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Once the scandals cleared, Stanley Kunitz defended the novels: "Bodenheim is not a pornographer; he is deadly earnest, and there is an evangelistic tone to all his novels, in spite of their wild humor. The keynote of all his work is hatred, hatred for meanness and dirt and cruelty, and sometimes, it seems, hatred for humanity itself...he was one of the pioneers in bringing naturalism of the French school into American writing."
Despite all this notoriety and sudden influx of cash, Bodenheim possessed what he called "a malady of the soul." After a legendary, gossip-column falling out with Bodenheim, Hecht described his erstwhile friend's "mystic sense of himself as an unwanted one." Their falling out was over Hecht's novel Count Bruga, about an eccentric poet said to be based on Bodenheim.
Indeed, after the Jazz Age sobered up to the Great Depression, Bodenheim's literary popularity waned, but he did not stop writing. The combined effect of the Depression, his dependence on booze, the official break-up of his first marriage and the increasing queasiness of former friends to have anything to do with him was the inevitable decline. Max Bodenheim was like a fading comet on a precipitous plunge across the night sky. By the 1940s, his vision of bohemianism was found mostly in the bottoms of bottles. His resentful, alcohol-fueled literary output was hard to read and of no particular interest to an America now freed of the Depression's yoke.
He briefly broke his fall with a second marriage in 1939 to Grace Finan, the widow of a painter. He spent part of the year with her in the Catskills, and she told Kunitz in 1942, "It's fun to watch him in the country. He enjoys every leaf and twig. We plan to make our permanent home in Catskill, one of these days. He likes to roam the hills and raid the orchards."
Soon after this, Bodenheim broke with Finan (she died in 1950) and returned to the considerably meaner streets of New York. He became a regular habitue of the San Remo, a raucous bar at 93 MacDougal Street, at the corner of Bleecker, that stayed open nightly until 4 a.m. By then, he was a full-blown alcoholic and a neighborhood "character" in the same league, though not nearly as tolerated, as Joe Gould, the subject of Joseph Mitchell's classic, Joe Gould's Secret. Gould and Bodenheim, in fact, frequented the same Raven Poetry Circle meetings, and they even began to physically resemble one another.
Oddly enough, at the same time that Bodenheim was hanging out in the San Remo, the bar was the favorite watering hole of writers who would become known as the Beat Generation–Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, as well as painters Larry Rivers, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and unaffiliateds like W. H. Auden, John Cage, Paul Goodman and Merce Cunningham. Bodenheim appears in few accounts of these people's lives. He was a pariah.
By then, according to one old-time Villager, Bodenheim was "a pest.... If you saw him coming, you crossed the street."*
His favorite shtick was to sell his poems in bars and restaurants (the ones he'd not been banished from). Because he was no longer capable of writing, he reportedly bought poems from other Village poets, a hundred at a time, and peddled them as his own. When he had nothing to sell, he panhandled. When he got enough money together, he drank himself into a stupor. After each protracted bender, he ended up in Bellevue Hospital. After one arrest in early 1952, for sleeping in an empty subway train, he told Time magazine, "The Village used to have a spirit of Bohemia, gaiety, sadness, beauty, poetry.... Now it's just a geographical location."
Leo Connellan, an aspiring writer who later became Connecticut's poet laureate, met Bodenheim in these latter stages of his life. Despite Max's horrific habits, the then young Connellan viewed him as a sort of mentor.
"At one time, he was as good as anybody. He and St. Vincent Millay. I lived in the Village then, in a $4 week room right off Charles Street," said Connellan, who died in Connecticut in February 2001. "Everyone knew Ruth. She'd gone over to Dorothy Day Catholic Work Home on Staten Island…. Many times I went over there, too, to do farm work for food and a place to sleep. We all thought Ruth was playing at being bohemian. The original conception of the liberated woman was of a Long Island housewife who came into the city to screw 15 guys between Friday and Sunday and then went back to the clothesline on Monday morning to be a mom. That was freedom. Ruth came to the Village in that wave and met Max. Max used to be at the Kettle of Fish or Rienze, on the corner of Bleecker Street, and he was always crocked out of his skull. He'd scribble something on a piece of paper and sell it for 25 cents and he'd buy drinks."
Hahn described him at this time as, "A grotesque figure who had long since lost his good looks, with cheeks fallen above toothless gums, unshaven face and unspeakable clothes, he yet, at the age of sixty, found a woman to marry him."
This would be Ruth Fagin, whom he met in 1950. Fagin was presumed to be mentally unstable, though she was a not unattractive honor graduate of the University of Michigan who'd come to New York to pursue a job in journalism. Before she found life on the streets with Bodenheim in New York, she had worked at the Washington Daily News, Newsweek and (back in Michigan, where she was from) the East Lansing News. Her job in New York was as a freelance manuscript typist.
As Hahn describes it, "After their marriage, Bodenheim and Ruth lived in the manner to which he had become accustomed, cadging money or drinks. Occasionally Ruth picked up men to sleep with, or Bogie found them for her. The two stuck together. They fought each other, cursed each other, but helped each other too, sharing whatever dingy shelter they could find at night."
Connellan remembers the situation differently:
"One day, I was working for a guy named Johnny Romero as a frycook...and I was walking up towards MacDougal Street. And my God there was Max, he has pressed pants, a shirt and a tie on, and it turns out Ruth had gone up to the 4th Avenue publishers, gotten them to reprint Naked on Roller Skates, Replenishing Jessica and Minna and Myself. Max was always out of it. I also had a job then driving cars across the country. The agency would give me $125 to use on the car, $100 of which was for me. And what I'd do is sell seats in the car, go to the Riviera on West 4th Street and announce, 'Hey, you want to go to Texas? For $25, I'll take you and we'll share driving.'
Anyway, I was walking down Sixth Avenue past where they used to have a Hayes Pickford Cafeteria, where the unwritten rule was that if you were broke and someone saw you, without saying a word, they would buy you a bowl of thick pea soup and a couple pieces of rye bread and that was your ticket. You could stay there all day. The next time I'd see you in dire straits, I'd go get you a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup and some rye bread. It was an unwritten rule. Ruth came out of the Hayes Pickford, and I said, ‘Well, Ruth, I'm going to split town...it'll be about a week before I see you and Max again.' She looked at me, 'Well at least you could go and say goodbye to Max.' So I went in and he was drunk. I sat down opposite him and I said, 'Max, I'll see you next week.' He didn't hear me."
That, of course, was the last time Connellan saw Max. But his remembrance of the man accused of killing Max and Ruth was also different than that portrayed in accounts that have been written.
"There was a guy on MacDougal Street we called Charlie and Charlie was sort of dimwitted, like the Lenny character in Of Mice and Men. Everybody told Ruth, 'You want to cocktease guys, go ahead, but leave Charlie alone, Charlie won't understand you.' Anyway, I got to Galveston and picked up a newspaper and the headline said, ‘Maxwell Bodenheim Murdered in New York.’ When I got back, I went to see Will Brady, a gay friend of mine, and he said, ‘Well Leo, you know we all told Ruth if she wanted to trip that's fine but not with Charlie because Charlie wouldn't understand that she didn't mean it.’ And that's exactly what she did. Ruth went into the Kettle of Fish, she cockteased Charlie that night and got him to go with her and Max. They went to a hero shop and got grinders and booze and they went around the corner to the apartment."
"When they found Maxwell Bodenheim," said Connellan, "he was sitting on the bed with two bullet holes right through the copy of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us that he had been reading. Is that not a perfect image? Ruth, of course, was decimated on the floor. Even the cops knew what really happened that night. I think Charlie didn't serve but five or six years."
The few historians who've written about the rise and fall of Maxwell Bodenheim have the last word, for now.
Emily Hahn succinctly put his life in perspective this way: "Bodenheim's novels were not immortal. It is for his life and death he is remembered. These were lurid in exactly the fashion Philistines felt they had a right to expect of Bohemians."
Jack B. Moore, the only writer to attempt a biography of Max, wrote: "I believe it true of Bodenheim's life and art that rarely has an American writer of any historic significance committed more obvious and sometimes disastrous mistakes: but it is also true that rarely have the virtues and accomplishments of such a writer been so clearly misrepresented and so quickly forgotten."
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