Books: Bedlam Blasted

Bedlam Blasted*

Author Hecht, Cursing, Burrows Morbidly through the Loams of Illusion

The Story. Mr. Winkelberg, a paunchy Dutch biped, sold cheap jewelry in Chicago. In the hairy bulb between Mr. Winkelberg’s shoulders was accumulated a small mass of miscellaneous garbage which Mr. Winkelberg called his opinions, his beliefs, his reasons, his god.

There were many Winkelberg relatives, all the same. The whole city, lusting and pulsing in greedy dark animalism, was a city of Winkelbergs. There were a million such Winkelberg cities, a world full of them, a Winkelberg mankind. Every dawn, when the red sun bowled up over the earth, all the Winkelberg bulbs stirred in a blind organism known to the Winkelbergs as a day of life. Personified, this day was a disheveled maniac, a Humpty Dumpty in streaming cheesecloth toga, bawling fresh tidings from Bedlam down the winds of the earth.

So, at least, it all seemed to Kent Savaron, Hechtic mooncalf from Wisconsin. He rocketed into Chicago, impelled by a desire to write. Glutted with his boyhood, gorged with reading, he feasted immoderate-ly on the profuse externals of the city. As he fed, self-consciousness awoke and introspection tickled and whetted his emotional appetites. These he celebrated with loose living and brilliant adjectival bombinations, in print and conversation. As he became conscious of the Winkelbergs, their repulsiveness deepened his subjectivity into fiercer and fiercer hunger for experience, a hunger that consumed life and fed, most gruesomely, upon itself. When he married Stella Winkelberg it was largely to inflict a wound upon the body Winkelberg and to revel in the gradual perversion of one of its members.

Stella inevitably revenged her kind by plunging Savaron down the abyss of sex. Writing his autobiography afforded him a ledge to cling to tem-porarily. Then that crumbled and he dreamed dizzily of himself as im-prisoned by the Winkelbergs, craning out of a lopsided tenement win-dow in a nightcap, blowing kisses into infinity. He left Stella, strug-gled a while to brake his racing thoughts, then blew his tired brains out.

The Significance. The tree of life has roots as well as branches. Shelley shinnied to the topmost twig, swaying above sanity with piercing cries of joy. Savaron, cursing brilliantly, burrowed down through the loams of illusion to the last dark rootlet of which words can tell. Psychologically, the book is a faultless exposition of the destructive approach to super-manhood. It would be restless reading for maiden aunts, a dangerous typhoon for souls without some windward anchor of faith or stupidity.

The Author. It may seem surprising that Author Hecht is not notorious as a violent madman. This intelligently savage Savaron biography is an improvisation upon his own. But Mr. Hecht, though dark, shaggy and demonaical of mien, managed to continue for 13 years as a trusted employe of The Chicago Journal and The Chicago Daily News; he is now at large in Manhattan as press agent for Joseph Schildkraut in The Firebrand. Aged 31, he has a wife and two children. He is kind to dogs, children and old people. From this it would appear that his state of mind, however uncomfortable it may be when he writes, is not without some solace. So far, it has made of him nothing more fearsome than the journalistic James Joyce of America.

Born of Slavic parentage at Racine, Wis., Mr. Hecht punctuated his career in Chicago with Eric Dorn, “most ar resting novel of 1921.” Humpty Dumpty is a replica of that book, with new characters and an amplified concatenation of philosophical firecrackers. Other Hechtiana: A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (sketches), Gargoyles (flaying journalistic and juridical hypocrisies), The Florentine Dagger (a mystery novel, alleged to have been written in 24 hours, on a bet), Fantasius Mallare and its sequel, The Kingdom of Evil (studies in the elephantiasis of carnal lust, for the first of which Author Hecht, being poor, was temporarily imprisoned) and The Egotist (played by Actor Leo Dietrichstein).

America of the Fifties

THE LETTERS OF FREDERIKA BREMER— Edited by Adolf B. Bronson— The American-Scandinavian Foundation ($2.00). In roaring, lynching, razzle-dazzle, hell-for-leather ’49, when men went mad for gold in California, when Longfellow wrote poetry in Cambridge and carpenters got 16 dollars a day; when Choctaw Indians came to Christ and dying John Calhoun, his eyes like fetch candles, stood up to speak in the U. S. Senate, there came to these shores a middle-aged Swedish spinster who had written novels. Her friend Hawthorne said that she was worthy of being the maiden aunt of the whole human race; at all events her name, Frederika Bremer, forgotten now, was then known in every house. Here and there she visited, met most of the famed people in the U. S., observed the quaint customs of the land, described it all in letters to her sister back in Sweden. Her letters were published soon after and widely read. Now they have been republished.

Her novels—Hertha, The President’s Daughter, The Home, The Neighbors, Nina,—were never trim enough to make the passage between Today and Yesterday; lugubrious galleons, in that gulf they foundered. But time has preserved her letters in their own sharp salt; and the lapse of this half-century has bred in them a charm, a pathos they could never have had in the beginning—the charm of the ingenuous, the pathos of the unaware. Here was a little lady looking at a country sick with dysentery, fever in its veins and the drums of war tapping. She ob-served with the keenness of a cocotte and wrote with the freshness of a nun. Thinking herself at a garden party— as indeed she was—she perfectly described the setting for one of the bloodiest trials of history. Great people walk absently through her pages. Emerson, whose soul she compares to a glass of water; Washington Irving, “a man with large, beautiful eyes” James Russell Lowell, “brilli-ant, witty, gay”; Henry Clay uttering his battle-cry “California”, “the last syllable of which he pronounced in a peculiar way”; Amos B. Alcott, advised to drink milk to make his transcendentalism less foggy; farmers, slave holders, Abolitionists, preachers, pale brides, dark chivalrous gentlemen, all brought strangely back in the letters of this little old maid, out of a dead world, out of a lost time.

Edith Wharton

France, Newport, Henry James For years, Mrs. Wharton, American novelist, has chosen to live in France and to write of the U. S. from that vantage point. That she should stay in America in order to keep her local color fresh is absurd; for by birth and training her material is so a part of her that she could scarcely err when she writes of American society. If all of our social customs should change overnight, Mrs. Wharton would, by instinct, know the change. Yet she has not always written of the frills and furbelows of life. Her Ethan Frame stands as one of the first stories of our literature and it deals with grim and simple life, with plain people. Her latest published work, Little Old New York, a collection of novelettes, contains The Old Maid—another story worthy to rank with Ethan Frame. Her new novel is appearing serially in The Pictorial Review. It is called The Mother’s Recompense.

Mrs. Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones. Her family tree is rich with names such as Newbold, Stevens, Schermerhorn, Rhinelander. She was, as a child, much in Europe. Both there and in the U. S., her education was entirely in the hands of private instructors. She lived in Newport or New York when in the U. S. Married at 23 to Edward Wharton, of Boston, she widened her habitat by living for a time in the summers at Lenox.

Now she spends practically all of her time in France, where she has two houses. During the War she worked nobly for the French cause and was awarded the French Legion of Honor. The Marne and A Son at the Front are both excellent War books, particularly the latter. Perhaps no sketch of Mrs. Wharton, no matter how short, should fail to mention her friendship and admiration for Henry James. That her work has a resemblance to his is apparent to the most casual reader. Yet her warm characters are a sharp contrast to his chilly creations. Mrs. Wharton did not publish her first book until she was 37. Her progress has been steady since then and, with increasing age, she loses none of her vitality or her magnificent ability to characterize. Only one or two of her long line of books have failed to please her critics. She is an artist in words, a writer of great distinction. If her detachment from the U. S. has made pos-sible her splendid and sometimes ironical vision of the U. S. aristocrat, then her definite joy in living away from us may be forgiven. Perhaps others should follow suit; but few others would have by birth and inclination that somewhat impossible to define but nevertheless definite “American Tradition.”

*HUMPTY DUMPTY—Ben Hecth-Boni & Liveright ($2.00).