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My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village
Bodenheim's memoir, My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, released six months after his death in 1954, was ghostwritten by Samuel Roth. He had been paying the down-and-out Bodenheim for his biographical stories about Greenwich Village at the time of the writer's murder.
- GenresBiography
141 pages, paperback
First published January 1, 1961
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About the author
Maxwell Bodenheim
65 books10 followersMaxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist. A literary figure in Chicago, he later went to New York where he became known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international notoriety during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 3, 2020
I don't know how much of this was true, he was telling these stories to someone for booze money, and I don't care. These are some of the most jaw-dropping tales of hipster boho insanity ever told. When I got to the part of the model who clutched a large marble sculpture penis and plunged to her death out a third story window I knew I was in the presence of a master storyteller. And I'm only on page....25. Fuck.
Let me curb my enthusiasm because further on down the book he gets a lot less intense, and in fact the title proved to be misleading. It's less about his life and loves and more about tales of freaky people in Bohemia (Bohemians came before the Beatniks). He's a very scholarly guy but he has a Neanderthal view of women and something even worse for the LGBT crowd. Still a decent read but I'd check out his poetry instead.
Let me curb my enthusiasm because further on down the book he gets a lot less intense, and in fact the title proved to be misleading. It's less about his life and loves and more about tales of freaky people in Bohemia (Bohemians came before the Beatniks). He's a very scholarly guy but he has a Neanderthal view of women and something even worse for the LGBT crowd. Still a decent read but I'd check out his poetry instead.
November 17, 2022
Though it could have been written by me, it was not. Wonderful and for a large part true, although I lived there in the 1980s and not the 1950s, anthropological study of Greenwich Village and its denizens.
A fun read, if not a fun end for the author. But all adult fun and games have an element of danger, as Bondenheim's murder at the hands of a roommate proves.
A fun read, if not a fun end for the author. But all adult fun and games have an element of danger, as Bondenheim's murder at the hands of a roommate proves.
October 25, 2025
The first thing to know about "My Life and Loves" is that it says next to nothing about Bodenheim's life or loves, outside of an afterword by his old publisher (who allegedy put the book together, after the poet's death, from the material he'd left behind).
The second is that Bodenheim (and/or his publisher), though he was a long-term Greenwich Villager, has almost nothing good to say about his neighbors' intellectual, spiritual or sexual tendencies. H.L. Mencken -- who flayed Bodenheim's poetry (and Village bohemia in general), and who for all his gleeful iconoclasm was a closeted Puritan -- would have enjoyed the opening chapter, recalling a popular apartment building known among local artistes as Gonorrhea Mansion and offering a stern critique of the lust-driven life.
Bodenheim has little sympathy for Freudianism, Buddhism, Marxism or homosexuality, though he was smart enough to fill the book with tales of his peers' adventures, especially in the last category. It isn't quite as entertaining as I hoped, but there's an extended, very funny account of Gertrude Stein's 1933 visit to New York, in the course of which she stayed at the Algonquin but went downtown to visit her acolyes. Bodenheim was no fan:
"She was greeted like a conquering hero, for the American intelligentsia was still under the delusion that our literature could be saved by a revolution in style, even though its body had been drained of its intellectual and moral contents, deprived of its guts, and filled with the embalming fluids of Freudian pathology, like a corpse barbered, waxed and dressed for the inspection of relatives. ...
"Her gray-white hair, cut to a mannish bob, looked like a Colonial wig ... Strunsky nudged me and whispered, 'She looks like George Washington at Gettysboig' ... When she rose and spoke the effect was tremendous, as if a statue had come to life. The chairman was so unnerved that he introduced the celebrated Miss Stein as 'Albert Einstein.' "
Strunsky, incidentally, is Albert Strunsky, owner of Gonorrhea Mansion, who drove himself into poverty renting rooms to poets and painters who had no hope of ever paying rent. He was torn between disdain for most of his customers' artistic output and his natural soft-heartedness, which always won out. One of many charcters memorably sketched here, and one of the few identified by his real name.
The second is that Bodenheim (and/or his publisher), though he was a long-term Greenwich Villager, has almost nothing good to say about his neighbors' intellectual, spiritual or sexual tendencies. H.L. Mencken -- who flayed Bodenheim's poetry (and Village bohemia in general), and who for all his gleeful iconoclasm was a closeted Puritan -- would have enjoyed the opening chapter, recalling a popular apartment building known among local artistes as Gonorrhea Mansion and offering a stern critique of the lust-driven life.
Bodenheim has little sympathy for Freudianism, Buddhism, Marxism or homosexuality, though he was smart enough to fill the book with tales of his peers' adventures, especially in the last category. It isn't quite as entertaining as I hoped, but there's an extended, very funny account of Gertrude Stein's 1933 visit to New York, in the course of which she stayed at the Algonquin but went downtown to visit her acolyes. Bodenheim was no fan:
"She was greeted like a conquering hero, for the American intelligentsia was still under the delusion that our literature could be saved by a revolution in style, even though its body had been drained of its intellectual and moral contents, deprived of its guts, and filled with the embalming fluids of Freudian pathology, like a corpse barbered, waxed and dressed for the inspection of relatives. ...
"Her gray-white hair, cut to a mannish bob, looked like a Colonial wig ... Strunsky nudged me and whispered, 'She looks like George Washington at Gettysboig' ... When she rose and spoke the effect was tremendous, as if a statue had come to life. The chairman was so unnerved that he introduced the celebrated Miss Stein as 'Albert Einstein.' "
Strunsky, incidentally, is Albert Strunsky, owner of Gonorrhea Mansion, who drove himself into poverty renting rooms to poets and painters who had no hope of ever paying rent. He was torn between disdain for most of his customers' artistic output and his natural soft-heartedness, which always won out. One of many charcters memorably sketched here, and one of the few identified by his real name.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews