The Literary Life

As sad and grimy dawn came to a Brooklyn subway station one day last week, police rounded up seven disheveled bums who were sleeping in an empty train. Only one pleaded not guilty to disorderly conduct. Nursing the hangover from an all-night party, Maxwell Bodenheim, one of the old breed of Greenwich Village Bohemians, insisted he was only an innocent straphanger. The sick old (61) poet-novelist spent the day in jail before a friend posted $25 bond.

Pathetic and ineffectual, Bodenheim flaps through the Village today, eating and drinking when he can cadge a handout or peddle a bit of verse in the San Remo bar on Bleecker Street. Mostly he lives on gin and the memory of a time when the literary life brought him greater rewards.

Scandal & Uproar. In the first quarter of the century, Bodenheim, along with men like Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and Edgar Lee Masters, spawned Chicago's lusty artistic revolt. Harriet Monroe's Poetry and Margaret Anderson's Little Review fought for the privilege of introducing his eccentric verse. Teamed with Ben Hecht, he provided his share of the scandal and uproar that lit up the city.

He helped Hecht to found the Chicago Literary Times, an irreverent journal that described Chicago as "the jazz baby--the reeking, cinder-ridden, joyous Baptist stronghold . . . the chewing-gum center of the world, the bleating, slant-headed rendezvous of half-witted newspapers, sociopaths and pants makers." He headed east to Greenwich Village in the 1920s.

He wrote Naked on Roller Skates, a novel about a girl who wanted to live with "an A number one, guaranteed bastard [who will] beat my heart and beat my brain . . . and lug me to . . . the lowest dives . . ." He wrote Replenishing Jessica, about a millionaire's promiscuous daughter. It became a bestseller in 1925; Bodenheim and his publisher were charged with selling obscene and indecent literature, but triumphantly beat the rap.

Bean Pots & Trouble. Then in the '30s, his books stopped selling. Money came seldom and trouble often. Once, on an unconventional camping trip, the poet scalded his right foot by stepping in a pot of hot bean soup. Police said he had been dancing in the moonlight. He demanded relief for poets from a municipal relief agency. Given a $2.50 voucher for groceries, he complained that he had no home, no way of cooking the groceries, and cried indignantly that he was unable to eat the voucher itself. He was reported dying of tuberculosis, and 50 Greenwich Village poets and painters organized a fund drive to send him West. They raised $12. Two months later he was picked out of a gutter, rushed to Bellevue Hospital. His illness was diagnosed as alcoholism.

Acquitted this week, he did not seem particularly disconcerted by his misadventure. Everybody seemed to feel sorry for Bodenheim but Bodenheim. "The Village," he said, "used to have a spirit of Bohemia, gaiety, sadness, beauty, poetry . . . Now it's just a geographical location." But as he hustled back to the San Remo bar, he acted as though he thought he might save it from mediocrity still.

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