Studying Ben Hecht’s papers at Chicago’s Newberry Library for a prospective book is less an academic exercise than a mental game akin to assembling a complicated jigsaw puzzle. Box upon box (67 in all) reveals an imaginative and prolific author whose literary productivity defies easy classification or assessment. Trying to figure out how all the pieces of his creativity fit together becomes the trick.
In more than a half-century of writing. Hecht completed 10 novels, approximately 250 short stories, some 20 plays, scores of screenplays, numerous radio and TV scripts, four memoirs, two collections of newspaper columns (selected from a prodigious output of journalism), two books about Jewish affairs and more than the occasion poem. In addition, neatly stored in those boxes at the Newberry are quite a few unfinished or unpublished efforts.
Yet for Hecht, who died at 70 in 1964, statistics tell just a fraction of the story. As a Chicago journalist from 1910 to 1924, he was known as a star reporter and popular columnist–so popular that his still-engrossing collection of sketches, “1001 Afternoons in Chicago,” was proclaimed a classic and “something of a Bible” for newspaper writers nationally after it appeared 80 years ago this year.
At the same time, Hecht turned out avant-garde fiction, poetry and drama that earned him a place (alongside Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Maxwell Bodenheim and others) in the Chicago literary renaissance.
His original story for the 1927 movie “Underworld” won the first Academy Award for writing given by Hollywood. In 1928, “The Front Page,” a play co-authored with Charles MacArthur, became a Broadway triumph and (in the phrase of Tennessee Williams years later) “took the corsets off the American theater.”
Hecht’s youthful genre-hopping, combined with rapid completion of projects, set patterns for his work that continued throughout his life. Joseph Epstein, who teaches literature and writing at Northwestern University, shrewdly appraised Hecht’s career by calling him “the great hack genius.” The paradox of Epstein’s phrase–How many hacks are geniuses?–points out a central problem in evaluating Hecht. Throw in the definite article “the” along with the adjective “great” and you, of course, compound the problem.
Hecht himself realized the difficulty presented anyone trying to survey what he did. At the beginning of his 654-page autobiography, “A Child of the Century” (1954), he says:
“I can understand the literary critic’s shyness toward me. It is difficult to praise a novelist or a thinker who keeps popping up as the author of innumerable movie melodramas. It is like writing about the virtues of a preacher who keeps carelessly getting himself arrested in bordellos.”
From his early days in Chicago through the nearly four decades he divided his time between New York and Hollywood, Hecht approached what he wrote from distinct perspectives. Some projects (such as the 1939 novella collection “A Book of Miracles” and “A Child of the Century”) he considered serious literary works. Others were mercenary ventures to subsidize the writing he cared about, causes he adopted (most notably, saving European Jews from the Holocaust) and a comfortable, bicoastal standard of living.
Though he rarely missed a chance to belittle the assembly-line process of screenwriting, many clipped-and-saved gossip columns in the Newberry report $1,000-per-day or $10,000-per-week assignments in Hollywood to deliver or doctor a script. Some films Hecht worked on include “The Scoundrel” (which won him another Oscar), “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious”–even “Queen of Outer Space” and “The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.”
French director Jean-Luc Godard said in the late 1960s that Hecht “invented 80 percent of what is used in American movies today.” The creator of cinematic stereotypes wasn’t shy about using those stereotypes and others to dash off a screenplay, story treatment or scene change. Frequently, as with “Gone With the Wind” and several of Alfred Hitchcock’s most celebrated films, the work was lucrative yet went uncredited on the screen.
Common to all of Hecht’s writing is a vivid, energetic style, with charged phrasing that crackles and explodes with immediacy and force. He emphasizes stories that are telling and well-told, to the extent that “A Child of the Century,” which he calls “an autobiography of my mind,” is really an extended collection of personal tales. Their veracity is at times suspect–Norman Mailer once said, “Hecht was never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose”–but the inventive rendering carries the narrative (and the reader) along.
The sheer volume of writing Hecht left behind certainly suggests a speed in composition most wordsmiths, serious or otherwise, would envy. Although trained as a reporter to turn out copy on a typewriter, his papers show he quickly shifted to pencil and cheap, unlined sheets–which often reflect minimal revision when compared to the final version.
Wearing down what he estimated to an interviewer were “75 to 100 pencils a week,” Hecht never seemed at a loss for words. His apprenticeship in journalism might have taught him he didn’t want to keep pounding a typewriter (he preferred sitting in a comfortable chair and scribbling on a writing board), but it instilled in him the done-in-a-day conditioning reporters learn for completing assignments under strict deadlines.
Hecht’s Chicago years also proved significant in selecting subjects he wrote about after he departed for New York and Hollywood. His novel “Count Bruga,” published in 1926, comically portrays poet Hippolyt Bruga, a not-overly-fictionalized depiction of Bodenheim. Stories for the films “Underworld” and “Scarface” draw on a reporter’s memory of gangster comportment and crime in the city. “The Front Page,” considered by most theater critics one of the finest American stage comedies (and the inspiration for four movies, including “His Girl Friday”), brings to life competitive shenanigans of Chicago journalists while poking fun at local politics and police activity.
Although he ridiculed Chicago and asserted its “reputation as a cultural center is a myth” in what seemed to be a good-riddance essay for The New Yorker in 1925, his outlook dramatically changed shortly thereafter. In the epilogue to the published version of “The Front Page,” which went through several printings, Hecht and MacArthur (a former Tribune reporter) offer an “apology” for initially setting out to criticize journalism and Chicago:
“It developed in writing this play that our contempt for the institution of the Press was a bogus attitude; that we looked back on the Local Room where we had spent half our lives as a veritable fairyland–and that we were both full of nostalgia for the bouncing days of our servitude.
“The same uncontrollable sentimentality operated in our treatment of Chicago which, as much as any of our characters, is the hero of our play.
“The iniquities, double dealings, chicaneries and immoralities which as ex-Chicagoans we knew so well returned to us in a mist called the Good Old Days, and our delight in our memories would not be denied.”
For Hecht, the “Good Old Days” of his Chicago youth strikingly return with robust, albeit often romanticized, intensity during his last decade in four books. More than one-third of “A Child of the Century” concerns his time as a reporter and first steps as a serious writer. He produced the biography-memoir “Charlie” in 1957, the year after MacArthur died, with the most vibrant sections about his frequent collaborator’s life during their joint time in Chicago.
Seven years later, “Gaily, Gaily” appeared, focusing directly on roistering high jinks and ribald antics of Hecht’s first five years as a young reporter, beginning in 1910 at 16. A year later, not long after he died, “Letters From Bohemia” came out. The publisher termed the writer’s final book a “nostalgic memoir,” with Chicago reminiscences about (among others) Anderson, Bodenheim and MacArthur included.
In curious literary symmetry, Hecht spent much of his last decade reliving in his imagination and through words his first decade as a reporter and aspiring author. Besides the four autobiographical books from 1954 to 1964, he also published several magazine articles and turned out scripts referring back to his youthful years.
“I find an increasing tendency when writing of myself to tell pleasant lies,” Hecht once said. This impulse to fabricate (Did he really, for instance, produce a mystery novel, “The Florentine Dagger,” in 36 hours to win a bet?) complicates anyone’s understanding of the writer, especially what he says in his late-life memoirs. That he repeats certain stories, changing and embellishing circumstances and details, makes matters even more difficult.
Interestingly, right up to the day he died, Hecht kept working on what he hoped would be a grand Broadway production about the rivalry between Italian and Irish mobs in Chicago during Prohibition. Drafts of the never-produced musical (which began as a play) are among Hecht’s papers and propose several possible titles: “Chicago,” “Chicago Days,” “Chicago Nights,” “Underworld” and “Angel in the Underworld.”
Ernest Hemingway called the Paris of his early years “a moveable feast.” For Hecht, Chicago was that–and much more. Here, however, speculation intrudes on sources, leading to questions about his preoccupation with a specific city at a particular time. Was it an aging author’s nostalgia for years of initiation and discovery? Was it the rosy recollection of a period of intently lived experience before becoming something of a perpetual-motion writing machine? Was it the celebration of a time of literary promise that seemed artistically idyllic–and in contrast to his Hollywood hackery? Was it a way of trying to escape the horrors of the Holocaust that haunted so much of his thinking throughout the 1940s? Was it the combination of several motivations Hecht himself couldn’t articulate?
Occasionally, in the memoirs, clues appear. In “A Child of the Century,” for example, he writes:
“My years in Chicago were a bright time spent in the glow of new worlds. I was a newspaper reporter, playwright, novelist, short-story writer, propagandist, publisher and crony of wild hearts and fabulous gullets. I haunted streets, studios, whore houses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, mad houses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fly belly could hold, learned not to sleep (an accomplishment that still clings to me) and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.”
A few pages later, he explains himself in relation to Chicago:
“I have lived in other cities but been inside only one. I knew Chicago’s thirty-two feet of intestines. Only newspapermen ever achieve this bug-in-a-rug citizenship.”
Recalling his past and moving to New York in “Charlie,” Hecht goes so far as to confess:
“We were all fools to have left Chicago. It was a town to play in; a town where you could stay yourself, and where the hoots of the critics couldn’t frighten your style or drain your soul.”
A more telling rationale for Hecht’s obsession with Chicago comes from someone who knew him well from the late 1920s on, actress Helen Hayes. Widow of MacArthur and long-time New York neighbor, she spoke about “Ben and Charlie” at a Newberry Library dinner in 1980 after the arrival of Hecht’s papers.
“Ben was never comfortable in the adult world,” Hayes said. “He spent his whole life trying to hang on to youth, its mindset, its wonderment, its carefree fizz.”
Most of Ben Hecht’s enduring work–for the theater, on the movie screen and in prose–uses his youthful Chicago days for inspiration. This child of the 20th Century always carried the City of the Big Shoulders around in his imagination, producing words that still reverberate today.
Reading Ben Hecht
Here are 12 works by Ben Hecht that show his breadth as a writer and help explain his life:
– “Erik Dorn” (1921) — A novel, featuring a Chicago reporter involved in a love triangle, that captures post-World War I disillusionment and urban angst with lacerating epigrams and brooding digressions.
– “1001 Afternoons in Chicago” (1922) — Memorable newspaper sketches that reveal the city and its people with sensitivity and panache.
– “Broken Necks” (1926) — Short stories that reflect small-magazine literary experimentation and savvy understanding of mass-market fiction.
– “The Front Page” (1928) — An enduring portrait of wise-cracking, scoop-minded reporters that helped define the Chicago school of news and the broader public’s view of journalism.
– “A Book of Miracles” (1939) — Seven artfully crafted novellas that explore spiritual concerns through distinctive characters and ingenious plots.
– “1001 Afternoons in New York” (1941) — Sharp-edged newspaper columns that evoke pre-World War II America and make a case for the urgent need to help European Jews escape Nazi persecution.
– “A Guide for the Bedevilled” (1944) — An extended personal and passionate essay on the evils of anti-Semitism, by a writer previously unconcerned about his own Jewishness.
– “The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht” (1945) — A compendium of short fiction by an inventive storyteller who takes on a variety of subjects and narrative techniques.
– “A Child of the Century” (1954) — A sprawling autobiography that not only dramatizes the author’s life but also allows him to speak his mind on long-nursed grudges and abiding obsessions.
– “Charlie: The Improbable Life and Times of Charles MacArthur” (1957) — An anecdote-filled portrait of the former Chicago reporter, who went on to write Broadway plays and Hollywood movies, often in collaboration with Hecht.
– “Perfidy” (1961) — Controversial and polemical account of the establishment of Israel and the Jewish state’s early leadership.
– “Gaily, Gaily” (1963) — Adult adventures of a callow Chicago reporter that mingle memory and imagination to produce cleverly rendered tales of initiation and self-discovery.
— Robert Schmuhl
