Maxwell Bodenheim

Blackguard Maxwell Bodenheim

"CARL Felman stepped from a train at the Union Station of a midwestern, American city. His young face, partly obscured by a blonde stubble of beard, was a passive concealment, and his thin lips and long nose did not hold that stalwart sleekness which one associates with earth. If some joker had taken a Gothic effigy of Christ, trimmed its beard, dressed it in grey and dirty clothes, and forced upon it an unwilling animation, he would have produced an exact duplicate of Carl's aspect and gestures."And so begins this portrait of the poet as a young man ..."Blackguard is the history of a renegade soul, the narrative of a Modern Cellini, who in the dark saturnalia of life, discovers the essential nudity of our existence. The hero of his novel, Carl Felman, is type of blond beast, a post-Nietzschean, who refutes all our platitudes on good and evil, by an art of life that goes beyond them. The record of his experience, however, is a passive revelation. The author sees all our emotions as anchored in our body; he sees the spirit itself as a sort of bodily projection. A sensuous mechanism with powers of illusion. Hence the futility of life's struggles and its achievement."This Kindle edition of Jazz Age poet & novelist, Maxwell Bodenheim's first novel, Blackguard (1923) is at last brought back into digital print after its absence from the marketplace for over almost one-hundred years. Meticulously copyedited from a first edition volume owned by the editor, this is the one and only edition currently available. In addition, editor Paul Maher Jr. (A Vast Glowing Empty Page: The Life and Work of Jack Kerouac; Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews & Encounters; All Things Shining: An Oral History of the Films of Terrence Malick) has compiled introductory essays, reviews and correspondence to shine a light on those lost years of the late, great King of Greenwich Village, Maxwell Bodenheim. This is the first in a reprint series of all of Bodenheim's poetry and prose. For more on Maxwell Bodenheim, join Maher's blog: https: //hobohemiadotblog.wordpress.com