signed “The Scavenger.” Among them is this estimate of Theodore Dreiser:

Hark you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in America to-day who does not listen to you, who describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria, and Chicago, and New York, and all the little milk station stops between. … I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian gospel. I would like to argue with him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his friends endeavor to make out, he has magnificently booted the reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls. … And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country and I acclaim him as the only real uncontaminated genius of these States—and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get published, so that there will be two of them.

Sometimes, but not often, he threw his thoughts into an easy verse form, as in “Humoresque”:

Faces, faces.
Swimming like white fever specks away;
Faces coming close.
See the meaningless odd bumps on them called features.
Yellow bits of paper blanks blown along the street.
The rain is like laughter,
The black devils of my brain,
Have leaped outside the window
And are laughing at me.

“Most of those earlier sketches in the Little Review furnished me with backgrounds which I put into Erik Dorn, said Hecht. “My first book was called Moisse. It was a weird, fantastic thing, and I sent it to Edward J. O'Brien, who had been prodding me to write. O'Brien said it was the first great novel of the twentieth century and accepted it on behalf of Small, Maynard & Co., and then nearly lost his job trying to get them to print it. I rewrote it eventually, worked long hours over it, and then put it aside. Then I wrote another novel called Grimaces. I sent it to Mencken and he said it was not good. The ideas were unoriginal, the whole thing was incoherent. I threw it away. When I came to write Gargoyles I followed some of the themes I had put into these two books. I wrote Gargoyles twice, so I have really been over some of the ground five times. And it can be rewritten again. In fact when it came out I realized at once where I might have improved it.”

In spite of the fact that Ben Hecht has been before the public as a novelist for only two years he has been writing like mad for nearly ten. And all the work that he has already piled up, be it juvenile, or amateurish, or actually full of merit, bears the marks of vehemence, of enthusiasm, of boisterousness, of depth of feeling that one finds in his later work. He has always been an iconoclast; he has always been able to pump up a hearty indignation. He has always had a gift for facile expression. He has never been afraid to work hard and despite all sorts of distractions around him will sit hours at a typewriter, pounding away on his favorite theme, discarding and rewriting, with but little show of effort and without any pretense to the hocus-pocus of authorship.

“I used to write plays incessantly and must have turned out twenty or thirty of them,” he told me. “They were sad specimens compared with what I wanted to do. Three or four I wrote with Bodenheim out of our conversations. Bodenheim used to sit around, say a sentence full of color and charm, and I would reply. Then we would write this down. I never expected any of them to turn up but last fall without any warning I found that they had put The Master Poisoner into ‘Frenzied Fricassee’ at the Greenwich Village Theater. I swear I knew nothing of it. It was terrible … well, ask some one who heard it. Eventually I became acquainted with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. He had studied plays for technique and knew a lot more about stage directions and limitations than I did. We wrote several comedies. One of them, The Wonder Hat, still turns up in amateur theaters now and then. It is one of those sweet little plays about Pierrot and Pierrette—that's about all you can say for it. Dregs I also wrote as a play by myself, and The Hero of Santa Maria, composed with Goodman, had a small run in New York.”

At about the same time Hecht was writing short stories for the Smart Set. He took characters from round about him and made them serve his purpose. The stories were sometimes grim, more often caricature. He speaks of these tales as “second rate stuff.” “Once I wrote two stories on the same theme,” said Ben. “I worked three weeks on ‘The Yellow Goat’ and six hours on ‘The Eternal Fugitive.’ I sent both to Mencken and he took the latter. Then I sent ‘The Yellow Goat’ to the Little Review.

“The Little Review was the only fearless literary magazine that the country has ever had. We had a lot of fun with it. We used to go to Margaret's office in the Fine Arts building and sit around and debate. Poets and authors would drop in, most of them unpublished then. Once Margaret turned an issue over to Alexander S. Kaun and myself and gave us the key to the office. We opened all the mail and whenever we spotted a manuscript that seemed to be just ordinary conventional writing we sent it back with a caustic note. There was a whole box of poems from Vachel Lindsay and we fired it back with the memo, ‘Rotten.’ Then Dreiser sent a play which he explained had been knocking about in his desk. We wrote back that if that was the best he could do he might let it knock around another ten years. Finally a story from Galsworthy. We wrote something about ‘cheap stuff’ across the face of it and mailed it back and I don't know whether Margaret Anderson was ever able to fix things up with him after that escapade.”

One recalls in this connection a remark credited to Galsworthy by an eastern publisher, who informed him that he had in his desk the manuscript of a story by Ben Hecht.

“But isn't he rather an erotic writer?” asked Galsworthy.

IV

It is as a reporter that one loves best to remember Ben Hecht, for there was a nonchalance, a recklessness, a boisterousness, an enthusiasm about his reporting that sat much better upon him than his later and more serious mood. He was always intensely interested in human foibles and life's trivialities, and seen through his eyes they became magnified and important. His ability to tell a story, to write quickly, to grasp the contents of a situation intuitively, to conjure up images in great profusion without apparent effort, made a newspaper career inevitable for him. He could make any situation alive, interesting and human, because he invariably drew on his imagination. A few words uttered by some one, a fragment of thought begun, but not completed, were enough to start trains of thought in his mind and to let loose the resources of his creative power. He therefore became a romantic reporter, one to whom the meticulous accuracy of a stenographic report was abominable and uninspired, and who loved to let the imagination play over the dull, prosaic routine of a commonplace event. He had the faculty for making a drab world seem gorgeous and full of color; he had the dissector's skill for laying bare the sores of humankind in all their vileness.

There are innumerable anecdotes extant of his proficiency, of his ability to “deliver.” His “angle” on a story was always different from that of the conventional reporter. I recall half a dozen instances. On one occasion three of us waited for Winston Churchill in the lobby of the Blackstone hotel. Churchill had just written “The Inside of the Cup” and had been indulging in philosophical research work at the University of California. A young woman, Miss Marie Armstrong—who, by the way, is now Mrs. Ben Hecht—was there to get a “feature story” on how Churchill planned his woman characters for his novels. My own task was to get an expression on political primaries, in which the author had been interested in Vermont. But Ben's preoccupation was with the philosophers and scientists that Churchill had just been reading in Berkeley. Churchill talked volubly about Renan, Darwin, Compte, Schopenhauer, Spencer—Ben Hecht's tendency toward modernism and iconoclasm immediately made itself visible; he listened long, and the next day the Chicago Journal bore on its front page, under scare headlines, a long interview with Churchill on God, life, matter, divinity, immortality, and what not, all of it in strange juxtaposition with the murders, jury reports, thefts, and political scandals that make up a reader's daily fare in Chicago, and no doubt much more interesting. There is an anecdote that once when Ben was working at an out-of-town hanging and was sending his own frank story of the proceeding his editor wired him to tone down the gruesome details. Hecht's reply came at once: “Will try to make hanging as pleasant as possible.”

Life to him was not always a matter of reporting catastrophes; he loved to linger in second-hand bookstores, to converse with old men on a bridge while his eyes were fascinated by the play of lights upon the water, to sit in strange eating houses and consort with men of various talents and occupations. Sometimes he would write stories about a scene or a mood. One day he wandered out to a tiny city park, where old men sat about in the sun, and the unemployed loungers fingered through dirty newspapers. Squirrels were running over the grass, hunting for nuts, and the comment of one of the old men was nothing more than a simple statement of what his eye beheld. Ben returned to his office and wrote half a column of conversation and description which, in the opinion of the reader who looks for a fillip at the end, “got nowhere.” Yet it expressed a simple, homely setting, conveyed exactly the feeling one got in the park and in its implication gave the reader a thought on the futility and aimlessness of life. In many a newspaper office it would have gone into the waste basket; in this instance the story found first page position because of an editor who could see beyond his desk. In similar vein was written one of the best tales Hecht wrote for The Daily News in his series of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, which is to be found in his book of those tales, entitled Grass Figures. He describes men who are lying on the grass in Grant Park just off Michigan Avenue. “Funny thing about them,” he remarks, “they lie there on their backs all in the same position, all looking at the same clouds. So they must all be thinking thoughts about the same thing. Let's see; what was I thinking about? Nothing.” And then he reaches the conclusion: “I was just waiting and so are they.” And he reads the following out of their attitude:

Everybody was waiting. On the back porches at night, on the front steps, in the parks, in the theaters, churches, streets and stores—men and women waited. Just as the men on the grass in Grant Park were waiting. The only difference between the men lying on their backs and people elsewhere was that the men in the grass had grown tired for the moment of pretending they were doing anything else. So they had stretched themselves out in an attitude of waiting, in a deliberate posture of waiting. And with their eyes on the sky, they waited.

Of similar meditative origin are several other sketches written for this series—among them: “Fog Patterns,” “Waterfront Fancies” and “The Lake.”

The apogee of his reporting experiences is reached in his book, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago (Covici-McGee, 1922), which pictures, better than anything that has been written so far, the conglomerate mob life of a big industrial center. It is a selection of tales made from his contribution of one a day for over a year to the Chicago Daily News. The contents of the book range over the gamut of the emotions, they touch philosophy, comedy, cheap burlesque, tragedy and tenderness, and represent the mental processes of Hecht and his ability to spin a yarn out of simple themes. Ben refers to the stories as hack work done for a meal ticket, as a reporter's relief from the more disturbing and engrossing details of life. No doubt many of them are that—“ground out on the typewriter,” as the phrase goes—but some touch heights which their author has not reached in his more strained and ambitious writing. Some represent his philosophical reflections, his views of people, his attempts to spin colorful combinations of words, which became so marked a characteristic of Erik Dorn. When one has read these tales, people and incidents remain in the memory, isolated sentences keep recurring, pictures detach themselves from the themes and demand recognition:

The fog tiptoes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the air and slowly devours the city.

The office buildings vanish, leaving behind thin smoke pencil lines and smoke blurs. The pavements become isolated lowroofed 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.

He has always been interested in the fog, in the smoke, in the street. “Michigan Avenue” is the story of a street—a street of refinements and material satisfactions. He sketches it thus:

This is a 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. The sun lays harlequin stripes across the building faces. The smoke plumes from the I. C. engines scribble gray, white, and lavender fantasies against the shining air.

A deplorable street—a cement and plate glass Circe. We walk—a long procession of us. It is curious to note how we adjust ourselves to backgrounds. In other streets we are hurried, flurried, worried. We summon portentous frowns. … But here—the sun bursts a shower of little golden balloons from the high windows.

The high buildings waver like gray and golden ferns in the sun. The sky stretches itself in a holiday awning over our heads. A breeze coming from the lake brings an odorous spice into our noses. Adventure and romance! Yes—and observe how unnecessary are plots. All the great triumphs, assassinations, amorous conquests of history unravel themselves within a distance of five blocks. The great moments of the world live themselves over again in a silent make-believe. …

And his theme is that Michigan Avenue is the street of day-dreams, that given five minutes it becomes a street of heroes and heroines; we are actors all, living over in our minds the great events of the ages under the inspiration of this “Circe of the streets.”

It is of the tales in 1001 Afternoons, and of those now entombed in the newspaper files and not placed in book form that Henry Justin Smith, Hecht's editor, wrote in his introduction to the book:

Of the thousand and one Hechts visible in the sketches there were several that appear rarely, if at all, in his novels: the whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings; Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the forgotten, the forlorn. In his novels he is one of his selves, in the sketches he is many of them. Perhaps that is why he officially spoke slightingly of them at times, why he walked in some days, flung down a manuscript and said: “Here's a rotten story.” Yet it must be that he found pleasure in playing the whole scale, in hopping from the G string to the E, in surprising his public each day with a new whim or a recently discovered broken image. I suspect, anyhow that he delighted in making his editor stare and fumble in the dictionary of taboos.

V

When we omit 1001 Afternoons from our consideration and examine the three books and one play that Ben Hecht has published in the last two years, we find a curious thread of similarity running through all of them. This is all the more striking because outwardly the books do not appear similar, and Hecht does not, on the surface, appear to be a writer who uses a uniform style and form. Erik Dorn, his most colorful book, is the story of a man who rebels against his drab surroundings, strives to rise to ecstatic heights, and fails; Gargoyles is an analysis, so far as its chief character is concerned, of an American who strives for high political office, gains that at the expense of his self-respect, becomes an accomplished hypocrite and a disillusioned man; Fantazius Mallare is the story of a man who revolts against his surroundings, tries to overcome the tyranny of his senses, and fails miserably; the play, The Egoist, is a comedy in which an actor tries to find ecstatic release in a perfect love adventure and fails. In each case the principal character is at war with the limitations, the thralldom of life—and loses.

Erik Dorn (Putnam, 1922), was the first of the books and remains the most satisfying and the most revealing. It disclosed evidence that Hecht had labored long and faithfully over his characters. In plot and style it gives a better glimpse of the real Hecht than any of the other books. It is a clear-cut story, and much of it Hecht himself lived, notably the experiences in Europe, which are based upon Hecht's trip to Germany, immediately after the armistice in 1918, for the Chicago Daily News. Part of the story embodies events observed by Hecht as a reporter; part of it is imagined. The book reveals his infatuation for the physical side of the city, his close acquaintance with city life, his leaning toward philosophical reflection, his preoccupation with sex as a motive power in life, his passion for colorful metaphor, his love for words and phrases, his ability to write swiftly-moving prose. Like many another first novel it is packed full of things observed and lived over a long series of years; this accounts for the fact that no book of Hecht's written since has surpassed it.

Erik Dorn is an editor who takes an active part in the routine of newspaper making. This brings him into intimate touch with city life and gives Hecht an opportunity to describe the atmosphere he knows best. As he passes through the city Dorn observes “a zigzag of windows, a scribble of rooftops against the sky.” He sees “the city alive with signs, smoke, posters, windows; rising, flinging its chimneys and its streets against the sun.” The men and women that he meets remind him of “faces like a flight of paper scraps scattered about him.” … “Bodies poured suddenly across his eyes as if emptied out of funnels. The ornamental entrances of buildings pumped figures in and out.” We learn of Dorn that “no drawn picture stirred him to the extent that did the tapestry of a city street. The nature of Erik Dorn was a shallows. Life did not live in him. He saw it as something eternally outside.” At thirty Erik Dorn had explained to himself: “I am complete. This business of being empty is all there is to life. Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to peer through the muddle of ideas and arrive at a nowhere.”

The description runs on. We find it revealing, as if in Erik Dorn Ben Hecht had in mind a concise prototype. We wonder. … “He often contemplated with astonishment his own verbal brilliancies which his friends appeared to accept as irrefutable truths of the moment. His phrases assembled on his tongue and pirouetted of their own energy about his listeners. Smiling, garrulous and impenetrable—garrulous even in his silences, he daily entered his office and proceeded skilfully about his work. He was, as always, delighted with himself.”

In his picture of the editorial room, Ben Hecht has tried to give the counterpart of the local room of the Chicago Daily News, using here and there an author's license in dealing with characters we all know. The picture of a newspaper in the process of making is done with short strokes of the brush and infinite power of suggestion. The bedlam is conveyed in fantastic sentences: “A curious ritual—the scene—spreading through the four floors of the grimy building with a thousand men and women shrieking, hammering, cursing, writing, squeezing, and juggling the monotonous convulsions of life into a scribble of words.” Erik Dorn has stated it in an epigram: “The press is a blind old cat yowling on a treadmill.”

Two women enter the life of Erik Dorn—Anna, the complacent, unemotional wife, exhausted after seven years of married life with Dorn, and Rachel, “a morose little girl with a dream inside her.” Anna to him is duty, a recognition of the material side of life; Rachel is a sensitive and beautiful being who stirs in Erik spiritual and ecstatic desires. Rarely have two influences been sketched with such precision, such happy verisimilitude. Hecht is most successful in his passages describing Dorn's relations to Anna and to Rachel, and in his descriptions of the old father, Isaac Dorn, who seems to move as a symbol of futility through the book. It is Rachel who prompts Erik Dorn to begin his ecstatic pilgrimages, and who realizes that he looks for something beyond her, beyond himself, whereas she is falling in love with his bodily self. “Of what do I complain?” she writes him. “Of your ecstasies and torments of which I am not a part, but a cause? Forgive me. I adore you. I am so lonely and such a nobody without you. And I want you to write to me that you long for me, to be with me, to caress me and talk to me. And instead you send phrases analyzing your joyousness. … I have found happiness—all the happiness that I desire—and hold it tremblingly. And you have not found happiness but are still in flight toward your faraway one, your dream figure.”

But our interest is not so much in the story as in the author's treatment of his theme. The episodes of Ben Hecht's life as a reporter crowd into the picture. Everything that has been a part of his experience is grist to his mill. Erik Dorn proceeds to Germany and here lives the most fantastic adventures of the book. Rachel has gone out of his life, Anna has become alienated. Into the postwar confusion he throws himself, observing the red uprising, playing about the edges of the Holocaust. Life becomes tolerable when he meets von Stinnes, a quaint ironical figure who illuminates this part of the book. The love episode with Mathilde is commonplace, and saddens Dorn. In the end he returns to America to find that his wife has obtained a divorce. Thus with Rachel gone, Anna gone, there is nothing left for Dorn but his task at his office, which remains as it was. The book ends as it began, with a picture of the old father, Isaac Dorn, mumbling futilely and falling asleep. Dorn's search for the beyond has come to naught.

Several episodes in the book, not in harmony with the rest of the story, forecast the method Hecht used later in Gargoyles. One is the dissection of the character of Hazlitt, the lawyer, who conducts the defense for a woman who had murdered her betrayer, and then finds himself drawn to the same woman. Another is the surrender of Rachel to her lover, Frank, after he beats her in plain, cave-man fashion. Both episodes are elementary and not of consequence to the story.

“I had another long section in the book devoted to German politics,” said Hecht. “It was a 15,000 word monograph that I wrote on shipboard upon my return in 1919. I read it to Sherwood Anderson and he was greatly impressed, in fact aghast at what I said. I tried to put it into Erik Dorn in the section devoted to Dorn's adventures in Germany, but Mencken and George P. Putnam both voted against it as off the subject, and so I let the publisher drop it out.” … John Macy, in a review of the book, pointed out the technical merit in Hecht's method of beginning and ending Erik Dorn on the same note—that of the old man, thus completing a cycle of futility. “It is interesting to find other men discovering merit in one's accidentals,” was Hecht's comment.

Between the publication of Erik Dorn and Gargoyles something happened to Ben Hecht. For one thing he determined to use the surgeon's knife on society as he saw it, and to cut deep into the living flesh. There were flashes of that spirit in the ruminations of Erik when he reached a low level of depression between his various pursuits of ecstatic adventures. But on the whole Erik Dorn was an amiable book; it contained concessions to beauty, both physical and spiritual, and an undertone of pity and sympathy warmed certain episodes. That is perhaps why, by contrast, Gargoyles seemed the work of a cold and hardened cynic. The style and approach of the author had undergone a change; attempts to capture beauty by feats of verbal acrobatics were absent; the characters were commonplace persons, with no aspirations worthy of record, no dreams fit to inspire poetic raptures. The method of Rémy de Gourmont had got into his blood; he deprecated an allegiance to the form of the well-rounded novel, which had come down to us from the 19th century, and in which a character was visualized wholly and complete; like his French maître he preferred to make characters merely the vehicles for ideas. Ben Hecht had recast his theme and his mood, and for his people he had come down to a gray and fetid earth with a vengeance.

Ben Hecht said of Gargoyles: “I wanted to take a section of society, say people in the professional class, like a judge, a lawyer, a writer, and strip them of their veneer and show them as they really are. I wanted to expose their lying, hypocritical, toadying souls.” And so he did. And the result was a cold analysis of a group; a dissection on a stone table which left them nothing to call their own. The author had striven for objectivity, although the book was still strongly subjective. He had tried for a formidable result. He had avoided the colorful words and phrases that he himself so dearly admired and tried to write in a vein of unrelieved realism. As a result he puzzled many of his admirers. Erik Dorn had been welcomed east and west, had been commented on favorably by certain conservative critics, had even achieved a printing in England. Gargoyles seemed to invite criticism, although in the end it will probably have been read more widely than Erik Dorn.

The plot of Gargoyles is strung rather loosely on the rise of George Basine to the position of judge, but actually the book is a series of cross sections, in which Hecht takes up his characters by twos and threes and exposes them in various situations. None of them seems to be so much a living person as a trait personified. All of these are unlovely; there is not a character in the book who is really what he purports to be; nearly every one is dominated by some form of sex hunger, or sex aversion; and the conduct of each is determined by some hypocritical or insincere motive, or is brought about as the result of unsatisfied physical desires. Gargoyles all—strange, twisted humans, leering at the reader; shapes that bear little resemblance to reality because all warmth, pity, sympathy, kindly intention, hope and joy has been excluded from their make-up.

To write Gargoyles Hecht again drew on contemporary history as he had seen it made in Chicago. Out of his stock of police reporter's memories came the incidents of the vice commission at work, the crusade against private banks, the liberty loan rallies. The spectacle of the vice commission is still well remembered in Chicago. A lieutenant governor of the state instituted an inquiry to determine why girls went wrong, beginning with the thesis that low wages were responsible. Every form of publicity was seized upon and exploited. Men and women meeting at midnight in a public restaurant of spotless repute were dragged out to testify before the commission on what they knew about gay dining out. Heads of great corporations were interrogated in public about the wages of their stenographers and clerks. Politicians presented ill-digested summaries of vice conditions; in one instance the commission demanded that one large corporation state its profits, and when this was refused, arbitrarily fixed the profits at a sum that ran into many millions because the chairman suspected this to be true. Fallen women elbowed club leaders; shopgirls told of supporting their families on meager wages. The whole situation proved a glorious opportunity for exploitation by the newspapers, who assumed no responsibility in reprinting the comical antics of the state investigating body. The effect of this hilarious travesty was felt for many months; motion picture houses were deluged with films insincerely depicting the war on social evils, boys and girls read lurid stories of the enslavement of girls in opium dens, the work of serious investigators and scientific bodies was retarded and disrupted and no practical result was achieved outside of keeping the names of certain self-seeking politicians in the headlines. It was one of those typical “exposures” to which Americans give their time and energy under questionable leadership, and which produces in every instance the same result—nothing. Ben Hecht was assigned to the investigation and so became acquainted with its methods, which he detested. In Gargoyles he has pictured not only the situation but also its effect on certain of his characters.

Gargoyles provided more than a ripple in the New York publishing pond. Originally Hecht sent it to George P. Putnam, who viewed it favorably but hoped that certain changes and excisions could be made. Ben Hecht had written the book with a fine indignation and a feeling for those strong Anglo-Saxon words that have fallen into disuse in the best social circles because their strength has gone largely into their smell. There were also situations that demanded deodorizing, but this Hecht refused to admit. He said that he saw no reason why an artist should quibble over words; he had written a straightforward account of things as he saw them, and so expected it to be printed. He wired east that he would accept no changes in his copy. After considerable discussion Hecht went to New York, withdrew his manuscript from the Putnams and decided to submit it to Horace B. Liveright. Liveright was at that moment at his home in New Rochelle with a cold, but this did not deter Hecht. “I need an immediate decision,” said Hecht to Liveright, so the story goes; “I leave in six hours and you can have the book if you print it as it stands.” Liveright, confronted by Gargoyles on the one hand and the prospect of another mustard plaster on the other, chose the lesser of the two evils and replied: “I'll take the book.” The humorous aspect of the situation is that when the book was finally published Hecht said that it appeared practically in the form suggested by Putnam, with certain offending lines neatly dropped somewhere between New York and New Rochelle.

This was the first concrete encounter Ben Hecht had with the censorship of the printed word. He had tried to pick quarrels before; he had vented his indignation on all sorts of abuses and real and fancied grievances, and had been rewarded by the applause of friends who followed him with doglike eyes and patted him on the back without getting much wrought up over the issues themselves. The idea that a censorship in New York could influence the writing and printing of books gave Hecht more than a windmill to tilt at and he made the most of it. His best essay on the subject appears in the book called Nonsensorship, published by Putnam's in 1922, to which Heywood Broun, Charles Hanson Towne, John V. A. Weaver, and others also contributed. This contains a caricature of Hecht in the rôle of Don Quixote. Hecht's antagonism to the censorship was also used by Gene Markey for a caricature, in which he depicts Hecht ceremoniously shaking hands with John Sumner.

And so we come to the unexplained and abortive appearance of Fantazius Mallare, with its weird story, its fantastic drawings, and above all, its amazing preface. Every one knew of Ben Hecht's contempt for the commonplace, of his indignant thrusts at hypocrisy, cheating, lying, and the gaining of worldly honors under false pretenses, but no one suspected that Ben meant to take on all the hypocrites, cheats and liars as his personal enemies. Yet in the dedication to this book, which runs eight pages long, Hecht has enumerated all those he considers his personal enemies, and none of the prophets of old made a more sweeping denunciation when he thundered against the sins and vices of the cities of the plain. Then comes the story itself, written largely in the form of a journal, in which Mallare recounts how he tries to rise above the thralldom of the senses and detach himself from his material and physical surroundings, ending in complete disaster and the dissolution of his mind. “Mallare,” said Hecht once, “is my favorite character.” It may well be believed. He appears in various guises. His first bow was in the respectable circle of Harper's Bazaar, where Hecht introduced him in a story called “The Adventure of the Broken Mirror.” He also promenaded innocently enough in the Chicago Daily News in one of the 1001 Afternoons. And he may well be heard from again. For he is the clearest character that Hecht has visualized so far. The book contains some of the author's best writing, and some of his worst. It suffers from an unfortunate unevenness, from a preface that has no relation to the story, from coarseness in situations that call for subtlety. Mallare is mad, but it is the madness of irony, and in his categorical denunciation of the world his madness becomes a satirical episode. For Mallare “considered himself mad because he was unable to behold in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence … his eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him. … We keep alive only by maintaining despite our intelligence an enthusiasm for things which are of no consequence or interest to us. … Perhaps the greatest miracle is that which enables man to tolerate life, which enables him to embrace its illusions and translate its monstrous incoherence into delightful, eddying patterns. … Man, alas, is the only animal who hasn't known enough to die. … Unable, despite his shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for survival by the invention of souls. And so behold him—spectacle of spectacles—a chatty little tradesman in an immemorial hat drifting goodnaturedly through a nightmare. … It is for this ability to exist that he has invented the adjective sane.”

The author's satirical purpose was apparent, but he was not sufficiently master of his technique to overcome the objections sure to be raised by the custodians of the public morals. Even in past times writers have been subjected to the rigorous prohibitions of church and state, but the great masters have been known by their ability to circumvent all restrictions by adroit phrasing and subtle devices of writing. Ben Hecht, himself an admirer of subtlety and cleverness, failed to discern any difference between frankness and vulgarity. His own maladroitness made it possible for the post office department to step in and charge author, artist and publishers with misuse of the mails. About 700 copies still in sheets were confiscated, and 300 bound copies also were seized, so that out of the 2,000 copies to which the edition was to be limited less than 1,000 actually reached the public. The book has now become much sought after, not solely because its publication has stopped, but also because it contains the first drawings by Wallace Smith. After this episode, which was the one topic of discussion for months in literary circles in Chicago, Ben Hecht printed a personal card with this quotation: “There are no obscene words. There are only obscene readers.”

In portraying the mental dissolution of Mallare and his repressions, his complexes, his dissociation and his fantasy, Hecht had recourse to a little book by Bernard Hart of University College, London, entitled The Psychology of Insanity, which gives, in compact form, a survey of the simpler forms taken by mental disease.

“And now I have in mind two serious books,” said Ben Hecht the other day. “In fact I have done some work on them. For one there is the character of Cesare Borgia. Cesare Borgia lived a completely individualized life. He was absolutely without restrictions and inhibitions, assumed no responsibilities toward others, or toward the state. He did whatever pleased him. Into that book I am going to put what I left out of Gargoyles. Then I am writing a book about the so-called average American. A long time ago I wrote a sketch called “Mr. Winkelburg.” He was the little man for whom the flag waves, the bands play, the trains run, for whom movies are made, advertisements are written, factories work. In other words he is the real American. I have his name and address and telephone number.

“In these books I want to write truth. I want to write them absolutely true. They will be more outspoken than Gargoyles. As a writer I want to be able to tell exactly what I see in the words it pleases me to use. I cannot conceive of a writer adjusting himself to the sensitiveness and vanities of men who have nothing in common with him or his art and who want to put restraints on him.

When I write I don't want to think of the business of putting my words into books, of printing them and selling them. I want to ignore censorship and repression.”

The influence of Rémy de Gourmont's disregard of social responsibility is patent here.

VI

Strange, how a simple title may call to mind a whole series of forgotten episodes. The Contemporary One-Act Plays of 1921, edited by Frank Shay, came to my desk a few months ago, and upon turning the pages my eye fell upon The Hero of Santa Maria, a comedy by Ben Hecht and Kenneth Sawyers Goodman. An insignificant trifle in itself, but holding a vivid fascination for me, for I had arrived in Chicago from a foreign trip just in time to witness the grotesque incidents that gave birth to this social satire. Ben Hecht was then in the heydey of his newspaper reporting and it fell to his lot to witness how the funeral of a simple soldier lad was turned into a gigantic political rally by the forces then seated in the city hall. The idea of publicly honoring a soldier who had fallen with his boots on was at bottom worthy of respect; it was observed in various American cities, but probably no community but polyglot Chicago could deflect it for selfish political purpose into a huge rally. The lad when living might have begged his bread on the streets and been ignored; his family might have stood in line for hours before the desks of political pygmies without gaining either recognition or word of sympathy; dead he became the excuse for an overwhelming agitation. Politicians in office and out elbowed one another in a rush to lay wreaths upon his bier; the slightest reason for association with the funeral was seized upon by half illiterate ward heelers as an opportunity for oratory and flagwaving; decent respect for the dead was forgotten in the desire to get in front of the camera. I have often wondered whether the politicians who were so ready with their flowers and tears and fulsome resolutions ever recalled the family of the dead after the ceremony long enough to pay their respects, for, with perhaps one exception, the politicians belonged to one party—“hogged the show” in fact—and all of them suffered defeat soon after. Ben Hecht stood by while this typical American farce was being enacted; it must have afforded him a delicious study in mass psychology, in hypocrisy, in the buncombe attached to hero worship, for soon thereafter the episode of The Hero of Santa Maria suggested itself to him and he drafted the plot and some of the lines. … The scene is the living room of the Fisher home. Nate Fisher has tried for many years to get a civil war pension, but has always been refused, and the latest rebuff has just come to him. His son Toady is a good-for-nothing who has arrived home unexpectedly, but because the father considers him a thief, a liar and a drunkard, his uncle Marty hides him temporarily in an adjoining room, the better to prepare for his reappearance. Word is suddenly brought to the group by a local dignitary, Squire Hines, that Toady had enlisted in the United States cavalry, had entered a town of “Santa Maria del something-or-other on the Mexican border,” and had been killed. “At the very foot of the enemy's position,” intones the florid Hines, “Edward gloriously gave up his life for our beloved flag, the first American killed. When you have been duly informed of your bereavement by the war department the remains will be shipped here for interment, via El Paso, Tex.” The astonishment of the sister who contends that “Toady never rode a horse in his life” and that “he wasn't the kind to expose himself” is equaled by that of the father, who says somewhat grimly: “This here corpse is one I'll take a heap of interest looking at.” At this point Hines announces that the party plans to hold a large public demonstration with a military funeral and that the expenses will be borne by the local newspaper, Congressman-elect Foss and the Hon. Theodore I. Wilkinson, Democratic candidate for sheriff. Nate comprehends in a trice that his family is to be turned into a Democratic rally while he remains cheated of his civil war pension. If his son's funeral is to be made capital of by the community he will forbid it unless he can get his “rights.” Ably seconded by his daughter Elmira, and by his brother Marty—the only one who knows that Toady is alive and well in the adjoining room—Nate holds out for a promise that the party leaders will see that he gets his pension. This agreed upon, Hines leaves. Then Marty stages a family upheaval by calling the defunct Toady into the living room. And Toady, selfish, irresponsible ingrate, drives his own sordid bargain with his father. He explains that he once met a man in Madison Square, New York, with whom he swapped names. The other man enlisted in the U.S. cavalry and was no doubt shot at Santa Maria. He is the “Fisher” whose body is now being sent to the town for public burial. Toady is willing to stay dead, if his father will split the pension with him. The discussion that follows tears the veil from any pretense of patriotic conduct:

TOADY. I want four hundred dollars or I'll walk down the street to Hopper's hotel and get drunk where the hull town'll see me.

NAT. That's a fine way for a son to talk to his father. Here's Hines and Foss, come around to do the right thing, after ten years' crookedness, and just when it's all fixed up for me to get my just deserts.

ELMIRA. Yes, and mebbe your pa'd have got his pension long ago except for your carryings on, putting everybody against us.

TOADY. Don't make me laugh. Everybody's heard how Pa tried to buy a substitute when he was drafted only he couldn't raise the coin.

NATE. That's a lie, you blackmailing young skunk.

TOADY. I got my feelings the same as other people and just for that word skunk it'll cost you an extra hundred before I leave this house.

And Toady, without a spark of pride or patriotism, indifferent to virtues great and small, agrees to stay dead for eight hundred dollars of his father's pension money. The band comes blaring down the street, the governor, the senator, the tadpoles and the polliwogs crowd into the little living room, the resolutions are unfolded and read, telling pompously of the courage of the son and indorsing the claims for pension of the father.

The play is crude and the author's snafts are often only too obvious, but the beginnings of a social satirist are there. It required a certain degree of courage to write so unconcernedly when the episode was still fresh in the minds of the public and when any imputation of selfishness in a patriotic demonstration was likely to be regarded as high treason. Hecht drafted the play and took it to Goodman, who polished it with his knowledge of stage technique. Sometime in 1916, I believe, it became a part of the repertoire of the Players' Workshop in a store on East Fifty-seventh street. The performances at the Workshop failed to attract much attention and there is little to record about them except that Laurence Langner, Edward Goodman and John V. A. Weaver took part. John acted the rôle of the irascible father! Then the Washington Square Players caught it up and produced it in New York City, and it became one of the most popular satires in the one act theater.

But Dregs provoked a tempest from the start. Even the members of the cast at the Players' Workshop, who were Afraid of Nothing, must have trembled when the curtain rose and the principal character galvanized the audience into a quivering alertness with his famous first line. The line was simply an ejaculation of profanity and marked the extreme opposite of the innocuous opening sentences pronounced by the maid and the butler in the conventional British comedy of manners. For terseness it has never been surpassed. The story of the play was simple. A half-drunken bum, at midnight, stands on a street corner, and looking at the window of a drug store opposite, mistakes his own reflection for that of the Christ. He talks to him in his own vernacular, hoping that he has found a pal. In the meantime the low, degraded life of the street—brawls, drunkenness, police, a fallen woman—is enacted in the background. The vag discovers his mistake: “It was me in that looking glass all de time.” Beyond the monologue there is no action to the tale.

J. Blanding Sloan mounted the play and Laurence Erstine took the leading rôle, and the Players scheduled Dregs for two weeks. The rehearsals, applauded by a small group of cognoscenti, went encouragingly. The first audience quaked and walked out in whispers. The second audience trembled. Percy Hammond, then dramatic critic for the Chicago Tribune, attended the third performance and commented on “the unbelievable squalor of the words.” A few days later Ben Hecht walked into the Workshop and found the actors rehearsing a new play. He has told how it feels to be a discarded author. “Nobody said anything to me,” he said, “so I sat down in one of the back seats and listened. The actors stumbled about in their lines, and now and then I thought some one was going to come up to me and explain why my play had been withdrawn. But no one did. Their courage had ebbed away. They were going on with something easy and sure fire. After a while I felt chilled. I went out.”

But Dregs went on again, eventually, at the little audacious circle known as the Dill Pickle, in Tooker alley, where it was one in a repertoire that included Cocaine and Suppressed Desires. The Washington Square Players also negotiated for it, but they wanted to change its most effective lines. And that was more than its author could stand, for its lines had made it live.

VII

He is the most enigmatic figure in Chicago, if not in the nation, and curiosity about him refuses to die. Readers who have been captivated by Erik Dorn, repelled by Gargoyles, puzzled by Fantazius Mallare, and amused by 1001 Afternoons, conjure up the strangest sort of phenomenon to fit their surface deductions. Students at universities, coming stifled out of the fine New England calm that pervades the libraries of English literature, call him an iconoclast, link him with Shaw and Wilde, and extol his vehemence. Fantazius Mallare has been circulating sub rosa at various colleges at twenty-five cents an hour or more for the reading alone, and has helped pay many a student's bill for taxicabs. Illustrations from that book have appeared both in the Wisconsin Literary Magazine, published by students of the University of Wisconsin, and in the Circle, published by students at the University of Chicago. An experience Carl Sandburg had at the University of Texas is typical. Sandburg had gone there to make an address and during the day was asked repeatedly to tell something about Ben Hecht. At about eleven p.m. a member of the faculty took him aside and suggested a smoke in a quiet nook. “Now that we are uninterrupted,” he began, when they had seated themselves, “I want you to tell me about Ben Hecht.” “Have you read his books?” asked Sandburg. “No, but—” “Then I would suggest first that you read his books,” said Sandburg. “I have delivered a lecture on Hecht four times to-day and I am not going to give another to-night.”

All sorts of men call him “Ben”—laborers who talk broken English, and heads of corporations who covertly admire his contempt for conventional thinking. He has traveled in all sorts of company and can draw something out of any one he talks to. After he had published Erik Dorn he received “mash” notes from women moving in different social strata—little Jewish garment workers on the west side wanted him to look at their poems; actresses playing the leads in loop theaters sought to enlist his interest. He laughed and tossed the letters to his wife. He finds that every man is a “story” and when he talks about people he does not recount their inane gossip and repeat their platitudes; he analyzes their motives, characterizes them in terms of their inhibitions, restraints, and repressions. Once after visiting for several nights the colored theaters on the south side of Chicago, Ben came back with a fund of observations on the social and thinking habits of the negroes—on what jokes they laugh at and why, and wherein their response to the drama differs from that of the white man. One day at a fashionable restaurant, at which he had been asked to meet George Marion, the actor, and half a dozen others, Ben entered with a guest whom he introduced as “Mr. Johnson.” Remarks of courtesy to the effect: “What are you interested in, Mr. Johnson?” were parried by Hecht with the reply: “He writes, but he hasn't published anything yet.” During the luncheon Mr. Johnson remained politely attentive but silent and then slipped away. “That man Johnson,” explained Ben, “is a nifty little check raiser and con man. He just got out of the bridewell and needed a meal, so I brought him along.”

A whole series of legends has been woven about the friendship of Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim, the poet, which began years ago before Bodenheim had written Minna and Myself. The two men used each other as foils for their wit in public and for a time they collaborated on plays in private. Their estrangement came about when Bodenheim wrote Hecht asking for the loan of $200. “I am very glad to be of service to you,” wrote Hecht in reply, “enclosed please find check.” No check was enclosed, however, and when Bodenheim made inquiries, thinking that it had been lost, Hecht enjoyed the joke hugely. For a number of years thereafter Bodenheim referred to Hecht as “an enemy of mine.” Hecht reciprocated in kind, but when the report got abroad that Bodenheim was seriously ill in New York Hecht wrote a long story about him for the Daily News in which he praised him as one of the foremost American poets, who was likely to die in obscurity because an obtuse and illiterate world had not discovered his poems. In 1922 Bodenheim came to Chicago and Hecht sent him this note: “After seven years you and I are still the best hated men in American literature. Why not pool our persecution mania? My hate is getting monotonous. I confess that even yours lacks variety. I will be here Monday at 4 with a bottle of gin. I shall expect you. I salute the possibility of your fatheadedness.” Bodenheim did not act on this overture, but a few weeks later both men met and renewed their relationship, and safely ensconced in the Hecht home Bodenheim finished his novel, Blackguard, which was published by Covici McGee through Hecht's advocacy in the spring of 1923.

Ben Hecht presents the strange case of a writer with certain continental habits of thought set down in the midst of an American environment. Had he been born and educated in Europe he would easily have acquired the background of culture that is innate in every European novelist, at hand to be used as a jumping-off place when he begins his own independent thinking. Ben Hecht had to get its equivalent by reading and observation, but the American habit of doing things quickly and superficially captured him and he missed a big, solid, scientific foundation for his thinking. His social knowledge, in so far as it rests on observation and experience, is accurate; in so far as it rests on his reading it is often faulty and full of holes. Contemptuous of many authorities, Ben Hecht accepts those that please him, and often considers an original thinker a man who is only the echo of some one else. His judgments on men and books prove him to be an emotional reader, an enthusiast who leaps quickly at a decision without further inquiry. This is shown by his ready acceptance of the diluted sociology of Gustave Le Bon, a vendor of other men's ideas, and of his exaltation of the genius of De Gourmont in The Natural Philosophy of Love, a medley of scientific, pseudoscientific and questionable statements about the processes of procreation, thrown together in brilliant disarray by the Paris journalist, but scarcely permissible as first-hand evidence. College, which Hecht has often derided as useless and enervating, might have saved him from this naïve disclosure; at least certain courses in anthropology, sociology, and the medical sciences might have taught him that some of the discoveries on which he has placed the most value were made years before by other men and had reposed in musty libraries for decades.

He is a man of dreams and fantasies, of plans and reorganizations, of ideas that hold him enthralled one day and are gone the next. He has the faculty of tying up his most extravagant schemes with what appears to be a practical method for realizing them, so that his friends are always enthusiastic followers. His brain leaps ahead and visualizes the possibilities of a situation quicker than most men. And his aim always is to produce an effect, to gain a hearing, by a big, forceful, emphatic attack. Once the publication of a literary journal in Chicago was being discussed. “We will start the first issue with a street parade,” said Ben. “We will have wagons carrying authors, critics, and poets, and each will have banners telling who and what they are. We will make the whole town know there is a new magazine.” Similarly the Chicago group was thrilled and stirred when Ben proposed to transplant the London sandwich men to Chicago for literary purposes. The plan was to have one member of the clan write every week a ballad on some contemporary event which was to be printed in folio leaflets. Half a dozen sandwich men, dressed to suit the occasion, were to parade the streets selling the ballad for a small sum. The first ballad was the story of a murderer who was about to be hung, and the sandwich men were to march in dolorous costumes, each with a noose about his neck. When the murderer was granted one stay of execution after another, the ardor of the marchers cooled and Ben turned to other themes. When the Chicago Literary Times was finally inaugurated as a literary newspaper under Ben's editorship, it needed no blare of trumpets to announce that it differed from other journals. Ben had rolled up his sleeves and plunged in, and in his most powerful vein he had attacked everything, high and low, that to him had a semblance of weakness, ineffectiveness, dignity and prudery. He was particularly antagonistic to any show of dignity and declared that dignity meant an empty mind. There was nothing dignified about the Times. It laughed heartily in loud, boisterous laughter; it made fun of everything not approved by the spirit of modernism, naturalism, and expressionism; it eliminated staid, respected authors in a line and exalted rebels in a paragraph. It carried a chip on its shoulder. It was also characteristic of Ben that when it appeared he no longer thought of it as an eight page newspaper issued once every two weeks. He considered it the beginning of a great Chicago daily, one that would eventually offer spirited competition to the Daily News and the Tribune, and for the consummation of his dreams he was ready to go out and borrow a million.

He is full of contradictions and anomalies. Embittered against the Babbittry, contemptuous of the herd, he is personally warm and friendly and always ready to go out of his way to help some one he likes. Hateful of mass hypocrisies and shams, he cheerfully allows himself to be plucked like a pigeon and sponged upon by men who are neither sincere nor clever. He believes audiences have a low level of intelligence, and reviles them to their faces, yet everything he writes is planned with an audience in mind, and he is one of the most earnest students of effects in the novel and in the theater. Ostensibly a cynic, a disillusioned man, he is devoted to his home, loyal to his household. An ardent worshiper before the French decadents, he is actually a strong, virile character to whom decadence is an acquired taste and whose books prove him to have great resources of primal life and power that he sometimes tries to deny for the sake of an enfeebled pose.

VIII

We who have worked side by side with him, who have listened to him between editions while he sat with his feet on his desk, his felt hat pulled down over his forehead, and talked and talked and talked; we who have rejoiced at his first nights and despaired of his prefaces, look upon Ben Hecht as the most baffling, and for that reason the most promising writer of the whole Chicago group. Robert Herrick is a known quantity; Edgar Lee Masters' career holds no more surprises; Sandburg can be plotted in straight lines and curves; Anderson can only repeat his apologia pro sua vita with more and more intensity and verboseness. But with Ben Hecht anything is possible. He is the only young writer whose vehemence, whose spirited indignation, has not been diluted by association with people. He has so much fight and vigor in him that, once having harnessed his powers, he may present the most amazing results at fifty just as he now arrests attention at thirty. All that he has written thus far may be regarded as the faint forecast of a talent the depths of which none of us can gage. He cannot get sour on the world now and dissipate his gifts in grumbling, for he began sour and that is mainly responsible for his tremendous hammering, his undoubted fecundity. His greatest failing is his superficiality, his greatest enemy is the editor or the publisher who will print everything to which he signs his name. Once he gets away from his journalistic ballyhoo, from his superficial estimates of people, from his desire to walk the tight rope and do acrobatic tricks in mid-air to the delight of a gaping mob, he will be able to dig deep and search for the really lasting treasures of literature. He is to-day a man whose promise is better than his performance, whose gifts are better than he knows, whose mental processes cry aloud for discipline and direction. His fine sarcasm, his biting irony, his social irresponsibility, may yet make him a first rate force for striking at the worthless idolatries of an industrial civilization. To-morrow may find him a prophet and a seer; to-day he stands there, a Pagliacci on the fire escape, singing his heart out over the streets and alleys of a city whose very stones he loves but whose people fill him with sad and mournful soliloquies.