Letters from Bohemia

Maxwell Bodenheim was more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have ever heard or read. He was also more ignored than any literary talent of his time.

His seven volumes of poetry fetched him hardly a thimbleful of notice. Not acclaim, but ordinary notice such as is given the most inconsequential bores who darken the lives of literary critics.

Yes, my friend Bogie whose work I admired more than the poetry of most of his famed contemporaries was a total washout as a literary contender. His glowing metaphors seemed to remain invisible to the critics. And without critics to give a poet a leg up, he is likely to remain in limbo. No lecture dates, no college faculty jobs, no royalty checks. And, of course, no invitations to the White House or other important showcases for the poetry writer.

But I doubt whether poet Bodenheim ever daydreamed of such grand finales. From the time I first met him in his Chicago teens, Bogie had a mystic sense of himself as an unwanted one. No one asked him for lunch or dinner. He was a sort of unharnessed human. You watched him scampering around, and never thought of offering him shelter or the diversion of friendship. Besides, you knew what happened if you did--insults, rows, thefts, and complaints from the neighbors.

It wasn't true. Bogie was often a guest in my home. He revealed a few oddities that stood my teeth on edge. But I preferred him to the usual visitors, who droned through card games, or put me to sleep with political discussions.

Another truth was Bogie's attitude toward social invitations. It pleased him immensely to turn them down. "Thank you for inviting me to dine at your house," he wrote a well-to-do lady who fancied (continued on page 130) Bohemia (continued from page 125) she was running a salon, "but I prefer to dine in the Greek restaurant at Wabash Avenue and 12th Street where I will be limited to Ending dead flies in my soup."

Of his rapidly growing unpopularity in his youth, poet Bodenheim said, with a mocking grin:

"Nobody seems to like me. Do you think it is because I am too aware of people's tiny hearts and massive stupidities?"

"They are too aware of your big mouth," I told him. "Why don't you try ignoring their imperfections, after sundown?"

"I was born without your talent for bootlicking," said my friend Bogie. He crowed with delight and whacked his thigh.

Despite the continuing, unvarying defeats of his life, it is this strut I remember as Bogie's signature. Ignored, slapped around, reduced to beggary, Bodenheim's mocking grin remained flying in his private global war like a tattered flag. God knows what he was mocking. Possibly mankind.

I may be writing of a Bodenheim with a special routine in my presence. He may have whined and wept elsewhere. But not the Bodenheim I knew. Disaster was never able to disarm him. Even the Greenwich Village moocher, half-starved and ragged, remained proud of his ability "to destroy people on my guillotine of phrases. Oh, boy, stick around and you'll see some heads roll."

It was not Sherwood's sort of self-love that kept Bogie abloom. It was his incredible sense of superiority. In his last years, tottering drunkenly to sleep on flophouse floors, shabby and gaunt as any Bowery bum, Bogie hugged his undiminished riches--his poet's vocabulary and his genius for winning arguments. He won nothing else.

New York, after 1924, failed to alter him by a hair. He wrote of New York, "The poverty of its ash cans cannot match the pathetic debris in the heads of its literary critics."

Nearly everyone who met Bodenheim was either irritated or outraged by him; and frequently moved to take a swing at his nose. Although poet Bodenheim had small ability as a pugilist, it was unwise to attack him physically. He threw things. Bottles, chairs, vases, plates, carafes, end tables started flying across the room. Such missiles always belonged to some aggrieved host or hostess who had not even invited him. Bodenheim, in his lifetime, never owned a cup or saucer to aid him in combat.

The poet also alienated rafts of people who had never met him, but "had heard of him." They heard that on a dance floor poet Bodenheim was certain to cut in, enfold your wife or sweetheart in a lecherous grip, and insist that she go to bed with him, pronto.

I never witnessed the spectacle of Bogie trying to drag a dancing partner into the hay, and ending never in a bed, but hurtling headfirst out of a doorway. There may have been a grain or two of truth in such gossip, for the poet wrote, in our Chicago Literary Times:

"Since the dubious dawn of human history, dancing has been one of the more adroit female ruses for the sexual stimulation of the male. A young woman who embraces a man while he is being assailed by primitive drumbeats and bacchanalian horn tootings, may pretend she is interested only in the technique of dancing. I wonder if the same young woman, naked in bed with a man, would insist that she is only testing out the mattress."

Another rumor had it that the poet arrived at studio parties carrying a burlap bag into which he transferred speedily all the canapés and liquor bottles available. I could verify this rumor, and also another one--to come within earshot of the poet was to be derided stridently for any convictions you had about anything.

These tales were to be heard in Bodenheim's heyday, his 20s and 30s, before he had matured into a Greenwich Village sot. He became, then, too pathetic a fellow to punch in the nose or kick down the stairs.

Only the police continued to beat him up, due to his defiance as a Communist orator. He would not climb down a ladder from which he had been addressing a noon-hour audience of factory workers, or cease his oratory.

The truth is that Bogie was the sort of Communist who would have been booted out of Moscow, overnight. He insisted that communism was a cure-all for the miseries of the poor. Stalin and his selfless colleagues were toiling to create a utopia of peace on earth and good will to men.

"How can you be against the Russian politicians, as you call them," asked my friend, "when those alleged politicians are doing exactly what Jesus Christ tried to do--eliminate war and tyranny from the life of mankind? Russia," he smiled happily, "has rediscovered love and justice, and is ready to turn the other cheek to the capitalistic bullies of the world. Yes, sirree, Moscow is the new Mount of Olives."

Bogie dreamed that in Stalin's Russia he would find all the good meals and sensitive understanding that he had been denied in the U.S. Lacking carfare to go have a look at his cornucopia land, he aired his fondness for it--with the usual Bodenheim results. He not only angered the police but disturbed, equally, the Communist Party leaders of New York. They denounced Bodenheim as a nuisance and refused to print his proletarian poems, gratis, in their Red periodicals.

• • •

Why did a young man as talented as Max Bodenheim bring such a load of bricks down on his head, until the day he had it, literally, blown off by a crazy man's gun? I'll tell a few Bodenheim stories that may partly answer the query. Bodenheim was, in his youth, a slim fellow with blond hair, albino eyebrows over pale eyes, five feet, ten inches in height. He had a lean, handsome face, and all his teeth. His clothes were shabby but clean, and included in winter an American Army overcoat. He had joined the U.S. forces at 17 and been stationed a year in Texas, half of that time in the regimental guardhouse. He had been put behind bars for hitting a lieutenant over the head with his musket. The lieutenant had been ridiculing Private Bodenheim as a Jew.

Bogie carried all his worldly belongings with him. They were in the bulging briefcase held under his right arm. In this case were all his unpublished poems, an extra pair of socks and underpants, a spare tin of tobacco for his corncob pipe, rejection slips from the nation's editors and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

• • •

Bodenheim journeyed to New York as the salaried Eastern correspondent for a weekly paper I had started called The Chicago Literary Times. He received $30 a week for his Gotham reports, and his name was on the paper's masthead as assistant editor. I filled some 70 percent of the paper with copy, Bogie wrote most of the remaining 30 percent. There were a few intruders, among them Lloyd Lewis, Vincent Starrett, Wallace Smith, Rose Caylor, George Grosz, Herman Rosse, Stanislaus Szukalski. I wrote in the paper of my editorial assistant:

"Maxwell Bodenheim, in manner and appearance, is the ideal lunatic. He is somewhat bowlegged and possessed of malicious pale-green eyes one associates with murderers.

"While engaged in arguments (he has seemingly nothing else to do) Bodenheim improvises brilliantly. He accompanies his razor-edged epigrams with startling grimaces. He bares his teeth in sudden snorts. He clucks unexpectedly with his tongue, as if summoning a flock of chickens to enjoy his wit. He beats a tattoo with his right foot, and whacks triumphantly at his thigh.

"Excited by the withering fire power of his phrases, he starts bobbing his head (continued on page 220)Bohemia(continued from page 130) like a pigeon on a trail of popcorn. During rebuttal by an opponent, he gives vent to catcalls and ear-splitting guffaws.

"The expressions of his face are usually unrelated to his subject matter. While hamstringing a critic (and he can) he adopts a pensive look--

" 'H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken. There is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.'

"During such utterances, he flutters his yellow-fringed eyelids, cocks his head to a side and pretends he is falling asleep. His grimaces remind me of a child making faces out of ennui.

"Yet despite the chronic ferocity of his opinions, Bodenheim is a sentimental man. Anyone's sufferings but his own bring a tear to his eye or pencil. He gives away most of his wealth--nickels and dimes acquired in alley crap games--to beggars, old drunks and cigar-butt hunters.

"Behind his almost idiotic guffaws and facial contortions, a first-rate mind is in constant operation. H. L. Mencken, who despises him, cannot assail his 'dunderheads' as wittily as can Bodenheim. Despite the hallucinations of grandeur and nightmares of persecution that bother Bodenheim, the poet retains an astonishing diagnostic clarity toward others.

"Bodenheim's poetry and prose are a worship, chiefly, of words.

"I have known Bodenheim to be mistaken by casual observers for a pickpocket, a vaudeville acrobat, an errand boy, a theological student and a French aristocrat."

What I wrote of Bodenheim in 1924 was true, but it overlooked almost entirely the poet's charms. There was innocence and courage in him, and wild loyalty. And his misfortunes seldom produced a note of self-pity.

• • •

We collaborated during one winter on several one-act plays. One of them was called The Master Poisoner. We were both excited in its writing. We thought it contained our finest acrobatic phrases. When I read the play recently, I was astonished by its plot and dialog. They were both incomprehensible. Yet the printed phrases seemed to spin and leap with some mysterious excitement. Youth in love with words. The embrace may have been a little disorderly, but I have found few things better to love--since then.

We worked nights. Bogie would arrive at my apartment at eight o'clock, having filched his supper elsewhere. I didn't invite him to dine in my house because I hated to watch him eat. My wife also found the spectacle unpleasant. He drank like a man gargling, and wolfed his food as if he feared it might be snatched away.

But his table noises were a minor matter. It was what he ate that was upsetting. As soon as his food was placed before him, Bogie set up a clamor for Worcestershire sauce. He emptied a full bottle on his steak or chicken. He then fished his bottle of Tabasco sauce out of his briefcase and sprinkled the fiery fluid over his food. For a finale, he unscrewed the tops of all the salt and pepper shakers on the table and coated his sauce-drenched food with their contents. A jackal would have shied from his dish.

As important to collaboration as not watching Bogie eat, was not hearing his denunciations of his enemies, who seemed to have overrun the world. We made a pact that during our writing together, neither of us would utter a word of criticism or complaint on any subject.

Bogie was a half hour late one evening. A blizzard had delayed him. He entered the room with the remains of a pipe clutched in his teeth. It had been a pipe brought back from the South Seas by the painter Jerry Bloom. It was a pipe four feet long and its carved bowl rested on your foot as you stood smoking it. Jerry had given Bodenheim the pipe (the only one like it in the Western Hemisphere) in exchange for a sonnet by the poet describing one of his seascapes.

"The streetcar step was covered with frozen snow when I alighted from it," Bogie explained, "I was smoking the pipe at the time, and tripped over it and it broke into little pieces." The yellow eyelashes fluttered. "Shall we start with our collaborating for tonight?"

We worked till midnight. I noted an oddity in Bogie's posture. He kept his head in a crooked position as he offered his share of our weird dialog. He made no complaint, however, of any injury; and I thought it wiser not to inquire if anything was the matter with him.

At midnight Bogie bowed himself out of my doorway.

"I think we have done some exquisitely confusing work tonight," he said. "We will resume our capricious wrestling match with Mr. Maldor tomorrow, same time." Mr. Maldor was our Master Poisoner.

We didn't resume the next night. After leaving my apartment, Bodenheim collapsed in a snowdrift. An ambulance took him to the County Hospital. I learned the next day that Bogie had broken his shoulder when he had tripped over his Polynesian pipe. He had spent the three hours writing with me while in acute pain. But he had honored our collaborator pact--no complaints.

• • •

During the winter of our playwriting. Bodenheim was in love with a dancing girl named Ilona. She had been a member of the Chicago Grand Opera ballet troupe, but was dismissed that season from its ranks.

"Due to the insensate jealousy of Signorina Pitalli, the première danseuse," Bodenheim explained. "Beside Ilona, Miss Pitalli became aware that she was glued to the stage."

"That is partly true," Ilona said. We were together in an all-night beanery. The ousted ballerina was mostly skin and bones. But I remember her large, glittering eyes favorably. They hinted at some mania. She informed Bogie that she was going to be given an audition by a vaudeville booking agent named Sam Singer. She had been working on a wonderful dance that she called Lavender and Old Lace.

"I've got the costume for it," she said, "except for the shoes. I need a pair of lavender ballet slippers. And I guarantee you, Maxy dearest, I'll bowl Sam Singer over with my routine."

A great quarrel developed between the lovers. Bogie forbade his Ilona to go near Sam Singer. I left the table while the poet and Ilona were exchanging violent insults.

I didn't see Bogie again for several weeks. I remember that he sat with me in a saloon one night, tears running from his eyes:

"We kept on quarreling for two days about Sam Singer," said Bogie. "Then we separated. I told her she could go dance for Mr. Sam Singer in her tights, but in doing so, she was dancing out of my life, forever. Last night I realized that I was crude and unjust to Ilona. I decided to go to her and apologize for my ugliness, and beg her to forgive me. When I arrived at her rooming house, the landlady told me that Miss Ilona Metz had died five days ago of pneumonia and that she was now in her grave in the Woodlawn Cemetery. Can you loan me ten dollars, please, so that I can buy Ilona the lavender dancing shoes she wished for. I want to put them at the foot of her grave."

The next night, Bogie told me the end of the story. It has stayed in my mind ever since as a sort of ballet in which a poet dances the strange, secret meanings of his life.

After leaving me with the ten dollars in his pocket, he had dropped into another saloon for a drink. A prostitute joined him there. He bought her a drink and then read her a newly written poem to the prostitute. It was about Ilona's dying and was titled Elegy to a Pirouette. After reading his complete cycle of Ilona poems to the prostitute, he went with her to her room.

"When I woke this morning," Bogie said, "she was still asleep. I dressed quickly. Then I looked in my briefcase which should have contained the eight dollars remaining from the original ten. I intended to give the prostitute two dollars and then go buy the lavender dancing slippers for Ilona. But there wasn't a single simoleon in the briefcase. I knew at once that I had been robbed after I fell asleep. I knew also it would be a pure waste of time to accuse her of the theft, or to try to get back my stolen money. She would start yelling and policemen would ultimately appear and take us both off to jail.

"Then I felt an electric shock as I noticed something on the floor--the sleeping prostitute's shoes. They were purple shoes with purple buttons on them. They were not shoes for dancing, but they had a gay look of their own."

Bodenheim stole the sleeping prostitute's shoes and a few hours later placed them at the foot of Ilona's grave.

"Exposure to wind and snow," he explained, "will fade their purple color to the right shade of lavender that Ilona wished for to match her costume. I wrote this poem to Ilona while riding in the streetcar."

Bogie recited a poem of which I remember a few lines:

Dancer on the floor of heaven,These once industrious shoesNow dream of you.

• • •

News came to us that the young poet Maxwell Bodenheim had refused to register for military service in the First World War. He had announced himself as a conscientious objector. A number of radicals on the Near North Side had undertaken to protect him from military oppression. They had hidden him away in a lush apartment, and were providing him with excellent food and drink; and allowing a trusty trollop to spend a night, now and then, with him.

A few of us who knew the Federal Building as newspaper reporters, called on the proper authorities to persuade them to stop hounding our sensitive poet and causing him to remain in hiding, atremble for his life.

"You're a bunch of fools," the head recruiting officer told us. "Your poet friend Bodenheim registered for service on the first day our office opened. Here's his card. Nobody's hunting for him. Your friend is ineligible for further Army service. He was dishonorably discharged after previous Army service in Texas. The United States Army has no interest in him whatsoever except to keep the daffy son of a bitch out of its ranks."

This news finally leaked out to the radicals who were wining and dining their heroic conscientious objector in the flossy apartment. Loud with wrath, they descended on the poet. They excoriated him as a crook and a charlatan, and drove him out of his sybaritic hideaway.

Listening pensively to the rage of his deceived benefactors, Bodenheim fluttered his eyelids and announced, "The anger of fools is my favorite crown."

2022; • •

Bodenheim came to dinner in my house, having promised to forgo sauce bottles and salt and pepper shakers. It was a party of welcome to a new writer for The Chicago Literary Times. Its staff to date had remained only Bodenheim and I. I thought it time to add another worker.

His name was John Armstrong. He had sent me the manuscript of a novel written while in detention at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station at Lake Forest. It was a fascinating manuscript, detailing the miseries and frustrations of life in the Navy. Sailor Armstrong was under detention in the lunacy ward of the U. S. Navy Hospital.

After some discussion, the Navy doctors admitted that Armstrong was not seriously insane, but only too oddly behaved to serve in the U. S. Navy. His chief oddity was that he was inclined to go off into fits of laughter that lasted for hours. He could be quieted only by powerful drugs.

The officer in charge of the Naval base agreed to release him into my custody with three provisos. I was to give him employment on my weekly paper; to provide sleeping quarters for him in my house; and to do all I could to keep his novel from being published.

At the dinner table welcoming the new literary find were Margaret Anderson, Sherwood Anderson, Burton Rascoe (the critic), and several opera singers whose names I have forgotten. And Bodenheim.

A discussion of music circled the table despite Bodenheim's insistence that the art of music had no relation to the art of conversation. His further efforts to swing the talk around to a discussion of himself, or at least, of poetry in general, were ignored. But literary find John Armstrong suddenly sided with the poet.

"Mr. Bodenheim is right," said Armstrong, "one doesn't talk about music. One listens to it."

Armstrong left the table and headed for the phonograph in the living room. The music he selected for listening was Chaliapin's record The Song of the Flea from Boito's opera Mefistofele.

In the middle of the record Chaliapin unlooses a burst of satanic laughter, for a half minute that seems like an hour. Sailor Armstrong kept putting the needle back and playing the passages over and over. Finally, rolling his pants up to his knees (why, I don't know), Armstrong joined Chaliapin in his laughter. Putting the needle back to replay the passage, Armstrong finally outlaughed the great baritone in range and volume.

We all listened and watched from the dining table.

"A fascinating sort of dementia," someone said.

"It is rarely you see an American writer," said Margaret Anderson, "who is not hopelessly sane."

There were other comments about the laughing genius with the rolled-up pants whom I had been clever enough to add to my paper's staff. Please, we were very young that night.

It was all too much for Bodenheim. At last our lonesome poet made a canny bid for our attention. Having emptied his tenth wineglass, he proceeded to eat it. He bit off chunks of his fragile goblet, chewed and swallowed the bits of glass as if they were the finest of desserts.

The diners turned one by one to watch the poet's amateur and gory performance as a glass eater.

"Good God!" someone said, "you'll kill yourself swallowing that glass. 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.

A half hour later, Bodenheim's triumph was completed. A doctor arrived to inject a powerful drug into John Armstrong, who had never stopped laughing.

Our literary find went back that night to the detention ward at the Naval base. Bodenheim, after some minor medical attention, remained as my sole colleague on the Literary Times

• • •

Publisher Horace Liveright came to Chicago to scout for new writers. Liveright had a lean, medieval face. His large, dark eyes looked on authors with an enthusiasm rare in publishers. He thought writers were elves and genii. He never wearied of listening to their boasts or loaning them money. His only misbehavior toward his authors was his attitude toward their mistresses. He did his best to lure them to bed, and sometimes succeeded.

In his suite in the newly built Drake Hotel, Liveright listened to Bodenheim's true story of a prostitute he had known and whom he deemed the finest of human beings. Bogie was trying to land a job for his paragon of a streetwalker.

"Believe me, she is a perfect typist, and," the poet said, "if you dressed her up correctly she would contribute an exquisite air to any office."

"You must write her story as a book for me," said Liveright. "I have never heard anything more moving. I'll give you a thousand-dollar advance right now."

Liveright wrote out a thousand-dollar check to Maxwell Bodenheim, and the poet watched the pen move as if he were looking at an incredible feat of magic. When the check was signed, Bogie stood up and asked in a hushed voice, "Can you tell me, please, where the bathroom is?"

Bogie was shown the right door. We waited a half hour for the new Liveright author to emerge. Horace became nervous.

"I never saw such happiness in any author's eyes," he said. "I couldn't help looking at him when I was signing the check. He sat there like a man bewitched. Hadn't you better go see if anything's wrong? He may have had some sort of collapse."

I entered the bathroom. Bogie was standing over the toilet, all set to urinate, but unfunctioning. Perplexity was in his face, and some pain.

Over the toilet seat was a woven-cane cover, the latest thing in stylish toilet decor. Pointing at the half-inch holes in the ornamental cane cover, poet Bodenheim said:

"I can't possibly pee through that small aperture. Maybe rich people can, after considerable practice. But I don't want to start practicing in Mr. Liveright's bathroom. If I wet that elegant cane seat, he's likely to think of me as a vandal, and tear up that little old check he has written out in my name."

I showed Bogie how to outwit the cane seat by lifting it out of the way, and came back to Horace with the story of the confused urinator.

"What an honest, unspoiled human being," publisher Liveright said. "We have no natural geniuses of that kind in New York."

Bodenheim, putting the check reverently into his briefcase, said, "I give you my word of honor that I shall surpass Victor Hugo as a novelist."

Bodenheim wrote a few novels for Liveright, Georgie May, Replenishing Jessica, Naked on Roller Skates. They were hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit and truth in them, and some verbal fireworks in every chapter.

He spoke of his novels without enthusiasm.

"Millions of people are reading my prose effusions," he said--millions and thousands were the same general number to Bogie--"but I'm not actually happy. I am returning shortly to writing poetry."

He did. His royalty checks dwindled. His brief fame as an odd, erotic novelist evaporated. And the Greenwich Village Bodenheim emerged. A homeless wino started reading his poems in saloons and picking up the pennies and nickels thrown to him. Occasionally an editor bought one of his poems and rewarded him with a $25 check.

He continued trying to strike it rich by entering all the poetry contests. Prizes ranging from a hundred to a thousand dollars were to be snatched by the winners.

Bodenheim had entered, since his youth, 223 such contests, and been defeated by other poets in all of them. He used to sign his letters to editors "Maxwell Bodenheim, 224th-ranking U. S. A. poet."

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 briefcase; and his eyelids still fluttered disdainfully when he spoke.

In a saloon, Bogie showed me the poems he had written in the last ten years. They covered several hundred pages of typing. They were no longer poems full of fragile and unexpected metaphors, poems that used to seem written not by a human being but by some brilliant Jack of Diamonds.

The new Bodenheim output in his ten New York years was full of coherently phrased love for shopgirls, laborers, and all underdogs and castaways. There was no hint in them of the poet's own travail, of his despairs, hungering days, attempted suicides. Written during hangovers, during illnesses that kept him out of saloons that still tolerated his presence, they were the poems of an observer, never a victim. They were also in sonnet form, and rhymed. But their unexpected imagery was unchanged.

Unchanged also was his talk. Not a cackle, grimace or snap of phrase missing. We rode to my home in Nyack. The rain turned into a thick snowfall.

I wanted him to stay overnight, but he couldn't. His wife, Grace, was ill and needed his love and attention. In the snow-clouded doorway, Bogie said, his voice full of mockery:

"I don't suppose you can imagine anyone loving me or needing my love. I am a scarecrow without teeth. Well, let me tell you something: My little Gracie loves me and needs me. As much as any man is loved or needed in the world. And she knows I will always come home to her, to take care of her."

A half-drunken Bodenheim left Nyack, without staying for dinner. His overcoat pockets bulged with loot stolen from my dressing room--socks, shorts, ties, shirts, a pair of patent-leather shoes, and pajama tops. He had been too proud to ask for them.

During our talk before he went, we had made a literary arrangement. Bogie was to send me every week a new poem or two pages of prose on any subject. In return I would send him a check for $35.

The arrangement lasted for a year, possibly two. I never saw Bogie again, but his two pages of prose and an occasional poem arrived every week. Separate from them came a letter acknowledging the receipt of his weekly check, or protesting politely its nonappearance.

These letters, some of which I didn't lose, contain one of the most desperate self-portraits I have ever read; the portrait of an unwanted talent; penniless, almost rotted away with liquor and calamities--but still as proud and articulate as any prime minister.

Since the time Mencken identified Maxwell Bodenheim as "a faker and a stupid clown," almost nothing has been written of the poet or his work. In the U. S. an unsuccessful poet is more disdained than even a bankrupted industrialist.

In these letters a first voice sounds for Bodenheim--his own.

Care of Harvey Barnes, R.F.D. No. 1, Woodstock, New York

Dear Marie [Marie Armstrong Hecht--for a while]:

You did not answer my last letter so perhaps The Mountebank has reached you with some of his subtle poison. I am rather ill, with a touch of t.b.--the result of long years in stuffy, quaintly odored, cheap rooming houses--and I am penniless with no strength to go out and fight for nickels. If you could send me $50 I might get through the next month, as I cannot impose on the people I am with any longer. At any rate, you will not respond with a note announcing the invisible enclosure of $200--an ironic relief. I do not expect to hear from you, of course--my attitude toward all humans is invincibly cynical just now. However ...

With all earnestness, Maxwell Bodenheim

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, January 11th

Dear Ben and Rose:

Thanks very much for the January 8th check which came this week. Yesterday, I attended a party given by the Doubleday and Knopf firms in honor of the publication of an anthology entitled Poems of the Negro, edited by Langston Hughes, and One Way Ticket, Langston's latest book of verse. I was invited because two of my poems to Negroes are included in the anthology. The affair was held in the Downtown Art Gallery which occupies two spacious floors, and the large assemblage was rather evenly divided between white and Negro highbrows, male and female. I was entranced by the talk confined entirely to literary small talk, social gossip and airy witticisms. It was weird to turn from this atmosphere and remember the existence of a grim, portentous, menacing, outside world. I was treated with nice friendliness and responded in turn, but ... I felt a bit puzzled as I left the Gallery and walked to the subway ... Best regards to both of you from Grace and myself.

As ever, Maxwell

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, February 24th

Dear Ben and Rose:

Thanks very much for the weekly check which came yesterday ... The Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress have just awarded a $1000 poetry prize to Ezra Pound. This honoring of a shallow, pompous, race-hating, heartless old wraith of a fascist--who was a trivially eccentric snob long before fascism came into being--represents a brazen insult to American poets and poetry. Reading through a list of the judges in the account printed by The New York Times, Louise Bogan, Conrad Aiken, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, et al., I failed to see the inclusion of a single person known to me as a Jewish creative writer. Another writer apologetically confessed to me that the entire situation was a bit odd, and I replied that it was as odd as a pane of transparent glass ... If you can send the next check so that it will reach us on the coming Monday, we will greatly appreciate it. We hope that your book is proceeding smoothly and we both send both of you our best regards.

As ever, Maxwell

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, Saturday

Dear Ben:

Glad you like the two poems. After reading them--and I have 20 more, just as good and written during the past half year--you can readily see why poetry of this kind doesn't have a snowball's chance on the equator with American magazines and papers. Five weeks ago I sold one poem to Esquire and two months ago Poetry--once Harriet Monroe's pet--accepted another. Never before in the history of American print have magazines shrunk to such a low level. Formerly, on the cultural field, we had Dial, The Freeman, The Double Dealer, The little Review, The Seven Arts Monthly, etc. Now we have exactly nothing, and after the War, with the attendant dull, semifascist sneak punch which certain men will try to put over here, it will be even worse ... I have been very ill with neuritis, arthritis, and a slightly frayed heart. Put a nice snarl, dagger, sympathy for underlings, and a searching grin into that new book you're writing. In the midst of my material flirtations with a park bench as a future couch, and my semistarvations, I'm glad that a few men are still alive to write edged truth and matters generally offensive to pigs, foxes and rodents. Despite our personal differences, I have always liked your work and can honestly say that I've never slammed it. Do write very soon. I'm enclosing another poem.

As ever, Bogie

When I say I've never slammed your work, Count Bruga, of course, is excepted.

P.S. Give my very best wishes to Rose. I hope it's a girl!

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday

Dear Ben and Rose:

Your weekly check came yesterday afternoon. Thanks a lot. The Cleveland Plain Dealer mailed me a clipping of a tiny 17-line review of the Selected Poems which states that the poems are uneven but "there are times when Maxwell Bodenheim rises to heights from which he cannot be dislodged by any legitimate criticisms. His influence on his important era--from 1914 to today--will be acknowledged in the end." Seems that some of the out-of-town boys and girls haven't heard of the Gotham brush-off and indifference bloc, or are too fair to subscribe to it. Glad to note that Swan Song is contradicting its title and holding on in a lingering prelude. Now drat OPA has been murdered, the cute black hogs can give themselves a coat of whitewash and emerge as legally sanctioned white swine. The big bloaters were also getting envious of their underworld half brothers and decided to end the intolerable situation. Capitalism will eventually crumple under the weight of its greedy clichés, ponderously frayed hypocrisies and unholy marriage between race-hating poisons and commercial rivalries for world markets, and the result will be a better life for the many or a survival of a few dazed wandering semisavages. The finale may not take place for two or three hundred years because the old top hog is tricky, resourceful and astute ... Well, fond regards to you and Rose and best wishes to your daughter.

As ever, Bogie

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, Wednesday

Dear Rose and Ben:

When I opened the letter in the hotel lobby and took out the two checks, I wept a little, and the hotel clerks and bellboys regarded me with a sort of suspicious and puzzled aloofness, wondering whether they were witnessing a mysterious ham act or deep emotion. Thanks very, very much to both of you. The landlady accepted the money with an amazed, sullen manner--the mien of a baffled wolf--though she had to be verbally polite and there is nothing else she can inflict now ... I hope that you have read my short stories and will tell me whether they are good or bad. This is one of the very few times that I have ever been rescued from a greased tightrope several feet away from the edge of the chasm and I'm still a bit shaky. Thanks again. I do hope that I'll have a chance to talk to both of you soon. My second play, The Elusive Answer, was presented to Mike Todd two weeks ago and I'm crossing fingers and hoping for a miracle. Fond regards to both of you and best wishes to your daughter.

As ever, Bogie

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, Monday, September 8 th

Dear Ben and Rose:

Thanks very much for the weekly check which came today. In an ancient Chinese tale, the poet Li T'ai-po recited his personal woes to another creator much more endowed with worldly goods. The other quizzically remarked that the list represented a monotone of misfortunes calling for an equally undeviating amount of compassion close to the exhaustion of boredom. Li T'ai-po replied that the ability of two monotones to blend harmoniously represented a test of the presence or absence of suppleness, depth and variety in friendship ... The building in which we live has been sold, and the landlady, only a lessee, must vacate the premises. We have been told by the city renting commission that we can remain, after her departure, and strive to make arrangements with the new owner. The hitch is that the furniture in our place belongs to her, and she has offered to sell it to us and asked us to name a figure. So, we must either purchase the furniture, or buy new chairs, beds, tables, etc., or be left with a bare apartment and the floor for sleeping quarters. With a new abode practically impossible to find in the present housing shortage, this leaves us in a dire dilemma. One hundred and fifty dollars including the coming rent would solve our abrupt and entirely unexpected problem. I trust that you will not be irritated at my having at least presented the above facts to you. The deadline for the furniture purchase is September 15th.

Hoping to hear from you, we send our fond regards and best wishes to your little daughter.

As ever, Bogie

10 Montague Terrace, Brooklyn, New York, March 10th

Dear Ben and Rose:

Thanks very much for the weekly check which came today via airmail.

I spend 15 minutes every Sunday listening to ex-Mayor La Guardia over the radio, as he lambastes the 30-percent loan sharks; the real-estate gang blocking sorely needed housing construction until rent ceilings are abolished and rentals can skyrocket; the food firms and their clammy, infinitesimal tricks; the professional gambler-crooks and their crocodile lurkings, etc. The guy is shrill, stuttering, old-maidish and sometimes banal, but his sheer guts, defiance, and pounding away at little disagreeable truths and facts are marvelous in comparison to the dreary, smooth, covered-up hacks among other radio commentators. If he is connected to the Coast, you ought to tune in on him some Sunday noon. His New York station is WJZ.

Fond regards to both of you and best wishes to your child.

As ever, Bogie

Dear Ben and Rose Hecht:

Please forgive my delay in thanking you for the $100 check--a delay caused by the fact that I've been having a tough time of it. I was compelled to leave the Brooklyn address where dearest Grace and I lived for so many years. At present, I am staying with surface friends in New York City, but I have no privacy there, since my bed is in their living room and their children are prying and noisy. A lone drab room in a third-rate hotel would repel me. I have searched for a locked-door private room with a nice family--I would eat my meals outside--but that is difficult to find. On the night before the morning on which Grace died in the flesh only, I gave a lecture before an evening English class at Washington Irving High School in New York and hurried back to Grace. Our apartment-door lock was broken and Grace closed the door with an inner latch which I could lift from the outside with a knife. On this night she had forgotten and locked the door. Very sick, she had to crawl on hands and knees to open the door. I telephoned her doctor but, since we owed him $10, he refused to come and sent a substitute, who injected morphine into her aching legs and assured me that she would fall asleep and survive. At the beginning of the next morning when she was gasping for breath, I phoned him again, desperately, and he came ... when it was too late. Then he had the nerve to stand in the doorway and ask me if I was going to pay him. If the landlord had heeded our pleas to repair the lock, Grace might still be alive in the flesh. The vicious heartlessness of most human beings appalls me ... I am not asking for money and I sincerely mean this, but if I could have a quiet talk with both of you, soon, I would deeply appreciate it, as I seem to be going to pieces.

As ever, Maxwell Bodenheim, Bogie