Books: Hechtic Tales

THE CHAMPION FROM FAR AWAY— Ben Hecht—Covici, Friede ($2.50). Once considered a radical, Ben Hecht has now been made safe for readers of the Saturday Evening Post. These 13 short stories are the kind any editor of a successful fiction magazine would print, but they would not stand a chance of being accepted by the kind of agitated left-wingers Hecht played with in his youth.

Some of them: A Herculean Russian oaf starves his way to the U. S., falls into the clutches of a crooked wrestling manager, tastes glory briefly.

A horrible little girl cinemactress makes a monkey out of Cinema Tycoon Herman Gershky (Carl Laemmle?).

A ventriloquist goes crazy, gets jealous of his dummy, "murders" him.

A get-rich-quick promoter backs a play which turns out to be a flop; he sees red and continues to back it. (Manhattan playgoers will be reminded of The Ladder, a flop similarly bolstered.)

The Author. In the days when Chicago was having a literary renaissance Ben Hecht was one of the better-known in a group that included Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters. Called variously iconoclast, intellectual mountebank, "in-sincere fiddler," "Pagliacci of the Fire Escape," Hecht was famed for his conversation; "his subtle innuendoes, his philosophical observations, his penetrating irony, his vehement indignation, his gentle persuasiveness, his dubious facts." Once a collaborator with Maxwell Bodenheim, Hecht soon quarreled with him: the quarrel is still going on.* Mustachioed, with rumpled hair, pouchy eyes, Ben Hecht looks like what he is: a metropolitan, a journalist.