A Dark and Wayward Book

This elegantly illustrated and designed book is based on the first edition of Ben Hecht’s 1922 masterpiece “Fantazius Mallare,” a vitriolic tale of madness, transcendence and crime. When that first edition was privately printed and sent to subscribers, Hecht and his illustrator, Wallace Smith, were arrested for distribution of “lewd, obscene and lascivious content” through the U.S. mail. Clarence Darrow defended them, but Smith was briefly imprisoned and Hecht lost his job as a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. The novel was banned in many states.

Hecht moved to Hollywood, where he became a whirlwind of activity, penning the original story for “Underworld” (which won him the 1927-28 Oscar), adapting his play “The Front Page” for the screen in 1931 and writing such memorable films as “Scarface” for Howard Hawks, “Notorious” and “Spellbound” for Alfred Hitchcock and “Wuthering Heights” for William Wyler. He was a script doctor on at least 70 other films, including “Gone With the Wind,” and he ghost-wrote Marilyn Monroe’s autobiography, “My Story.” Yet it was “Fantazius Mallare” that first made Hecht’s name.

The mad, reclusive artist Mallare, living in an unnamed modern city, is the filter through whom the narrative is screened. He burns his paintings and smashes his sculptures, deciding that “Art has become a tedious decoration of my impotence.... A wounded man groans. I, impaled by life, emit statues....”

Mallare then redecorates the interior of his house to mirror the disintegration of his mind. He employs a black hunchbacked dwarf, whom he names Goliath, as his valet, and purchases a girl from a band of wicked Gypsies, to make her “like one of the dreams in my brain” (as he says), to have an object upon which to focus the permutations of his madness. And the so-called journal entries in the novel take us deep into the convoluted horrors entertained by the increasingly psychotic Mallare.

He murders a homeless man in the street, imagining that he has killed the girl, Rita. When he returns home and finds her happily awaiting his arrival, he is convinced that she is a hallucination. He savagely beats her to prove this to himself while Goliath, horrified and fascinated, looks on. Hecht presents us with dark and disturbing facets of human existence in a heightened language that smacks of De Lautremont, Sade and Baudelaire. Indeed, “Fantazius Mallare” often reads like some illegitimate offspring of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” writ large and in more lurid colors.

At other times, Hecht’s book is like a lengthy prose-poem, giving us lucid glimpses into the method of Mallare’s madness: “I prefer the snow.... One flake remains invisible. A thousand flakes are of no account. It is only when the flakes repeat themselves too endlessly for my eye to distinguish that I finally ignore them and walk contentedly in a storm. Thus with logic. When I have surrounded myself with an infinity of assurances, my error vanishes in the constant repetition of itself. And I am reassured. And sane.... My hands choked her. She had followed me into the street and I choked her. But I do not remember this. At least, the thing grows elusive and unsatisfactory. Why? Ah, the snow covers me. I will cover my confusion with a sigh like the snow.... “ Images of snowfall and silence permeate the book.

The illustrations by Smith are like Aubrey Beardsley’s work, but more idiosyncratic and spidery; their somber wealth of detail dazzles and disturbs the eye. And they have been reproduced here, with original borders, in velvety blacks and stark white, reduced by about a third of their original size.

In this age of Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen King, the violence and cruelty of “Fantazius Mallare” are less shocking than they were 80 years ago. But the undisputed eloquence and intelligence of the main character make his descent into madness and delusion all the more hypnotic and off-putting. The reader wants to grab Mallare by the lapels and slap him into sensibility. Hecht’s wicked jeremiad is endemic of a kind of sickness at the heart of the American Dream. He shows us a “noble mind ... o’erthrown,” a dreamer unable to wake from his nightmares of absolute control, an artificer caught in a web of god-like indifference and cruel whim. Mallare ends up crucified by his own self-inflicted horrors. This voice out of the past, from an America flush with money, pride and bootleg booze, sings of isolation and egomania run amok, of a mind driven to destroy where creation becomes impossible.

“Fantazius Mallare” is the secret field, the dark mulch out of which Nathanael West and other dark visionaries of the American scene grew tall. In his lengthy dedication, Hecht enumerates the souls he finds wanting in wit and strength: “This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated to my enemies--to the curious ones who take fanatic pride in disliking me ... to the anointed ones who identify their paranoic symptoms as virtues ... to the prim ones who find their secret obscenities mirrored in every careless phase ... who wince adroitly in the hope of being mistaken for imbeciles; to the prim ones who fornicate apologetically (the Devil can-cans in their souls) ... to the critical ones who whoremonger on Parnassus ... to the serious ones who suffocate gently in the boredom they create (God alone has time to laugh at them) ... to these, and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this inhospitable book