Hieroglyphic of silence

The Harvest Moon, Harvey Dunn (Smithsonian AF.25720)

 
Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas
To provide an importance for life.
           —Maxwell Bodenheim, from "Sappho Answers Aristotle”* 

In 1914, twenty-two-year old Maxwell Bodenheim published his first work in Poetry magazine. That same year, his poem “The Camp Follower” was one of fourteen chosen for the magazine’s war issue. The magazine’s editor, Harriet Monroe, later recalled Bodenheim as a “blond youth [who] used to appear at the office now and then, bearing innocent young rhymes written out in an incredibly large round babyish hand.”**

Four years later, Bodenheim published his first poetry collection, Minna and Myself. His work was well reviewed, and his poems appeared alongside those of other rising young writers such as Carl Sandburg and TS Eliot. His poem “Soldiers,” first published in the Pagan Magazine Anthology (1918), was included in Minna and Myself.   

Soldiers

Early June morning, Claggett Wilson, Smithsonian

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles ... 

Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence. 
—Maxwell Bodenheim

The poem offers a vivid contrast to lines from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding” (1942),  in which Eliot writes, 

What the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

In Bodenheim’s “Soldiers,” the dead communicate in messages of opaque distortion that are impossible to decipher. A fantastic creature who has perished in a small pond smiles fiercely, and the twisted lips of a dead man offer a “hieroglyphic of silence” — but the dead speak only in questions and “gravely” mocking sentences. 

In the Foreword to Minna and Myself, Louis Untermeyer wrote, 

Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit.... Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbal nuance. But it is not merely as a word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy.... In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep.***

In 1925, Harriet Monroe reviewed Bodenheim and his work in Poetry magazine. While she praised Minna and Myself, she found less to admire in Bodenheim’s subsequent publications. She wrote, “One watches the development of his art with much the same feeling which a gaping crowd lavishes on a tight-rope athlete dancing over perilous abysses.” By this time, Bodenheim was better known for his boorish arrogance and lechery than his writing; Monroe concludes the review with questions about Bodenheim’s future: 

What drop of poison in this poet’s blood, embittering his thought, threatens to nullify the higher reaches of his art? .... 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?† 

Today, Bodenheim may be best known for the circumstances surrounding his death.†† In February of 1954, after Bodenheim and his wife were found murdered in a flophouse, the New York Daily News reported, 

They found him with his mouth open and his eyes staring and a bullet hole in his chest, while near him lay his wife, with four knife wounds in her back. They lay, in the stiff and contorted attitudes of violent death, in a dirty furnished room, tenanted by an idiot and lout with the occasional thunder of a passing El train which, when it passes, drowns all sound, including poetry. ††† 

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* Maxwell Bodenheim, “Sappo Answers Aristotle,” Poetry, vol. 18, no. 2, 1921, p. 63.
** Harriet Monroe, “Maxwell Bodenheim,” Poetry, vol. 25, no. 6 (Mar. 1925), p. 320.
*** Louis Untermeyer, “Foreword,” in Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim, Pagan, 1918.
† Monroe, “Bodenheim,” pp. 324, 326, 327.
†† See previous post on Bodenheim on this blog (“The Camp Follower”), particularly biographer John Strausbaugh’s comments.
††† Kermit Jaediker,“The Last Bohemian,” New York Daily News, 28 Feb. 1954. The full story can be read here.