Introducing Irony - A Book Of Poetic Short Stories And Poems
(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
("CARL Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of...)
"CARL Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern, American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of beard, was a passive concealment, and his thin lips and long nose did not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl's aspect and gestures."
And so begins this portrait of the poet as a young man ...
"Blackguard is the history of a renegade soul, the narrative of a Modern Cellini, who in the dark saturnalia of life, discovers the essential nudity of our existence. The hero of his novel, Carl Felman, is type of blond beast, a post-Nietzschean, who refutes all our platitudes on good and evil, by an art of life that goes beyond them. The record of his experience, however, is a passive revelation. The author sees all our emotions as anchored in our body; he sees the spirit itself as a sort of bodily projection. A sensuous mechanism with powers of illusion. Hence the futility of life’s struggles and its achievement."
This Kindle edition of Jazz Age poet & novelist, Maxwell Bodenheim's first novel, Blackguard (1923) is at last brought back into digital print after its absence from the marketplace for over almost one-hundred years. Meticulously copyedited from a first edition volume owned by the editor, this is the one and only edition currently available.
In addition, editor Paul Maher Jr. (A Vast Glowing Empty Page: The Life and Work of Jack Kerouac; Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews & Encounters; All Things Shining: An Oral History of the Films of Terrence Malick) has compiled introductory essays, reviews and correspondence to shine a light on those lost years of the late, great King of Greenwich Village, Maxwell Bodenheim. This is the first in a reprint series of all of Bodenheim's poetry and prose.
For more on Maxwell Bodenheim, join Maher's blog: https://hobohemiadotblog.wordpress.com
Maxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist. During the Jazz Age he was called America's "King of the Literary Bohemians. "
Background
Maxwell Bodenheim was born on May 26, 1892, in Hermanville, Mississippi, United States, a small town founded by his maternal uncle, M. B. Herman. He was the only child of Solomon Bodenheimer and Caroline Herman Bodenheimer. Both Bodenheimer and Herman were Alsatian Jews who immigrated to America in the nineteenth century; Herman made a small fortune in local real estate and trade and later became a distinguished Memphis surgeon, while Bodenheimer remained unsuccessful in all his various employments, including whiskey salesman and dry goods clerk. Carrie Herman Bodenheimer never let her husband forget her family's relatively high station. Around 1900 the Bodenheimer family moved to Chicago.
Education
In 1908 Maxwell was expelled from Hyde Park High School; he never attended school again.
Career
In 1909 Bodenheim left home and joined the army under an assumed name. It was a disastrous step for him. Totally unequipped to accept the army's stern regimen, he tried to desert, was hauled back, panicked, swallowed lye, and completed his tour of duty in jail at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1911, following his discharge, he bummed around the Southwest, where, according to his "Merciless and Unedited Biography" published in the Chicago Literary Times, he earned money by reselling stolen cotton. During this period of stress he began seriously to write poetry - his first and most constant literary love - and shortened his name to Bodenheim. Late in 1912 Bodenheim returned to Chicago, then at the height of its artistic renaissance. Through his poetry and wit and his often disgraceful behavior, Bodenheim became recognized as a sort of enfant terrible of the new poetry, a role he was captivated and perhaps captured by. Harriet Monroe and Margaret Anderson (editor of The Little Review) feuded over who would publish the prickly young genius first; Monroe won, and Bodenheim's poems first appeared in Poetry for August 1914.
In 1915 Bodenheim left Chicago for New York, where his precocity and acerbity again met recognition and qualified approval. He stayed at first with fellow poet Alfred Kreymborg, who in 1916 made him one of the coeditors of Others, a short-lived but highly respected little magazine and anthology. Bodenheim's progress through the remainder of the decade was stormy and filled with escapades, yet nearly always illuminated by his reputation as an uneven but highly ingenious writer. His plays were performed by the Provincetown Players in 1917 and 1918. During the same period he published the first of his eleven volumes of poetry (Minna and Myself, 1918).
In 1923-1924 Bodenheim was employed by the Chicago Literary Times, and through the 1920's he published six generally praised books of poetry: Advice (1920); Introducing Irony (1922); Against This Age and The Sardonic Arm (1923); Returning to Emotion (1927]); and The King of Spain (1928); and six less well-received but still interesting novels: Blackguard (1923); Crazy Man (1924); Replenishing Jessica (1925); Ninth Avenue (1926); Georgie May (1928) and Sixty Seconds (1929). Beginning in 1920 he traveled several times to Europe, where his work was occasionally praised by the equally prickly Ezra Pound. He spent the summers of 1922, 1923, and 1925 at the MacDowell Colony.
Yet Bodenheim's notoriety grew with his list of books while his artistic development seemed static. Bodenheim's reputation as a Villonesque scapegrace and as a rake began to overshadow his literary attainments. As he and America lurched into the Depression, the striking poetic imagery and slashing indictments of American urban violence in his fiction became obscured by press releases about foolish and sad women who ran away from home to be with him, or who committed suicide because he had disdained them. Even the legal battle against the suppression (for "indecency") of his Replenishing Jessica in 1925-1926 became a silly comedy. Bodenheim imagined he would become known for championing literary freedom; instead, his defense told him to stay away from court, and the jury slept while supposedly salacious passages were read to them.
During the 1930's Bodenheim's accomplishments were fewer though still significant, his disgraces more frequent though less flamboyant. Early in the decade he published a spate of novels, including A Virtuous Girl and Naked on Roller Skates (1930); Duke Herring (1931); Run, Sheep, Run and 6 A. M. (1932); and New York Madness (1933). His Slow Vision (1934) contains a powerful depiction of the personal and social decay so seemingly characteristic of the period, while in Bringing Jazz! (1930) he experimented successfully with jazz poetry. But Bodenheim was with growing frequency indigent and often drunk; he then began his practice of selling poems to passersby in Greenwich Village for small change or drinks. Still feisty even in decline, in 1935 he headed a march of writers to New York City Hall to complain about the inadequacy of their relief money. In 1940 he was fired from the Federal Writers' Project in New York, for allegedly lying about Communist affiliations.
Bodenheim scraped soddenly through the 1940's, living on his second wife's small income. During this time he borrowed money from old friends, among them Hecht and the poet Louis Grudin, and sank even lower into his private abyss. Lights in the Valley (1942), Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (1944), and his last book, Selected Poems (1946), did little to abate his personal decline or to revive his literary reputation, although Selected Poems displayed his solid achievement. In February 1952, he was arrested in a New York subway for vagrancy. Bodenheim's last years were unrelievedly alcoholic and sordid. He died in New York City while trying to defend his wife from Harold Weinberg, a former mental patient who had become part of the flotsam of their world. Weinberg stabbed his wife to death and then shot Bodenheim in the heart. Bodenheim was buried in Oradell, New Jersey, on February 10, 1954; Weinberg was committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane the following April 18. Bodenheim's poetry could be delicate and fragile (such as "Death"), or bitterly cynical of American society ("Summer Evening: New York Subway Station"). His novels were technically weak and discursive, but often funny or full of pessimistic insight concerning modern American urban life. His criticism was fearless and never imitative or modish. He was certainly never as destructive to any other person or thing as he was to himself and his talent.
Achievements
Maxwell Bodenheim is credited with introducing the spirit of French Naturalism into American Literature. During his life he produced 13 novels, 10 volumes of poems, and the memoir "My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village" (1950). In 1939 Poetry awarded him its Oscar Blumenthal prize.
On November 22, 1918, Bodenheim married Minna Schein, a former writer's secretary. They had one child. Minna Bodenheim worked hard at keeping the family together since her husband was as mercurial and improvident as he was productive during these years. Their relationship was always intense, and Bodenheim wrote many letters to her both while they were married and after, expressing his emotional dependence upon her. In 1938 he was divorced by Minna, and the following year he married Grace Fawcett Finan. Grace Bodenheim became bed-ridden midway through their marriage and Bodenheim loyally nursed her when he was able; she died in 1950 after a long and painful battle with cancer and other afflictions. Early in 1951 Bodenheim met Ruth Fagan, several decades his junior and as mad as he; and that spring they declared to their friends that they were married.
