In Rusty Armor

A CHILD OF THE CENTURY (654 pp.) --Ben Hecht--Simon & Schuster ($5).

As a young Chicago newspaperman, Ben Hecht once found himself standing in a train shed awaiting the arrival of a VIP when he observed a workman lying underneath a locomotive. "His legs protruded from the thighs down. I noted that the locomotive had steam up and that its bell was ringing." Next minute "the workman's long legs were lying on the platform . . . The rest of him . . . remained between the tracks." Just then the VIP's train pulled in, so Reporter Hecht left "the bloody scene" and hurried off to his interview. "I had felt no shock at what had happened under my nose, and by the time I interviewed the statesman I had forgotten it." Author Hecht describes this iron insensibility as a "katatonic armor [that] has served me frequently in my living. Whether it served me well or not, I have sometimes wondered." The quarter-million words of his autobiography, most of which reads like a cry from the soul of an armored car, should clear up this question once and for all.

Ben Hecht has assaulted the world as a gifted playwright (The Front Page}, maudlin novelist (A Jew in Love), bright essayist (A Guide for the Bedeviled} and cantankerous pamphleteer for Zionism.

From boyhood, when he lay in a Racine (Wis.) attic gobbling Shakespeare, Hecht regarded the world simply as a mint for the coining of "words" and "phrases." Most young bibliophiles "take sides" pas sionately when they read a book, regard less of whether they understand all the words, but young Hecht managed to do just the opposite. He recognized no "characters" in Shakespeare, only "words [that] seemed to hang in the air like feats of magic." He was only 16 when he landed the job of "picture chaser" on the Chicago Daily Journal. He was "sent forth each dawn to fetch back a photograph . . . usually [of] a woman who had undergone some unusual experience . . .

such as rape, suicide, murder or flagrante delicto . . . While maturer minds bad gered the survivors ... I scurried through bedrooms, poked noiselessly into closets, trunks and bureau drawers, and, the coveted photograph under my coat, bolted for the street." How to Be Happy. Armored Ben's first prose efforts took the form of phony news stories ("Tales of lawsuits no court had ever seen, involving names no city directory had ever known").

Then he was promoted to genuine rapes, brothel murders, "a rash of bichloride of mercury suicides." He saw 17 murderers "twisting in their white sheets on the end of the whining rope" and could, today, he says, "cover a hundred pages with . . . fascinating cadavers." Writes Hecht nostalgically of those days: "That was happiness." The weakness of Hecht's armor was that it left him in sketchy underwear whenever he took it off. Like many an other supposedly invulnerable fellow, he was exposed, when in the buff, as more of a maudlin breast-beater than a Front Page chesty. Swept up by the Chicago literary movement just before World War I, he tried to temper his fondness for cadavers with pious offerings at the shrine of The Little Review. In its inner circle a young man might hear anything from a first reading of Sandburg's Chicago to Maxwell Bodenheim's murmuring cottony love messages into the rapt ears of plump bluestockings ("Your face is an incense bowl from which a single name rises").

Apostle in Disguise. "I dedicated myself," says Hecht, "to attacking prudes, piety-mongers and all apostles of virtue." The snag was that young Ben, raised by a good mother, was himself a disguised apostle of virtue. He would prance into a brothel "playing drunkard and whoremonger with all the vocabulary at my command"--only to find himself clutching the hand of a fallen sister and begging her to reform. He even took one young prostitute to live with him and "encouraged her to weep over her vile life." He "read books to her every night," while she "lay nude . . . listening like one bewitched." Disillusionment came when the young shepherd returned home unexpectedly and found his lamb folded into bed with "a man with a large mustache." Beside the bed sat a second gent, waiting his turn. Poor Hecht fled "this hellish sight"--but not without recalling appropriate words of Swinburne: 0 lips full of lust and of laughter, Curled snakes that are fed from my breast . . .

But when Hecht looks back on it all, he laments the passing of those "merry," "wanton" days. True, he went on to make a heap of money on Broadway and in Hollywood, but this, he says, was cold comfort because he suffered terribly from "a nostalgia for poverty." He gets some comfort out of the somewhat mistaken belief that until he spoke up in 1939 "no voice of any importance anywhere" had protested against Hitler's butchery of Jews. He is also proud of having backed Palestine's Irgun terrorists so vigorously that he found "British spies among the early irises" of his Nyack garden and became (evidently forgetting about Benjamin Disraeli) >>'the first Jew to be denounced in the House of Commons for 500 years." But to Hecht none of this counts for much compared with the misfortune of living in the contemporary world. For Ben Hecht clearly blames Ben Hecht on his time--which may be less than fair to the 20th century.

Also, Gassy Lamentation. Today, Author Hecht believes, "the artist is a vanishing figure . . . Individualism has dried up." All the girls, he complains, have become "masculinized," all the men soft as blubber. Police state government bleeds the citizen with taxes, relentlessly watches his every move. It is a far cry from the good old days of 1921, when Author Hecht, acting as "fund-raiser" for a Baptist group, "persuaded the Baptist synod ... to offer a prize of $5,000 for the best biography of the Savior," entered the contest under "the name of a needy Baptist pastor"--and walked off with the prize.

If Hecht had confined his autobiography to a personal record of such activities, it would have made more interesting reading. But he has padded it with feats of overblown metaphor ("My throat is sick with too much living, as if I had swallowed a long stove pipe") and bursts of gassy lamentation ("About those around me--hardly any have ever given me anything I could use as a human being --love, understanding or comfort"). A Child of the Century drives home the lesson that words and phrases are best kept short and plain--a fact Hecht might have learned from the story he tells about Author Michael (The Green Hat} Arlen, who "affected a shepherd's crook for evening wear." Once at dinner a lady novelist told him: "You look almost like a woman." Arlen studied her for a moment and answered simply: "So do you."

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