“Relaxations for the Impotent” Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the Contradictions of American Smut
J.-K. Huysmans pastiche? Formative influence on Allen Ginsberg’s Howl? Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare (1922) is at turns obtuse, grotesque, and moralizing — and sought to provoke the obscenity trial of the century. Only it didn’t, quietly vanishing instead. Colin Dickey rereads this failed satire, finding a transcendent rhythm pulsing beneath the novel’s indulgent prose.
January 29, 2025
Sandwiched in between Ben Hecht’s early career as a muckraking journalist and his later establishment as one of the preeminent screenwriters of the twentieth century, we find his 1922 novel, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, largely forgotten and yet entirely unforgettable. Often dismissed or reviled, Hecht’s biographer Adina Hoffman deemed it an “overheated exercise in adolescent self-indulgence”, a book that, she notes, “was actually a revision of a novel he had written several years earlier and stashed in a drawer, where it probably should have stayed.”[^1]
Certainly, the novel is patently odd. It’s often described as an inferior riff on J.-K. Huysmans’ classic, À Rebours (usually translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain), and the two certainly share some superficial similarities — both involve decadent aristocrats, alone in their mansions, decaying into a puddle of excess. The plot of Hecht’s novel is obtuse and at times difficult to make sense of: Mallare, bored with life but unwilling to commit suicide, buys the freedom of Rita, an eighteen-year-old girl, from a camp of Romani at the edge of town. Horrified by his attraction to Rita, he attacks her; believing he’s killed her, when she returns, he deems her a ghost and a hallucination, and then may or may not try to kill her again. The novel is abstract and vague, and intentionally obscene. Hecht’s prose is accompanied by a series of illustrations by Wallace Smith that are as deliberately provocative as they are baroque and surreal. Smith’s linework evokes Aubrey Beardsley, and his figures have an Egon Schiele quality to them, with their emaciated bodies and penciled-in musculature. Among the most notorious is an anthropomorphized tree with breasts, her arms outstretched and trunk thrown back in ecstasy as Mallare buries his head in her bark and grinds his hips against her rooty crotch.
The plot summary, such as it is, is mostly beside the point: this is not a novel with a coherent or interesting story, and its charms — such as they are — are not to be found there. A bizarre fever dream of a work, Hecht wrote it to provoke, and, by all measures, failed miserably. It’s ludicrous, dripping with a facile philosophy so juvenile that it is hard to take seriously — and yet the novel itself persists as a strange document. It’s the work of a writer who will come to be known for his incredible deftness with language, and the writing — almost despite itself — comes alive throughout.
Hecht was in something of a transitionary period in the early 1920s; burnt out as a journalist, his calling — Hollywood — was still itself in its infancy, and film as a medium was nowhere near technologically advanced enough to support what would be Hecht’s great talent: fast-paced, acerbic dialogue. Over the course of four decades — in addition to his activism during the 1940s, when he raised awareness about the Holocaust and supported Zionist militias in Mandatory Palestine — he would become synonymous with motion pictures. In the words of critic Richard Corliss, Hecht “personified Hollywood itself”. He wrote or worked on dozens of iconic films, including His Girl Friday (based on his play The Front Page) and Scarface for Howard Hawks, Notorious and Spellbound for Alfred Hitchcock, and Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 Underworld, for which he won the first ever Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. A precocious writer, Hecht had ditched college after only a few days and come to Chicago where, by the age of seventeen, he was a fulltime reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal. After spending time in Germany as a foreign correspondent after World War I, he started a popular column for the Chicago Daily News titled “One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago”. But Hecht’s literary ambitions sought more than reportage, and in the early 1920s, he turned to writing fiction and plays.
Fantazius Mallare was conceived of as a double provocation. On the one hand, Hecht wanted to satirize the avant-garde of the era, with an over-the-top style, intricate and macabre illustrations by Wallace Smith, and an attempt to puncture the inflated self-seriousness that Hecht saw as being in vogue at the time. (The novel is filled with sometimes interminable faux profundities. “The will to live is no more than the hypnotism of banalities”, Mallare decrees at one point. “We keep alive only by maintaining, despite our intelligence, an enthusiasm for things which are of no consequence or interest to us.”[^2]) Hecht, according to Witter Bynner, was attempting to satirize writers who were “making fiction a blend of sex and psychoanalysis”.[^3] Simultaneously, Hecht set out to explicitly court legal action, hoping to take a shot at the stultifying censorship regime of the day. “I am the victim of an overwhelming desire to masturbate”, Mallare tells his love object, Rita. “But if I yield to the mysterious reality you have assumed I will become too grotesque for my vanity to tolerate. I will remain aware while possessing you that my penis is beating a ludicrous tattoo on a sofa cushion.”[^4]
Hecht’s plan was to mail copies of Fantazius Mallare to the major literary magazines of the day, hoping to build support among the literati while violating the Comstock Act prohibition against using the postal service to mail obscene materials. Once on trial, he’d summon literary luminaries to his defense, who’d argue the merits of his work on First Amendment grounds, and with any luck strike a lethal blow to the puritanical regime of the American postal censors, exposing them as prudish villains inhibiting great art.
The plan failed miserably. Rather than seize upon Hecht and Smith’s work as a transgressive masterpiece, the literary community mostly ignored it. It did, however, attract the notice of the censors, who indeed prosecuted the two of them on obscenity charges. Hecht had hoped for a star-studded defense, one that would garner massive media attention, but despite having Clarence Darrow as his lawyer, he would not trigger the Inherit the Wind–style obscenity case he’d hoped for. In the end, only H. L. Mencken agreed to appear in his defense, and, their legal case disintegrating, Hecht and Smith each pled “No Contest” to the charges. Both were fined $1000 (a fairly hefty sum, translating to over $18,000 in today’s dollars). Undaunted, Hecht produced a sequel, The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare, which was even more poorly received.
Perhaps one of the reasons Fantazius Mallare failed was that it did not seem to deliver on its transgressive mission. Among the few who agreed to review the book was D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to courting controversy and running afoul of censorship laws. But Lawrence found the novel to be utterly lacking. “I’m sorry”, he wrote, “it didn’t thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. . . . And really, Fantasius, with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious modern individual with a dominant idea.” Dismissive of the whole enterprise, Lawrence offered an improved subtitle for the book: “Relaxations for the Impotent”.
Is Fantazius Mallare without merit, then? Does it deserve to be thrown back in the drawer from whence Hecht fished it? I think, on the contrary, the work has its own strange merits, albeit perhaps not the ones that Hecht intended. I agree with Lawrence that it hardly titillates; if it did then, it certainly does not now. Nor do I find it all that compelling as a satire on the avant-garde. Its target is too ambiguous, its aim too ambivalent.
But in these failures lie its potential strength. Had Hecht succeeded in hitting either of his targets, the book would feel less interesting — it would be merely a weapon directed toward targets no longer relevant, at best a historical document of a different time when the avant-garde reigned and the censor controlled the mail. It is far more fascinating as failed detritus. Useless, it comes alive in its purposelessness, its tastelessness taking on a luminous shine of its own.
By failing at its satirical intent, Hecht’s novel falls out of its own historical moment, remaining animated in ours. Failing and flailing, the book enters into the realm of “trash culture” — dirty and forlorn, yet possessing a strange sheen unto itself precisely for this reason. As Ken Hollings explains in the first of his three-volume study of trash, Inferno, “In aesthetic terms, Trash exposes itself as a grotesque and liberating parody of sin: a willful abdication from the demands of the ideal. We use Trash not as a way to understand order but as a means of perceiving that order.”[^6] Hollings’ subject is primarily 1960s films, but his comments apply equally well to Hecht’s bizarre misfire. For while Hecht may have in time become the ultimate insider of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Fantazius Mallare is itself decidedly outsider art: lurking beyond the bounds of the acceptable, in the process it demarcates that very boundary.
Fantazius Mallare, after all, belongs to the long history of American smut — and it is typical of such a hyper-puritanical culture that its smut must first begin by attacking censorship itself, producing such an odd mélange of obscenity that it hardly arouses. The provocations that so bored Lawrence are themselves a response to the boring prudery of America, their ability to transgress dependent on the small and asinine imaginations of the moralists who controlled — who still control — so much of American cultural discourse.
“Trash”, Hollings continues, “may be defined by a clear hierarchy of values but is not sustained internally by it. Quite the contrary: on the inside Trash is very different from the forces that shape it from the outside.” Trash is best seen, he notes, “not as something terminal but as an individual state of becoming—a striving towards a final condition which is only made possible by embracing the horror of disintegration.” This is another thing that’s so compelling about a piece of trash like Fantazius Mallare: its internal contradictions, its inability to settle on a register and commit to it, its refusal to either take itself seriously or present itself as parody, the war it wages between being obscene filth and pretentious high art.
Or I, too, would sit like the night gorged with monotonous shadows. Instead, I translate. A memory of sanity gives diverting outline to the shadows in me. I am not a maniac like the night. My mind closes like darkness over the world but I enjoy myself walking amid insane houses, staring at windows that look like drunken octagons, observing lamp posts that simper with evil, promenading fan shaped streets that scribble themselves like arithmetic over my face.[^8]
À Rebours is defined by Huysmans’ great attention to material detail. Page after page is devoted to Des Esseintes’ precise arrangement of furniture, drapery, and ornamentation, to the effect of various colors in candlelight — all documenting his attempt to substitute reality with artifice. Hecht’s novel, on the other hand, eschews this attempt almost entirely. If Huysmans’ is a novel built out of surfaces (wallpaper, lacquered furniture, exotic woods), Hecht’s is one built from the surfaces of the words themselves. Its antecedents can be found not just with À Rebours, but also with Poe’s poetry, particularly works like “Ulalume” and “The Bells”, poems in love with the music and clang of language, its actual meaning far less relevant. Eighty years before “Conceptual Poetry” became a respectable genre among the avant-garde, Hecht churned out a novel where the delight lies not in what the words mean but how they jaw and tumble against each other.
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 mutilation to the idiot God they have invented. . .[^9]
On and on it goes, profane (“to the righteous ones who finger each other in the choir loft”), incantatory and rhythmic (“to the conservative ones who snarl, yelp, whimper and grunt, who are the parasites of death”), a string of hypocrisies singled out by Hecht in a litany that quickly achieves a kind of transcendent rhythm. There’s been speculation that Hecht’s prologue influenced Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and whether or not that is the case, the two share a similar structure and both achieve a similar kind of transcendence, as the prepositional phrases pile one on top of another, Ginsberg’s a cascade of great minds destroyed and Hecht’s a cascade of the destroyers.
Simultaneously attacking high art and low morals, Fantazius Mallare’s weird fascination comes from the fact it’s never clear what it wants to be. Its closest analog may actually be Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) — another work that can never decide if it’s titillating smut or moralizing satire, the two impulses constantly undercutting one another.
Smith’s illustrations capture these tonal contradictions better than one realizes at first. In the most notorious, where Mallare embraces the tree-woman, his face is obscured, but in the majority of the rest, it is not. And it is in these images where one gets a sense of the cacophonic tenor of the whole project: Smith depicts bizarre, fantastical, and idealized landscapes, yet in most, Mallare’s face looks utterly blasé. Astride a black nightmare-steed hurtling through the cosmos, a sword balanced on the steed’s back, Mallare holds his hand to his chin like a philosophy professor only half-listening to his student’s thesis. In another, he sits before a gilded door replete with a skeletal bonsai tree and a grotesque candelabra, affecting the posture of a schoolkid awaiting pickup. And so on. The more baroque and lavish the settings, the more comically apathetic Mallare appears.
A contradictory hodgepodge at odds with itself, the novel’s form comes to mirror the drive of its protagonist. Mallare himself spends the first half of the book, like Des Esseintes, trying to insulate himself from the world in a perfectly sealed environment over which he has complete control. But it backfires, his inconsistent and prurient desires undoing his reason and design. As he laments at one point, “I desired to create for myself a world within which I might love and hate—to be a God lost within his dream. . . . But my dream becomes the product of Frankenstein.”[^10] And as Mallare cannot control his environment, Hecht cannot control his text.
But perhaps this is, in a strange way, the point. Amid the overwritten prose, it suddenly becomes clear what Hecht is doing — critiquing our very desire for consistency, for unity, for consonance and the perfection of a well-ordered mind. “This is the basis of egoism”, Mallare writes in his journal,
the mania to change realities into unreality. Because man is a tool of reality. Of unreality he is that God. It is this desire to dominate which inspires him to avoid truths over which he has no sway and invent myths. Gods and virtues over which he may set himself up as creator and policeman. It is this which causes him to cloud the simplicities of nature in a maze of interpretations. It is by his interpretations that he achieves the illusion of importance.[^11]
In Mallare, Hecht sees all of us — not only in his day but somehow in our own. Unable to face the messiness of reality, in which we are beholden to the hard facts of existence, we dream up gods and myths that allow us to place ourselves at the center of existence, mastering it through the false patterns and ersatz order that we place on top of it.
This, ultimately, is the terrible revelation of Fantazius Mallare: for all of Hecht’s juvenile perversities, he recognized what we are still mired in today. The conspiracy theorist who fabricates hidden orders to explain away chaos, the religious fatalist who interprets everything as one more sign and omen of a grand scheme always just about to unfurl, the social media consumer who’s abdicated any attempt to understand fact in favor of whatever slop is fed to them by the algorithm — yet one more secret order hidden from them: all the desperate mania of those trying to turn reality into unreality, to turn that which holds sway over them and makes tools of them into false patterns and designs that can have the order of myth. Rather than enmesh ourselves in the messiness of the human project, with its shortcomings and contradictions, we wall ourselves up in chateaus of unreality, attempting to keep out our own human nature.
Colin Dickey is the author of five books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places; The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained; and, most recently, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy.