Word: bodenheim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shall probably live a year or two at most," Poet-Novelist Maxwell Bodenheim once wrote in a letter to a young woman admirer, "and then investigate the twinkling scandals of the sky." The letter was found on the young woman's body in a Times Square subway wreck in 1928, at the height of Bodenheim's literary popularity. This week, 25 years later, Max Bodenheim was off at last to investigate the twinkling scandals...
...died as he had lived-violently, sensationally and in squalor. The operator of a cheap rooming house near the Bowery found Bodenheim, 60, and his third wife, Ruth Fagan, 35, dead in a sleazy furnished room. The poet sprawled on the floor, a paperback copy of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us propped awkwardly on his chest, covering a .22-cal. bullet hole. On a bed beside him was the barefoot body of his wife, her face cruelly beaten and a deep knife wound in her back. The murderer had locked the door behind him with a padlock...
Tossed out on a Greenwich Village sidewalk with his belongings and young wife for being two months behind on his $42.50-a-month rent, Maxwell Bodenheim, 61, eccentric poet-novelist of the '20s (Replenishing Jessica, Naked on Roller Skates), was in need of a friend. New York City's Welfare Department, said Max, had let him down by assuring him that the rent would be paid...
...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...
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...