Bodenheim Curriculum Vitae of the Day

February 7, 2010
Rest in peace, Bogie. Fifty six years ago today Maxwell Bodenheim was discovered in a Third Avenue apartment lying in a pool of blood alongside his equally lifeless wife Ruth Fagan. It was the end of his four-decade long somersault down the boho-lit ant-heap.

As the angry young man in Chicago he was heralded by critics as the next Rimbaud. As the bitter old drunk in Greenwich Village he was pitied by the Beats, who, seated at the San Remo bar (where Bodenheim was known derisively as "Moscowitz"), pondered whether Bodenheim was the right role model for their anti-establishmentarianism.

So we give an abbreviated timeline of his success and fame and failure and oblivion told through contemporary eyes. Hard to tell where the decade of the 1940s went, but rumor is he was posing as a pimp to unsuspecting servicemen. Is it a career path or a cautionary tale? You be the judge.

1922: "His is an acrobatic mind that juggles a dozen mixed or mad metaphors in curious congruity, balancing itself upon the points of emotion with a mordant grimace. Bodenheim, for all his macabre experiments, is sure of his footing, and his agility, because of the very precariousness of his position is fascinating. He is sometimes garrulous, grotesque, narcistic, verbally dandified, frequently irritating, seldom unintelligible."
(Louis Untermeyer reviewing Introducing Irony in the August 1922 issue of The Bookman)

1923: "Brittle, penetrating, filled with dry humor and biting satire...He is wispish in appearance, with sharp features and sandy hair. His conversation is as biting as his poetry. A keen analytical mind and a contempt for the unintelligent make his reactions and expressions fearless and rather terrifying...I have never known him to hesitate to criticize a man's work because that man was his friend. Both in his work and in his person he seems afraid of friendliness. This is, in a sense, his strength...Bodenheim is a sort of poetic Jonathan Swift, a twentieth century Pope turned democrat."
(The Bookman, July 1923)

1925: "Eccentric, erratic, is Mr. Bodenheim, careless of a world's criticism outside of his work, but there is an air of sincerity about him, cynical sincerity, a brittle sparkle to his conversation, that fascination of exotic, social lawlessness."
(The New Yorker, July 25, 1925)

1935-1939: "Bodenheim's career as a steady and fairly sober employee [of the Federal Writers' Project] came to an abrupt end when he (along with a few other writers of established reputations) was unofficially permitted to do his own work at home...For Bodenheim, who until then had managed to report to work punctually every day, the once-a-week trip to the office became a prodigious ordeal. He would arrive in front of the office building in a self-inebriated state; then, unable to summon enough will power to enter, would go to a bar across the street to continue his drinking. Eventually, it would take two of his Project friends to escort him, protesting and staggering, from the bar to the office."
(Jerre Mangione from The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project)

1952: "A tall, glum, scraggly, hawk-nosed, long-haired, itchy-looking, no doubt pickled, fuming and oozing, Bowery-type specimen; and yet, for a' that, something austere and even classic about his ruins--Old Roman, not just any ordinary human junk heap."
(Milton Klonsky recalling Bodenheim during the Winter of 1952, from his 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

1954: "In last nine days, front pages have honored two writers. Hemingway crashed, reported dead, found again. Then, at the opposite extreme, Max Bodenheim murdered in a Third Avenue rooming house, all proving that violent deaths are the only thing that can give writers now any immortality. What a pair--one who never missed a bet, knew the right people, dropped the wrong ones as he went along, played it rich and social and for publicity. The other played the dunghill and his dunghills hot lower and lower. Both quarreled with all old friends. Max killed with The Sea Around Us on his chest--a sea that engulfed him."
(Dawn Powell from The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965, edited by Tim Page)

1963: "I don't mean to preach a risen and exalted Bodenheim, which would be ridiculous; nor do I mean to "revive" him as a poet. Actually, he was a lousy poet. What I mean is that for us, now, Bodenheim has come into his own as a kind of bohemian culture hero, an Urbeatnik, so to speak, though his beatification has been long overdue."
(Milton Klonsky from the 1963 Esquire article "Maxwell Bodenheim as Culture Hero")

2002: "Bodenheim is no longer read. The work of the writer considered by his contemporaries the exemplar of the bohemian spirit consists almost entirely of borrowed ideas, conventional novels, and pedantic poetry. Its only astonishing quality is its quantity...The poems, while just as hackneyed in theme, are as rigorous and stylized as the novels are flaccid and shapeless."
(Ross Wetzsteon from Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960)