The Patron Saint of Bloggers

On my writing, I have been complimented for finding the extraordinary in the mundane. Because I try to look at my everyday surroundings and perceive in them things that aren't obvious or everyday.

I'll accept that. But much of the credit must go to another writer.

It is perhaps admirable that I find insights to share from the mundane life that I live. But this other writer's life was amazing, and the insights he wrung from it were literally the stuff of high drama. He wrote a book that is my bible.

He was no ordinary man. His parents emigrated from Russia at a time when it was very smart to do so. Especially if one was Jewish. They settled in, worked hard, attained the middle-class.

Their son, on the other hand, became a prodigy -- and a rebel. By age ten, he mastered the violin at the professional level; a life in music lay before him. Two years later, he joined the circus as an acrobat. Whatever he did, whatever he achieved, the next new thing always beckoned. He read voraciously, then and all his life.

At 16 he finished school forever and went to Chicago to be a journalist. He proved to be good at it. Very good. Within a few years he was an ace crime reporter, and then a foreign correspondent. He broke a sensational murder case and made headlines nationwide. And at night he wrote for literary magazines, experimented with plays and worked on a novel or two. Journalism all day; literature all night. He just never stopped. He may not have been able to.

Chicago was his town; as both a newsman and a literati, he had one foot in the street and the other in the salons. He saw it all -- beggars and bankers, prostitutes and playboys, anarchists and artists, burlesque and ballet, flappers and cops and immigrants and cleaning ladies and on and on. He drank it in, all of it.

And when publishers began beating on his door for manuscripts and plays and PR firms offered him vast sums of money to massage the images of the famous, he left journalism -- or tried to.

Because after a few weeks he returned to his old newspaper and pitched an idea: what if journalism and literature could be merged? What if there were more to journalism than the flat recitation of facts? What if he went out into Chicago, day after day, to find the stuff of literature in everyday life?

All he was asking for was a nice salary -- and carte blanche. All he was offering was 1000 or 1500 words of -- something. Every single day of the week. The column would be called 1001 Afternoons of Chicago.

Today, this would be called "a good gig," but nothing revolutionary. Slice-of-life journalism, journalism that focuses on the plight of the little guy -- it's old hat today. In those days, however, it was unheard of, radical. But the writer was already a hot literary figure. The editors hired him back at once.

And the column began. It was Chicago, 1921, and the town was hopping with jazz and political ferment and money and commerce and bootleg alcohol. Every day, he came up with 1500 words of something: tragedy, comedy, satire, life, death, crime, sadness, triumph:

A flapper stares into the heart of the Jazz Age and sees... nothing. An old cop has witnessed so many lurid crimes that none stand out to him. A radical labor leader makes the rounds of the town's hot spots the week before he reports for a twenty-year prison sentence.

A pretty manicurist offers blistering observations on men in general. A sheriff's deputy explains why he plays gin rummy with condemned criminals. A mother of nine who toils ceaselessly finally gets a night off -- the hard way. In desperation and hope, an old sailor changes religions every time he falls off the wagon, as the boys at the pool hall laugh and jeer.

The writer kept it up for a year. Oh, he still worked on his plays and and articles and speeches and novels -- and published a smash best-seller while he was at it. And somehow also turned out a column a day, every day, of news as literature. And they are some of the best short pieces that I have read. They portray a Chicago 80 years gone; and yet they're as fresh as yesterday.

Oh, I don't love them all; but some are amazing.

The writer finished the column, published it in book form, and became even more famous than he had been -- a true man of letters. Then he moved on to other things.

His name was Ben Hecht. And eventually the "other things" he moved onto were movie scripts: he wrote many of the Hollywood classics of the '30s and '40s, and script-doctored half of the rest. Hecht was the archetypal Hollywood script-writer with a cigarette in his mouth and a smoking-hot typewriter, banging out first-class work in eight weeks, four weeks, two weeks, and once, two days. Scarface, The Front Page, Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Mutiny on the Bounty, Wuthering Heights, and dozens more.

He stayed in Hollywood for two or three months of the year, picked up a hundred thousand dollars or so, then went home to New York to be a social activist and man of letters. That was his life for nearly 40 years. Nice work if you can get it.

And at the end of his life, sitting on a pile of money and scripts but wondering why he never wrote the truly stupendous novel of his dreams, Ben Hecht came to realize that 1001 Nights of Chicago was among his very best work. Others agree.

I would go one step further and anoint Ben Hecht the patron saint of all bloggers -- those peculiar people who write not just because they want to, but because they need to. And who have their own unique viewpoint to bring to daily life.

I'll never be Ben Hecht. But he's a mighty target to shoot for.

Here, then, for your amusement, are several of my favorite pieces from 1001 Nights of Chicago. Or you may go to Project Gutenburg, that treasure-house of public domain manuscripts, and read the whole thing.

Mrs. Sardotopolis' Evening Off
Nirvana
Sergt. Kuzich's Waterloo
The Exile
Coral, Amber, and Jade
An Iowa Humoresque
Queen Bess' Feast
Thumbnail Lotharios

Thank you, Mr. Hecht.