The Bell Tolls for No One Read online

  These stories from 1948–1985 demonstrate Bukowski’s growth as a writer of short fiction. He gradually hones his craft and learns how to combine the tragic and comic modes effortlessly. In his late phase, Bukowski had mastered his style to the point of making the laconic, finely modulated prose we see in “The Bell Tolls for No One.” The mood is swiftly established, and not a word is wasted. His goal in his fiction was to entertain, yet he was driven to explore the dark places, the Nietzschean cave with the monstrous Minotaur. As he once said: “I can’t name it. It’s just there. The thing is there. I have to go see it. The monster, the god, the rat, the snail. Whatever’s out there I have to go see it and look at it and endure it and maybe not endure it but it’s needed. That’s all. I really can’t explain it.”20 The unspeakable, monstrous, inscrutably violent and tender mystery at the heart of existence will not leave him in peace.

  INTRODUCTION NOTES

  1. “The Reason Behind Reason,” Matrix, vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 1946 in Absence of the Hero, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010).

  2. Charles Bukowski letter to Whit Burnett, Box 19, Folder 13; Princeton University Library.

  3. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 677; “Ultimate Religion,” in The Essential Santayana, ed. Martin A. Coleman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), p. 344.

  4. Absence of the Hero, pp. 255–270.

  5. See David Stephen Calonne, Charles Bukowski (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), pp. 31–32; also see footnote 8, p. 185).

  6. See Erin A. Smith, “Pulp Sensations” in David Glover and Scott McCracken, The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2012); on Bukowski and Pulp, see Calonne, Charles Bukowski, pp. 171–173; Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 296–297.

  7. Charles Bukowski, “the lady in red,” in Dangling in the Tournefortia (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), p. 13.

  8. Jack Black, You Can’t Win, Introduction by William S. Burroughs (Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 2000).

  9. Wallace Fowlie, “Shadow of Doom,” in The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller (Berkeley, CA: Bern Porter, 1945), p. 102.

  10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 150.

  11. Kauri 15, July-August 1966, p. 4; on Healey, also see “Eyes Like the Sky” in Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness (San Francisco: City Lights, 1983), pp. 175–180.

  12. Hillary Chute, “Graphic Narrative,” in Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds., The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 410. Also see Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963–1975 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2002).

  13. For reproductions of Wilson’s illustrations of Bukowski stories, see Patrick Rosenkranz, Demons and Angels: The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson, Volume 2 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2015).

  14. Crumb remarked about Bukowski: “I like his ironic humor and his alienated attitude about the world in general. He expresses that in very succinct and eloquent terms.” See D.K. Holm, ed., R. Crumb, Conversations (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), p. 208.

  15. On The Way the Dead Love, see Abel Debritto, Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 127, 135–6.

  16. The poem may be found in Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry, ed. Charles Potts (Walla Walla: Tsunami Inc., 1998), pp. 48–51.

  17. Los Angeles Free Press, Feb 13–19, 1976, p. 20.

  18. See Absence of the Hero, pp. 99–111.

  19. David Stephen Calonne, “Bukowski and the Romantic Conception of Genius,” Jahrbuch der Charles-Bukowski-Gesellschaft 2011/12/13, pp. 217–218.

  20. The Charles Bukowski Tapes, DVD, directed by Barbet Schroeder (Detroit, MI: Barrel Entertainment, 2006).

  A Kind, Understanding Face

  The parents died younger than it is usual to die, the father first, the mother soon afterward. He didn’t attend the father’s funeral but he was at the last one. Some of the neighbors remembered him as a boy and had thought him a “nice child.” Others only remembered him grown, on sporadic one or two week stays at the house. He was always in some far off city, Miami, New York, Atlanta, and the mother said he was a journalist and when the war came without his becoming a soldier, she explained a heart condition. The mother died in 1947 and he, Ralph, entered the house and became a part of the neighborhood.

  He became the victim of scrutiny, for the neighborhood was decently average, home-owned, home-lived rather than rented so that one was more aware of the permanence of things. Ralph seemed older than he should have been, so quite worn. At times, though, in favorable shades of light he was almost beautiful, and the left lower eyelid would sometimes twitch behind an almost gaudily lit eye. He spoke little and when he did he seemed to be joking, and then he would walk off, either too fast briskly, or he would slouch-swagger off, hands in pockets and flat-footed. Mrs. Meers said he had a “kind, understanding face.” Others thought he sneered.

  The house had been well cared for—the shrubbery, the lawns and the interior. The car disappeared, and soon in the backyard were three kittens and two puppies. Mrs. Meers, who lived next door, noticed that Ralph spent much time in the garage breaking the spider webs with a broom. Once she saw him give a crippled spider to the ants and watch them cut it to pieces alive. This, beyond one incident, gave vent to the most early conversations. The other: coming down the hill he had met Mrs. Langley and had said, “Until people learn to excrete and copulate in public they will be neither decently savage nor comfortably modern.” Ralph had been intoxicated and it was understood that he was grieving. Also, he seemed to give more time to the kittens than the puppies, almost teasingly so, and this, of course, was strange.

  He continued to grieve. The lawns and shrubs began to yellow. He had visitors, they kept late hours and were sometimes seen in the mornings. There were women, stout, heavy-laughing women; women too thin, shabby women, old women, women with English accents, women whose every other word referred to the bathroom or the bed. Soon there were people day and night. Sometimes Ralph was not to be seen for days. Somebody put a duck in the backyard. Mrs. Meers took to feeding the pets and one evening Mr. Meers, in an anger, attached his hose to Ralph’s faucets and gave the place a good soaking down. He wasn’t stopped, wasn’t even noticed, except by “a thin, terrible-looking man” who came out of the screen door with a cigar in his mouth, walked past Mr. Meers, opened the incinerator, looked into it, closed it, walked past Mr. Meers and back into the house.

  Sometimes at night the men fought in the backyard and once Mrs. Roberts (on the other side) called the police, but by the time they arrived everybody was in the house again. The police went into the house and remained some time. When they made their exit they were alone.

  It began to be almost too much when suddenly the neighbors noticed that the people were gone. The duck was gone too. It began to be quiet nights. In the days there was only one woman, thin-faced, with an English accent and rather snobbish, though cleanly dressed and younger than the others had been. Ralph was seen coming home with library books and then leaving every morning at 7:15 A.M. in overalls. He began to look better, though Mrs. Meers smelled whiskey on the woman the few times she spoke to her. Ralph began to water and trim the yard. The left lower eyelid was improved. He spoke more. “People are good. Everybody’s good. I hope we can be good friends,” he spoke to Mrs. Roberts. “I guess I’ve been a kid most of my life. I guess I’m just growing up. And don’t mind Lila. She’s . . . she’s really . . . ” He didn’t finish. He just smiled and waved a hand and turned the hose onto a bush.

  Sometimes on weekends they saw him intoxicated, and her, of course; but he always made work and was very kind, really a good-natured person. “If she could only be like Ralph
. Oh, I know he takes a drink! But he’s a brilliant boy—and that job, you know! He is so nice. But I guess he needs her.”

  He must have needed them too. They started coming back, first a few, and then the rest. The woman, Lila, seemed to dislike it most. She was in a fury but Ralph just laughed. Then the duck came. When the duck came Lila went into silence. The kittens and puppies were almost full-grown and the poor duck, once master, had its troubles. The “thin, terrible-looking man who went to the incinerator” was seen building a pen and thereafter the penned duck was understood by the neighbors to belong to the “thin, terrible-looking man who went to the incinerator.”

  One of the dogs died. They bought a piano and played it almost continually, day and night, for a week then left it alone. They buried the dog behind the garage, setting up a cross in the neck of a whiskey bottle half sunken in the soil. But they had buried the hound shallow and it set up an odor. One night a husky woman invaded the grave and burned the remains in the incinerator, cussing loudly and violently, laughing and then vomiting and crying. “It’s not death that aches us, it’s the getting older, older . . . wrinkled hands, wrinkled face . . . Christ, even my keester’s wrinkled! Christ, Christ, old age: I hate it, hate it!”

  They evidently sold the refrigerator. Everybody tried to help the moving van men get it into the truck. There was much laughing. The piano went too. It was understood that Lila had tried a suicide and failed. For several days she was very drunk, dressed in an extremely short skirt and four inch spiked heels. She spoke to everybody, even the neighbors.

  Some of the crowd thinned out. It was understood that Ralph was charging rent. He was getting thinner and quieter. He bought some seed and planted a lawn, fencing off the new soil with stakes and string. He was seen leaving early every morning in his suit, and several weeks later he was leaving at 7:15 A.M. in his overalls. The crowd remained, though, but weren’t quite as noisy. In a fashion, the neighborhood had accepted the house. The lawn came up fine, and it wasn’t unusual to see Ralph, in the evenings, speaking to Mr. Meers as they worked about the yards. The other inhabitants seemed to have a certain disdain and central fancy in mind, but Ralph was nice, even on the weekends when he did take a drink. He was just too easy-going putting up with those people; and you could see, he did care much for Lila.

  The piano came back. The refrigerator came back. Lila began to wash Ralph’s clothing, though Mrs. Meers still smelled whiskey when she spoke to her. Lila had something though. She was really an upper class girl meant for Ralph. She wasn’t, in spite of it all, as Mrs. Roberts said, quite like those others. They both had education and good upbringing. You could see that. Ralph had been a journalist . . .

  So Ralph’s suicide was a real surprise. Of course, they all are, though they say it’s old stuff, nothing new. The note seemed written in a moment of agonized frenzy. And on the back of the note were some disconnected notations taken from his readings, as strange as everything else had been:

  I saw some manticores, a most strange sort of creatures, which have the body of a lion, red hair, a face and ears like a man’s, three rows of teeth which close together, as if you joined your hands with your fingers between each other: they have a sting in their tails like a scorpion’s and a very melodious voice.—Rabelais.

  The absolute love of anything involved the love of universal good; and the love of universal good involves the love of every creature.—Santayana.

  Warcollier established himself before World War I through an invention for the manufacture of artificial jewelry from the scales of a fish. Factories were opened in France and the United States . . .

  The lawn went to pot.

  Save the World

  She came in and I noticed that she was banging into the walls and her eyes didn’t seem to focus. It was the day after her writer’s workshop, and she always seemed that way as if she had been taking dope. Maybe she was. She hit the kid for spilling her coffee and then got on the telephone and had one of her everlasting “intelligent” conversations with somebody. I played with the little girl who was my daughter. She hung up. “Are you all right today?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you act kind of . . . distracted.”

  Her eyes looked like the eyes of people in movies who played at being insane.

  “I’m all right. Are you all right?”

  “Never. I’m always confused.”

  “Have you eaten today?”

  “No. Mind throwing some potatoes in the pot to boil? The pot’s in the sink, soaking.”

  I had just come out of the hospital and was still weak.

  She walked into the kitchen, then stopped and looked at the pot. She propped, stiff, swaying in the doorway as if the pot were an apparition. It couldn’t have been the kitchen that scared her because she had been the worst housekeeper of all my ex-wives.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “The pot’s all right. It just has soapwater in it. Just scrub it out a bit and dump it.”

  She finally came out, walked around a bit, bumped into a chair, then handed me a couple of magazines: PROGRAM OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY U.S.A. and AMERICAN DIALOGUE. DIALOGUE had a cover of a baby asleep in a hammock made out of a couple of gun belts with bullets protruding. The cover also indicated the contents: THE MORALITY OF OUR TIMES. ON THE SUPERIORITY OF THE NEGRO.

  “Look, kid,” I said, “I’m not much on politics of any kind. I’m not much good that way, you know. But I’ll try to read this stuff.”

  I sat there and went through it, a bit of it, while she put some meat on in the kitchen. She called me in and the kid and I went in. We sat down to it.

  “I read about the superiority of the Negro,” I said. “You know, I am an expert on the Negro. Down at work most of them are Negroes . . . ”

  “Well, why don’t you just be an expert on Whites?”

  “I am. The article spoke of the ‘fine, tough muscular system. The beautiful, rich color, the full broad features, and the gracefully frizzled hair of the Negro’ and that when Nature got to the white man she was pretty well exhausted, but she pinched up his features and did what she could.”

  “I knew a little colored boy once. He had the softest, shortest hair, his hair was beautiful, beautiful.”

  “I’ll try to read the Communist Party Program tonight,” I told her.

  “Have you registered to vote?” she asked.

  “I never have.”

  “You can register at your nearest school on the 29th. Dorothy Healey is running for County Tax Assessor.”

  “Marina is getting more beautiful every day.” I spoke of my daughter.

  “Yes, she is. Listen, we’ve got to go. She goes to sleep at 7. And there’s something I must hear on KPFK. They read one of my letters over the air the other night.”

  KPFK was an FM radio station.

  “All right,” I said.

  I watched them leave. She pushed the kid across the street in the stroller. She had the same old wooden stride, nothing fluid at all. I watched them go. A better world. Jesus. Everybody has a different way, everybody has a different idea, and they are all so sure. She’s sure too, that wooden woman with the insane eyes and grey hair, that woman running into her walls, crazy with life and fear, and she would never quite believe it that I didn’t hate her and all her friends who gathered 2 or 3 times a week and praised each other’s poetry and were lonely and who made each other, and carried signs and were very enthusiastic and sure, they would never believe that the solitude, the privacy I asked for, was only to save myself so I might guess who they were and who the enemy was supposed to be.

  Still it was nice to be alone.

  I walked in and slowly began washing the dishes.

  The Way the Dead Love

  My head hurt for a week and a half. I had some beautiful hangovers that way. Lou would get on the wine and apologize until I felt like vomiting. I even worked a couple of days uploading boxcars.
Lou found a wallet in the crapper of a bar with $35 in it. So we went on. A while. But I felt like I owed Lou something. I think I got it one night. Lou was talking about his girlfriend.

  “What a body! What breasts! And she’s young, Hank, young!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Only she can’t stop drinking. She’s drunk all the time. She can’t pay her rent. She’s down in the cellar.”

  “Down in the cellar?”

  “Yeah, that’s where they put ’em when they can’t pay their rent.”

  “Is she down there now?”

  “Yeah.”

  We drank a while. Then I said, “Lou, I gotta call it off early tonight. I’ve got something to take care of.”

  “Sure, kid.”

  He left and I went out and got a fifth of whiskey. I went down to the cellar. There was only one door down there. I knocked. The door opened and here stood this young piece in panties and bra, in high heels, with just this thin negligee on. I pushed my way in. She screamed: