Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“Passed In Review”
George Currie
August 30, 1933

“What Is This Thing Called Love?” Sings Maxwell Bodenheim and Even the East River Bridges Are Moved

“Maxwell Bodenheim in “New York Madness” (The Macaulay Company) arrives at the conclusion that while such a thing might be, life has become too complex, too exacting ever to allow a man and a woman dwell together in a completne contentment.

At least, that seems to be the burden of his story, for at the end, when Mona has decided that she loves the crippled Emil, after all, the ruthless Mr. Bodenheim causes the disheveled and hysterical Alicia to come staggering back to the apartment in time to wreck an hour-old Harden of Eden with the frightened statement that her Joe, on the spot, had committed suicide chiefly because life wasn’t worth living, just hanging around to scrap with her.

The same preoccupation with the race’s sexual problem which characterized “Replenishing Jessica” and “Georgie May” rages feverishly throughout “New York Madness,” but either Mr. Bodenheim is getting older or he has undertaken a self-discipline which a Matthew Arnold would have called “Literary restraint.” Both Alicia and Mona, even Joe, the speakeasy proprietor, and Emil, the crippled newsdealer, are gifted with volcanic passions. Mr. Bodenheim still seems to think it is a great pity they may not be in continual eruption, like so many Vesuviuses. The boredom of human existence exasperates him. However, I think in this book he reveals more clearly than in any of his other novels that at heart he is a small boy whose fondest wish is not to worship at the shrine of Venus with odes, libations and reverences, but rather with skyrockets, Roman candles and firecrackers. In his ecstacies he seems to have an urge to clap his hands and cheer. Again he is his own most enthusiastic audience. But slightly subdued, if you please.

Wandering Bridges

He takes the reader from “sin spot,” as the columnists call them, to “sin spot.” He sits apart, using Alicia and Mona and their gentlemen friends to prove that alcohol is but an anaesthetic for ennui, certainly a not very original observation. He is deeply interested in the vagrant attraction of one for another, skillfully masked behind the conventional subterfugues of small talk. This may be a sign that Mr. Bodenheim is growing up. At least he has overtaken Honore Balzac at last and is now treading on the heels of Guy de Maupassant.

He is at his best in this book when he sharpens his knife upon the literati, gathered for a lark after rendering honor to one who is so obviously Pearl S. Buck that lest, by not mentioning her name, we fail in the identification, he describes this “white lady from China” as one “who had written an enormously best-selling, sentimental, placidly flowery and pathetic version of a Chinese farmer’s rise to power and influence in his locality––a book in the ‘undangerous’ and earthly simple category.”

The book reviews in the New Yorker irritate him to a wordy frenzy. So do the Communists, although he introduces Mona to Emil in the heat of one of their smaller riots with the cops. The stool pigeon, the vice squad and the fixings which alarmed New York but a short while ago make their appearance early and as early make their exit. The frameup for a while seems to have left its scars upon Mona and Alicia, but wearying of such crusading missionary work Mr. Bodenheim moves on to more universal problems, such as a reason for men and women saying one thing and thinking another, etc.

Both the girls are scarlet creatures, half-pagan, half-repressed. Beneath their tinsel each has the heart which is perpetually on the gold standard. You will be amused by Alicia’s explanation to Joe that, while she has always been a gold-digger, at heart she never was.

Meekle, the straight-thinking liberal of Columbia Heights, is inclined to get a bit beyond Mr. Bodenheim at times, the reason being, no doubt, that Meekle is always reasonable, even when ducking out of Jose Marranza’s pool room to avoid a beating up after a brawl. But I wonder how long ago it was that one of the East River bridges left its moorings to move down to Atlantic Ave.

“Miguel Romalos, nicknamed Meekle, lived in the dirtier and less respectable part of Columbia Heights, one short block away from the foot of Atlantic Ave. –that lower part of Brooklyn hemmed between the shadows of two great bridges and confronted . . . by . . . the uplifted, gray talons of Manhattan’s downtown district,” we read, which reminds me I must take a stroll along the water front to check up on the wonders wrought by time. Or is it that Mr. Bodenheim has confused Atlantic Basin with Wallabout Market and the Navy Yard?

To be sure, so far as the fortunes of Meckle and the girls and Joe and Emil, not to mention Tom and Stan, are concerned, it doesn’t matter. Mr. Bodenheim has his district dead to rights, even if he has seen fit to exercise a curious poetic license by moving great bridges about like pawns and rooks, to suit his momentary necessities.