A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

B >> Ben Hecht >> A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago



E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Clare Elliott, Charles Franks, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team



A THOUSAND AND ONE AFTERNOONS IN CHICAGO

by

Ben Hecht







Preface


It was a day in the spring of 1921. Dismal shadows, really Hechtian
shadows, filled the editorial "coop" in _The Chicago Daily News_
building. Outside the rain was slanting down in the way that Hecht's own
rain always slants. In walked Hecht. He had been divorced from our staff
for some weeks, and had married an overdressed, blatant creature called
Publicity. Well, and how did he like Publicity? The answer was written in
his sullen eyes; it was written on his furrowed brow, and in the savage
way he stabbed the costly furniture with his cane. The alliance with
Publicity was an unhappy one. Good pay? Oh yes, preposterous pay.
Luncheons with prominent persons? Limitless luncheons. Easy work, short
hours, plenteous taxis, hustling associates, glittering results. But--but
he couldn't stand it, that was all. He just unaccountably, illogically,
and damnably couldn't stand it. If he had to attend another luncheon and
eat sweet-breads and peach melba and listen to some orator pronounce a
speech he, Hecht, had written, and hear some Magnate outline a campaign
which he, Hecht, had invented ... and that wasn't all, either....
Gentlemen, he just couldn't stand it.

Well, the old job was open.

Ben shuddered. It wasn't the old job that he was thinking about. He had a
new idea. Something different. Maybe impossible.

And here followed specifications for "One Thousand and One Afternoons."
The title, I believe, came later, along with details like the salary. Hang
the salary! I doubt if Ben even heard the figure that was named. He merely
said "Uh-huh!" and proceeded to embellish his dream--his dream of a
department more brilliant, more artistic, truer (I think he said truer),
broader and better than anything in the American press; a literary
thriller, a knock-out ... and so on.

So much for the mercenary spirit in which "One Thousand and One
Afternoons" was conceived.

A week or so later Ben came in again, bringing actual manuscript for eight
or ten stories. He was haggard but very happy. It was clear that he had
sat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hated
to let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea--the idea that
just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often
flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there
dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but
walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers,
sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its
interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors,
his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was no
newspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist's dream. And it had
begun to come true. Here were the stories.... Hoped I'd like 'em.

"One Thousand and One Afternoons" were launched in June, 1921. They were
presented to the public as journalism extraordinary; journalism that
invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really
dwells. They went out backed by confidence in the genius of Ben Hecht.
This, if you please, took place three months before the publication of
"Erik Dorn," when not a few critics "discovered" Hecht. It is not too much
to say that the first full release of Hecht's literary powers was in "One
Thousand and One Afternoons." The sketches themselves reveal his creative
delight in them; they ring with the happiness of a spirit at last free to
tell what it feels; they teem with thought and impressions long treasured;
they are a recital of songs echoing the voices of Ben's own city and
performed with a virtuosity granted to him alone. They announced to a
Chicago audience which only half understood them the arrival of a prodigy
whose precise significance is still unmeasured.

"Erik Dorn" was published. "Gargoyles" took form. Hecht wrote a play in
eight days. He experimented with a long manuscript to be begun and
finished within eighteen hours. "One Thousand and One Afternoons"
continued to pour out of him. His letter-box became too small for his
mail. He was bombarded with eulogies, complaints, arguments, "tips," and
solicitations. His clipping bureau rained upon him violent reviews of
"Dorn." His publishers submerged him with appeals for manuscript.
Syndicates wired him, with "name your own terms." New York editors tried
to steal him. He continued to write "One Thousand and One Afternoons." He
became weary, nervous and bilious; he spent four days in bed, and gave up
tobacco. Nothing stopped "One Thousand and One Afternoons." One a day, one
a day! Did the flesh fail, and topics give out, and the typewriter became
an enemy? No matter. The venturesome undertaking of writing good newspaper
sketches, one per diem, had to be carried out. We wondered how he did it.
We saw him in moods when he almost surrendered, when the strain of
juggling with novels, plays and with contracts, revises, adblurbs,
sketches, nearly finished "One Thousand and One Afternoon." But a year
went by, and through all that year there had not been an issue of _The
Chicago Daily News_ without a Ben Hecht sketch. And still the
manuscripts dropped down regularly on the editor's desk. Comedies,
dialogues, homilies, one-act tragedies, storiettes, sepia panels,
word-etchings, satires, tone-poems, fuges, bourrees,--something different
every day. Rarely anything hopelessly out of key. Stories seemingly born
out of nothing, and written--to judge by the typing--in ten minutes, but
in reality, as a rule, based upon actual incident, developed by a period
of soaking in the peculiar chemicals of Ben's nature, and written with
much sophistication in the choice of words. There were dramatic studies
often intensely subjective, lit with the moods of Ben himself, not of the
things dramatized. There were self-revelations characteristically frank
and provokingly debonaire. There was comment upon everything under the
sun; assaults upon all the idols of antiquity, of mediaevalism, of
neo-boobism. There were raw chunks of philosophy, delivered with gusto and
sometimes with inaccuracy. There were subtle jabs at well-established
Babbitry. And besides, of the thousand and one Hechts visible in the
sketches, there were several that appear rarely, if at all, in his novels:
The whimsical Hecht, sailing jocosely on the surface of life; the witty
Hecht, flinging out novel word-combinations, slang and snappy endings;
Hecht the child-lover and animal-lover, with a special tenderness for
dogs; Hecht the sympathetic, betraying his pity for the aged, the
forgotten, the forlorn. In the novels he is one of his selves, in the
sketches he is many of them. Perhaps this is why he officially spoke
slightingly of them at times, why he walked in some days, flung down a
manuscript, and said: "Here's a rotten story." Yet it must be that he
found pleasure in playing the whole scale, in hopping from the G-string to
the E-, in surprising his public each day with a new whim or a recently
discovered broken image. I suspect, anyhow, that he delighted in making
his editor stare and fumble in the Dictionary of Taboos.

Ben will deny most of this. He denies everything. It doesn't matter. It
doesn't even matter much, Ben, that your typing was sometimes so blind or
that your spelling was occasionally atrocious, or that it took three
proof-readers and a Library of Universal Knowledge to check up your
historical allusions.

* * * * *

The preface is proving horribly inadequate. It is not at all what Ben
wants. It does not seem possible to support his theory that "One Thousand
and One Afternoons," springing from a literary passion so authentic and
continuing so long with a fervor and variety unmatched in newspaper
writing, are hack-work, done for a meal ticket. They must have had the
momentum of a strictly artistic inspiration and gained further momentum
from the need of expression, from pride in the subtle use of words, from
an ardent interest in the city and its human types. Yes, they are
newspaper work; they are the writings of a reporter emancipated from the
assignment book and the copy-desk; a reporter gone to the heaven of
reporters, where they write what they jolly well please and get it printed
too! But the sketches are also literature of which I think Ben cannot be
altogether ashamed; else why does he print them in a book, and how could
Mr. Rosse be moved to make the striking designs with which the book is
embellished? Quite enough has been said. The author, the newspaper editor,
the proof-readers and revisers have done their utmost with "One Thousand
and One Afternoons." The prefacer confesses failure. It is the turn of the
reader. He may welcome the sketches in book form; he may turn scornfully
from them and leave them to moulder in the stock-room of Messrs.
Covici-McGee. To paraphrase an old comic opera lyric:

"You never can tell about a reader;
Perhaps that's why we think them all so nice.
You never find two alike at any one time
And you never find one alike twice.
You're never very certain that they read you,
And you're often very certain that they don't.
Though an author fancy still that he has the strongest will
It's the reader has the strongest won't."

Yet I think that the book will succeed. It may succeed so far that Mr.
Hecht will hear some brazen idiots remarking: "I like it better than
'Dorn' or 'Gargoyles'." Yes, just that ruinous thing may happen. But if it
does Ben cannot blame his editor.

HENRY JUSTIN SMITH.

Chicago, July 1, 1922



CONTENTS

A Self-Made Man

An Iowa Humoresque

An Old Audience Speaks

Clocks and Owl Cars

Confessions

Coral, Amber and Jade

Coeur De Lion and The Soup and Fish

Dapper Pete and The Sucker Play

Dead Warrior

Don Quixote and His Last Windmill

"Fa'n Ta Mig!"

Fanny

Fantastic Lollypops

Fog Patterns

Grass Figures

Ill-Humoresque

Jazz Band Impressions

Letters

Meditation in E Minor

Michigan Avenue

Mishkin's Minyon

Mottka

Mr. Winkelberg

Mrs. Rodjezke's Last Job

Mrs. Sardotopolis' Evening Off

Night Diary

Nirvana

Notes For A Tragedy

On A Day Like This

Ornaments

Pandora's Box

Pitzela's Son

Queen Bess Feast

Ripples

Satraps At Play

Schopenhauer's Son

Sergt. Kuzick's Waterloo

Sociable Gamblers

Ten-Cent Wedding Rings

The Auctioneer's Wife

The Dagger Venus

The Exile

The Great Traveler The Indestructible Masterpiece

The Lake

The Little Fop

The Man From Yesterday

The Man Hunt

The Man With A Question

The Mother

The Pig

The Snob

The Soul of Sing Lee

The Sybarite

The Tattooer

The Thing In The Dark

The Watch Fixer

The Way Home

Thumbnail Lotharios

Thumbs Up and Down

To Bert Williams

Vagabondia

Waterfront Fancies

Where The "Blues" Sound

World Conquerors



FANNY


Why did Fanny do this? The judge would like to know. The judge would like
to help her. The judge says: "Now, Fanny, tell me all about it."

All about it, all about it! Fanny's stoical face stares at the floor. If
Fanny had words. But Fanny has no words. Something heavy in her heart,
something vague and heavy in her thought--these are all that Fanny has.

Let the policewoman's records show. Three years ago Fanny came to Chicago
from a place called Plano. Red-cheeked and black-haired, vivid-eyed and
like an ear of ripe corn dropped in the middle of State and Madison
streets, Fanny came to the city.

Ah, the lonely city, with its crowds and its lonely lights. The lonely
buildings busy with a thousand lonelinesses. People laughing and hurrying
along, people eager-eyed for something; summer parks and streets white
with snow, the city moon like a distant window, pretty gewgaws in the
stores--these are a part of Fanny's story.

The judge wants to know. Fanny's eyes look up. A dog takes a kick like
this, with eyes like this, large, dumb and brimming with pathos. The dog's
master is a mysterious and inexplicable dispenser of joys and sorrows. His
caresses and his beatings are alike mysterious; their reasons seldom to be
discerned, never fully understood.

Sometimes in this court where the sinners are haled, where "poised and
prim and particular, society stately sits," his honor has a moment of
confusion. Eyes lift themselves to him, eyes dumb and brimming with
pathos. Eyes stare out of sordid faces, evil faces, wasted faces and say
something not admissible as evidence. Eyes say: "I don't know, I don't
know. What is it all about?"

These are not to be confused with the eyes that plead shrewdly for mercy,
with eyes that feign dramatic naïvetés and offer themselves like primping
little penitents to his honor. His honor knows them fairly well. And
understands them. They are eyes still bargaining with life.

But Fanny's eyes. Yes, the judge would like to know. A vagueness comes
into his precise mind. He half-hears the familiar accusation that the
policeman drones, a terribly matter-of-fact drone.

Another raid on a suspected flat. Routine, routine. Evil has its eternal
root in the cities. A tireless Satan, bored with the monotony of his rôle;
a tireless Justice, bored with the routine of tears and pleadings, lies
and guilt.

There is no story in all this. Once his honor, walking home from a
banquet, looked up and noticed the stars. Meaningless, immutable stars.
There was nothing to be seen by looking at them. They were mysteries to be
dismissed. Like the mystery of Fanny's eyes. Meaningless, immutable eyes.
They do not bargain. Yet the world stares out of them. The face looks
dumbly up at a judge.

No defense. The policeman's drone has ended and Fanny says nothing. This
is difficult. Because his honor knows suddenly there is a defense. A
monstrous defense. Since there are always two sides to everything. Yes,
what is the other side? His honor would like to know. Tell it, Fanny.
About the crowds, streets, buildings, lights, about the whirligig of
loneliness, about the humpty-dumpty clutter of longings. And then explain
about the summer parks and the white snow and the moon window in the sky.
Throw in a poignantly ironical dissertation on life, on its uncharted
aimlessness, and speak like Sherwood Anderson about the desires that stir
in the heart. Speak like Remy de Gourmont and Dostoevsky and Stevie Crane,
like Schopenhauer and Dreiser and Isaiah; speak like all the great
questioners whose tongues have wagged and whose hearts have burned with
questions. His honor will listen bewilderedly and, perhaps, only perhaps,
understand for a moment the dumb pathos of your eyes.

As it is, you were found, as the copper who reads the newspapers puts it,
in a suspected flat. A violation of section 2012 of the City Code. Thirty
days in the Bastile, Fanny. Unless his honor is feeling good.

These eyes lifted to him will ask him questions on his way home from a
banquet some night.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

"Make it twenty-two," his honor smiles. "And you have nothing to say?
About how you happened to get into this sort of thing? You look like a
good girl. Although looks are often deceiving."

"I went there with him," says Fanny. And she points to a beetle-browed
citizen with an unshaven face. A quaint Don Juan, indeed.

"Ever see him before?"

A shake of the head. Plain case. And yet his honor hesitates. His honor
feels something expand in his breast. Perhaps he would like to rise and
holding forth his hand utter a famous plagiarism--"Go and sin no more." He
chews a pen and sighs, instead.

"I'll give you another chance," he says. "The next time it'll be jail.
Keep this in mind. If you're brought in again, no excuses will go. Call
the next case."

Now one can follow Fanny. She walks out of the courtroom. The street
swallows her. Nobody in the crowds knows what has happened. Fanny is
anybody now. Still, one may follow. Perhaps something will reveal itself,
something will add an illuminating touch to the incident of the courtroom.

There is only this. Fanny pauses in front of a drug-store window. The
crowds clutter by. Fanny stands looking, without interest, into the
window. There is a little mirror inside. The city tumbles by. The city is
interested in something vastly complicated.

Staring into the little mirror, Fanny sighs and--powders her nose.



THE AUCTIONEER'S WIFE


An auctioneer must have a compelling manner. He must be gabby and
stentorian, witheringly sarcastic and plaintively cajoling. He must be
able to detect the faintest symptoms of avarice and desire in the blink of
an eyelid, in the tilt of a head. Behind his sing-song of patter as he
knocks down a piece of useless bric-a-brac he must be able to remain cool,
remain calculating, remain like a hawk prepared to pounce upon his prey.
Passion for him must be no more than a mask; anger, sorrow, despair,
ecstasy no more than the devices of salesmanship.

But more than all this, an auctioneer must know the magic password into
the heart of the professional or amateur collector. He must know the
glittering phrases that are the keys to their hobbies. The words that
bring a gleam to the eye of the Oriental rug collector. The words that
fire the china collector. The stamp collector. The period furniture
collector. The tapestry enthusiast. The first edition fan. And so on.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I desire your expert attention for a moment. I have
here a curious little thing of exquisite workmanship said to be from the
famous collection of Count Valentine of Florence. This delicately molded,
beautifully painted candelabra has illuminated the feasts of the old
Florentines, twinkled amid the gay, courtly rioting of a time that is no
more. Before the bidding for this priceless souvenir is opened I desire,
ladies and gentlemen, to state briefly----"

* * * * *

Nathan Ludlow is an auctioneer who knows all the things an auctioneer must
know. His eye is piercing. His tongue can roll and rattle for twelve hours
at a stretch. His voice is the voice of the tempter, myriad-toned and
irresistible.

It was evening. An auspicious evening. It was the evening of Mr. Ludlow's
divorce. And Mr. Ludlow sat in his room at the Morrison Hotel, a decanter
of juniper juice at his elbow. And while he sat he talked. The subjects
varied. There were tales of Ming vases and Satsuma bargains, of porcelains
and rugs. And finally Mr. Ludlow arrived at the subject of audiences. And
from this subject he progressed with the aid of the juniper juice to the
subject of wives. And from the subject of wives he stepped casually into
the sad story of his life.

"I'll tell you," said Mr. Ludlow. "Tonight I'm a free man. Judge Pam gave
me, or gave her, rather, the divorce. I guess he did well. Maybe she was
entitled to it. Desertion and cruelty were the charges. But they don't
mean anything. The chief complaint she had against me was that I was an
auctioneer."

Mr. Ludlow sighed and ran his long, artist's fingers over his eagle
features and brushed back a Byronic lock of hair from his forehead.

"It was four years ago we met," he resumed, "in the Wabash Avenue place. I
noticed her when the bidding on a rocking chair started. A pretty girl.
And as is often the case among women who attend auctions--a bug, a fan, a
fish. You know, the kind that stiffen up when they get excited. The kind
that hang on your words and breathe hard while you cut loose with the
patter, and lose their heads when you swing into the going-going-gone
finale.

"Well, she didn't get the rocking chair. But she was game and came back on
a Chinese rug. I began to notice her considerably. My words seemed to have
an unusual effect on her. Then I could see that she was not only the kind
of fish that lose their heads at auctions, but the terrible kind that
believe everything the auctioneer says. You know, they believe that the
Oriental rugs really came from the harem of the caliph and that the
antique bed really was the one in which DuBarry slept and that the
Elizabethan tablecloth really was an Elizabethan tablecloth. They are kind
of goofily romantic and they fall hard for everything and they spend their
last penny on a lot of truck, you know. Not bad stuff and probably a good
deal more useful and lasting than the originals would have been."

* * * * *

Mr. Ludlow smiled a bit apologetically. "I'm not confessing anything you
don't know, I hope," he said. "Well, to go on about the missus. I knew I
had her from that first day. I wasn't vitally interested, but when she
returned six days in succession it got kind of flattering. And the way she
looked at me and listened to me when I pulled my stuff--say, I could have
knocked down a bouquet of paper roses for the original wreath worn by
Venus, I felt so good. That's how I began to think that she was an
inspiration to me and how I figured that if I could have somebody like her
around I'd soon have them all pocketed as auctioneers.

"I forget just how it was we met, but we did. And I swear, the way she
flattered me would have been enough to turn the head of a guy ten times
smarter than me and forty times as old. So we got married. That's skipping
a lot. But, you know, what's it all amount to, the courting and the things
you say and do before you get married? So we got married and then the fun
started.

"At first I could hardly believe what the drift of it was. But I hope to
die if she wasn't sincere in her ideas about me as an auctioneer. I didn't
get it, as I say, and that's where I made my big mistake. I let her come
to the auctions and told her not to bid. But when I'd start my patter on
some useless piece of 5-and l0-cent store bric-a-brac and give it an
identity and hint at Count Rudolph's collection and so on, she was off
like a two-year-old down a morning track.

"I didn't know how to fix it or how to head her out of it. For a month I
didn't have the heart to disillusion her. I let her buy. Damn it, I never
saw such an absolute boob as she was. She'd pick out the most worthless
junk I was knocking down and go mad over it and buy it with my good money.
It got so that I realized I was slipping. I'd get a promise from her that
she wouldn't come into the auction, but I never could be sure. And if I
felt like cutting loose on some piece of junk and knocking it down with a
lot of flourishes I knew sure as fate that the missus would be there and
that she would be the fish that caught fire first and most and that I'd be
selling the thing to myself.

"Well, after the first two months of my married life I realized that I'd
have to talk turkey to the missus. She was costing me my last nickel at
these auctions and the better auctioneer I was the more money I lost, on
account of her being so susceptible to my line of stuff. It sounds funny,
but it's a fact. So I told her. I made a clean breast. I told her what a
liar I was and how all the stuff I pulled from the auction stand was the
bunk and how she was a boob for falling for it. And so on and so on. Say,
I sold myself to her as the world's greatest, all around, low down,
hideous liar that ever walked in shoe leather. And that's how it started.
This divorce today is kind of an anti-climax. We ain't had much to do with
each other ever since that confession."

Mr. Ludlow stared sorrowfully into the remains of a glass of juniper
juice.

"I'll never marry again," he moaned. "I ain't the kind that makes a good
husband. A good husband is a man who is just an ordinary liar. And me?
Well, I'm an auctioneer."



FOG PATTERNS


The fog tiptoes into the streets. It walks like a great cat through the
air and slowly devours the city.

The office buildings vanish, leaving behind thin pencil lines and smoke
blurs. The pavements become isolated, low-roofed corridors. Overhead the
electric signs whisper enigmatically and the window lights dissolve.

The fog thickens till the city disappears. High up, where the mists thin
into a dark, sulphurous glow, roof bubbles float. The great cat's work is
done. It stands balancing itself on the heads of people and arches its
back against the vanished buildings.

* * * * *

I walk along thinking about the way the streets look and arranging
adjectives in my mind. In the heavy mist people appear detached. They no
longer seem to belong to a pursuit in common. Usually the busy part of the
city is like the exposed mechanism of some monstrous clock. And people
scurry about losing themselves in cogs and springs and levers.

But now the monstrous clock is almost hidden. The stores and offices and
factories that form the mechanism of this clock are buried behind the fog.
The cat has eaten them up. Hidden within the mist the cogs still turn and
the springs unwind. But for the moment they seem non-existent. And the
people drifting hurriedly by in the fog seem as if they were not going and
coming from stores, offices and factories. As if they were solitaries
hunting something in the labyrinths of the fog.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.