During the time of my picture chasing, the thought of writing anything for the Journal’s columns remained as foreign as the thought of reading them. The appearance on the front page of a two-column photograph I had brought to the office exhausted my interest in the newspaper, except for the limerick contest on the back page. Daily awards up to fifteen dollars were being offered for the best last line to unfinished limericks. I worked on last lines constantly while in the office, for money troubles had begun to beset me. Despite my weekly seventeen dollars and fifty cents I was broke half the week and often went without lunch or without a pipe to smoke.
This was due to unconsidered investments in books. Salesmen appeared at the gate of the local room. They carried suitcases full of book backs. These they opened, accordion fashion, to reveal irresistible phantom sets of Turgenev, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Kipling, De Musset, Smollet, Sterne, Flaubert, Maupassant and others. I bought all the sets that were offered, not even scorning the poetical dramas of Swinburne. I paid a dollar down on each set, signed a document obligating me to pay fifty cents every Saturday on each purchase and found myself facing bankruptcy. With five, ten and finally fifteen sets of books to support, there was often not enough left out of my wage after the Saturday collections to carry me through Wednesday.
This siege of hunger came after I had left my tante’s bed and board, with exotic results I shall set down later. Now I grew thin and desperate, and I became ambitious to make money. The limerick contests had brought me only a single third prize of five dollars. I began to feel dissatisfied. I had found out recently that reporters who wrote stories for the paper received higher salaries than any picture chaser could ever command, however accomplished he became.
Also I had felt the first sting of criticism. In the years to come, I was to be flayed and eviscerated by critics, and I learned how to steady my nerves against their assaults. But this first challenge of my honor and sufficiency (into which all criticism degenerates for its victims) shook me like a betrayal. To work wildly and with all one’s forces, to pitch one’s heart like a gift to God knows whom, and to earn a slap in the face and the title “idiot” is an almost fatal shock when first felt. Grimly and shakily one gets used to the bleak phenomenon of defeat. One learns that there is a curious incompetence in one’s talents, and that the betrayal comes not from the outside but from an inner Judas. The critics are only bystanders with a little salt for one’s wounds.
—Ben Hecht, from “Vignette Of A Headless Man,” in A Child Of The Century, 1954
An amazing passage. Thanks for posting it. I’ve been meaning to read Hecht’s memoir, though it’s unbelievably out-of-print at the moment. Glenn or anybody else on here know someone at NYRB publishing? It seems like an ideal fit for their catalog. You could even write the new forward.
Excellent. I’ve already begun digging for a reasonably priced copy of this book.