(3 of 3)
Ben Hecht is always about to embark upon a new enterprise. His dark eyes, nervous movements, ejaculatory speech, bitter mind, all suddenly are brought to bear upon the impossible and it is accomplished. He does too much. His plays just miss being brilliant. His novels suffer from a lack of taste which would undoubtedly be ironed out in a second writing. When he started to write a Rabelaisian fantasy in Fantazius Mallare he was only adolescent in his pornography and was consequently affected. His last book, a detective story, The Florentine Dagger, he claims to have written in ten hours. It's not a bad yarn. I am told, however, that, dictating as rapidly as one is able, it would scarcely be physically possible to accomplish this feat. I once dictated ten thousand words of a story in a week-end and have never been the same since. However, Ben Hecht's versatility and his energy are astounding! That's fortunate, for his life is lived to astonish. He must have an audience, no matter how contemptible to him.
In spite of the fact that Chicago is vociferously proud of this noisy genius, he was born in New York City and went to the high school of Racine, Wis. He has been a journalist for years. He was a correspondent in Berlin in 1918-19. His back-page feature stories for the Chicago Daily News were the best of their kind. They were the reactions of a rather peculiar brand of sentimentalist to the more simple and sordid phases of existence. They have been collected under the title A Thousand and One Nights in Chicago.
I remember seeing Hecht in his own house, a figure of some domesticity, with his wife and children; relating rapidly anecdotes gleaned from a rather grotesque variety of facts which he has gathered from years of constant, voracious, exotic reading. He was really a person of much charm. I looked forward to his first novel. Erik Dorn was a disappointment to me. It had passages of power; but its vulgarity and carelessness overbalanced them. Gargoyles I liked even less. Hecht is a brilliant, flaunting, ironic and not yet so very stable figure. What he does in the future seems to me partly to depend on how frank his flattering group of friends care to be with him. He has two signal faults: a too great facility and an overwhelming desire to appear to be wicked.
J. F.