Freebird Books and Goods

Basement Follies

2010-03-06T17:23:00.014-05:00

March 6, 2010
With enormous cheer, Tigran shouted to the party of sidewalk scavengers: "We're going to make America a book-loving country!" No one lifted their heads in acknowledgment.

They didn't want to take their eyes off the prize. Boxes and boxes of rodent-chewed, mildewed, water-stained books from Freebird's basement. After two years of procrastination and denial (and one week after getting engaged), I finally faced the mountain of junk lurking beneath the surface.

At the recommendation of Henry and Zack Zook at Book Court, I hired a local contractor named Tigran to tackle the salvage project. If you walked by the store this afternoon you would have seen him hauling up one cardboard box after another, depositing them on the curb where his friend Lincoln awaited with his empty van.

Initially Tigran was shocked by my request. "You want to dispose of all this?" he asked, sweeping his hand across the shambled vista. "In Russia, where I grew up, books were so treasured. You would never think of throwing them out."

It was a good point, and one that gave me pause for these last couple of years. But I was tired of providing a rent free habitrail for waterfront creatures, where paperbacks were miniature mattresses, if you catch my drift. I could live without their potential income. It was time to release them from their dungeon. Time to rid the special "odor" that occasionally wafted upwards and made customers ask to my embarrassment "what is it about used books that makes them smell so wonderful?" Finally, Tigran relented.

In between Lincoln's curbside pick-ups, passersby sorted through the books and haggled good-naturedly about the the value of the leftovers. Tigran, whose energy never flagged, conducted this scene with turbo-charged verve, peddling editions of The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn to the skeptical crowd. One would have thought he was a booster for the NEA. "Hey guys! Change your life. Read a Book!" In response, a woman thought it was all a joke: "Ha ha! He said 'read a book.'"

Tigran: "Here. You want a book on laughter?"
Pedestrian: "I like to laugh, but I don't want no book on laughter. Do YOU want to read a book about laughter?"
Tigran: "Of course! Who doesn't love laughter?"

I'm with Tigran. But in case you feel that Freebird is somehow making too much light of the situation and not preserving the sanctity of the operation, fear not. Books we got, and more are on the way. The purpose of clearing out all the literary debris in the basement is to make way for new neighbors. The charity Books Through Bars (a nonprofit which helps prisoners get access to literature) will occupy part of the cellar and use it as their base of operations by the end of this month.
--Peter Miller

A Modest Marriage Proposal

2010-03-01T13:38:00.003-05:00

March 1, 2010
Freebird would like to apologize to the borough of Brooklyn for the improper use of the Columbia Street road salt pile. What appears to be a caricature of the borough president Marty Markowitz in repose being fed grapes by Mayor Bloomberg, is in FACT an outline of myself dressed as Cupid shooting arrows at my girlfriend Casey Baltes.

We did not intend to impugn the right honorable gentleman from borough hall. The original illustration had been painstakingly drawn with colored sand by the famed Buddhist artist Jeruptor Swashili, who traveled specially from Dharamsala to create the mandala-like valentine.

However, around 3 a.m. American Stevedoring dump trucks transporting additional salt obscured Swashili's design with their treads. Countervailing gusts from the Van Brunt wind tunnel distorted the image further into the final shape seen at sunrise.

The alteration ruined a planned celebration at the base of the salt pile from which Celine Dion (who turned down the Vancouver closing ceremonies to be here) would emerge on a pedestal built from salvaged Harlequin romances out of Freebird's basement. To the tune of "Be the Man," a banner was scheduled to unfurl from a nearby loading crane, stating "Casey, will you marry me?!!"

At the conclusion of her serenade, Ms. Dion was to turn to Casey and say "So Cay-see, weel you marree heem?" I would be hiding in a chartered NY Water Taxi idling dockside for the immediate getaway.

It is our sincerest regrets that residents along Columbia Street between Kane and Degraw were awoken to the Grammy-award winner screaming into the microphone "What zee sheet ees thees?!" However we do not take responsibility for the damaged eardrums of any Ikea customers passing by in complimentary buses.

Though we had a hitch, I am proud to say that, in the end, Casey accepted my proposal and we sped off not in the expensive water chariot but a speedy B71 bus.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I love you Casey!
--Peter Miller

Bodenheim post-script of the day

2010-02-27T11:36:00.001-05:00

February 27, 2010
"Kill me, kill me," he shouted incoherently. "Nobody say anything in this court. I do all the talking." Pointing at his lawyer, he said, "He killed Maxwell Bodenheim. I saw him. Send him to Matteawan for the rest of his life."
(Harold Weinberg, on the verge of being released from an insane asylum after being incarcerated for thirteen years for the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim. However, at the hearing he would be declared unrehabilitated and sent back to the notorious mental hospital, Matteawan. Quoted from Time magazine, November 16, 1967)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Banana oil

2010-02-26T16:33:00.000-05:00

February 26, 2010
Banana oil: Insincere flattery; nonsensical exaggeration.

Ruth made up her mind to try him out. What was the use of living unless she allowed a dog to bite her sometimes; found out whether it hurt, whether it made her feel vomity? All of this self-esteem and purity that people were forever making speeches about--what was it except sleeping, or suffering, in a classy hotel-room and paying for it with your blood-drops because you were afraid to open the door, because you imagined that the payment established your superiority over other people? The old banana oil!

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim etiquette of the day: Diner courtesy circa 1930

2010-02-24T09:34:00.001-05:00

February 24, 2010

Shovelling the food without intermission and with the nose two inches from the plate was permissible. Drinking soup from the bowl--an equal shudder to dear Mrs. Post--would have brought the plaster down. If a woman was alone and occupied one of the stools beside the counter, she was treated familiarly. If she seated herself at one of the white-slabbed tables, extending vertically to the left of the counter, she was not molested. If a man cursed, or used the common notion of smut, in the proximity of women, he was reprimanded. If he persisted, he was thrown out on his ear. On the other hand, profanities and alleged dirt were roborant signs of manhood...when "ladies" were absent. In this regard it did not matter whether the woman was a well-known harridan, baggage, or spotless housewife. The rule went in all cases.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Peter De Vries

2010-02-23T09:55:00.000-05:00

February 23, 2010
"He once walked into the office [of Poetry magazine] and accused me of having a face unmarked by sorrow. I didn't know what to do. I just took the day off and went home."
(Peter De Vries, quoted on Maxwell Bodenheim, Time Magazine, July 20, 1959)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Hamburger down

2010-02-22T14:20:00.001-05:00

February 22, 2010
Hamburger down: Take it easy (according to the glossary of Naked on Roller Skates)

Terry drank his cornwash straight and remained undisturbed. Colored-white quartette still too interested in the next cancan to pay attention to her bark. If they did, he'd soap his way through....Convulsions to the left.
"Come on, Black Bill. Get up. Start something."
"Hamburger down, boy."
"You heard my lip. Get up. Start something."
"Ha-amburger down, boy."
"You gonna wind up a mess, boy."
"What for?"
"You know why."
"Aw, take it slow. I ain' gon' lift your chippy."
"You're damn right you ain'."

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim insult of the day: Greenwich Village

2010-02-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

February 21, 2010
"The Village used to have a spirit of Bohemia, gaiety, sadness, beauty, poetry . . . Now it's just a geographical location."
(Maxwell Bodenheim, quoted in an article about his destitution, Time magazine, February 18, 1952)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Scissorbill

2010-02-20T17:21:00.001-05:00

February 20, 2010
Scissorbill: Someone considered contemptible or foolish.

Rones was jocular to salve down the inopportune connivance without discouraging Ruth, but his eyes never departed from Terry--probing, smoothly casual. Wish this old scissorbill would open up. White men who talked freely were easy to handle, big or little. White men who glued their traps were another matter, unless they were shivery or plastered sleepy, and this old duck wasn't either...seemed not.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim sex scene of the day

2010-02-19T14:09:00.001-05:00

February 19, 2010

While Jim was washing up, Terry went out to the barn for a drink of water. The well was on the ground floor of the barn. In the darkness of the structure he collided with Roberta returning from the chicken coop. She pawed at his shoulders to escape from falling, and then strained against him, her head digging into his upper chest: her breath exuding into him, like a spasmodic fan-blast of heat.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Four-flusher

2010-02-16T10:04:00.002-05:00

February 16, 2010
Four-flusher: An unreliable person; a boaster; a welcher; a piker; one who poses for effect; one who pretends to have and has not; a bluffer; a braggart. (From Criminal Slang: The Vernacular of the Underworld Lingo, 1949)

"Well, I'm not going to be here all my life," he said. "I'm just waiting for a better chance to come along. You know I've always treated you decent, Sel, you know that, and if you stick to me you'll never be sorry about it. I can't make a break with Pete now, not until I get another prospect, but when I do I'll tell him to go to hell. You're too good a girl to be taking orders from that four-flusher, and you know it as well as I do."

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Book browsers

2010-02-15T11:32:00.003-05:00

February 15, 2010

Tables stood in front of their windows on the sidewalk and spread the silent, hieroglyphic appeal of books to the sordidly marching unconcern of men and women. Worn, and with half of their color slain, the books perched together on the tables, like dead symbols waiting for the rare resurrections--symbols of stupidity, love, hatred, and fancy, begging some mind to seize them and elevate them once more to an illusionary importance. Sometimes men and women stepped out of the heedless procession and lingered at the tables, as though they were reprehensible deserters, fleeing from their ranks in the commonplace army. They picked up the books and dropped them, with an idle and defrauded air. Sometimes one of these people selected a book and hurried into the shop, with the elation of one whose prejudices had shaken hands with their reflections.

(From Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1924, Harcourt, Brace)

Bodenheim love poem of the day

2010-02-14T15:40:00.000-05:00

February 14, 2010

BOARDING-HOUSE EPISODE

Apples race into appetites:
The unswerving mechanism of the table
Hurries through the last dish of supper.
Then an undulating interlude
From people who have spent one pleasure,
Distractedly juggling its aftermath
And peering at new desires.
One woman gazes at another
While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes
And skims across her face.
Violets in a madman's scene.
Suspended in the air.
Are the eyes of her neighbour.
And in between them sits the nervous man
With face like pouting gargoyle,
Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot
say:
Explosive evasions;
Fears too tired to shriek;
Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.
He eyes each woman, like a man
Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice.
Crisp inanities ripple back and forth
Among these three, like ghostly parrots
Visiting each other's cages.
She with crazy, violet eyes,
Plays with her fork, as though its clink
Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts;
She with murder in her eyes,
And curtly voluminous body,
Evenly plays her child-role.
Cringing on the rim of middle age.
With broken shields piled at her feet.
She has made this man a haunted palace
And she stands before the door
She dare not open, with a dagger
For the woman standing at her side.

They sit, afterwards, upon the veranda.
Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening:
Woman with twisted, violet eyes.
Woman with hidden murder on her lips,
And man like a pouting gargoyle.
Then, like tired children,
Their words grow cool and lazy.
They draw closer to each other
And, with a trembling curiosity.
Look at each other's hands.

(from Advice: A Book of Poems by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1920, Alfred A. Knopf)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Typing pools

2010-02-13T16:14:00.002-05:00

February 13, 2010

NONDESCRIPT TYPIST
Within an office whose exterior
Resembles an ultra-conservative mind
You battle with the avaricious words
Of a meager, petrified man.
Your face is brown stagnation
Sometimes astounded by a thrust
Of chattering wistfulness.
Bravery is fear
Effectively sneering at itself,
And you are forever wavering
Upon the edge of this condition.
Yet your obscurity
Is an important atom
In the mysterious march of time.

(from The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Cake-eater

2010-02-12T17:17:00.001-05:00

February 12, 2010
Cake-eater: An effeminate fellow; sissy; (specif.) an effete young man who attends tea parties or the like (as defined by the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

A small table to their left was graced by two cake-eaters and the girl whom they were trying to make. Dapper loafers through the early twenties, who would soon be swinging first over a girl indifferent to both of them. She nodded her head slightly, in the direction of a hard-faced buck sitting with Diana. Hard-face was an old flame who had previously turned her down but was willing to make her happy for another night. When she had rid herself of the other two, outside, she would return to Diana's and meet him.

(from Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim slang word of the day: Cake-slashing

2010-02-11T13:52:00.002-05:00

February 11, 2010
Cake-slashing: Assault and mayhem (according to glossary in Naked on Roller Skates)

The chippy kept silent. The man she craved was on Blackwell's Island, doing a stretch for cake-slashing, and either of the present contestants was bearable to hotsprat* the intermission. Rones walked up. Rones was always propitiatory until the contumacies of his patrons dived in his direction. In the latter case he was an unstirred bouncer doing his job, or a viscid mongoose, according to the magnitude of the offence--whether it was rabies induced by too much of his diluted formaldehyde, or a studied menace. A man of untold honeys and rapacities. An unregenerate man with a self-unknown heart--Moby Dick's cannibal transplanted to Harlem and educated to more devious ritual and procedure, yet capable of atavistic transgressions.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

*Hotsprat: Trivial but agreeable entertainment

Bodenheim insult of the day: Fellow poets

2010-02-09T13:49:00.000-05:00

February 9, 2010

The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country--a lurching, colloquial, fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism concerning "a longing to enter the house of her being"; ravings over the strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads--"O, the corn, how it aches!" and "What is better than the patient and sturdy road?"--; much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and factories--crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling poets....Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting.

(From the foreword to The Sardonic Arm by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1923, Covici-McGee)

Bodenheim slang of the day: Chivvy

2010-02-08T14:05:00.001-05:00

February 8, 2010
Chivvy: Unpleasant odor

"Don' come back here, chippy. You barred from this flat. You ain' selling nothing here. We don' want your chivvy."

Terry opened the door: pushed Ruth into the hallway: slammed the self-locking door against her: and then turned and struck Jackson in the face. In a trice, the flat became an infuriation of kicks, fists, chairswingings, tackles, with Sprad and Terry battling the other three.

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim)

Bodenheim Curriculum Vitae of the Day

2010-02-07T13:10:00.011-05:00

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)

Bodenheim ode of the day: Subway sweat

2010-02-06T11:40:00.001-05:00

February 6, 2010

SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION

PERSPIRING violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each other's bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on.
The scene consists of mosaics
Jerkily pieced together and blown apart.
A symbol of billowing torment,
This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder.
Weariness has loosened her face
With its shining cruelty.
Round and poverty-stricken
Her face renounces life.
Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
Does not understand her head.
An old man stoops beside her,
Sweat and wrinkles errupting
Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
A little black pot of a hat
Corrupts his grey-haired head.

Two figures on a subway-platform,
Pieced together by an old complaint.

(From Introducing Irony by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1922, Boni & Liveright)

Bodenheim demimonde of the day: Taxi dancers

2010-02-05T11:02:00.001-05:00

February 5, 2010

"The Academy" hired thirty girls and they were supposed to fill the role of dancing instructors, but this was merely a pretext, and the lure of the place was that it furnished young women who could be danced with and spoken to without the formality of an introduction. The price of each dance was twelve cents, out of which the girls received five, and the dances were limited to one and a half minutes and continued without a pause until the closing hour. On a thriving night it was possible for the girls to dance at least a hundred and twenty times, and their weekly earnings, supplemented by a variety of tips, amounted to fairly neat sums. They danced like painted, flexible, unemotional dolls, and held weariness at arm's length with the tropical indifference of youth, although afterward as they straggled from the hall the penalty became evident in their dragging, gaudily slippered feet and the rounded complaint of their shoulders. They made no pretense of instructing the men who could not dance, but simply walked with them around the floor, in a halting or scampering fashion, with a look of pouting martyrdom on their faces.

(from Crazy Man by Maxwell Bodenheim, Harcourt, Brace, 1924)

Bodenheim self-pitying rant of the day

2010-02-04T17:07:00.004-05:00

February 4, 2010

These attitudes of BOORISH REMOTENESS have wearied me, especially since I know that they would not have been given to a Dreiser, or an Anita Loos, under the same circumstances. Frankly, you and the entire B & L staff have treated me cavalierly for just about the last time. Also, accounts of the trial in New York newspapers have disgusted me....I am tired of this endless campaign of calumny, ridicule, and distortion waged against me....The sooner I get out of America and away from the whole curious pack of you, the better it will be for my work.

(from a letter by Maxwell Bodenheim to his publisher, Boni & Liveright, on March 27, 1928)

Bodenheim slur of the day: Bohunk

2010-02-03T10:16:00.002-05:00

February 3, 2010
Bohunk: a person of Central or Eastern European descent--used contemptuously (Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)

"Say, what did you call me?"
"A bohunk."
"Well, you better take that back 'r I'll start something, I don't care how big you are."
Terry had clambered out and was facing the mechanic. The bellow with which a man lashes himself into fistic passion, or defies and implores the lack of such a passion, was never necessary to Terry. He hesitated now because the mechanic was five inches shorter. Unfair? Well, hell...

(From Naked on Roller Skates by Maxwell Bodenheim, 1930)

Naked on Roller Skates

2010-01-23T21:14:00.025-05:00

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

Survival Instincts

2010-01-15T18:20:00.007-05:00

January 31, 2010
Back in August 2008 we sat down to read our store copy of Jay McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life for some insight into Rielle Hunter, the other woman accused of bringing the John Edwards candidacy to a grinding halt. As opposed to the new age twit depicted in the media who fed Edwards's messiah complex, the novel (based on McInerney's own participatory investigations of the '80s club scene) portrayed Hunter as a fearless, clear-eyed twenty-something whose youthful indiscretions around New York announced a woman of fierce independence.

But now that the Edwards and Hunter are back in the news and the full extent of the affair is being revealed, our curiosity has drifted away from the John-Rielle-Elizabeth dynamic to the other man in the middle: Andrew Young. With the release of his tell-all memoir of the episode, Young raises questions not about how John Edwards could be so reckless but how an aide-de-camp could take such a colossal fall for his boss.

The other night Charles Hutchinson and I browsed in the Atlantic Bookshop, the excellent used bookstore that relocated to Atlantic Avenue just over a year ago from 12th Street in Manhattan. There, in their dollar bin, was an Overlook edition of Ernest Lehman's short fiction, Sweet Smell of Success. Inspired by his own experience working in Broadway press agencies and Hollywood studios, Lehman's tales often plumb the effects of power on mere mortals. Not the Fitzgerald innocent bystanders tragically mowed down by thoughtless Daisy Buchanans, but the fellow travelers, the ruthlessly ambitious, the bottom feeding sycophants, the Andrew Youngs.

It's most famously shown off in the film adaptation of his story "Tell Me About It Tomorrow," better known as Sweet Smell of Success. Press agent Sidney Falco is pressed into ever more humiliating service to J.J. Hunsecker, Lehman's brilliant swipe at the tyrannical columnist Walter Winchell. The novella, collected in the Overlook edition, explores more of Falco's torment as he must dispense with Hunsecker's enemies in order to curry favor. Smear campaigns lead to outright violence and Sidney would like nothing better than for everyone to stop complaining and just do what Hunsecker says. But it is Falco, not Hunsecker, who gets his comeuppance in the end. For Lehman, Hunsecker is an unrehabilitatable force. Instead, it is Falco's failure of conscience that is the greater sin. It is his desperate toadyism that results with punishment.

Elsewhere in his fiction Lehman's characters are a combination of the weak, the blindly loyal, the system players, and the power hungry. A husband ventures into the city to stare at the pretty girls in a diner until a jealous boyfriend stares back ("The Man Who Liked to Look at Women")' a movie publicist is asked to shepherd the studio chief's moll around town and arrange assignations ("Don't You Like It Out Here?"); a junior executive on the make courts his boss's daughter though yearning after another woman ("You Can't Have Everything"); a chauffeur for an Arthur Godfrey-type television personality cluelessly brags of his employer's shortcomings to another passenger ("He Brung Happiness to Millions").

It's no stretch to say from reading these stories that Lehman would have been obsessed by Andrew Young's demeaning tenure with John Edwards, as outlined in this recent Politico article. Young suffered--with little reluctance--one indignity after another: chauffeur, lawn man, personal shopper, beard. As he took the fall for Edwards and embarked on a comic journey with Rielle from one safe house to another (with his own family in tow no less), Young only seemed to lose the respect of the three other principals. Rielle acted like a spoiled brat and Elizabeth yelled at him to reassert his paternity, while trashing Young as a creepy stalker to the media. Meanwhile John froze him out altogether.

So without a novel out yet to make sense of poor Mr. Young's travails, Freebird recommends Ernest Lehman's short punchy tributes to handmaidens of male weakness.

And to conclude survival month here, we pull one more piece of advice from Anthony Greenbank's 1974 guidebook, Survival in the City. This one aimed at John Edwards:

Do not be carried away by the en masse beauty of city girls. Head turning is against the rules. Once a girl has passed, you should be happy with the memory. Of course, if you are creative enough to invent some reason for turning around—like stopping to tie a shoelace—it might be permitted, but it must be done smoothly.

(Survival in the City, p. 93-4)