Critical Woodcuts/Ben Hecht and the Supermen
NO ADULT who interests himself in the shapes which the mind of our time is taking can afford to pass by Ben Hecht and his works. They are not appropriate reading for children or unsettled old maids.
To speak briefly of the man: Born in New York City in 1893, son of Joseph Hecht and Sarah Swernofsky Hecht, he was educated in the High School of Racine, Wis., and at the age of seventeen began to be a journalist in Chicago. He has read voraciously in the literature of the nineteenth century. In 1921 he published "Erik Dorn," the most arresting novel of the year by reason of its style and the psychological characteristics of his hero. In the following year he produced "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," a collection of brilliant sketches contributed to "The Chicago Daily News"; and "Gargoyles," a somewhat Dreiserian piece of fiction dealing in mordant style with the hypocrisies of newspapers, politicians, courts and vice commissions. In the next two years he poured out short stories, a comedy, a detective story, "The Florentine Dagger"; edited and wrote with Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim "The Chicago Literary Times," an explosive pink and green journal of ill-smelling petards; and, in addition to all this by-play, he has produced "Fantazius Mallare," an extraordinarily shocking fantasy, illustrated with rare distinction and sympathy by Wallace Smith, and "withdrawn," Mr. Harry Hansen tells us, "at the request of the Federal government"; the sequel, "The Kingdom of Evil," and "Humpty Dumpty." Succinctly interpreting the facts before us, one may say that here is a high-strung, excitable mind which has got its shape under the pressures of journalism and contemporary civilization and literature in Chicago.
What is the shape of this mind? Mr. Hecht's friends are acquainted with an eager, friendly young "genius," who fascinates and astonishes them. Mr. Henry Justin Smith, of "The Daily News," tells us in his preface to "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," that there are several genial aspects "which 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." Mr. Harry Hansen, almost unique among the Chicago "school" in writing always like a man who has at some period of his life tasted the milk of human kindness—Mr. Harry Hansen in his remarkably sympathetic and illuminating study of personalities in the Chicago group, "Midwest Portraits," speaks with enthusiasm of Mr. Hecht's ability as a reporter, his imaginative energy, his "faculty for making a drab world seem gorgeous and full of color," 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." Mr. Hansen corroborates also my intuition that Mr. Hecht is to a notable extent a "product" of his environment by this statement from his author's lips: "I consider myself thoroughly American; my ideas are the result of living in Chicago alone."
But all this is pretty superficial. There are plenty of bright reporters and verbal artists in the world who like big buildings and little children and are kind to dogs and old people. Mr. Hecht interests us because his is a definite type of mind. Mr. Hansen gives us Mr. Hecht's own description of his type, written immediately after the suppression of "Fantazius Mallare," as follows:
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.
I don't undertake to go beyond this in saying to what extent Mr. Hecht's principal books are autobiographical—to a very great extent, I surmise. In dramatic imagination, the imagination which penetrates and lives within other types of personality than one's own, Mr. Hecht is as deficient as Byron. Hitherto he comprehends and sympathizes thoroughly with only one type of mind, and that is the type described by him in the preceding paragraph as his own. The shape of this mind, as I conceive it, is due primarily to three pressures, of which I will describe the operation in a little more detail.
From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has, so to speak, sat at the center of Chicago journalism, a city in which, one would like to hope, journalism is more exclusively concerned with accidents, frauds, and crimes than in any other city in the world. He has sat there for thirteen years, a high-strung, excitable receiving organism, while day after day for 4,745 days there have streamed in upon him from all over the city reports of all the fires and boiler explosions and automobile collisions; all the installment company sharks, and oil promotion companies, and bank defalcations, and City Hall intrigues; and all the raping and lynching and love-nesting and bootlegging and highway robbery committed in one of the great paradises of stick-up men. After excessive subjection to this sort of stimuli one becomes quite incapable of the normal human reaction to it; one ceases to individualize and discriminate; one develops a kind of self-protective callousness and reacts to the moving atrocities as merely good stories or poor stories, "old stuff" or "sob stuff." If in addition to being a journalist one is also a poet, one generalizes all the accidents into one colossal accident, all the frauds into one colossal fraud, all the crimes into one colossal crime; and one sets these gigantic shapes in motion in a kind of vast "blurred procession," upon which, pretending that it is humanity, one looks down with colossal contempt.
From the age of seventeen to thirty Mr. Hecht has been gulping modern literature voraciously, with a sure instinct leading him to the authors who dispense the strongest vodka. He is himself described as a cool, sarcastic intelligence; but clearly he loves to stimulate that cool, sarcastic intelligence by cultivating the society of minds acquainted with strange dreams, delirium, anarchy, nihilism. Mr. Hansen gives an excellent account of his reading and his successive literary infatuations. When he first met Mr. Hecht he was reading Burton's "Arabian Nights," the next day it was Gautier—in translation, then Dostoievsky, Huysmans, Anatole France, Arthur Symons, George Moore, Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman. Andreyev, H. L. Mencken, Arthur Machen, etc. In his latest novel, "Humpty Dumpty," there are two or three pages in which the hero, sorting his library onto the shelves, gives a summary comment upon modern authors, indicating how swiftly Mr. Hecht runs beyond his old masters. For example: Nietzsche is now "like an old Spanish cannon." Pater is "a good teething ring for embryonic stylists." "Mencken will last as long as the bookcase at least. He's a noisy guest." D. H. Lawrence's work is "an amateur blue print of sexual impulses poorly remembered." "Three psychoanalysis books are enough for any library. To hell with Sigmund. I begin to dislike him anyway. He's corrupted immorality." "We'll spotlight 'Ulysses' in the center here. The first herculean effort to disorganize the Wells, Walpole, Galsworthy, Hall Caine school of hammock fictioneers."
There appears to be nothing in Mr. Hecht which reacts to the "dissolving" tendency of his reading with a fresh impulse of organization. Everything in him welcomes dissolution and seconds it. Consequently his reading supplements the effect of his journalistic occupation; it intensifies in him his sense that he is a spectator of a vast meaningless pageant. He does not find in literature any sobering body of classical experience or any human conclusions, because he does not seek them. He seeks only secrets of stylistic expressiveness, stimulus for his fantasy and assistance in getting his mind beyond good and evil. As soor as he has read an author he tosses him aside like the skin of a sucked orange, like a bottle from which the intoxicant has been drained. James Joyce he reverences still as a master of the moment, merely because James Joyce has pushed on beyond him and beyond almost all other writers of the hour in expressing intellectual chaos.
Finally, in enumerating the pressures which have shaped Mr. Hecht we must remember that from the age of seventeen to thirty he has lived in a city which, though it says nothing to the heart, though it impresses almost every casual visitor as devoid of charm for the finer sensibilities, though its showy pretense of concern for the arts is still vain with the ostentation of merchant princes and the pathetic fumblings of amateurs, yet somehow conveys to almost every visitor a stunning sense of enormous brutal, unscrupulous power in its gigantic arms and legs and in the huge, heavy pulsing of animal life through its turgid arteries. Chicago, to the imagination which broods on cities, is a soulless Titan, impressing no civilized being by what she has done; awaking only a dim wonder what she might do if she possessed a mind and a heart. In such a city an impressionable young journalist can easily live for thirteen years and still believe that a Titan is a far more august being than a civilized man. Chicago has imposed her amorphous titanism upon Mr. Hecht; when he tries to think of God he conceives of some amorphous lustful energy about as tall as the Chicago Tribune Building.
In "Fantazius Mallare" and "The Kingdom of Evil," Mr. Hecht paints the logical conclusion of tendencies which he has remorselessly observed in his own mind; he projects upon the screen of his imagination his own type of mind swollen to gigantic proportions by the disease incipient in it; he paints the elephantiasis of evil. Beneath the grandiose phrases and images of an occasionally impressive symbolism, one can trace readily enough the excitable, imaginative journalist, in whom excessive journalism and undigested modern literature have produced an atrophy of the normal emotional faculties, aspiring toward a super-humanity through the repudiation of all normal human sentiments and the untrammeled expansion of curiosity and libidinous desire. Mr. Hecht himself appears to have little sense of the necessity of the laws and conventions which more or less govern human society. The ordinary mortal, tolerably comfortable, moderately law-abiding, appears to his inflamed imagination, haunted by Crucifixion imagery, as a pitiable, contemptible, horribly agonizing wretch, self-nailed on a cross and writhing under a self-imposed crown of thorns. Fantazius Mallare, by selling his soul to the devil, and entering the kingdom of evil, aspires to become a free spirit; and in theory should transcend human limitations and enjoy a god-like expansion of experience. But Mr. Hecht is, I believe, an honest explorer and reporter of this realm of consciousness. As a matter of fact, his Fantazius attains no godlike experience. He attains no freedom. He becomes the beaten and bleeding slave of an amorphous demoniacal deity, which he recognizes as the horrible enlargement of his own lusts. He has left man in his "maggotism," to find the superman only a magnified maggot.
"Humpty Dumpty" is not a fantasy, but a striking psychological novel. It is "Erik Dorn" done over again, and better done. That means, essentially, that Mr. Hecht, with greater mastery of expression, with sharper psychological scrutiny, and with unabated passion for telling the truth, has given us once more a brilliant picture of his own type of mind and of his mind's adventures with other minds, messed up in bodies which interest him only so long as they excite his mind. The hero of this book, Kent Savaron, is a novelist who has read what Mr. Hecht has read and has reacted to his reading as Mr. Hecht has reacted. He conceives himself to be a superior emancipated intellect, belonging to a little group outside their age, who look upon the procession of humanity as a foolish pageant which concerns them only for amusement and derision. Ordinary mortals he regards with ineffable contempt as swine in sties. When he has to deal with them, he loathes them to the point of murderous hatred; he wants to kill them, thinking that is all they are fit for. Whether by love or hate, he is uncertain, he is attracted to Stella. He marries her as a step in an egotistical debate with himself, and partly for the savage pleasure that he feels in cutting her out of her bourgeois family. Gradually he makes her over in his own image, till she becomes also a hard egotistical lust for experience with no end beyond itself. The men she mingles with, like the women he mingles with, lose all individuality; become bits of the mob flesh tossed into the caldron of a libidinous egotism. Savaron accurately concludes that he has suffered from "a sort of insanity which concealed itself in an intellectual honesty toward life." For him, the end is suicide. It is a very terrible book, brilliantly written, enriched with poetic vision and original wit, and psychologically, I believe, perfectly sound.
There are two interesting ways of testing the soundness of Mr. Hecht's horrible psychological realism. One way is relatively comfortable, and it may even conduce to smugness. It is to take the report of "The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb,"[1] and to study the traits of the two brilliant, well-to-do young college men, who thought they were supermen and beyond good and evil, particularly Leopold, who was an expert ornithologist and knew half a dozen difficult languages and was graduated from college with Phi Beta Kappa rank. Study the traits of these two young supermen who had lost the faculty of appropriate emotional reaction to experience, who looked at the human pageant, including their own trial, as detached intellectual spectators, and who killed a fourteen-year-old boy "for fun"; and you will find there, recorded by alienists and psychiatrists, every prominent feature of the type of mind described by Mr. Hecht in "Erik Dorn" and "Humpty Dumpty." The other way of testing Mr. Hecht's psychological veracity is more painful. It is this: Whenever he tells you something incredibly atrocious about the mind of Kent Savaron, remove the rosy glasses with which you habitually perform your own introspections, and looking with straight, uncolored eye beams into the deeper recesses of your own "inner consciousness," ask yourself flatly whether you don't find the outlines of that atrocity there—and tell no man what you find.
- ↑ Chicago, 1924.