The Isaiah of the Butterflies

In this new installment of an ongoing series, LARB founder Tom Lutz reflects on the “King of the Greenwich Village Bohemians,” Maxwell Bodenheim, and the significance of the year 1925.

By Tom LutzApril 25, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• History

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of 12 monthly articles on the centennial of 1925; some of it is excerpted from Tom Lutz’s 1925: A Literary Encyclopedia, which was published in March. For multimedia materials, see the website.

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MAXWELL BODENHEIM, known as the “King of the Greenwich Village Bohemians” at one point, was a prolific and internationally renowned poet and novelist in the 1920s and 1930s. Already having trouble with alcohol then, he got worse and worse and spent the 1940s homeless, drunk, and panhandling with his second and third wives. In 1954, he and the third, almost 30 years his junior, were both murdered in a fifth-floor walk-up flophouse near the Bowery, a dingy five-dollars-a-week room. The Bodenheims, who had been living on the street, had been invited to sleep in the room by its tenant, a 25-year-old dishwasher with a long police record. The man ended the night by shooting Bodenheim twice in the chest, beating and stabbing Mrs. Bodenheim to death, padlocking his door shut from the outside, and skipping town.

The New York Times story about the murder singled out the two novels Replenishing Jessica (1925) and Naked on Roller Skates (1930) as the highlights of Bodenheim’s career. He had come out of the gate fast as a young man, publishing in Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine (Monroe called him “a new genius”) and Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review. He was featured in anthologies alongside the great poets of his day, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. He moved to New York and lived for stints with Alfred Kreymborg and Williams, also working with the Provincetown Players, who performed several of his plays.

Bodenheim began publishing at least a book of poetry or prose a year, taking a break in 1923 and 1924 to work with Ben Hecht launching the Chicago Literary Times, which featured the top Midwestern writers, including Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, and Anderson, along with avant-garde writers from New York and Europe. With Kreymborg, Williams, and Malcolm Cowley, Bodenheim edited Others: A Magazine of the New Verse—one of the other new, influential little magazines, which ran from 1915 to 1919. Naked on Roller Skates was the last of his books to make a profit, but it was Replenishing Jessica that made the most money and made him nationally famous. An obscenity trial over the novel put his name in the news and jacked sales. The defense had the entire book read to the jury, and the fact that many fell asleep during the reading was used as an argument for acquittal. The trial occasioned a famous remark by Mayor Jimmy Walker, who concurred with the jury, saying, “No girl has ever been seduced by a book.”

Bodenheim did, however, seem to seduce with his books. A prickly, sardonic, often nasty and belligerent young man, he had a reputation as a Don Juan, in part because of the more or less explicit sexuality (factoring in the obscenity laws) in his books. That, together with his ravishing good looks and what some saw as a need for female adulation, made him a literary matinee idol of his day. “He was young and slim with sandy red hair and pale, baleful blue eyes,” Life magazine wrote, “and women jammed tiny candlelit rooms in the Village when he gave readings of his poems.” Ben Hecht described him as “a golden-haired youth with pale eyes and the look of a pensive Christ,” and The New York Times said that, as “a handsome and striking man in his youth, Mr. Bodenheim was always surrounded by feminine admirers.” In the mid-1920s, a publicity photo showed him reading from one of his books with five young bob-haired women draped over his arms and shoulders.

In 1928, when 16 people died in a Times Square subway derailment, the Daily News reported on one of the victims, a young woman named Dorothy Dear, among whose effects they found a series of salacious letters from Bodenheim. That same year, a young admirer named Virginia Drew made the mistake of asking for his opinion of her poetry. He said it was “sentimental slush,” and she took her own life by jumping into the Hudson River. He had a fling with Village figure Aimee Cortez, who was then found dead in front of her gas jet with a photograph of Bodenheim. In what was apparently part of his grooming ritual, he told 18-year-old Gladys Loeb that her poetry was “nauseous trash,” and she too attempted suicide by unlit oven, holding his photo. She was rescued before she died, the room full of gas.

Bodenheim inevitably blew up his relationships, one by one, with the people who had helped him, and with the communities he had entered on the strength of his looks, charm, talent, ambition, and willfulness. William Carlos Williams, in his prologue to Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), describes Bodenheim arriving from the Midwest in 1914 and the way they all helped him—Williams and his wife put him up for a week, “at no small inconvenience to Florence, who had two babies on her hands”—and at the end of the week, Bodenheim said, “I think you have profited by my visit.” Williams described “Bogie,” as he was sometimes called, before he had published even his first book:

Bodenheim pretends to hate most people, including [Ezra] Pound and Kreymborg, but that he really goes to this trouble I cannot imagine. He seems rather to me to have the virtue of self-absorption so fully developed that hate is made impossible. Due to this, also, he is an unbelievable physical stoic. I know of no one who lives so completely in his pretences as Bogie does. Having formulated his world neither toothache nor the misery to which his indolence reduces him can make head against the force of his imagination. Because of this he remains for me a heroic figure, which, after all, is quite apart from the stuff he writes and which only concerns him. He is an Isaiah of the butterflies.

Conrad Aiken described a fictionalized version of him, too, as if he foresaw the dreadful end:

[A] dirty raincoat flung capelike over his round shoulders, the white face already sneering, the queer yellow head bare to the drizzle […] the lashless blue eyes, smiling, with an affectation of cynicism which couldn’t wholly conceal the essential beauty—though a wasted beauty—of the pallid ascetic face.

H. L. Mencken declared Bodenheim “a faker and a stupid clown.” And Bodenheim responded in kind: “H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken,” he wrote. “There is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.”

Ben Hecht tells a story in his 1964 memoir, Letters from Bohemia, of a dinner he threw to welcome a new staff member to the Chicago Literary Times—at that point, the staff was just himself and Bodenheim. The guests included Anderson, Bodenheim, several opera singers, and a new staff member, fresh from a navy psychiatric ward. When the table insisted on talking about music, Hecht wrote, Bodenheim kept trying to “swing the talk around to a discussion of himself, or at least, of poetry in general,” and when he was ignored, “it was all too much” for him:

[O]ur 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.

One of his great talents, according to his biographer Jack Moore, was for alienation. He was so ready to take offense and give it that he found it impossible to keep a job or a set of friends or a relationship with an editor. He also found it impossible to stay reasonably sober for any length of time. The editor and critic Burton Rascoe, who saw that Bodenheim was hungry, once gave him two dollars for lunch. But because the editor didn’t personally take him out to lunch, Bodenheim was grievously insulted. He vilified the man (who had called him, in print, “a remarkable and gifted poet”) from then on, writing that Rascoe was “a literary prostitute […] like all the others in this gilded bordello of publishing parasites,” a man who “kowtowed to nincompoops and well-dressed mediocrities.”

Eventually, he alienated everyone. He hounded people at the Greenwich Village bars, forcing them to buy the poems he had scribbled on scraps of paper for the price of a drink. He wrote letters to ex-friends demanding money. Hecht often sent some, although at other times he just pretended to, sending a note saying “here’s ten dollars” with a paper clip but no bill. Such gibes aside, he remained Bodenheim’s most supportive friend. In the early 1950s, when Hecht had him over to his house in Nyack, New York, Bodenheim rifled through Hecht’s closet, making off with shoes, socks, shirts, ties, and even pajamas. Hecht’s response was to send him a weekly check for $35. It was Hecht who paid for the funerals after the murders.

Replenishing Jessica was Bodenheim’s best-selling book, but it is not a very good novel. His books, Hecht wrote in his memoir, “were hack work with flashes of tenderness, wit, and truth in them, and some verbal fireworks in every chapter.” The surface is great—Bodenheim writes well and fluently from sentence to sentence—but there is precious little psychological or cultural insight. Jessica is rich. Jessica is free from sexual inhibitions and fears of social censure, and so she takes a dozen or so lovers across a few continents. And that about sums up the plot. Remembering the novel in a 1949 New Yorker essay, S. J. Perelman describes Jessica as an heiress “alternately racked by an impulse to bundle and a hankering for the arts.” He describes five or six of her love affairs, then says:

The concluding fifty pages of “Replenishing Jessica” cover a span of approximately six years and vibrate with the tension of high-speed oatmeal. Jessica passes through a succession of lovers (including poets, musical-comedy stars, and other migratory workers), marries and discards Purrel [one of the earlier lovers], and inherits four million dollars, zestfully described as composed of real estate, bonds, and cash. (Offhand, I cannot recall another novel in which the scarlet threads of sex and real estate are so inextricably interwoven.)

What the novel does do well is assay the varieties of ways that sensuality, power, culture, and personality combine, or don’t, to culminate or fail to culminate in orgasms. For a culture new to literary representations of those moments of close encounter, Bodenheim’s book was revelatory. He was no D. H. Lawrence or André Gide, though, and especially now that his characters’ “impulse to bundle” is, as it already was in the late 1940s, a bit ludicrous. And whatever his literary value, as a person he earned Mencken’s denunciation of him as a clown, a rather sad clown.

In 1925, Bodenheim was still in demand as a literary voice, and he published book reviews and poems in the prestigious little magazines. A poem on lynching in The Little Review was reprinted in Opportunity the next month. He was international, downtown, and uptown—he was everywhere. And although he was clear-eyed about the low quality of his novels, he continued to think of himself as a poetic genius and a radical outlaw:

I am a distinguished outcast in American letters—a renegade and recalcitrant, hated and feared by all cliques and snoring phantom celebrities, from ultra-radical to ultra-conservative—an isolated wanderer in the realm of intellect and lithely fantastic emotion, hemmed in by gnawing hostilities and blandly simulating venoms.

This self-image, I assume, helped make his degradation livable.

Harriet Monroe wrote an insightful review of his career in the March 1925 issue of Poetry that opened with an image of him showing up at the magazine’s office in 1914 as an innocent youth, and she gives him a serious appraisal as a poet, but wonders, in the end, about the “drop of poison in this poet’s blood, embittering his thoughts,” which “threatens to nullify the higher reaches of his art.” She watches him angrily tear down other writers and spoil his own work with petty revenges. “What Freudian tragedy of suppression and deprivation through this poet’s childhood may have turned his blood to gall, and the wine of his satire to vinegar? Will he never work himself free of the inferiority complex which twists his art?” The answer, she seemed to understand, would be no, he never would.