Today is the birthday of Maxwell “Bogie” Bodenheim (May 26, 1892 – February 6, 1954), a poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. Relatively obscure today, he was widely known internationally during the Jazz Age of the 1920s for his erotic poetry and prose and scandalous womanizing. But by the 1940s he was a homeless wino who wrote hasty poems and sold them for drinks. He was shot dead in 1954 by a mentally disturbed man involved in a sordid tryst with Bodenheim’s wife, whom he also killed. (More on Bodenheim follows.)
We’re marking the occasion of the birth of Bodenheim here with two of his poems:
Songs to a Woman
By Maxwell Bodenheim
I
You are like startled song-wings against my heart
Which flutters like a harp-string wounded
By too much quivering music.
You cover me with a blue dream-robe
Whose silk ripples out like imaged water ....
And when, for a moment, you leave,
I am a black sky awaiting its moon.
II
If I could be moon-light scattered out
Over the blowing dark-blue hair
Of kneeling, flowing crystal breezes
Breathing a litany of pale odors,
If I could be moonlight scattered out
Over the whispers meeting in your heart,
The marriage of our souls would be
No more complete than now.
III
Like a delicately absent-minded guest,
Your smile sometimes lingers after
Your lips are solemn.
And once I saw a tear in your eye
Playing hide-and-go-seek with some leaping, dimpled memory.
These things, to me, are like scattered perfume
Wavering down upon my heart.
IV
The struggle of a smile craving birth
Invades her little weeping faun’s face,
And even makes her tear-drops leap ....
She smiles as only grief can smile:
A smile like ashes caught within
A tiny whirlwind of light;
When the light goes, the ashes drape her face
Till even her lips seen grey.
V
Wave your veils to pallid gavottes,
Blow them on with dimly-spiced laughs,
And catch them breathlessly against your breast!
You have prayed too long in you sinking temple --
Night has come, with her fumbling release,
Her moment in which you may play with sad thoughts.
So, wave your veils to pallid gavottes,
Blow them on with dimly-spiced laughs
And catch them breathlessly against your breast.
“Songs to a Woman” by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1919. Public domain.
The Rear-Porches of an Apartment-Building
By Maxwell Bodenheim
A sky that has never known sun, moon or stars,
A sky that is like a dead, kind face,
Would have the color of your eyes,
O servant-girl, singing of pear-trees in the sun,
And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked
When your lavender-white eyes were alive. . . .
On the porch above you are two women,
Whose faces have the color of brown earth that has never felt rain.
The still wet basins of ponds that have been drained
Are their eyes.
They knit gray rosettes and nibble cakes. . . .
And on the top-porch are three children
Gravely kissing each others' foreheads
And an ample nurse with a huge red fan. . . .
The passing of the afternoon to them
Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.
“The Rear-Porches of an Apartment-Building,” by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1917. Public domain.
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Poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife, Ruth Fagan, having breakfast of tomato juice and sandwiches in their apartment on
World-Telegram photo, 1952.
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Bodenheim met writer Ben Hecht in 1912 in Chicago and they maintained a love/hate relationship to the end. Together they founded The Chicago Literary Times. The Chicago literary group also included Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Edgar Lee Masters, among others. Bodenheim was dispatched to Greenwich Village as the magazine’s eastern correspondent, which, according to writer Jeff Kisseloff, set into motion Bodenheim’s long trail of “empty bottles and broken hearts.”
Ben Hect offers a glimpse into Bodenheim’s mania in Hect’s memoir, Letters from Bohemia . Here he describes a dinner party during which Bodenheim became irritable that he was not the center of attention. Writes Hect:
“Having emptied his tenth wineglass, he proceeded to eat it. He bit chunks of his fragile goblet, chewed and swallowed the bits of glass as if they were the finest of desserts... ‘Good God,’ someone said, ‘You're a poet, not a circus freak.’ ‘Every poet is both,’ Bodenheim answered aloofly... He continued to talk of poetry, and to recite some of his own latest work, holding the diners fascinated by the stream of blood and words from his mouth.”
Bodenheim wrote several novels: Georgia May, Replenishing Jessica, Naked on Roller Skates, the most well-known. They were, in the words of Ben Hect, “hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them, and some verbal fireworks in every chapter.”
In 1926, Bodenheim was hauled into court on obscenity for his novel Replenishing Jessica, whose heroine found "the simple feat of keeping her legs crossed…a structural impossibility." The case was dismissed, but the notoriety bolstered Bodenheim’s reputation and made his novel a bestseller.
A couple of years later he again achieved notoriety, this time as the Great Lover, when a series of spurned lovers attempted suicide after being rejected by Bodenheim.
By the early 1930s, Bodenheim quit writing novels altogether and became largely known as a character – the king of Greenwich Village bohemians. Soon the book royalties started drying up and by the start of the Second World War, he was homeless and a raging alcoholic.
Writes Hect: “The Greenwich Village Bodenheim had no allure for me. I preferred to remember the Chicago version. One rainy day I ran into Bogie on Broadway. His face was gaunt, most of his teeth were gone. But there were some things unchanged about him. He was wearing the same army overcoat, carrying the same worn and bulging brief case; and his eyelids still fluttered disdainfully when he spoke.”
Time magazine in 1952 described Bodenheim’s itinerate life at that time: “He flapped disconsolately around the Village resting up periodically in the Bellevue alcoholic ward, sleeping in gutters, hallways and subways.” It was during that period he took up a third wife, Ruth Fagan, a former teacher with a history of mental illness. They were inseparable as they tramped around the Village from one flop house to another and oftentimes Fagan would pick up men for a place to sleep. One such “friendship” with a mentally unstable dishwasher, Harold “Charlie” Weinberg, went terribly wrong.
After a night of heavy drinking with Weinberg, the Bodenheims accepted an invitation to go to Weinberg's room. What happened after that is uncertain. Weinberg may have tried to rape Ruth and Bodenheim may have intervened. Or Weinberg and Ruth may have agreed to have sex and Bodenheim, who had been asleep, may have woken up and objected. Either way, the result was that Weinberg shot and killed Bodenheim and then stabbed Ruth to death.
In the end, Bodenheim had written a total of ten books of verse and thirteen novels, as well as a partly ghost-written memoir called My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village. Once the envy of the literary world, the king of Greenwich Village, the Great Lover, today Bodenheim is rarely read and his work has nearly faded from memory.
Emily Hahn, author of an "informal history of bohemianism in America," attempted to sum up his life: "Bodenheim's novels were not immortal. It is for his life and death he is remembered. These were lurid in exactly the fashion Philistines felt they had a right to expect of Bohemians."
Recommended reading:
“MAD MAX: Death of a Bohemian King” by Alan Bisbort
Village Rogue: The poetic life of Maxwell Bodenheim
Passage about Maxwell Bodenheim by Ben Hecht, from Hecht's memoir, Letters from Bohemia (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1964)
Naked on Roller Skates: A Tribute to Maxwell Bodenheim
Time magazine’s account of his murder:
