Brat of the Century
A Child of the Century.
by Ben Hecht.
Simon and Schuster. 654 pp. $5.00.
“I am a rascal,” says your true rascal grinning, and thereby robs you of the privilege of calling him one.
Ben Hecht, whose heroes are mainly rascals, does not belong in the merry and daring company he cherishes. He brags of a somewhat picaresque past—circus tumbler, Chicago newspaper reporter, promoter of dubious enterprises and get-rich-quick schemes before he became novelist, playwright, and Hollywood scriptwriter—but he lacks the devil-may-care candor that makes so many rascals ingratiating, at least in literature. His 654-page autobiography—posterity will trim his copy—reveals him as a cautious man and a somber one; burdened less with conscience, to be sure, than by the need to justify himself at every turn. A Child of the Century is a jumbled book, a re-hash of everything Hecht ever wrote—A Jew in Love, Erik Dorn, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, Count Bruga, The Front Page. It will do no good to his reputation. He comes out indeed rather shabbily—as word-slinger rather than stylist, master of invective rather than wit, poetaster rather than poet, crackpot philosopher and calculating crackpot, romantic cynic and cruel sentimentalist, third-rate Mencken and fifth-rate Rochefoucauld.
His vicarious pleasure in the sordid gives to his autobiography a singular note of bad taste. His newspaper days in Chicago, for example—with what relish he describes the merry hatchet murders, the gleeful hangings, the mirth-provoking rapes, the colorful pimps, prostitutes, swindlers, and dope-peddlers. He had no part in these gay doings, much as he found them entrancing. But what fun he and his fellow ghouls of the Chicago Daily News had, reveling in the filth and misery of others, romping in the gore of the victims. Even today, at the mature age of sixty-two, he can still rhapsodize over those glorious, vomit-filled, entrail-festooned years, in the heartless fashion of a perennial medical student.
“I could cover a hundred pages with lists of fascinating cadavers. . . . But I stop my pencil and sit sighing among my phantoms and feel pleased. What better is there to sigh for than happiness, yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. And that was happiness. . . . The headlines of murder, rape, and swindle were ribbons around a Maypole.”
Is all this a pose, or sheer depravity? Who cares? How can we take seriously any man who writes such drivel? But Mr. Hecht demands to be taken seriously, and is as bitter as any holy man against the society that will not let him have his own say.
He is especially bitter on the subject of Hollywood. He could not stomach the stupidity, the cynicism, the immorality, the lack of integrity (look who’s complaining!) of the movie colony. Again and again he fled, but every time the devils in charge seduced him back with more money. In the end, he observes pridefully, he was being paid $300,000 a year, and highly indignant he was, too, at the filthy bribers when they decided he was doing them more harm than good and withdrew their bribes.
Of such stuff are Hollywood Communists made, and how Ben Hecht escaped their camp remains something of a mystery. He chose Irgun instead, as a more romantic terrorist movement. Perhaps I do Mr. Hecht an injustice. The slaughter of the Jews in Germany seems to have inspired him, perhaps for the first time in his life, with a genuine rage. Like the Jewish lawyer in The Caine Mutiny, Hecht didn’t want his grandmother made into soap; it had to be that personal with him before he could drop his pose of weary cynicism. But also Irgun was obviously a lost cause. For Hecht belongs—when he is not being a toughie—to the fate-forlorn school of romantics, sighing, ah! for the love doomed to die and the dream destined to a sad awakening. Not that Hecht planned to perish with the dream. Hardly! His movement, fortunately, operated only abroad, so that Hecht could sit in safety around his swimming pool in Westwood, fertilizing terroristic schemes of the kind that bore fruit in the hostage-killings of innocent British sergeants (how different when the Germans do it!) and in the assassination of a man of peace, Prince Bernadotte. And those, too, were happy days. But the “politician Ben Gurion” triumphed over the hero Peter Bergson, Irgun was finished, and Hecht was free at last to return to his movie scripts and his rhapsodies over rape and ax-murders. His sigh of relief is all too audible. The Jews, too, had let him down. As he always knew they would.
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Someone was always letting our hero down. The Jews, or England, or F.D.R., or literary people, or Hollywood, or his lady-loves. Or finally all of mankind. That he might be demanding of them more than he was ever willing to give seems never to have occurred to him. How he rails at compromise of any kind who compromised all—including his talent. He whines in justification that he is a poor man, and bemoans the fact that he has had all his life to write claptrap for a living. Yet $300,000 (which he made in a single year in Hollywood) might well suffice a writer of good purpose for a lifetime. And someone should tell Mr. Hecht that the Hollywood hacks he jeers at might—like himself—have need for swimming pools, limousines, and the well-stocked cellar. He is particularly scornful of the honest hacks who can do no better than they are doing.
Mr. Hecht’s constant jibes at better people than himself grow wearisome as well as offensive. Apparently he as the type of man who can maintain his own stature only by dwarfing others. To justify himself he must make everybody else seem worse. And, in the end, he must deny the very existence of virtue. “Kindness tolerance, integrity, modesty, generosity— these are attributes that events permit us. They are our holiday moods, and we are as proud of them as of the fine clothes we have hung away to wear on occasions.”
“WHO IS VIRTUOUS?” reads one chapter heading in A Child of the Century. A subsequent chapter is headed: “I SERENADE A VIRTUE—MY OWN.” The trouble is, Mr. Hecht is not kidding. His faults, he would have us believe, are those all mankind shares. His virtue—a particularly bold one—he maintains Prometheus-like against the gods: “It is lack of fear of other people’s minds.”
“Since my boyhood I have sought always to please, but out of a kindness in me, never out of fear or respect for what was in others.”
What Mr. Hecht proclaims as his outstanding virtue others may consider his besetting sin. We need not fear, but respect is due to, those who succeed where we fail, who are strong where we are weak, and who are virtuous in situations where we behave wickedly. The sand-lot ball-player worships Stan Musial, the budding novelist James Joyce or whomever. Striving towards what they consider perfection, they improve, each in his own craft, by slow and painful degrees. In the end may come disillusionment, to be sure, but it is of a healthy kind, meaning no more than that we have lifted ourselves to the level of those we worshipped. If they seem now diminished, it is because we have grown taller. But Mr. Hecht acknowledges no gods, and this is a pity. It accounts for the complete absence in him of taste or style or standards. He is a “fancy Dan” at the plate, with a shrewd eye for the pitcher’s weaknesses, but he will never bat .300 in any league. He has no use for averages—1.000 or nothing—and has therefore never seriously tried to raise his own.
Nobody bats 1.000. There is an element of truth in Mr. Hecht’s doubts of the virtues. To drop the baseball metaphor, we are all of us sinners, and this hackneyed truth doesn’t need the beating that Mr. Hecht gives it. It is true that no one is totally virtuous, and the tolerably decent are singularly vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy since they fail according to their own lights. They are not to be trusted. Sometimes they perform honorably and sometimes they do not. Better the out-and-out rogue. You know where you stand with him. So argue those who, as George Orwell puts it, think no bread at all is better than half a loaf.
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Granted this philosophy, it is no surprise that in Mr. Hecht’s book gangster Mickey Cohen emerges as a rather nobler figure than Zionist leader Weizmann. Roosevelt—need you doubt it?—is an anti-Semite, Ben Gurion a murderer, Sherwood Anderson a plain stinker. Westbrook Pegler rates high—“one of the brightest of the prose lighthouses.”
Nor, with his philosophy and background, could Mr. Hecht have escaped the line of Hollywood Communism entirely. To be sure, he finds the Communists in this country silly, but not nasty and contemptible like the people who pursue them. “The fiercest of the Red hunters among us . . . is the ex-Red who has turned his coat. This fellow is usually a dollar chaser.” Next in line is the “American of German sympathies, still smarting over German defeat.” In all of Mr. Hecht’s long classification of “Commie hunters” there is not one decent citizen, alarmed by the extent and the danger of Communist penetration into American government, education, social service, or the trade union movement. To be sure, to be sure. But fit that into his admiration for Westbrook Pegler; if you can.
Mr. Hecht goes further along the line. Communism may be bad, but we, too, are headed for a dictatorship of a less romantic kind. “Americans . . . need no policemen to club them into line, as do the stormier Slavs. They are already there. . . . The move from suppressing thought by innumerable little cockeyed vigilante groups to suppressing it by one large dignified body called the U.S. Government is not likely to be an involved or dramatic one.” Where have we heard all this before? What a vulgarization of the difficult problems we face of combating Communism without violating civil liberties—problems that are the proper concern of responsible people in both major parties.
And what a silly, surly, irresponsible fellow Ben Hecht makes of himself, whatever his talents! Was this once the gay desperado of American letters, the darling of the literary rebels, the frisky soul of the lost generation—my generation? For I, too, can claim with Ben Hecht to be a Child of the Century.
A terrible fate has overtaken us two children. Twenty-three years ago I reviewed sourly for the Menorah Journal a half-baked novel, A Jew in Love, by a young writer named Ben Hecht. Nearly a quarter of a century later, I find myself reviewing the same half-baked book, called this time A Child of the Century, but containing the same half-truths and sophomoric philosophy—and reviewing it in the same bilious spirit.
Eheu fugaces!
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