Chapter 1

[Autograph: To my friend Harry Ridings
Ben Hecht 2 Oct]

_Limited edition for private circulation only, consisting of two
thousand and twenty-five numbered copies. Only two thousand
copies for sale. Published September 1922._

No. 832.

PRESS OF
PRINTING
SERVICE
COMPANY

CHICAGO

COPYRIGHT NINETEEN-TWENTY-TWO
COVICI - McGEE
Chicago

FANTAZIUS MALLARE

_A Mysterious Oath_

BEN HECHT

Drawings
WALLACE SMITH

_Chicago_
COVICI - MCGEE
1922

Drawings

Opposite
Page

First Drawing 20
Second Drawing 42
Third Drawing 58
Fourth Drawing 74
Fifth Drawing 88
Sixth Drawing 94
Seventh Drawing 106
Eighth Drawing 132
Ninth Drawing 168
Tenth Drawing 174

DEDICATION

_This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated to my
enemies--to the curious ones who take fanatic pride in disliking me; to
the baffling ones who remain enthusiastically ignorant of my existence;
to the moral ones upon whom Beauty exercises a lascivious and corrupting
influence; to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of
their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten
themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears,
bind, gag and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot
God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored with laughing
at them); to the anointed ones who identify their paranoic symptoms as
virtues, who build altars upon complexes; to the anointed ones who have
slain themselves and who stagger proudly into graves (God deliver
Himself from their caress!); to the religious ones who wage bloody and
tireless wars upon all who do not share their fear of life (Ah, what is
God but a despairing refutation of Man?); to the solemn and successful
ones who gesture with courteous disdain from the depth of their
ornamental coffins (we are all cadavers but let us refrain from
congratulating each other too courteously on the fact); to the prim ones
who find their secret obscenities mirrored in every careless phrase, who
read self accusation into the word sex; to the prim ones 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 cowardly ones who borrow their courage from Ideals which they
forthwith defend with their useless lives; to the cowardly ones who
adorn themselves with castrations (let this not be misunderstood); to
the reformers--the psychopathic ones who publicly and shamelessly
belabor their own unfortunate impulses; to the reformers (once
again)--the psychopathic ones trying forever to drown their own obscene
desires in ear-splitting prayers for their fellowman's welfare; to the
reformers--the Freudian dervishes who masturbate with Purity Leagues,
who achieve involved orgasms denouncing the depravities of others; to
the reformers (patience, patience) the psychopathic ones who seek to
vindicate their own sexual impotencies by padlocking the national
vagina, who find relief for constipation in forbidding their neighbors
the water closet (God forgives them, but not I); to the ostracizing
ones who hurl excommunications upon all that is not part of their
stupidity; to the ostracizing ones who fraternize only with the worms
inside their coffins (their anger is the caress incomparable); to the
pious ones who, lacking the strength to please themselves, boast
interminably to God of their weakness in denying themselves; to the
idealistic ones who, unable to confound their neighbors with their own
superiority, join causes in the hope of confounding each other with the
superiority of their betters (involved, but I am not done with them); to
the idealistic ones whose cowardice converts the suffering of others
into a mirror wherein stares wretchedly back at them a possible image of
themselves; to the idealistic ones who, frightened by this possible
image of themselves, join Movements for the triumph of Love and Justice
and the overthrow of Tyranny in the frantic hope of breaking the
mirror; to the social ones who regard belching as the sin against the
Holy Ghost, who enamel themselves with banalities, who repudiate
contemptuously the existence of their bowels (Ah, these theologians of
etiquette, these unctuous circumlocutors, a pock upon them); to the pure
ones who masquerade excitedly as eunuchs and as wives of eunuchs (they
have their excuses, of course, and who knows but the masquerade is
somewhat unnecessary); to the pedantic ones who barricade themselves
heroically behind their own belchings; to the smug ones who walk with
their noses ecstatically buried in their own rectums (I have nothing
against them, I swear); to the righteous ones who masturbate blissfully
under the blankets of their perfections; to the righteous ones who
finger each other in the choir loft (God forgive me if I ever succumb to
one of them); to the critical ones who whoremonger on Parnassus; to the
critical ones who befoul themselves in the Temples and point
embitteredly at the Gods as the sources of their own odors (I will
someday devote an entire dedication to critics); to the proud ones who
urinate against the wind (they have never wetted me and I have nothing
against them); to the cheerful ones who tirade viciously against all who
do not wear their protective smirk; to the cheerful ones who spend their
evenings bewailing my existence (the Devil pity them, not I); to the
noble ones who advertise their secrets, who crucify themselves on
bill-boards in the quest for the Nietzschean solitude; to the noble ones
who pride themselves on their stolen finery; to the flagellating ones
who go to the opera in hair shirts, who excite themselves with denials
and who fornicate only on Fast Days; to the just ones who find
compensation for their nose rings and sackcloth by hamstringing all who
refuse to put them on--all who have committed the alluring sins from
which their own cowardice fled; to the conservative ones who gnaw
elatedly upon old bones and wither with malnutrition; to the
conservative ones who snarl, yelp, whimper and grunt, who are the
parasites of death; who choke themselves with their beards; to the
timorous ones who vomit invective upon all that confuses them, who
vituperate, against all their non-existent intelligence cannot grasp; to
the martyr ones who disembowel themselves on the battlefield, who
crucify themselves upon their stupidities; to the serious ones who
mistake the sleep of their senses and the snores of their intellect for
enviable perfections; to the serious ones who suffocate gently in the
boredom they create (God alone has time to laugh at them); to the virgin
ones who tenaciously advertise their predicament; to the virgin ones who
mourn themselves, who kneel before keyholes; to the holy ones who
recommend themselves tirelessly and triumphantly to God (I have never
envied God His friends, nor He, mine perhaps); to the never clean ones
who bathe publicly in the hysterias of the mob; to the never clean ones
who pander for stupidity; to the intellectual ones who play solitaire
with platitudes, who drag their classrooms around with them; to these
and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this
inhospitable book, celebrating the dark mirth of Fantazius Mallare, is
dedicated in the hope that their righteous eyes may never kindle with
secret lusts nor their pious lips water erotically from its reading--in
short in the hope that they may never encounter the ornamental phrases I
have written and the ritualistic lines Wallace Smith has drawn in the
pages that follow._

MALLARE

FANTAZIUS MALLARE

[I]

Fantazius Mallare considered himself mad because he was unable to behold
in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic
little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence.
He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His
eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him.

When he was thirty-five years old he lived alone high above a busy part
of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant
across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance
of a somnambulist. He found life unnecessary and submitted to it
without curiosity.

His ideas were profoundly simple. The excitement of his neighborhood,
his city, his country and his world left him unmoved. He found no
diversion in interpreting them. A friend had once asked him what he
thought of democracy. This was during a great war being waged in its
behalf. Mallare replied: "Democracy is the honeymoon of stupidity."

There lived with him as a servant a little monster whom he called
Goliath and who was a dwarfed and paralytic negro. Goliath's age was
unknown. His deformities gave him the air of an old man and his hunched
back made him seem too massive for a boy. But in studying him Mallare
had concluded that he was a boy.

Goliath had been one of the first symptoms of Mallare's madness. He had
brought the little monster home from an amusement park one summer night.
Goliath had been standing doubled up, his pipe stem arms hanging like a
baboon's, his enlarged black head lifted and his furious eyes staring at
a Wheel of Fortune.

When they left the confetti-electrics of the park behind, Mallare spoke
to the dwarf whose wrinkled hand he was holding.

"If you come home with me I will make you a servant and give you a fine
red suit to wear. Also, I will call you Goliath for no reason at all,
since I am at war with reason."

Goliath said nothing but sat staring happily out of the window of an
automobile as they rode home.

The home of Fantazius Mallare was filled with evidences of his past.
There were clay and bronze figures and canvases covered with paintings.
These had been the work of his hands. It was to be seen that he had once
given himself with violence to the creation of images. And for this
reason he was still known among a few people as an artist.

In the days when he had worked to create images Mallare had been alive
with derisions. He desired to give them outline. But the desire went
from him. The brilliant fancies of his thought began slowly to bore him.
The astounding images that still bowed themselves into his mind became
like a procession of mendicants seeking alms of him. He folded his hands
and with an interested smile watched his genius die.

At the time of this curious tragedy Mallare was thirty. He kept a
Journal in which he wrote infrequently. There was in this Journal little
of interest. Apparently he had amused himself during his youth jotting
down items of preposterous unimportance.

"I saw a man with a red face," he would write one week. The next he
would add a line, "There are seven hundred and eighty-five normal
strides between the lamp-post and my front door." Turning a page a month
later he would meticulously set down the date, the hour of the day, the
direction of the wind and under it write out, "I have a stomach ache
from eating peaches."

The Journal bristled with innocuous informations. An acquaintance of the
period, interested in Mallare's work as an artist, smiled and commented,
"These are, no doubt, symbols. A psychological code into which you have
translated great inner moments."

Mallare answered, "On the contrary. They are the only thoughts I have
had in which I could detect no reason. It has amused me to put down with
great care the few banalities which have normalized my days. They are
very precious to me, although they have no value in themselves.

"It is the ability to think such absurdities as you have read that has
kept me from suicide. The will to live is no more than the hypnotism of
banalities. We keep alive only by maintaining, despite our intelligence,
an enthusiasm for things which are of no consequence or interest to us.

"That I saw a man with a red face aroused in me a gentle curiosity
lacking in words or emotion. The desire to live is compounded of an
infinity of such gentle curiosities which remain entirely outside of
reason. This never-satisfied and almost non-existent curiosity we have
toward things, masquerades under the intimidating guise of the law of
self-preservation. Man is at the mercy of life since, his intelligence
perceiving its monotony and absurdity, he still clings to it, fascinated
by the accumulated rhythm of faces, impressions, and events which he
despises.

"It is a form of hypnosis, and these words I have written in my Journal
are the absurdities by which life seduced me from abandoning it. I am
grateful to them and have therefore preserved them carefully."

The history of Mallare's madness, however, is to be found in this
Journal. There are two empty pages that stare significantly. The empty
pages are a lapse. It was during this lapse that Mallare smiled with
interest at the spectacle of his disintegration. There follows, then, a
sudden excited outburst, undated. In it the beginnings of his madness
pirouette like tentative dancers.

"Perhaps the greatest miracle is that which enables man to tolerate
life," the passage starts, "which enables him to embrace its illusions
and translate its monstrous incoherence into delightful, edifying
patterns. It is the miracle of sanity. To stand unquestioning before
mysteries, to remain an undisturbed part of chaos, ah! what an
adjustment! Content and even elate amid the terrible circle of Unknowns,
behold in this the heroic stupidity of the sane ... a stupidity which
has already outlived the Gods.

"Man, alas, is the only animal who hasn't known enough to die. His
undeveloped senses have permitted him to survive in the manner of the
oyster. The mysteries, dangers, and delights of the sea do not exist for
the oyster. Its senses are not stirred by typhoons, impressed by
earthquakes or annoyed by its own insignificance. Similarly, man!

"The complacent egomania of man, his tyrannical indifferences, his
little list of questions and answers which suffices for his wisdom,
these are the chief phenomena or symptoms of his sanity. He alone has
survived the ages by means of a series of ludicrous adjustments, until
today he walks on two legs--the crowning absurdity of an otherwise
logical Nature. He has triumphed by specializing in his weaknesses and
insuring their survival; by disputing the simple laws of biology with
interminable banalities labelled from age to age as religions,
philosophies and laws.

"Unable, despite his shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality
and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for
survival by the invention of souls. And so behold him--spectacle of
spectacles--a chatty little tradesman in an immemorial hat drifting
good-naturedly through a nightmare.

"It is for this ability to exist unnaturally that he has invented the
adjective sane. But here and there in the streets of cities walk the
damned--creatures denied the miracle of sanity and who move bewilderedly
through their scene, staring at the flying days as at the fragments of
another world. They are conscious of themselves only as vacuums within
which life is continually expiring.

"Alas, the damned! From the depths of their non-existence they
contemplate their fellowman and perceive him a dwarf prostrate forever
before solacing arrangements of words; an homunculus riding
vaingloriously on the tiny river of ink that flows between monstrous
yesterdays and monstrous tomorrows; a baboon strutting through a
mirage."

The history of Mallare's madness begins thus. And the pages continue.
The writing on them seems at a glance part of a decoration in black and
white. The letters are beautifully formed and shaded. They resemble
laboring serpents, dainty pagodas, vines bearing strange fruits and
capricious bits of sculpture.

To the end Mallare fancied himself aware of the drift and nuance of his
madness. Its convolutions seemed neither incomprehensible nor mysterious
to him.

An intolerable loathing for life, an illuminated contempt for men and
women, had long ago taken possession of him. This philosophic attitude
was the product of his egoism. He felt himself the center of life and it
became his nature to revolt against all evidences of life that existed
outside himself. In this manner he grew to hate, or rather to feel an
impotent disgust for, whatever was contemporary.

When his normality abandoned him, he avoided a greater tragedy. In a
manner it was not Mallare who became insane. It was his point of view
that went mad. Although there are passages in the Journal that escape
coherence, the greater part of the entries are simple almost to naiveté.
They reveal an intellect able to adjust itself without complex
uprootings to the phenomena engaging its energies. The first concrete
evidence of the loathing for life that was to result in its own
annihilation appears in a passage beginning abruptly--

"Most of all I like the trees when they are empty of leaves. Their
wooden grimaces must aggravate the precisely featured houses of the
town. People who see my work for the first time grow indignant and call
me sick and artificial. (Bilious critics!) But so are these trees.

"People think of art in terms of symmetry. With a most amazing conceit
they have decided upon the contours of their bodies as the standards of
beauty. Therefore I am pleased to look at trees or at anything that
grows, unhandicapped by the mediocritizing force of reason, and note how
contorted such things are."

Mallare's point of view toward his world--the attitude that went
mad--was nothing more involved than his egoism. His infatuation with
self was destined to arrive at a peak on whose height he became overcome
with a dizziness. He wrote in his Journal:

"It is unfortunate that I am a sculptor, a mere artist. Art has become
for me a tedious decoration of my impotence. It is clear I should have
been a God. Then I could have had my way with people. To shriek at them
obliquely, to curse at them through the medium of clay figures, is a
preposterous waste of time. A wounded man groans. I, impaled by life,
emit statues.

"As a God, however, I would have found a diversion worthy my contempt. I
would have made the bodies of people like their thoughts--crooked,
twisted, bulbous. I would have given them faces resembling their
emotions and converted the diseases of their souls into outline.

"What fatuous, little cylindrical creatures we humans are! With our
exact and placid surfaces that we call beauty. And these grave and noble
houses we erect!

"Yes, I ought to have been a God. I should have had my way with people
then. I could have created a world whose horrors would have remained a
consoling flattery to my cynicism."

There are entries that follow whose significance is lost in a serpentine
rhetoric. They hint at nights of critical terrors. During the writing of
them Mallare was engaged in a desperate pursuit of himself. He was
escaping. He perceived his thoughts racing from his grasp like Maenads
down a tangled slope. The dread of finding himself abandoned brought his
will into life. If he were to go mad he would leap upon his mania and
ride it--quietly into darkness. He would be a gay rider astride his own
phantoms. Rather that than let the first insane capering of his
intellect unhorse him and leave him gibbering after a vanished mount.

The incoherence of the Journal suddenly glides into an adagio. The panic
has ended. And the lifeless eyed man again smiles triumphant out of the
pages.

"My room is red. It is hung with red curtains. I have bought only red
things to put in it. The sun coming through my red curtains reddens the
air of the room.

"I prefer to live in this painted gloom because it is possible I hate
the sunlight. I hate even my rivals the trees. Today I walked and found
trees that resembled too closely people passing under them. One is
impotent before such betrayal.

"But here in my rooms I find an almost complete annihilation of life. I
am bored with inventing causes for my hatred. There is a diversion on
earth called humanity--creatures full of enamelled lusts and arrogant
decays who go about smiling and slyly obeying laws which protect them
from each other. But they no longer divert me.

"They tell me of health and sanity. And I say sanity is the determined
blindness which keeps us from seeing one another. More than that, of
course: which keeps us from seeing ourselves. And health is the lame
artifice of our bodies which keeps us from loathing one another. I see
and I loathe. Yet I must beware of falling to sleep in explanations."

A month or a year may have passed between this and the continuation.
Whatever the period, a clarity arrived. Mallare's mind grappling with
the nightmare shadows engulfing it, distorted his reason to give them
outline and was saved. The writing, however, becomes more labored in
appearance as if the letters of words were now decorations in
themselves.

"I have listened for years to the prattle of men who call themselves
egoists. It is a title by which they have sought to identify me. To
label a mystery suffices for its dismissal and thus they seek to dismiss
me. There is in egoism, however, a depth to which all but myself are
blind. I have found this depth in myself and out of it rises a
definition which I must consider cautiously. There is but one egoist and
that is He who, intolerant of all but Himself, sets out to destroy all
but Himself. Egoism is the despairing effort of man to return to his
original Godhood; to return to the undisputed and triumphant loneliness
which was His when as a Creator He moulded the world to His whims and
before He divided Himself into the fragments of race and nature. This is
the explanation out of the depth.

"I must be cautious and keep my eyes open. Secrets fly from the blind.
Mount, I say, and ride this secret and observe its direction. To return
thus to Godhood means to destroy All. And I were madder than I am to
play with this prospect, unless, perhaps, there lie concealed in the
elements, chemistries still unknown which might be utilized for such
destruction.

"As it is, I can with my thought deny and re-create and impose upon the
world of reality a world of phantoms more pleasing to my nature. In my
red room I sit and give birth to persuasive horrors. People shaped like
dead trees. People freed from the monotonous hypocrisy with which a
despondent Nature endows their outlines. I have become aware that
lobsters, beetles, crabs, and all the crustacean monsters that abound
are not the abnormal accidents of creation, any more than were the
animate gargoyles of prehistoric eras. They are the things which an Ego
intent upon the diversion of truth fashioned in the beginning. Each
thing to seem as each thing was. But the courage of this Ego deserted
Him and He grew frightened when He came to give body to His most useless
creation--Thought. And He compromised. Yes, I could live among people
fashioned truthfully in their own images as are the crustaceans."

With this entry Mallare found it necessary to destroy the work his hands
had created. He attacked the canvases and figures in his red room.
Goliath who, preoccupied with his own deformities, had remained
indifferent to his master, serving him faithfully however, listened to
Mallare one night.

Sitting in the center of the room, his black hair grown into a long
slant across his pale forehead, Mallare talked to his servant as a man,
still asleep, reciting a dream.

"Here in this room, Goliath," he said, "are interesting works of art
which I am about to destroy. On the canvases are dithyrambic burlesques
in color, vicious fantasies, despairing caricatures. My fingers
fashioned them and I remember the pleasant sleep each brought me. But
now I must beware of sleep. My egomania, like a swollen thing, has
become impossible to articulate or to reduce to the impotent ironies of
clay and paint. But I must beware of falling asleep under it.

"My friends have vanished as naturally as if by death. I have forbidden
them to come. This disturbs them, but see to it, Goliath, that no one
ever enters my room unless I bring them. Frighten them if they come.

"Tonight, while there remained a little sanity, I had made up my mind to
kill myself. But I have changed it. I will destroy instead my work. This
is because I find the compromise easier and the destruction, perhaps,
more interesting. I feel disinclined to abandon the things I loathe. The
world with its nauseous swarm of life, its monstrous multiplications
which are the eternal insult to the Omniscience I feel, still holds me.
I am caught in a tangle and I remain suspended and inanimate, in the
depth of a nightmare. But with your aid, Goliath, I will continue
tenaciously mimicking an outward sanity so that people, when they see
me, will go away happy in the assurance that I am as stupid as they."

Rising from his chair Mallare attacked, one by one, the canvases and
statues. Goliath watched him in silence as he moved from pedestal to
pedestal from which, like a company of inert monsters, arose figures in
clay and bronze. The first of them was a man four feet in height but
massive-seeming beyond its dimensions. Mallare had entitled it "The
Lover."

Its legs were planted obliquely on the pedestal top, their ligaments
wrenched into bizarre muscular patterns. Its body rose in an anatomical
spiral. From its flattened pelvis that seemed like some evil bat
stretched in flight, protruded a huge phallus. The head of the phallus
was enlivened with the face of a saint. The eyes of this face were
raised in pensive adoration. At the lower end of the phallus, the
testicles were fashioned in the form of a short-necked pendulum arrested
at the height of its swing. The hands of the figure clutched talon-like
at the face and the head was thrown back as if broken at the neck. Its
features were obliterated by the hands except for the mouth which was
flung open in a skull-like laugh.

The figure on the whole was the flayed caricature of a man done so
cunningly that through the abortive hideousness of its outlines, its
human character remained untouched.

Mallare swung the figure by its base against the pedestal until it
splintered and fell to pieces. He stood whispering to himself--

"This was the lover. My statue of the lover. Dead, now."

A dozen similar caricatures in clay and bronze vanished under his
attack. Standing against the wall and blinking at the rutilant glare of
the room, Goliath the dwarf waited nervously. He had become aware that
his master was acting strangely. A look of ferocity slowly came into the
deep black of his face. His misshapen body trembled.

Mallare, the destruction ended, turned to him.

"And finally a last figure," he murmured. "Goliath, too. Do you agree,
Goliath? You will find a congenial company in the souls of these friends
I have butchered."

Goliath shook his head vigorously.

"Go 'way," he answered. Mallare nodded.

"Thanks," he smiled. "You reminded me in time. It is easy to mistake you
for one of my creations. Although I never created such eyes, improbable
eyes alive with murders. Go to bed."

Alone amid the wreckage, Mallare turned to his Journal. A precise smile
was on his lips and his eyes slanted toward the debris on the floor as
if he were watching the fragments, fearfully. His hair made a black
triangle against his forehead. He began to write:

"I am too clever to go mad. To go mad is to succumb to the sanity of
others. Since I avoid death, I must be wary of his misshapen brother.
Yet, I can prove to my satisfaction tonight that I am mad. I have
destroyed something. It was because the intricate presences of life
awaken too many despairs in me.

"Now I am alone. I must be cautious of my thought. I feel words like
rivals in my head. Alas, I must think in words. Words are the inevitable
canonizations of life. But worse, they are property loaned me and not
my own. I must have my own and live with it entirely. Yet there is some
comfort in words. They are not entirely sullied by their promiscuity.
Words are like nuts people pass each other without ever opening. The
insides of words are often virginal. But many words--too many
words--constitute intelligence and intelligence is the stupidity which
enables man to imprison himself in lies.

"Years have passed and I still live. I do not look for death. Death is
too simple a variant of destruction. My cleverness demands more of me
than to destroy the world by hiding myself from it. And there is a song
of windows in the high streets that sometimes relieves the black tension
of my mind.

"It is important now that I retrace my way toward a makeshift of
Omnipotence. But for this I will have to find a woman."

[II]

It was autumn. The air was colored like the face of a sick boy. Upon the
streets rested a windless chill. The pavements were somber as during
rain. There was an absence of illusion about buildings. They stood, high
thrusts of brick, stone and glass, etched geometrically against a
denuded sky.

Fantazius Mallare walked slowly toward his home. Over his head, trees
without leaves stamped their gnarled and intricate contours on the
shadowed air. A pallor covered the roofs. It was afternoon but a
moon-like loneliness haunted the autumn windows.

Mallare lived in another world. Neither trees nor buildings conveyed
themselves to his thought. Within his own world he was sane. His
relation to the phantoms and ideas which peopled his mind was a lucid
one. Mallare's world was his thought. He had retired within himself,
dragging his senses after him.