Naked on Roller Skates

February 2, 2010

Fifty six years ago this week the poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim was roused awake in his Greenwich Village apartment by the sound and sight of his companion Ruth Fagan having sex with a younger man named Harold Weinberg. The resulting fight quickly descended into a crime of passion. Weinberg would leave Bodenheim and Fagan lying in "a pool of cheap wine" and their own blood.

At the funeral, his contemporary Arthur Kreymborg observed "we need not worry about his future, he will be read."

Not reading Bodenheim probably came into fashion long before his murder in 1954, but his literary resurrection is perhaps the single most unanticipated event of the 21st century. You will not see his caricature on Barnes and Noble wallpaper anytime soon. Library of America has no plans to collect his verse in a critical edition. The great biography remains unwritten and uncontemplated. The only epitaph about his life is a posthumous memoir fabricated by an unscrupulous publisher trying to cash in on Bodenheim's sensational exit.

Yet for a not-so-brief moment Maxwell Bodenheim had an audience, a circle, even champions. In his early years he haunted the salons and bookshops of Chicago, where his reputation as the Brooding Artist was first sealed by the upstart newspaperman and aspiring playwright Ben Hecht. Back in 1923 Hecht would hold him in the kind of awe you reserve for fearless individualists, calling him "the ideal lunatic...[who] greets an adversary's replies with horrible parrot screams." Around the same time the influential critic Burton Rascoe anointed him "the Rimbaud of our day," who "twenty years hence critics will begin to see that he has produced some of the most notable poetry of the period."

For a while, Hecht and Bodenheim had parallel trajectories. Until the early 1930s, and as Hecht was taking Broadway and Hollywood by storm, Bodenheim was still a reputable poet and bestselling novelist. He shared the same publisher as T.S. Eliot, Theodore Dreiser (whom he outsold at times), and Anita Loos. His poems were celebrated in Poetry and The Little Review and collected up by Knopf. In 1925 The New Yorker singled him out as "one of our few sincerely colorful literati," in part because his novel Replenishing Jessica had just joined the ranks of An American Tragedy and Ulysses as the latest salvo against censorship laws:

Even now he is someone in our midst, wagging his huge, blonde head to the tune of his sardonic repartee, tapping his heels, cultivating his sucking stammer. Over him hangs the same persecution complex which tortured Lafcadio Hearn; in his mind, editors meet to plot means to keep him out of print. Ragged and unkempt, he wears only the honest donations of his friends. To-day his pipe is a burnt corn-cob, wedged in his broken front teeth; gone is the long Chinese relic which he used alternately as a cane and as a pipe, the bowl of which was so far from him that he had to stop passers-by to light it for him. [The New Yorker, July 25, 1925]

It was that run-in with the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (famous for successfully banning Joyce's masterpiece in the U.S.) that served as a turning point in Bodenheim's fortunes. While he enjoyed the attention of being a cause celebre--Bodenheim would brag in 1926 that he was "the first American novelist ever arrested and bailed out on an official charge of obscenity"--his charm was wearing thin. When Replenishing Jessica faced censorship again in 1928, Bodenheim's publisher and lawyer turned the subsequent trial into a farce--largely at the expense of Bodenheim's own prose and career.

In a kind of absurd perversion of future Bloomsday readings, the prosecutor was made to read the entire book out loud and into the court record. Walker Gilmer's biography of Bodenheim's publisher Horace Liveright describes the numbing effect the prose had: "As Prosecutor Wallace continued his reading in a dull monotone, reporters carefully counted the glasses of water he consumed and continued to sketch the reactions of the jury. Everyone, including the jurors, the lawyers, and the reporters, had difficulty staying awake."

Bodenheim would prevail and Replenishing Jessica would stay on shelves and sell over 30,000 copies, but censorship might have done him more long term good. Instead he produced a string of weakly sensational fiction for the masses while sporting a righteous bohemian moniker that became tiresome to colleagues and friends. Until his publisher's death in 1933, Horace Liveright showed enormous patience with the writer, continuing to dole out cash advances even as Bodenheim bit his hand. Liveright once telegrammed him: "You are one of the most ungrateful men I have ever known...I agree that the sooner you get out of America the better."

Bodenheim stayed in New York and wallowed in a bitter revulsion of the world around him. In his history of Greenwich Village, Ross Wetzsteon writes "Bodenheim's true genius was for alienation." Throughout the 1930s and '40s he was often homeless, selling poems at 25 cents apiece in neighborhood bars. At the Minetta Tavern (the same spot rival bum Joe Gould called home), Dylan Thomas gallantly wiped snot from Bodenheim's nose after meeting the fellow poet for the first time.

In 1942 William Saroyan invited Bodenheim, one guesses out of misplaced charity, to recite his poetry in the playwright's "mad barroom fantasy" Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning. But a visibly troubled Bodenheim only turned the Belasco stage into a geek show, frightening audiences and cast members alike. Actress Carol Matthau told Saroyan's biographers Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford that "he was like a derelict you thought you'd see in some gutter." After eight performances in the sweltering August heat, the play closed.

The New Yorker, which once heralded his "exotic, social lawlessness" and gave him space to editorialize against censorship, now noted him as a ghostly Village presence who spoke to people "directly and intensely with his eyes shut." By 1949 S.J. Perelman could openly mock Replenishing Jessica's turgid sex scenes, complaining the last fifty pages don't climax but "vibrate with the tension of high-speed oatmeal."

Ben Hecht still called him a friend but his early respect turned to condescension and pity as Hecht secured his own reputation as a man of letters. Wetzsteon accuses Hecht of in a sense creating the myth of Bodenheim in the same way Joseph Mitchell later regretted with Joe Gould. Just as Bodenheim's corpse was cooling, Hecht could safely reminisce in his 1954 memoir, A Child of the Century, about "the poet whose fine poems once infuriated critics, embittered editors, estranged readers and earned him, nevertheless, a curious sort of fame. When all other acclaim had been denied him he became remarkably renowned as a failure."

He was not a failure with women, at least with the kind who are attracted to self-destructive, self-described geniuses in the mode of Charles Bukowski. Like Bukowski, Bodenheim viewed relationships with extreme cynicism and queer romanticism. He saw them as abusive on both sides, physically and emotionally. Yet there was always a woman mothering him or idolizing him for his wanton ways. For a string of months in the late 1920s he inspired several lovelorn suicide attempts. A low rent Warren Beatty, Bodenheim used pick up lines like "Your face is an incense bowl from which a single name rises." Allen Ginsberg's mother Naomi--the subject of his poem Kaddish--long claimed to be one of Bodenheim's conquests.

That kind of alluring tempestuousness Bodenheim channeled into much of his fiction, making callous love a favorite subject. His 1930 novel, Naked on Roller Skates, is worth reexamining, at least from the point of view of the author's subsequent demise. In it Bodenheim's stand-in is Terry Barberlit, who despite his advancing age and down-on-his-luck turn as snake oil salesman is still a strapping and virile specimen. After beating up a mechanic half his age in a Connecticut small town he draws the attention of young Ruth (like the real life Ruth Fagan, 30 years his junior) who convinces Terry to run off to New York. There they torture each other, testing affections and the limits of fidelity.

Broken up into four rather loosely tied parts, Naked on Roller Skates skates itself across the Manhattan landscape, with a dropped in set piece in the then exotic Harlem--an opportunity for the white, almost albino-pupiled, Bodenheim to show off his knowledge of black slang (the novel comes equipped with a glossary). Ruth flirts with men to get a rise out of Terry. Terry responds with cool indifference but half an eye always trained in her direction.

It is clear from reading the novel that Bodenheim had real talent, and when he gets into a groove his hard boiled descriptions of the city's less glamorous sectors contain vivid observations:

Eighth Avenue in the Upper Twenties is a morgue where human beings view the decays of their hearts without being able to identify them. It is also a rostrum where senescent conceptions of good and evil acquire stage-fright and forget their oratories in the rough-house perpetrated by ward-heeler, corner-loafer, wench, bootlegger, peewee gangster...It is not a good business-street--not a main traffic sluice and few transients on the walks. The motley nests reek of a world one foot from the material bottom and a mile below the top. Barber Colleges with ten-cent shaves press against old-fashioned candy, ice cream parlors, where gloom and cracked marble counters still reign. The Universities in facial hacking usually feature a blondined, passee woman in starched white, who works beside the window as a bait to the customers. Fruit and vegetable stores pile their wares in stands on the walk--scurvy trays where fruit is marked down, penny by penny, until it reaches a state of shapeless rottenness.

Bodenheim's belief in women's masochistic tendencies could have been written by Bukowski himself: "Why were all women alike--longing to be kicked and caressed so close together that a split-second watch couldn't distinguish them?" Ruth and Terry smack each other, belittle and ignore, but remain steadfast in their miserable companionship. Again and again Ruth gets herself into scraps with dangerous men that Terry must extract her from. One is a smitten waiter in Terry's 8th Avenue greasy spoon who feels sexually humiliated by Ruth. At the novel's climax the waiter pulls a gun on the two as they relax in a chop suey joint. But unlike Harold Weinberg, he misses his marks. The episode finally brings Terry and Ruth together, lovingly united in their naked downhill roller skate slide.

* * *

However, as historian Ross Wetzsteon observed in his unromantic look back at New York bohemianism, Villagers didn't like such tidy conclusions, but "farces with tragic endings." By 1954 Bodenheim had finally obliged.

So in the only tribute we can muster for a tragic farce, Freebird moves on from survival to grave robbing. February is Maxwell Bodenheim appreciation month and over the next four weeks we spotlight Bodenheim's poetry, prose, and rants, including choice passages and slang from Naked on Roller Skates.
--Peter Miller