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The Obscene Art of Wallace Smith For The Banned Book Fantazius Mallare, 1922
“A memory of sanity gives diverting outline to the shadows in me. I am not a maniac like the night. My mind closes like 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.”
– Ben Hecht, author of Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath (1922), illustrated by Wallace Smith
First Drawing from Fantazius Mallare by Wallace Smith for Ben Hecht
Wallace Smith’s ten energetic black and white drawings for Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath (1922) twitch with menace, provocation and desire. Reminiscent of Sidney Sime’s satirical drawings, Austin Osman Spare’s “abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible” art, Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and perhaps William Mortensen’s otherworldly photographs, Smith’s illustrations linger in the mind’s eye.
Fantazius Mallare: ‘An exercise in adolescent self-indulgence’
‘Second Drawing’
Hecht’s biographer Adina Hoffman called Fantazius Mallare an “overheated exercise in adolescent self-indulgence”. She had a point. Get this extract as Mallare addresses Rita, his doomed object of desire:
“I am the victim of an overwhelming desire to masturbate. But if I yield to the mysterious reality you have assumed I will become too grotesque for my vanity to tolerate. I will remain aware while possessing you that my penis is beating a ludicrous tattoo on a sofa cushion.”
More? OK, then. Mallare strives to be, and sometimes considers himself to be, a god. He decides that the simplest way to prove his divine power is to control and abuse a woman (he chooses Rita) and resist his sensual urges (which he fails to do):
“I will hunt up a vulgar woman, one who does not piously regard her vulva as an orifice to be approached with Gregorian chants. I must be careful to avoid those veteran masturbators marching heroically under the gonfalons of virginity. It is a difficult business, finding a woman. A modest one will offend my intellect. A shameless one will harass my virility. A stupid one will be unable to appreciate my largess. An intelligent one will penetrate my impotency.”
The Plot
‘Third Drawing’
As Hecht has fun and Wallace’s illustrations illuminate the dark story, we continue to look at the book’s plot. Fantazius Mallare is delivered as a first-person narration by the reclusive Ben Fantazius Mallare, a 35-year-old artist at war with reason. Ebsco explains:
After throwing Rita against the wall, Mallare leaves for a walk and encounters a beggar. In a mad reverie, he mistakes the beggar for Rita and strangles him. Thinking that he has killed Rita, the sculptor walks home but finds her waiting for him. She seduces him, and he has sexual intercourse with her regularly. He deems it masturbation because he considers her a hallucination caused by his madness. If she exists, it is only because he has created her in his mind. Goliath [his servant] watches Mallare have sex with Rita and manifests his jealousy. Mallare sends his paralyzed dwarf servant away because he is ashamed that his senses have enslaved him. He therefore feels compelled to murder this female phantom.
Mallare viciously beats Rita, leaving her bloodied and angry. As he meditates, he wonders how he drew blood from a phantom; he contemplates that she may never have existed and that even the blood is part of the hallucination. Her love for him dissipates. To exact revenge, she angers him by engaging in sexual intercourse with Goliath. The servant lusts for Rita and excitedly fornicates with her, but while the two have sex, they look not at each other but at Mallare, awaiting his reaction. Mallare contemplates the incident as it happens, considering that perhaps Rita and Goliath are real and that he may be a phantom. Envious of his subordinates for exercising powers of their own and enraged that life may exist outside himself, he exiles her from Heaven (his house) for employing sex to turn his servant against him, leaving the forlorn Goliath to look out the window in search of her. By overcoming lust for Rita, or at least believing that he has, Mallare asserts that he has conquered his senses and the physical world. Fantazius Mallare concludes with Mallare writing in his journal exclusively in the third person, for he is no longer Mallare and is separated from himself.
Censorship and Book Sales
‘Fourth Drawing’
If that plot doesn’t sell it to you, the controversy might. Fantazius Mallare was daring enough to earn a $1,000 fine for obscenity in U.S. District Court for both Hecht and Smith. Following the fine and its branding as obscene, 2,000 more copies of the book were sold to discrete readers.
And the furore was not unintended, according to Goes on the Shelf (via John Couthart):
It should be noted that Hecht and Smith went to a great deal of trouble to have themselves convicted of obscenity. They had wanted to create a test case of the federal obscenity law and have a show trial in order to turn public opinion against it by ridicule. Hecht also intended to enter a million-dollar civil suit for defamation of character against John Sumner and his infamous Society for the Suppression of Vice if Sumner attacked his book.
The famous Clarence Darrow was to have been their attorney. The plan was to send review copies of Fantazius Mallare to all of the literary lights of the time, and then have Darrow call these people as expert witnesses at the trial. Alas, the scheme foundered on the unforeseen pusillanimity of the literary establishment—only HL Mencken agreed to appear as a witness. In the end there was no trial because Hecht and Smith entered a plea of nolo contendere.
Fifth Drawing
Not everyone was shocked and appalled. English novelist DH Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930), who knew a few things about erotic writing, reviewed Fantazius Mallare for Berkeley’s The Laughing Horse, “a magazine of polemics, phillippics [sic], satire, burlesque and all around destructive criticism”:
These drawings are so completely without irony, so crass, so strained, so would-be. There’s nothing in it but the author’s attempt to be startling…. The word penis or testicle or vagina doesn’t shock me. Why should it? Surely I am enough a man to be able to be able to think of my own organs with calm, even with indifference. It isn’t the names of things that bother me; nor even ideas about them. I don’t keep my passions, or reactions, or even sensations IN MY HEAD. They stay down where they belong….
…all these fingerings and naughty words and shocking little drawings only reveal the state of mind of a man who has NEVER had any sincere, vital experience in sex…. If Fantazius wasn’t a frightened masturbator he knows that sex contact with another individual meant a whole meeting, a contact between two natures, a grim recontre, half battle and half delight, always, and a sense of renewal and deeper being afterwards….The great gods pulse in the dark, and enter you as darkness through the lower gates. Not through the head.
Fantazius Mallare seems to me such a poor, impoverished, self-conscious specimen.
Extract: Introduction
‘Sixth Drawing’
You can read the entire book for free at the Internet Archice. This is how is starts:
Fantazius Mallare considered himself mad because he was unable to behold in the meaningless gesturings of time, space and evolution a dramatic little pantomime adroitly centered about the routine of his existence. He was a silent looking man with black hair and an aquiline nose. His eyes were lifeless because they paid no homage to the world outside him.
When he was thirty-five years old he lived alone high above a busy part of the town. He was a recluse. His black hair that fell in a slant across his forehead and the rigidity of his eyes gave him the appearance of a somnambulist. He found life unnecessary and submitted to it without curiosity.
Wallace Smith
‘Seventh Drawing’
Wallace Smith (December 30, 1888 – January 31, 1937) was an American book illustrator, comic artist, reporter, author, and screenwriter. He was born Schmidt, which he changed to Smith during World War I.
As Smith he became Washington correspondent for the Chicago American at the age of 20, remaining with that newspaper for over a decade. In 1920 he created the paper’sJoe Blow comic panel feature for the Chicago American. In 1923–1924 he contributed illustrations (using the nickname “Vulgus”) for The Chicago Literary Times, a magazine cofounded by Ben Hecht and Maxwell Bodenheim.
Smith moved to Hollywood embarking on successful, decade-long, screenplay-writing career. His film work included screen adaptations of his novels The Captain Hates the Sea and The Gay Desperado, Two Arabian Knights and The Lost Squadron.
In 1926, after moving to Hollywood from Chicago, he presented the silent film star Rod La Rocque with a copy of Fantazius Mallare, adding the inscription: “For Rod La Rocque -who has a thousand masks for his face – but, thank Christ, never an one for his heart.”
He produced illustrations for other books, designed book jackets, frontispieces and end papers. In 1923 he illustrated Hecht’s The Florentine Dagger and frontispieces for Blackguard by Maxwell Bodenheim and The Shining Pyramid by Arthur Machen.
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht (1894–1964) is remembered today as a notable Hollywood screenwriter. He won the first screenplay Oscar for Underworld in 1927, wrote the great screwball comedies Nothing Sacred and His Girl Friday (based on his play with Charles MacArthur, The Front Page), and worked with directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, among others.
‘Eighth Drawing’
‘Ninth Drawing’
‘Tenth Drawing’
Via: John Coulthart.
The post The Obscene Art of Wallace Smith For The Banned Book Fantazius Mallare, 1922 appeared first on Flashbak.
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