No, we’re not talking Microsoft Front Page, but the play—the journalistic classic set in Chicago in the 1920s: a Broadway comedy made into at least four movies. One of the Front Page playwrights was Ben Hecht, and for years I’d seen references to Erik Dorn, his first novel, which is about about newsrooms, sex, marriage, cheating hearts, enui and Life, cap L. Prime dorm-room bull session territory for young writers—at least back in the Underwood era!
Now the 1921 book is online from Manybooks.net as a Book of the Month, and while the prose is wordy and the pace badly lags the play’s, Hecht paints memorable pictures of Erik and those around him. Fittingly, Manybooks’ Matt McClintock lives in the Chicago area. Kudos to Project Gutenberg—Matt’s source of the file–for reviving this one! Preparing the text was Eric Eldred, with Distributed Proofreaders doing the proofing. What a great use of the public domain! Let’s hope that eventually Larry Lessig can counter the unfortunate Supreme Court verdict in Eldred vs. Ashcroft case where the public domain movement challenged the notorious Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Erik Dorn—as summed up on Manybooks…
“Seven years of married life and sixteen years of working for the same newspaper leave Erik Dorn feeling empty, bored, and segregated from life. An extramarital love affair offers only temporary satisfaction — it is the European turmoil of World War I which provides an opportunity to abandoning his banal Chicago existence and becoming a participant rather than an observer in life. Upon returning to Chicago Dorn finds his wife re-married and his love for the other woman dead. Only emptiness remains. Approx. 87,521 words.”
And an excerpt near the start of the novel…
“The employees of the editorial room—a loft-like chamber crazily crowded with desks, tables, cabinets, benches, files, typewriters; lighted by a smoke-darkened sun and the dim glow of electric bulbs—were already launched upon the nervous routine of their day. An excited jargon filled the place which, with the air of physical disorder as if the workers were haphazardly improvising their activities,—gave the room a vivid though seemingly impermanent life.
“On the benches against a peeling wall sleepy-faced boys with precocious eyes kept up a lazy hair-pulling, surreptitious wrestling bout. They rose indifferently in response to furiously repeated bellows for their assistance—a business of carrying typewritten bits of paper between desks a few feet apart; or of sauntering with eleventh-hour orders to the perspiring men in the composing room.
“In the forward part of the shop a cluster of men stood about the desk of an editor who in a disinterested voice sat issuing assignments for the day, forecasting to his innumerable assistants the amount of space needed for succeeding editions, the possible development in the local scandals. His eye unconsciously watched the clock over his[Pg 15] head, his ear divided itself between a half-dozen conversations and a tireless telephone. With his hands he kept fumbling an assortment of clippings, memoranda, and copy.
“Oldish young men and youngish old men gravitated about him, their faces curiously identical. These were the irresponsible-eyed, casual-mannered individuals, seemingly neither at work nor at play, who were to visit the courts, the police, the wrecks, the criminals, conventions, politicians, reformers, lovers, and haters, and bring back the news of the city’s day. A common almost racial sophistication stamped their expression. They pawed over telephone books, argued with indifferent, emotionless profanity among themselves on items of amazing import; pounded nonchalantly upon typewriters, lolled with their feet upon desks, their noses buried in the humorous columns of the morning newspapers.
“‘Make-up’ men and their assistants, everlastingly irritable as if the victims of pernicious conspiracies, badgered for information that seemed inevitably non-existent. They desired to know in what mysterious manner one could get ten columns of type into a page that held only seven and whether anyone thought the paper could go to press at half-past ten when the bulk of the copy for the edition arrived in the composing room at twenty minutes of eleven.
“Proof-readers emerged from the bowels of somewhere waving smeared bits of printed paper and triumphantly demanded explanation of ambiguous passages.
“Re-write men ‘helloed’ indignantly into telephones, repeating with sudden listlessness the pregnant details of the news pouring in; and scribbling it down on sheets of paper … ‘dead Grant park bullet unknown 26 yrs silk stockings refinement mystery.’
“Idlers lounged and discussed loudly against the dusty windows hung with torn grimy shades.
“Copy-readers, concentrated under green eye-shades, sat isolated in a tiny world of sharpened pencils, paste pots, shears, and emitted sudden embittered oaths.
“Editors from other departments, naïvely excited over items of vast indifference to their nervous listeners, came and went.
“An occasional printer, face and forearms smeared with ink, sauntered in as if on a vacation, uttering some technical announcement and precipitating a brief panic.
“Toward the center of the room, seated at desks jammed against one another in defiance of all convenience, telegraph editors, their hands fumbling cables and despatches from twenty ends of the earth, bellowed items of interest into the air—assassinations in China, probes, quizzes, scandals, accusations in far-away places. They varied their bellows with occasional shrieks of mysterious significance—usually a misplaced paste pot, a borrowed shears, a vanished copy-boy.
“These folk and a sprinkling of apparently unemployed and undisturbed strangers spread themselves through the shop. Outside the opened windows in the rear of the room, the elevated trains stuffed with men and women roared into a station and squealed out again. In the streets below, the traffic raised an ear-splitting medley of sound which nobody heard.
“Against this eternal and internal disorder, a strange pottering, apparently formless and without beginning or end, was guiding the latest confusions and intrigues of the human tangle into perfunctory groups of words called stories. A curious ritual—the scene, spreading through the four floors of the grimy building with a thousand men and women shrieking, hammering, cursing, writing, squeezing and juggling the monotonous convulsions of life into a scribble of words. Out of the cacophonies of the place issued, sausage fashion, a half-million papers daily, holding up from hour to hour to the city the blurred mirrors of the newspaper columns alive with the almost humorous images of an unending calamity.
“‘The press,’ Erik Dorn once remarked, ‘is a blind old cat yowling on a treadmill.'”
