Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath

by Ben Hecht, Wallace Smith (Illustrator)

Fantazius A Mysterious Oath is a novel written by Ben Hecht. The book follows the story of a man named Fantazius Mallare, a recluse living in his own world of fantasies and nightmares. Mallare is an artist who creates grotesque and disturbing images that reflect his inner turmoil and obsessions. He lives in a mansion that he has turned into a labyrinth of secret rooms and hidden passages, where he indulges in his darkest desires. The novel is a surreal and disturbing journey into the mind of a tortured artist, exploring themes of madness, obsession, and the destructive power of the imagination. The story is told through a series of vignettes, each one delving deeper into Mallare's twisted psyche. Along the way, he encounters a cast of bizarre and grotesque characters, including a dwarf, a hermaphrodite, and a mad scientist. Hecht's writing style is poetic and dreamlike, with vivid descriptions that bring Mallare's twisted world to life. The book is a classic of early 20th-century literature, and its influence can be seen in the works of writers such as William S. Burroughs and David Lynch. With its dark and unsettling imagery, Fantazius A Mysterious Oath is a haunting and unforgettable work of fiction.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Genres: Novels, Horror, Fantasy, Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

Ben Hecht, an American, wrote short stories, novels, such as Erik Dorn in 1921, dramas, including The Front Page in 1928 with Charles MacArthur, and screenplays, such as Gunga Din in 1938.

Ben Hecht, a journalist, directed and produced movies. A journalist in his youth, he went to 35 books and entertained most people. He received credits alone or in collaboration for seventy films.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Hecht

Reviews

[Melinda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very unusual book which is most beautifully written. Let me tell you some facts about it first. The copy you download free from Amazon is #832 of 2000 which were sold by subscription in 1922. They included 10 woodcuts which were beautiful and edgy. These woodcuts have not been included in the Amazon edition, for the same reason I think that the U.S. government banned this book in the same year. The dedication alone is amazing. It is insulting to almost every recognizable religious group, business tycoon, expert, glitterati, protester, do gooder, religious person,famous person, nun, frigid woman and literati. He evidently takes aim at people who don't know who he is, as well as his enemies. Then tells all of these people that he has so roundly insulted that he hopes that they never lay eyes on the wonderful phrases and gorgeous drawings in his book. The dedication was so politically incorrect, it would give a Liberal a heart attack and to all those to whom I recommended this book, I apologize if it offended in any way, shape or form. That was not my intention.

THE PLOT: The plot of the book on one level is very simple; it is the descent into madness of Fantazius Mallare. Of course, if you really look at the book, it is operating on many levels. It asks such questions such as: What is sanity? What is madness? How do they differ? Do they differ? Can one undo a fact by denying it with one's mind? Is man more than the chemistry set that drives him? Is sex all that drives man, deep down? Does the brain really rule? Is our next step in evolution to be Gods? Can we choose to turn madness on and off like a switch? Can we create whole world's in our minds with people populating them? What happens when these people we've created don't act like we've expected? His descent into madness begins immediately as he explains his disillusionment and ennui with the current world and man's egoism. He decides to leave behind the world and dive into the reality he creates in his brain instead. He has enough wherewithal when he's inside his head to be able to walk the streets of the town without getting lost, or running into people he says no longer exists and that he doesn't see. It's a fine trick if you can do it - avoiding one reality while seeing and interacting with a different one. This is not a plot that twists and turns, it more goes over one hill and back down, then around the corner then up a bigger dale, and then back down. At the top of each summit, you think the vista gives you a view of what's coming, but you'd be wrong. There are surprises here - especially to Mallare! You have to cogitate hard, but once you do, you'll find the plot gets at least an A+.

THE CHARACTERIZATION : The characterization in this book is primarily about Mallare in all his flavors of madness. That had to be difficult to write. Is he human and fleshed out? Oh yes! Absolutely human and fully fleshed out. So human in fact that his journal seems to be a real journal - so real in fact it could be a part of a psychological study. Mallare could easily walk from the pages if this were the '20s and say something witty or obnoxious or politically incorrect. The other two characters Rita and Goliath are real, but Mallare thinks they are phantoms in his brain. Their characterization is not significant, as what we are dealing with is all types of Mallare's. In his madness, he is trying them on for size - a God, a weeper, a phallus on legs, a worshipper at woman's feet, a smug watcher, a creator, a destroyer, a thinker, an observer, Mallare always Mallare. For characterization this gets an A+++

THE PACING: The pacing in a book like this doesn't really matter. This is not an adventure novel or a thriller where pacing can make or break a novel, this is an intellectual examination of one man's descent into madness written like poetry. Even saying that, the book flew past. All 200 and some pages seemed like a novella, as I was glued to everything Mallare. Maybe it was the quality of te prose, the antics of Mallare, the tragic events unfolding - I know not. All I know is A+ for pacing.

THE ENDING: The ending is anticlimactic. We see Mallare at his worst, weeping, suffering, begging for a specific thing to happen - which won't. Has he truly descended at last or is this another hill he's going over? The author leaves it up to the reader, or to the second book The Kingdom of Evil. Due to the ambiguous quality of the ending, and the fact that it leaves you thinking about all types of unanswered questions, I give the ending an A.

THE UPSHOT: If you don't get offended by the dedication, when, if taken in the spirit with which it was written, is absolutely hilarious and you include the excised woodcuts what you have here is a work of art. I must get my hands on a hardcopy immediately. With prose like poetry whose cadence is like music, everyone in the known world should read this. Why it is not a classic is befuddling. I found an old copy of the Kingdom of Evil in an old bookstore in a corner on the clearance table for 78¢. What a buy that was - woodcuts and all. Without that, I would have no idea about Ben Hecht and his fabulous books. My recommendation to everyone is read them. Read them now! They are free at major bookstores. Oh, but skip the dedication in book one.

[sophie esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the greatest miracle is that which enables man to tolerate life…which enables him to embrace its illusions and translate its monstrous incoherence into delightful, edifying patterns. It is the miracle of sanity.

This book takes the psychology of the modern, self-important ‘he-genius’, and chronicles his descent into madness.

What is reality but the habit of illusion?

The ink of Hecht’s own genius bleeds through, where this book reveals itself to be a complex exploration of the natural tendencies of the human psyche Through Mallare’s own maddened intellectual musings, we are invited to consider concepts of illusion and reality; delusion and sanity; and maybe even something like, egoism vs. nihilism.

I desire to create for myself a world within which I might love and hate—to be a God lost within his dream. Madness was necessary, so I embraced it. But my dream becomes the product of a Frankenstein. She—that hallucination—-is more real to my senses than I am. And I can no longer control her. My senses are unfaithful to me.

With our rather narcissistic protagonist, we are invited to consider the hypocrisy which underlies our own ways of living, thinking, and seeing; we consider where it is that our own God complexes lie; we consider our relationship with God, whether that be a spiritual entity or natural science. We are meant to consider our own submissions—to our sanity, our desires, our gods, and always to ourselves. We are meant to consider where we lose ourselves, which I see Hecht’s book suggesting is whenever we begin worshipping ourselves.

This is the basis of egoism—the mania to change realities into unreality. Because man is the tool of reality. For unreality he is the God. It is this desire to dominate which inspires him to avoid truths over which he has no sway and 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. Ignored by the planets, he invents the myth of mathematics and reduces the universe to a succession of fractions and Greek letters on a blackboard.

Besides being heavily philosophical, the ramblings within Fantazivs Mallare are beautiful for their passion, desperation, wonder, and also the universality of Mallare’s existential musings.

Ah, the snow is like my madness. It snows, snows. I climb silently among soft branches and white leaves. Delirium sleeps with a finger to its pale lips. I must continue to think. The storm hangs like a forgotten sorrow in my heart. But my thought persists. It crawls like a little wind through the forgotten storm. It rides carefully from flake to flake.

[Mimi Wolske · Rating 4 out of 5]

plenty of explicit sex...in fact, this book was suppressed for quite a few years. but, what struck me was the beginning... it was really disturbing. in fact, i think that it was perhaps the most venomous, hate-filled, manic-depressive, pathological thing i've ever read. if ever there was a book that could actually make someone WANT to commit suicide, this one is it.

this is the same guy who also wrote "His Girl Friday" and "Some Like It Hot".

yes, FOUR STARS... i really did like this one.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This seems to be a sort of parody of decadent literature, where the cool aloof aesthete protagonist has been exaggerated into a completely ridiculous figure. The writing is pretty good and the main character is appropriately stupid and repellent, but the main appeal of the book is the design and the beautiful art nouveau line drawings by wallace smith. also features a several page dedication from the writer to his enemies.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, forgotten gem of the macabre and decadent, or a gimmicky satire that would laugh at me for enjoying its florid style and pessimistic musings a century after its publication?

Either way, I recommend, even if it was my first exposure to printed AI garbage in the form of an introduction and chapter summaries (White Pine Publishing edition).

[Osiris Oliphant · Rating 5 out of 5]

from a review of a 2001 reprint in the los angeles times by D.J. CARLILE

He burns his paintings and smashes his sculptures, deciding that “Art has become a tedious decoration of my impotence.... A wounded man groans. I, impaled by life, emit statues....”

Mallare then redecorates the interior of his house to mirror the disintegration of his mind. He employs a black hunchbacked dwarf, whom he names Goliath, as his valet, and purchases a girl from a band of wicked Gypsies, to make her “like one of the dreams in my brain” (as he says), to have an object upon which to focus the permutations of his madness. And the so-called journal entries in the novel take us deep into the convoluted horrors entertained by the increasingly psychotic Mallare.

He murders a homeless man in the street, imagining that he has killed the girl, Rita. When he returns home and finds her happily awaiting his arrival, he is convinced that she is a hallucination. He savagely beats her to prove this to himself while Goliath, horrified and fascinated, looks on. Hecht presents us with dark and disturbing facets of human existence in a heightened language that smacks of De Lautremont, Sade and Baudelaire. Indeed, “Fantazius Mallare” often reads like some illegitimate offspring of Poe’s “The Black Cat,” writ large and in more lurid colors.

At other times, Hecht’s book is like a lengthy prose-poem, giving us lucid glimpses into the method of Mallare’s madness: “I prefer the snow.... One flake remains invisible. A thousand flakes are of no account. It is only when the flakes repeat themselves too endlessly for my eye to distinguish that I finally ignore them and walk contentedly in a storm. Thus with logic. When I have surrounded myself with an infinity of assurances, my error vanishes in the constant repetition of itself. And I am reassured. And sane.... My hands choked her. She had followed me into the street and I choked her. But I do not remember this. At least, the thing grows elusive and unsatisfactory. Why? Ah, the snow covers me. I will cover my confusion with a sigh like the snow.... " Images of snowfall and silence permeate the book.

Hecht’s wicked jeremiad is endemic of a kind of sickness at the heart of the American Dream. He shows us a “noble mind ... o’erthrown,” a dreamer unable to wake from his nightmares of absolute control, an artificer caught in a web of god-like indifference and cruel whim. Mallare ends up crucified by his own self-inflicted horrors. This voice out of the past, from an America flush with money, pride and bootleg booze, sings of isolation and egomania run amok, of a mind driven to destroy where creation becomes impossible.

“Fantazius Mallare” is the secret field, the dark mulch out of which Nathanael West and other dark visionaries of the American scene grew tall. In his lengthy dedication, Hecht enumerates the souls he finds wanting in wit and strength:

“This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated to my enemies--to the curious ones who take fanatic pride in disliking me ... to the anointed ones who identify their paranoic symptoms as virtues ... to the prim ones who find their secret obscenities mirrored in every careless phase ... who wince adroitly in the hope of being mistaken for imbeciles; to the prim ones who fornicate apologetically (the Devil can-cans in their souls) ... to the critical ones who whoremonger on Parnassus ... to the serious ones who suffocate gently in the boredom they create (God alone has time to laugh at them) ... to these, and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this inhospitable book

[Michael Shockley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The woodcuts are really something, but the book itself is a bit of a curiosity, for while it does provide something in the way of entertainment and there are occasional bursts of philosophical insight from the delusional narrator's demented ramblings, the story itself is almost entirely lacking, the characters outside of the main protagonist are largely underdeveloped, and the prose reaches such heights of absurd embellishment at times that one doesn't know whether to laugh or groan in exasperation (I did plenty of each). Yes, the narrator is going insane, and the prose can be taken to be a sign of some sort of mania or psychosis which he is undergoing, but just because there is a justification for this style of prose doesn't mean it's actually fun to read. I found the ending to be sort of vague largely due to the fact that the narrator's insanity eventually makes it difficult to distinguish what's really going on, and as such, I was generally dissatisfied with it. This book almost reads as a parody of the sort of literature that J. K. Huysmans and all the other decadent aesthetes wrote, but I can't say whether or not that's an accurate description of the text itself, or if that was the author's true intent from the start.

That being said, here are some humorous lines (because I have the maturity and sense of humor of a 12 year old):

"Yes, the penis is the democratic tabernacle of Life. Under its little Moorish roof, the senses of the race kneel in common prayer."

"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."

[Otto Thoennes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dark, feverishly intoxicating imagery. Hard to believe he was in his twenties when he wrote this.

[Stephen Rowland · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was shocked when I realized this brilliant psychological novel is actually AMERICAN.

[?0?0?0 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben Hecht, the brilliant writer of screenplays including, but in no way limited to, "Scarface", "His Girl Friday", "Notorious", and "Angels Over Broadway", wrote this novella 1922, which included ten darkly beautiful woodcut illustrations, only to run into censorship. It's not difficult to see why this book had a hard time coming to print, properly, until relatively recently: the opening pages tear to pieces every religion known to man, the protagonist smacks a woman around that he has in keeping, and our decadent protagonist, alongside the dwarf helper Goliath, split apart into madness but not only through our viewing of it but from our reading of the text that increasingly becomes the musings of a well-versed madman. This book had me stuck to its perverse chains from the start and I was pleased to find the decadent, schizophrenic, and erotic nature of the book building up with the narrative only to sputter out in an ecstatic flurry of confusion and sadness.

[april violet]

I found my copy at a used book store. I was taken by the illustration on the back of a man in fatigued coitus with a tree shaped like a woman (I suppose that must chafe). The illustrations in the book are sinewy and angular. Although eye-catching they have very little to do with the plot.

Fantazius Mallare is a misanthropic, reclusive artist at war with reason. He decides to track down a woman as a means to achieve omnipotence. The results don't go as planned, and he is unable to distinguish between the real and unreal. In the story you have a black dwarf who has an Igor role, a nympho, and an egotistical man who's iffy about sex. I'm a bit baffled by the book, so I'm not sure how to rate it. I alternated between head-scratching over the weak story and fits of laughter over the writing. To give a sampling of the text contained therein:

"It is unfortunate that I am a sculptor, a mere artist. Art has become for me a tedious decoration of my impotence. It is clear I should have been a God. Then I could have had my way with people. To shriek at them obliquely, to curse at them through the medium of clay figures, it is a preposterous waste of time. A wounded man groans. I, impaled by life, emit statues."

(The above passage did emit shrieks of laughter from yours truly.)

There's scant info on the internet about the book, which is interesting considering the controversy surrounding its publication. I had no trouble finding info about the author, Ben Hecht, who eventually became a Hollywood screenwriter.

[Rob Smith, Jr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to believe the writer of 'The Front page' wrote this. Him being a twenty-something-old kid better explains this mish-mosh of goofy psychological silliness. Aimless piffle, I find it. I guess for artsy types this is some kind of revelation. I'm not one for Vonnegut-ish rambling and calling it a story. Seems Hecht got out of this phase and moved on to practical prose.

It is interesting writing and the view point of the narrative in the mental state involved is very well done. But it starts and ends no where. Rambling repetition that gets tiresome and ridiculous.

Bottom line; I don't recommend this book: 2 out of ten points.

[BC Batcheshire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit brutal, but a great immersion of Man's perspective of Woman as object, even in her use as muse; a good study of the inherent misogyny of social conditioning - especially in composition of personal judgment - lending to the condemnation of senses and sensuality as feminine/weakness/sacrilege; and the damages wrought due to disregard of the Female, resulting primarily in the execution of inhumane impulses and a social schizophrenia on the part of participants.

[Bonfirebonanza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too bad it was so short, could've kept on going for days.

[Deo · Rating 5 out of 5]

saw a drawing of a man humping a personified tree on pinterest, loved it, reversed image searched to find the artist, which directed me to a wiki where they had a link to the internet archive. thought it'd be the artist's art book with little synopsis' of his inspirations and life, and was surprised to discover it was an entire story!

read it all in an hour, and let me tell you, best discovery ever!!! i love a story that is serves as psychosexual character study, and i especially love odd erotic art, i'm surprised it's not advertised along side with marquies de sade's, georges bataille, and anais nin's works.

mallare is such a miserable character, being in his head is both agonizing and fascinating. i particularly liked the way he described vaginas as "urine ducts", what a fucking chud lol. sad that rita didn't actually kill him though, better than breaking goliath's heart imo.

[Parker]

Bizarre and transgressive, Sick art inserts! Banned by the govt!