Fun from Hollywood

A BOOK OF MIRACLES--Ben Hecht--Viking ($2.75).

Whatever else Ben Hecht may be damned for--and blasphemy is likely to be included--he cannot be accused of writing A Book of Miracles for money. One of Hollywood's highest-paid writers (The Front Page, Let Freedom Ring, etc.), he forswore 15 months' salary to write it. (His movie salary is around $6,000 a week.) But for Hecht it was "fun writing what I want--without having Sam Goldwyn peering over my shoulder." Fun for Hecht has heretofore meant novels like Erik Dorn, Count Bruga, A Jew in Love--gaudy, swashbuckling, ranting books, splashed with dead-pan vehemence, a sort of Ouija-board mysticism, a little sour cream of human kindness--all with a suggestion of having been written by a slightly phoney, Dostoievskian pixy.

A Book of Miracles, a collection of lively present-day fairy tales, is the best of the bunch. The satire is sharper, better aimed; Hecht's imagination makes fewer mystic misfires, sparkles more inventively, humorously, humanely.

Some of them:

> Over the top window of Manhattan's tallest building hover perpetually two genuine angels, standing guard over a soul imprisoned in a steel girder.

> Hollywood appropriately furnishes the most extravagant miracle. When Producer Kolisher (a ringer for Sam Goldwyn) produces The Redeemer, God becomes interested, takes a hand in the last scenes. Robert Gary, the star, is ruined. Producer Kolisher, who knows how to please the public in spite of miracles, simply cuts God's contribution; critics eulogize his restraint.

> Near the Mencken tone of Hecht's early satire is the hilarious miracle which occurs when God liquidates radio broadcasting. He merely turns loose Heavenly static, and radio becomes a nightmare.

> Most miraculous miracle concerns Professor Emmett, a neurotic, misanthropic entomologist whose maladjusted marriage drives him to suicide. Reincarnated as a termite, he successfully resists the herd and fatal mating instincts of fellow ants, saves the U. S. from a terrific invasion of stone-eating termites.

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