Ben Hecht Sounds Off:
ANGOFF, CHARLES
WRITERS and WRITING Ben Hecht Sounds Off A Child of the Century. By Ben Hecht. Simon and Schuster. 654 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Charles Angoff Author of "Journey to the Dawn" and "In the Morning...
...As every newspaper reader knows, Hecht devoted some eight years to the cause of displaced Jews and of Israel...
...Weizmann and Ben-Gurion...
...With age, Hecht has turned philosopher and historian...
...He urged the Jewish people to "let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland...
...Ben Hecht is a Niagara Falls of enthusiasms, and he seems to have almost no conception of moral, emotional or intellectual responsibility...
...The decency and sanity of the human race is a small mask...
...They slip through his fingers, for Hecht, always on the gallop for the "scintillating" phrase and the "brilliant" epigram, hasn't the patience to appreciate the tenderness and the tears of living in such artists...
...He had bitter struggles with American Zionists and also with Dr...
...It is our fleeting performance as individuals...
...He says that daily journalism as it was practiced in the rough-and-tumble newspaper world of Chicago forty years ago "fitted me as water fits a fish...
...Quite a number of people, as a matter of fact—Gene Fowler, Fanny Brice, Charles MacArthur, Billy Rose ("a new sort of dreamer"), H. L. Mencken ("No single American mind has influenced existence in the Republic as much as did his...
...Hecht rubbed shoulders with eminent newspapermen in his time—Sherman Duffy, Henry Justin Smith, Keith Preston, Vincent Starrett, Ashton Stevens—and he writes about them con amore and probably gets them down on paper fully...
...The revealing phrase is the last: "no responsibilities beyond enthusiasm...
...Whatever else Ben Hecht doesn't know, he seems to know himself very well...
...But he comes a cropper when he attempts to say something truly revealing about more complicated men like Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser and Carl Sandburg...
...It bade me go out and look at life, devour it, enjoy it, report it...
...The rest, for most of us, is suicide...
...But when he finishes his stint in the land and the editorial shears take him over, he will emerge as one of the brightest of the prose lighthouses in a time darkened by the pall of government...
...Youth is our brief sanity...
...Weizmann didn't agree with Hecht, he was "a traitor," and because Ben-Gurion thought that such shocking advice was hurting the Jewish cause all over the world, Hecht sneered at his "comic haircut, whose white hair looked always like a chicken with its wings spread...
...I quote some of his pensees: "Democracy offers a fairly good meal ticket to the politician...
...Hecht says of him: "Pegler's small cheering section is shy of people I admire...
...Whom, then, has Ben Hecht found worthy of his constant love and admiration...
...Alas, his lucubrations make embarrassing reading...
...Because Dr...
...We have always had perpetually adolescent young men who are in a perpetual hurry, who have quick answers for the most abstruse problems of human relations, who somehow vulgarize whatever beautiful concept they embrace, who don't know the difference between a state of hysterical impatience and genuine emotion, who practice name-calling in place of logical reasoning, who prefer the loud and the startling in the arts to the quiet and the tender, who are more at home in the bar-rooms of the world than in its libraries and living rooms...
...He couldn't understand why they didn't take to his simple solution for the complex Arab-Jewish problem, which was to have the Jews kill as many Arabs and British soldiers as possible...
...His kind has appeared in every century and most likely will continue to appear to the end of time...
...Reviewed by Charles Angoff Author of "Journey to the Dawn" and "In the Morning Light" THE AUTHOR of this autobiography is not really peculiar to this century...
...There were no responsibilities beyond enthusiasm...
...And because President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't move fast enough to help the Jews—fast enough, that is, for Ben Hecht—he "did not like Jews" and "he looked now a little too red with Jewish blood for my further hosannas...
...But apparently the man for whom he has the deepest and warmest respect is Westbrook Pegler...
...It was a world that offered no discipline, that demanded no alteration in me...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 39
