Great Aches from Little Boudoirs Grow

Whenever I stretch out before my incinerator, churchwarden in hand, and, staring reflectively into the dying embers, take inventory of my mottled past, I inevitably hark back to a period, in the spring of 1926, that in many ways was the most romantic of my life. I was, in that turbulent and frisky epoch, an artist of sorts, specializing in neo-­primitive woodcuts of a heavily waggish nature that appeared with chilling infrequency in a moribund comic magazine. It was a hard dollar, but it allowed me to stay in bed until noon, and I was able to get by with half as many haircuts as my conventional friends above Fourteenth Street. My atelier was a second-­floor rear bedroom in a handsome mansion on West Ninth Street, temporarily let out to respectable bachelors during the owner’s absence abroad. In this sunny and reposeful chamber, I had set up my modest possessions: the draftsman’s table and tools of my trade; a rack of costly Dunhills I never smoked; and a lamp made of a gigantic bottle, formerly an acid carboy, and trimmed with an opaque parchment shade that effectively blanketed any light it gave. After pinning up a fast batik or two, I lent further tone to the premises by shrouding the ceiling fixture with one of those prickly, polyhedral glass lampshades esteemed in the Village, a lethal contraption that was forever gouging furrows in my scalp. It met its Waterloo the evening a young person from the Garrick Gaieties, in a corybantic mood, swung into a cancan and executed a kick worthy of La Goulue. The crash is said to have been audible in Romany Marie’s, six blocks away.

I had not been installed in my diggings very long before I found that they were not ideally suited to provide the tranquillity I had hoped for. My windows overlooked a refuge for unwed mothers operated by the Florence Crittenton League, and almost every morning between four and six the wail of newborn infants reverberated from the chimney pots. Occasionally, of an afternoon, I beheld one of the ill-­starred girls on the roof, scowling at me in what I interpreted as an accusatory manner, and although I had in no way contributed to her downfall, I was forced to draw the blinds before I could regain a measure of composure. Far more disturbing, however, was the behavior of the clientele attracted by the tenant of the studio above mine, a fashionable Austrian portrait painter. This worthy, a fraudulent dauber who had parlayed an aptitude for copying Boldini and Philip de László into an income of six figures, was the current Wunderkind of Park Avenue; the socially prominent streamed to his dais like pilgrims to the Kaaba in Mecca. The curb in front of the house was always choked with sleek, custom-­built Panhards and Fiats, and hordes of ravishing ladies, enveloped in sables and redolent of patchouli, ceaselessly surged past my door. What with the squeals and giggles that floated down from the upper landing, the smack of garters playfully snapped, and pretty objurgations stifled by kisses, I was in such a constant state of cacoëthes that I shrank to welterweight in a fortnight.

It would be unfair, though, to hold the painter entirely culpable for my condition; a good share of it was caused by a novel I was bewitched with at the time—Maxwell Bodenheim’s Replenishing Jessica. Its publication, it will be recalled, aroused a major scandal hardly surpassed by Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Determined efforts were made to suppress it, and it eventually gave rise to Jimmy Walker’s celebrated dictum that no girl has ever been seduced by a book. Whether the mot was confirmed by medical testimony, I cannot remember, but in one immature reader, at least, Replenishing Jessica created all the symptoms of breakbone fever. So much so, in fact, that prior to a nostalgic reunion with it several days ago, I fortified myself with a half grain of codeine. I need not have bothered. Time, the great analgesic, had forestalled me.

To call the pattern of Mr. Bodenheim’s story simple would be like referring to St. Peter’s as roomy or Lake Huron as moist; “elementary” sums it up rather more succinctly. Condensed to its essence, Replenishing Jessica is an odyssey of the bedtime hazards of a young lady of fashion bent on exploring her potentialities. Jessica Maringold is the twenty-­three-­year-­old daughter of a real-­estate millionaire, willful, perverse, alternately racked by an impulse to bundle and a hankering for the arts. Without any tedious preliminaries, she weighs in on the very first page perched on a piano bench near a stockbroker named Theodore Purrel, for whom she is playing “one of Satie’s light affairs.” “She was a little above medium height, with a body that was quite plump between the hips and upper thighs,” the author recounts, exhibiting a gusto for anatomical detail that often threatens to swamp his narrative. Purrel receives a similarly severe appraisal: “He was a tall man, just above thirty years, and he had the body of an athlete beginning to deteriorate—the first sign of a paunch and too much fat on his legs.” With all this lard in proximity, it is preordained that high jinks will ensue, and they do—cataclysmically. “His fingers enveloped the fullness of her breasts quite as a boy grasps soap-­bubbles and marvels at their intact resistance.” The soap bubbles I grasped as a boy were not distinguished for their elasticity, but they may have been more resilient in Mr. Bodenheim’s youth. Meanwhile, during these gymnastics Jessica surrenders herself to typically girlish musings. “She remembered the one night in which she had given herself to him. . . . She knew that Purrel would grasp her, and she reflected on some way of merrily repulsing him, such as pulling his tie, wrenching his nose, tickling his ears.” Unluckily, the delaying action had been futile, and Purrel managed to exact his tribute. Now, however, he impresses her as a dull, self-­confident libertine, an estimate borne out by his Philistine rejection of her intellect. “I wish you’d give this mind stuff a rest. . . . It doesn’t take much brains to smear a little paint on canvas and knock around with a bunch of long-­haired mutts. . . . I may not be a world-­beater but I’ve run up a fat bank account in the last eight years and you can’t do that on an empty head.” The struggle between Theodore’s animal appeal and Jessica’s spiritual nature is resolved fortuitously. “The frame of the piano, below the keys, was pressing into her lower spine, like an absurd remonstrance that made her mood prosaic in the passing of a second,” Bodenheim explains, adding with magisterial portentousness, “The greatest love can be turned in a thrice [sic] to the silliest of frauds by a breaking chair, or the prolonged creaking of a couch.” When the lust has blown away, Jessica is safe in her bedroom and her admirer presumably on his way to a cold shower. “Purrel felt feverish and thwarted without knowing why,” says the text, though any reasonably alert chimpanzee of three could have furnished him a working hypothesis.

Jessica’s next sexual skirmish takes place at twilight the following afternoon, in the studio of Kurt Salburg, a dour Alsatian painter who addresses her as “Liebchen” and subjects her virtue, or what’s left of it, to a coarse, Teutonic onslaught. His brutal importunities, unaccompanied by the slightest appeal to her soul, provoke her into withholding her favors, but she confers them a scant twenty-­four hours later on Sydney Levine, a masterful criminal lawyer, who requisitions them in the terse, direct fashion of an Army quartermaster ordering sixty bags of mule feed. “I have wanted you for six months,” Levine tells her. “I have no lies or romantic pretenses to give you. My love for you is entirely physical, and nothing except complete possession will satisfy it. . . . From now on, it would be impossible to control myself in your presence, and it will have to be everything or nothing.” Their romp leaves Jessica remorseful and more frustrated than ever. Eschewing the opposite sex for three weeks, she stays glued to her easel, creating futuristic pictures apropos of which the author observes, “She had a moderate talent for painting.” The sample he describes would appear to permit some room for discussion: “. . . two lavender pineapples, placed on each side of a slender, black and white vase, all of the articles standing on a dark red table that seemed about to fall on the cerise floor.” Of course, there is always the possibility that Mr. Bodenheim is being sardonic, just as there is always the possibility that the Princess Igor Troubetzkoy is planning to leave me her stock in the five-­and-­ten-­cent stores.

Ostensibly purified by her joust with the Muse, Jessica now retreads her steps to Salburg’s studio to bedevil him a bit further. This time the lecherous Alsatian uses a more devious gambit to achieve his ends. He employs the infantile, or blubber-­mouth, approach. “ ‘If you should refuse me now, I would never live again,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Never, never . . . I am helpless and frightened, Jessica.’ His words had a defenceless quiver that could not be disbelieved. . . . A disrobed and frantic boy was speaking his fear that she might whip his naked breast.” Following a rough-­and-­tumble interlude, the participants spend the evening at a Nachtlokal with Purrel, whom Jessica pits against Salburg to keep things humming. In the resulting scrimmage, the stockbroker draws first claret; Jessica is repelled by the artist’s craven behavior and, dismissing her flames as bullies and cowards, decides to pop over to Europe and see what beaux are available in England. There is a vignette of her, aboard ship, calculated to awake tender memories in the older girls: “She was dressed in dark purple organdy with white rosettes at the waist, stockings and shoes of the same purple hue, a long, thin cape of white velvet, and a pale straw turban trimmed with black satin.” It is a coincidence worth recording that the young person from the Garrick Gaieties referred to earlier wore exactly this costume when she danced the cancan in my web. Naturally, she removed the long, thin cape of white velvet to facilitate her kick at the lamp, but in every other respect her ensemble was identical. Sort of spooky, when you come to think of it.

Having installed herself in an apartment in Chelsea, Jessica plunges intrepidly into the bohemian whirl of London, keeping a weather eye out for brainy males. At the 1919 Club, a rendezvous so named “in commemoration of a Russian revolution”—an aside that pricks your curiosity as to which one the author means—she encounters four. They are (disguised under impenetrable pseudonyms) Ramsay MacDonald, the Sitwell brothers, and Aldous Huxley, but, regrettable to say, no pyrotechnics of note occur. At last, the situation brightens. One evening, Jessica finds herself in her flat discussing Havelock Ellis with a personable ex-­officer named Robert Chamberlain, “. . .  and during the course of the talk Jessica partly unloosened her heliotrope blouse because of the warmness of the room, and sprawled at ease on a couch without a thought of sensual invitation.” Innocent as the gesture is, Chamberlain in his crass, masculine way misconstrues it. “His confidently thoughtful mood was shattered, and for the first time he looked steadily at the tapering, disciplined curve of her legs, slowly losing their plumpness as their lines fell to her ankles, and half revealed by her raised, white skirt; and the sloping narrowness of her shoulders, and her small-­lipped, impishly not quite round face that was glinting and tenuous in the moderated light of the room.” But the foregoing is merely a feint on Bodenheim’s part, and two months of interminable palaver are necessary before his creatures coalesce to make great music. The slow buildup plainly does much to intensify Chamberlain’s fervor: “His mind changed to a fire that burned without glowing—a black heat—and his emotions were dervishes.” Once the pair wind up in the percale division, the same old sense of disillusion begins gnawing at Jessica. A week of stormy bliss and she is off to New York again, hastily sandwiching in a last-­minute affair with Joseph Israel, a London real-­estate broker.

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, 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. It’s like a union of Fanny Hill and Bing & Bing.) All these stimulating experiences, nevertheless, are no more than “a few snatchings at stars that turned out to be cloth ones sewed to the blue top of a circus tent,” though one suspects a handful of the spangles may have been negotiable. Tired of drifting about the capitals of Europe and unable to find a mate who offers the ideal blend of sensuality and savvy, she devotes herself to teaching children to paint at an East Side settlement house. Here, among the lavender pineapples she is midwifing, she meets a saintly, partially deformed type given to reading Flaubert and writing aesthetic critiques. His luxuriant brown beard, exalted eyes, and general Dostoevskian halo augur well, and as the flyleaves loom, Jessica’s saga ends with an elegiac quaver reminiscent of a Jesse Crawford organ solo.

Every book of consequence ultimately produces lesser works that bear its influence, and Replenishing Jessica is no exception. As collateral reading, I can recommend a small semi-­scientific monograph I myself recently helped to prepare. It concerns itself with the peculiar interaction of codeine and ennui on a white hysteroid male of forty-­four exposed to a bookful of erotic fancies. Unlike the average hypnotic subject, the central character was fully conscious at all times, even while asleep. He ate a banana, flung the skin out of the window, flung the book after the skin, and was with difficulty restrained from following. It sounds technical but it really isn’t. It’s an absorbing document, and above all it’s as clean as a whistle. Not a single bit of smooching in it from start to finish. I made certain of that.