Ben Hecht

“ Still, if I am happy ... but how does one know one is happy? I suspect my happiness. It is a clown’s suit in which my mourning disguises itself. Mallare has fallen out of his black heaven. And he picks himself up like a good burgher. He grunts and chuckles and looks at the skies, alas, without curiosity. Lucifer, fallen, finds diversion as a janitor in red tights. Ergo, I have proved something. I am in Hell and with Lucifer I know its secret—happiness.
“Where is Mallare who fancied himself a madman? Who sought to climb over his senses and found himself impaled by a tower of Babel? ”

“ Mallare’s eyes opened to the night.
[Sixty-one]
“Strange,” he thought, “I see and yet what I look at remains invisible. But tonight outlines dance. The night is a maniac suffering from ennui. His dark eyes are weary with the emptiness they create. Vainly he searches for life, his eyes devouring it, and leaving only his own image for him to contemplate.
“I am not so mad as that. 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. ”

“ Mallare answered, “On the contrary. They are the only thoughts I have had in which I could detect no reason. It has amused me to put down with great care the few banalities which have normalized my days. They are very precious to me, although they have no value in themselves.
“It is the ability to think such absurdities as you have read that has kept me from suicide. The will to live is no more than the hypnotism of banalities. We keep alive only by maintaining, despite our intelligence, an enthusiasm for things which are of no consequence or interest to us. ”

“ I desire you to speak, little one. If I can believe in the illusion of flesh and eager eyes, then I can believe in the illusion of sound. Come speak. I am at the mercy of my madness. If you speak to me, little one, I will understand. My stupid senses that retain their earthly logic will be ravished at the sound of your voice. ”

“ Goliath stands by his shrine and weeps. He waits beside a couch as if it were another Mallare able to give birth to a [One Hundred Sixty-eight] phantom. Poor dwarf, unlike Mallare he has not learned that suffering is an illusion, that couches and Medusas are illusions. Unlike Mallare there is no smile hanging its star above him.
“Sleep comes. A forgotten world babbles with shadows outside my windows. It is time to say goodnight to my friend, the lodge brother. Turn your tears to the cold moon, my friend. Mallare goes away. Far away into a house where he is alone.” ”

“ He is not a phantom. Goliath is no chimera. He lives. He has reality.
“‘Then how does it come,’ I continued thinking, ‘that he sees that which is visible only to you? His eyes are fastened on her who is to be seen only inside the caverns of Mallare. He raises his arms. His hands touch her. I am imagining Goliath. Goliath is not in the room. This is a memory of him that has wandered onto the scene of my madness.’
“Here my thinking ended. I sat contemplating the imbecile, the blubberer. He pressed himself upon me with his shameless importunings. He snivelled and his lips moved with my name. ”

“ But this other one, this Insufferable and Aloof One—this Serene One staring amusedly at me out of His black heaven—how send my hatred against him? Ah, I will conspire with his senses. I am no more than an idea in the head of God. But the head of God is but an idea that encircles me. I am a phantom within a phantom. Thus I must make myself nauseous. I must make myself too hideous. I must make myself so monstrous that the Idea which contains me will feel an anguish. ”

“ Nevertheless, my sanity is a myth. I have invented it, by arbitrarily identifying the moment of its departure. But it is better that way than to blunder on [One Hundred Seventeen] without knowing how mad I am or whether I am mad at all, or whether I ever have been mad. A lie believed in is an antidote for confusion.
“It doesn’t matter. Excellent logic. She is destroyed. And I am none the worse, except for a disillusion more—and an uncertainty. My uncertainty is removed by logic, or at least concealed by it. And I am sane. I return to life—another Napoleon walking backwards. ”

“ Now, as he studied her, the illusion he desired again filled him. His eyes turned inward saw only a dark-eyed phantom, a woman of mist that was no more than a hallucination drifting through his thought. He addressed this image of Rita softly.
“It is pleasant to be in love with you,” he said. “Because love hitherto has been one of the abominations. In the world I have destroyed love existed. It was the foul paradox of egoism. Man, feeling suddenly the torment of his incompleteness, embraced woman. He was inspired by the mania to transform his desires into possessions. ”

“ Sanity has its [One Hundred Twenty-one] rewards. Its laughter is a charming hint of madness that one may enjoy harmlessly.
“What a lecherous spectacle a row of dark houses is! Bedrooms filled with bodies—incredible nudities. Bed springs creaking. The hour of asterisks. Window blinds down. Doors locked. Lights out. The city lingers in the snow like a feeble burlesque. Houses and shops and street car tracks gesture reprovingly. Civilization bows its head in the night like an abandoned bride. Man, like an ape hunting fleas, preoccupies himself again with his nerve centers. ”

“ The night, white with snow, stared like a blind man. A phantom world hung in the air. Houses and street withdrew silently. The snow covered them. Mallare walked on, staring into the heavy weave of flakes.
“A great white leopard prowling silently,” he murmured. “It snows. The moon has come down and walks beside me. The wind blows and the moon gallops away on a white horse. A gentle annihilation. The night has fallen [One Hundred Eleven] asleep and this is a dream that pirouettes in its head. The street becomes a bridal couch.
“Ah, the snow is like my madness. It snows, snows. ”

“ And I say sanity is the determined blindness which keeps us from seeing one another. More than that, of course: which keeps us from seeing ourselves. And health is the lame artifice of our bodies which keeps us from loathing one another. I see and I loathe. Yet I must beware of falling to sleep in explanations.”
A month or a year may have passed between this and the continuation. Whatever the period, a clarity arrived. Mallare’s mind grappling with the nightmare shadows engulfing it, distorted his reason to give them outline and was saved. ”

“ This is the basis of egoism—the mania to change realities into unreality. Because man is the tool of reality. Of unreality he is the God. It is this desire to dominate which inspires him to avoid truths over which he has no sway and to 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. ”

“ How do I know my hands fought? Merely because I remember them striking. [One Hundred Eight] Yet that may have been an illusion too! Then why are my hands tired? Why do my arms ache? Another illusion, of course. Logic is independent of truth. Logic is the persuasive repetition of ideas by which man hypnotizes himself. I must beware of logic. It will but tie me hopelessly to hallucination. I must think without evidence. I do not know anything. What I see, hear, smell, touch is nothing. I can no longer summon my senses as witnesses. ”

“ Stretching themselves on their backs and seducing egoists with the unctuous lie of possession. The mania for possession—that most refined of all instincts—the most heroic of insanities! How easily they circumvent it! To desire is merely to love. But to create in oneself the objects of desire—that is to be mad and above life. Beyond it.
“I must explain this to her. If she loves me well enough she will understand. All things are possible in love. I will explain to her that I possess her at will without the loathsome absurdities of sex.”
The beggar paused and mumbled beside Mallare. ”

“ As I talk your outlines grow luminous. Your eyes become like conquered Satans. They crawl inside my brain like amorous spiders. Your lips are the libretto of a dream. Your breasts are little blind faces raised in prayer. Your body flutters like a rich curtain before the door of enchantments. I look within. Thus I possess you and my senses without leaving themselves, enter the infinity of my mind.”
Mallare’s eyes closed. He remained rigid in his chair. A murmur that Rita could no [Fifty-seven] longer hear came from his lips, as if voices were speaking out of a depth. ”

“ I have closeted myself with a lecherous animal and it turns on me. That is the reward of the privacy I hungered after.
“‘And you who lie and weep on a couch are no longer the dream of a God, but the crude marionette created by lust for its own diversion. I thought only to go mad. But I see I have become an idiot.’
“There was no more to say. Her weeping ended and she vanished. But she will return. In my sleep her outline wanders like an amorous ghost haunting the grave of my senses. Ah, I must be cautious now, more cautious, always cautious. It would be too easy to yield. ”

“ But here and there in the streets of cities walk the damned—creatures denied the miracle of sanity and who move bewilderedly through their scene, staring at the flying days as at the fragments of another world. ”

“ The world is a memory that expires under my thought. I am alone. Yet how much of me must still be the world! My dearest phantoms are, after all, no more than distorted reminiscences. I fear, alas, this is the truth. ”

“ The world is not so outrageous if one is sufficiently mad to pull it into taffy shapes and incredible scrawls.
[Sixty-two]
“But I must be warned. My madness sought to avenge itself at her intrusion. It overcame me with its anger. She was not content to let me possess the beautiful image of her. Although I have explained the thing to her clearly. It is possible she does not understand. I will talk to her again with greater lucidity. I will tell her that I do not desire her except as a dream for my mirror. ”

“ It is true, my senses [One Hundred Fifty-five] writhe less frightenedly. But I, Mallare—yes, Mallare the Supreme One—honor her assault with a shudder.
“‘Ah, who but Mallare could have invented so subtle a blasphemy, so accomplished an enemy. It is an old theological quibble, but I understand it now. God is the greatest atheist. He is proud of a disbelief in Himself.
“‘Yes, this phantom is the atheism of Mallare. And it is at last a true child. A parental pride excites me. Like Mallare, her father, she rises above herself. I have breathed the soul of hate into her. ”

“ He has triumphed by specializing in his weaknesses and insuring their survival; by disputing the simple laws of biology with interminable banalities labelled from age to age as religions, philosophies and laws.
“Unable, despite his shiftiness, to lie the fact of his mortality and decomposition out of existence, he has satisfied his mania for survival by the invention of souls. And so behold him—spectacle of spectacles—a chatty little tradesman in an immemorial hat drifting good-naturedly through a nightmare.
“It is for this ability to exist unnaturally that he has invented the adjective sane. ”

“ My mind closes like a 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. ”

“ Yes, the penis is the democratic tabernacle of Life. Under its little Moorish roof, the senses of the race kneel in common prayer.
“‘Observe it, Mallare. It is the rendezvous of expiring illusions, the gathering place of the anonymities which utilize man, beasts and plants. See how this curious dwarf staggers like a bewildered stranger in its shadow. He is an outcast. He is useless. He is no longer necessary. Life which made a pretense of him, enters its tabernacle and closes the doors on him. ”

“ This would be a God, this hermaphroditic prostitute who fondles himself at night. Mallare ... weep. Whips will not rid you of this monster. Mallare, the plaything.
“But there is a way to be rid of her. Hate will darken the gleam of her body. She will vanish. But do I hate her? My madness is infatuated since it makes her so radiant. And who am I that I laugh at my madness? It is I who am insane. Not this other Eden maker whose mania I applauded. I, Mallare, tear at my hair. ”

“ People who see my work for the first [Thirty-one] time grow indignant and call me sick and artificial. (Bilious critics!) But so are these trees.
“People think of art in terms of symmetry. With a most amazing conceit they have decided upon the contours of their bodies as the standards of beauty. Therefore I am pleased to look at trees or at anything that grows, unhandicapped by the mediocritizing force of reason, and note how contorted such things are.”
Mallare’s point of view toward his world—the attitude that went mad—was nothing more involved than his egoism. ”

“ They are conscious [Twenty-nine] of themselves only as vacuums within which life is continually expiring.
“Alas, the damned! From the depths of their non-existence they contemplate their fellowman and perceive him a dwarf prostrate forever before solacing arrangements of words; an homunculus riding vaingloriously on the tiny river of ink that flows between monstrous yesterdays and monstrous tomorrows; a baboon strutting through a mirage.”
The history of Mallare’s madness begins thus. ”

“ I have listened for years to the prattle of men who call themselves egoists. It is a [Thirty-five] title by which they have sought to identify me. To label a mystery suffices for its dismissal and thus they seek to dismiss me. There is in egoism, however, a depth to which all but myself are blind. I have found this depth in myself and out of it rises a definition which I must consider cautiously. There is but one egoist and that is He who, intolerant of all but Himself, sets out to destroy all but Himself. Egoism is the despairing effort of man to return to his original Godhood ”

“ My madness was not as mad as this dark street. This is a prettier witches’ night than the one I aspired to. I am amused and my amusement is an insult that inspires me. If one cannot become God, one can at least sit and sneer happily at the handiwork of his rival.
“The dawn comes into my head. Poor Mallare, who must readjust his vocabulary to coherences. The night flies away. How simple this little scene becomes. Mysteries vanish. Doors open. Window blinds raise themselves. And now people stick their heads out into the [One Hundred Twenty-three] cold. Wagons, trucks, crowds begin. ”