Screams From the Balcony Page 4
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[To Jon Webb]
[ca. October 1, 1962]
[* * *] Sherman was up yesterday to borrow 5 bucks. Said it was raining and his windshield wiper wasn’t working. I hate to be a bitch but this kid is getting to be real pain in the ass. He’s got a $150 a week job and he keeps borrowing from me, and then he’s got guts enough to claim he’s paid me back. [* * *] I’m going to have to cut off relations with Sherman. You are the editor, but if he sends in anything on me on congrat. for 1962 OUTSIDER, I wish you wouldn’t run it because congrats from this person are not congrats at all. Enough of this type of bitching which is a little bit swinish…if it were only the borrowing it would not be so bad, but there are other facets of personality here in Sherman that you wouldn’t find in a low-grade polecat. Enough. [* * *]
* * *
[To Jon Webb]
[ca. October 1, 1962]
I am enclosing another letter of acceptance which I much prefer to the other one I sent you. Of course, I do not know exactly what you want, and even if I did, I couldn’t do it. This one might be a little too long for you, or the ending rather sudden. I don’t know.
I am over my menopause or whatever the hell it was. It only lasted a month; maybe it was something else. I don’t mind going mad so long as it is clean. I don’t like the sloppy thing. Yet, you surely know that any of us who work with the word are open to anything, I mean any day we might test the cliff’s edge. This is the nature of remaining as alive as possible: while other men die slowly, we are more apt to blow out the fire with one quick fucking blast-see Van Gogh, see Hemingway, see Chatterton, see the whole thing back down and through. Or if we don’t kill ourselves, the State kills us: see Aristotle, see Lorca. And Villon, they ran him out of Paris just because he did a little thievery between poems. We are in for hard times, Jon, any way you look at it. Even those of us who are not giants. But it is harder for the giants. Their bones are the same as ours but they have strained and made the leap. Then there’s a lot of pap and shit: people who write drivelly little poems while maintaining a time-clock, children, new-car, new-home decency. They’ll make with the poem as long as nothing else is lost. It won’t work. Man can’t divide his impulses and expect to have power down every corridor. Now, the original Beats, as much as they were knocked, had the Idea. But they were flanked and overwhelmed by fakes, guys with nicely clipped beards, lonely-hearts looking for free ass, limelighters, rhyming poets, homosexuals, bums, sightseers—the same thing that killed the Village. Art can’t operate in Crowds. Art does not belong at parties, nor does it belong at Inauguration Speeches. It belongs sitting across from Khrushchev but only if it drinks a beer with the man and talks anything but politics…. and there are so many good beginnings. A strong young talent makes it. Then can’t stand light. This is nothing but the plain old-fashioned fathead and shows that the Artist was not ready in the first place. The days speak; the years tell; the centuries throw out the garbage.
God oh mighty, another lecture. Is this a sign of old age? Let me tell you that by saying these things to myself, and to you, I protect myself from rot. I’ve seen so much rot. And I may be rotting myself and may not know it. It’s just like when someone else is sleeping with your wife: you are the last to find out, or you never find out. Such is the soul. We are tested when we lace our shoes, or in the manner in which we scratch our back. [* * *]
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The following is from the letter accepting the “Outsider of the Year” Award that Bukowski sent for publication.
[To Jon Webb]
[ca. October 1, 1962]
[* * *] I have always been pretty much outside it all, and I don’t mean just the art I try to send down through my typewriter, although there it appears I stand outside the gate also. It appears from many rejections that I do not write poetry at all. Or as a dear friend told me the other day: “You do not understand the true meaning of poetry. You are not lyrical. You do not sing! You write bar talk. The type of thing you write you can hear in any bar on any day.”
I have always been one of those people who do everything wrong. This is essentially because I am not involved in the march.
Nothing is quite real to me. Streetcars. bombs. bugs. women. lightglobes. areas of grass. All unreal. I am outside. Death which is true enough, even this appears unreal. Not so long ago I was in the charity ward of a hospital in one of our greater cities. This is wording it badly: the whole god damned hospital was a charity ward, a place to crawl around in, a kind of purgatory on earth where the dying are allowed to lay in the stink of their sheets for days and the appearance of a nurse is redemption and the appearance of a doctor is like God Himself. All this is pretty much outside. They do keep the men and the women in separate wards. This is about all the individuality, all the identity we were allowed to retain: what’s left of the gender. [* * *]
* * *
[To Ann Bauman]
October 8, 1962
[* * *] I have taken a 30 day leave of absence (without pay) from my post office job. The job was driving me mad (if you’ll allow a platitude), but I find this time to drink and gamble—think—also leads to madness.
I was 42 on August 16th. That I have lived this long is a true miracle. I cannot hope for many more days. They will catch me. They will get me in their bloody net and I will have done.
I wish Sacramento were around the corner. I am usually—in spite of all doubt and razors and grief—fairly strong, but tonight I would have liked to talk to you. This letter then will have to do—and perhaps tomorrow—t & t & tomorrow—I will be more the hard steel German-Polack who bats out the sounds of living from the top of a beercan.
* * *
Photographs were needed for the Outsider feature.
[To Jon Webb]
[?October 15, 1962]
Well, I have been shot. It’s all over.
J. phoned and I told him I needed to be shot and J. is a great contact man and he came up with a brother-in-law, one John Stevens who works in a factory and shoots on the side, so over they came from Pasadena, J. and Stevens and J.’s wife and some other young man (I never did quite get where he fit), and they dragged the stuff in, and somebody said, “This guy doesn’t even look like a writer,” which is something I have heard before and before and before. Such as, “You wouldn’t think he was the guy who wrote those poems…” Or, “I don’t know, I expected, I expected well, more fire out of you.” People have these ideas of what a writer should be, and this is set up both by the movies and by the writers themselves. We can’t deny that such people as D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas and so forth had a scabbard of personality that cut down into people. I say or do nothing brilliant. The most brilliant thing I do is to get drunk—which any fool can do. If there is any dramatics in me, it must wait on the Art Form. If there is any ham in me it must wait on the Art Form. If there is any D. H. Lawrence in me it must wait on the A.F. I am pretty much tired and when it comes to playing writer, somebody else will have to do it.
Anyhow, they set the thing up and I got out the beer and J. and his wife talked to me, trying to make me forget the camera, but I’d be a fool to forget the camera, my mind is not that bad. If there were a snake in the room I would not forget the snake in the room. And flick, flick, you could hear the thing going. It is not essentially a happy mood and I kept thinking, this has nothing to do with the poem, this is how men die. Kennedy might phone me any day now and ask me to do a foreword to a campaign speech or something, and I will have to tell him what Frost did not. So flick, flick, more beer, another chair, another shirt, another cigarette, J.’s wife laughing, enjoying it all, like watching a bear poked with a cigarette. Then they stuck me behind the typer and asked me to type and I wrote: “It is only when I read of suicides that I feel happy at all. To know that there are other votes in that direction.” Flick, flick, there was plenty of beer and plenty of cigarettes and evidently plenty of film. The thing finally ended and I went into the can to piss and then I found we had probabl
y messed up everything. In the beginning, I had scratched the top of my head and here was this floater of hair sticking up on top of my head like a coxcomb or whatever. Everything ruined. Why didn’t they tell me? I came out and told them I had a flag on my head but they intended to ignore it. The camera won’t.
I got some more beer and we stopped off at J.’s, and here more trouble. I went into J.’s can and when I flushed the thing it ran over and out into the hall. He’s been having trouble with the thing and his landlady can’t seem to get it fixed and this set J. off. He has the true writer’s temperament and he ran down the stairs to fix his teeth in the landlady. I guess he was embarrassed about the toilet (I was too), and maybe the only way sensitive people can override embarrassment is to howl. I do not. When something bad happens I say nothing. What’s wrong with me there, I do not know. Anyhow, J. got his teeth in the landlady and a scene spouted up. She came up the stairs crying and had this mop and mopped the floor, and it was funny in a tragic way: here she was with the mop, weeping, poet J. standing over her saying, “Now, Mrs. M., I think you get simply too emotional over these things!” Anyhow, she went weeping down the steps, and J. came in and paced up and down cursing the toilet. He said he liked the view. You can see the whole horrible city of Los Angeles. J. likes to look at it. But he’s new in town. I’ve seen the welts of L.A. too long. I never go to the window. Not to look out at the city. To look at a bird maybe, all right. Anyhow, I guess you can’t blame him on the can: when a man wants to piss (or worse) you can’t piss in a view. Anyhow, we had another beer and left. I drove Stevens and his friend back to Pasadena, a city I am not too familiar with. My night was not over. When I left them out they said, “You see that blue light down there?” I told them I saw that blue light down there. They said, friend, when you get there, turn right. You’ll hit the freeway in about 2 or 3 miles. Well, I never did find the freeway. Maybe it was because I was too busy looking for a liquor store. It was about one thirty a.m. and they close at 2. But in Pasadena they close about 10 p.m. My old man said 30 years ago, “Pasadena is a one-horse town.” It was one of the few times he was on beam. And it still goes today.
To make it worse I got lost. I drove and drove and drove. And everything was closed. Gas stations, everything. Cafes, everything. On the largest boulevards there was not a single person on the streets. Just signal lights, street corners, and no direction signs and if there were direction signs they only said Arcadia and I had no idea where Arcadia was. I kept driving almost under a sense of panic. I get into these things time and time again. I got to thinking of Kafka, how he wrote about going into these buildings, one room after another, being shuffled and buffoned [sic] about, nothing making any sense. I am sure if Kafka had been driving with me this night he would have had another novel. Panic, sure, all you want is a bed and a cool beer and here you are driving in a peopleless world of smooth and efficient streets that only lead you further and further away and you can’t stop because this would then be real panic, you understand? I kept driving, and then it became really nightmare. I ended up in the hills! A small road going up into the hills and over one of the hills I saw a thing that looked like a Chinese temple. Jesus Christ, Jon, I was in Tibet! And sure enough, halfway through the hills here was this kind of Chinese village-inn type of thing, but no people, just these Chinese signs, and I began to feel as if I were going mad and I swung around the village driveway and shot back down out of the hills the way I came.
I must have driven an hour more, seeing no one, getting nowhere, backtracking, turning, going North, South, East, West. Then I saw a human being. He had one of these gas trucks and was running gas into a gas station. I asked him, “How do I get to L.A.?” “Whereabouts you want to get in L.A.?” he asked. “I don’t care where,” I told him, “just show me the city hall.” “Well, buddy,” he said, “you are going in the wrong direction. Just turn around and follow this street straight on in.” That simple.
But going back, I got found, I recognized some of the streets leading to Santa Anita racetrack and I was on my own route back home. I can get you to any racetrack from California to Mexico but don’t ask me where anything else is at.
I got to my sweet room, full of empty beer-cans and bottles and I went to the refrigerator. Luck. There sat one chilled and lovely glass bottle of Miller’s. I drank that and went to bed.
And that was the night of the photos. I hope something comes out of it because I don’t think I can go through with it again. Not this year, anyhow. I mean, other people can do these things easily. Me, I’m a frog on a dissection table. I guess that’s why I write. They keep cutting me open. It’s nothing profound, but so odd. And all these photos with this hunk of hair standing up on my head. I can’t even walk across a room with success. This morning I stepped on a can opener that was on the floor. No shoes on, of course. Another minor tragedy. Yet the spirit is not suicidal. I tend to linger just to see how many more odd turns the gods can throw on me. I suppose somebody will tell me I need the couch. Well, we all need the couch. Don’t tell me that with our Berlin walls and our stockpiles that our part of the universe is healthy and makes sense. If I need the couch they had better start building a lot of couches. I won’t deny that I might be somewhat off, don’t get me wrong But if you are going to try to show me a leader or a way out, I am going to ask a lot of questions.
Anyhow Stevens is supposed to phone me about the pictures. He has them in Pasadena and is going to put them into the soup. And I guess I am supposed to—ha, ah ha, ha, ha!!!—drive over and pick them up!
I will airmail them if I ever get to Pasadena and back again, and if you use any of them, I do wish you would give him a line: Photo or photos by John Stevens. Something like that.
Well, Jon, that’s how it went. I tried. Only wish my hair had been combed. Do you figure this ever happened to Hem or Willie the Faulk? I guess not. Going out to mail this now, get some beer and some sleep. To hell with the world’s series. I couldn’t sleep last night—steaming about the cockscomb.
* * *
[To Jon Webb]
Wednesday [?October 17, 1962]
[* * *] Tired today, from horses and other things, but hope to have a prof. photog up here tomorrow or Friday, and chances are he’ll have a better camera and know-how. That is, if I don’t go mad, or just don’t fall through the floorboards. This picture-taking has some semblance of horror in it to me. I go through the same thing whenever I get a haircut. And sometimes the bastards will spin you in the chair and show you yourself in the mirror. God. [* * *]
…I have all these letters Corrington has sent me, and I began to worry a while back when I was not feeling so good mentally and physically. I might have to get them off my hands and may ship them back through you and have Bill pick them up when he sees you. There is kind of an ivory-carved quality to most of these letters and they are much better than his poems. In the poem he still sometimes has this E.E. thing mixed with Auden plus a kind of hysterical abstract and fancy glibness. When the letters catch up to the poems (and I think they will)—I mean when the letters become the poems—they can’t catch them, being past them, Corrington will be a poet to listen to. He’s getting better now, which is much better than laying still. His politics and outlook a little too far right of center but this is the Southern Aristocrat somewhat, and doesn’t mean he lacks heart. Anyhow, if some day you get a pack of Corrington letters, I know you are busy, but flip through a few and hold the pack for Willie. They make the Miller letters look like burnt apple pie. [* * *]
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[To Ann Bauman]
[November 22, 1962]
[* * *] No, I am not feeling better. I need an operation for one of my maladies but don’t know if I have either the guts or the time for it. I never get splendid clean diseases that you can talk about over a cup of tea, like heart attack, stroke, amnesia, etc., but instead, ulcers and hemorrhages, madness, boils, ingrown toenails, rotten teeth, and now hemorrhoids, which, my dear, is a malady of the ass. [* * *]
> It is more than difficult for me to survive. My present job has me by the throat and I don’t know how much more I can take. I have no special trade and am getting old. It will all end somewhere down the line: an old dirty demolished German pig, sitting on a doorstep looking in the sand for a razor.
Life is for achievement? Even Hegel’s achievements are paling. See how we waste? Life is avoidance of pain until death. Life is finding that love between 2 people only goes one way. One is always the master, the other the slave. Life is Tuesday afternoon in a cage. I do not like to talk about life. It gets silly. It sounds silly. Death is the master. [* * *]
* * *
[To Jon Webb]
November 25, 1962
[* * *] Very little new out here. Just difficult to believe you are working on this Outsider of Year thing about me. I keep thinking of a certain paper shack I ended up once in in Atlanta without light, heat, food, typewriter or drink. A most cold, most dark end. Yow. I have slept on park benches in the warm parts of the country and there seemed air and light and easiness, but somehow this was so closed and finished. My ass was really in the trap, the first gilded shape of hell reaching out. I did have a pencil and I sat there in the dark daytime ice writing things on the edges, the margins of old newspapers that I found on the floor. How I got out of there I don’t remember, but I did and I left the writing there. It was quite mad, most of it, I guess. Now I have 3 collections of poetry, have been photographed by imbeciles, and you are giving me the honor and light of the O. of Y. award, almost as if much of my misery had been recorded right along as it happened. So many of our writers now have teaching positions, they teach the thing they do, and it’s no wonder the writing has no lumps, no rawness. But in spite of this, I am sure that right now there is some poor bastard freezing-starving somewhere, writing sonnets on toilet paper. Not all of us can go through the college degree teaching bit. We cannot jump through the hoops; no wiseness in practical sense of survival. If an English teacher can write, good enough for me. You don’t have to be thrown into half a hundred drunk tanks to be shaken into or out of life. But there is something about their lives that is too safe, too pat. Their intrigues of the day are political, bitchy and petty, feminine. Very few of them come to class drunk. They know what they are doing, even when they sit down to a typewriter. Corrington seems to have escaped much of this but I keep thinking they will get him. [* * *]