Absence of the Hero Read online

  “Who the hell isn’t?” the ex-con stood up. “We’re all that way, ain’t we, baby?” He stood there swaying, looking down at the scrubwoman. “Ain’t we, baby? Huh? Ain’t we?”

  “Look, Lou, these boys are talking about literature. Can’t you be decent?” the scrubwoman asked.

  “This Lawrence guy’s got nothing on me! I know why he wanted to go to this island with all those people and I know why those people wouldn’t go! Because they were crazy-afraid of this Lawrence, that’s why! They could see it in his eyes, it showed all over him! . . . Wanted to take a bunch of broads and colonize! COLONIZE! Just because this guy shot down 80 airplanes, it doesn’t put him in the clear!”

  “No, no, Lou,” I said, “that wasn’t Lawrence. That was Baron Manfred Von Richthofen.”

  “Well, he was probably worse than Lawrence! Each time he shot down a plane he probably got his—”

  “You mean,” I interrupted Lou, “each victory represented a Sexual Symbol?”

  “You know what I mean!” he snarled.

  “Well, it’s been a nice evening folks,” I said, “and I bid you all a fond farewell.”

  “Ya mean we gotta go?” the ex-con asked.

  “That’s about the content of it,” I replied.

  “Well, to hell with that fish! I’m goin’ down to the bar and finish it off right! Comin’, doll baby?” he leered at the scrubwoman.

  “No, thank you, Louis.”

  “O.K., you old bag!”

  The door slammed.

  “Maybe it was Homer,” I said.

  “Homer what?” from Baldy.

  “Homer who was the greatest.”

  “See you tomorrow night, Hank?”

  “Sure, Baldy.”

  “How about Confucius?”

  “That’s good. He was right in there, all right. . . .”

  “Just another spot, my dear boy,” the scrubwoman said.

  “All right, Helen.”

  “You know you have the most lovely hands, like a violinist.”

  “It’s nothing. It’s really nothing at all.”

  “You been to college, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but college can never make a man intelligent. It can only educate him.”

  “Do you write stories and poetry and stuff?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Ya had anything printed?”

  “Not yet, Helen. I’m still developing, you see.”

  “Develop’ng?”

  “Yeah. You see, a writer’s got to go through a period of development.”

  “Ya mean, ya gotta shoot down airplanes or something first?”

  “Not exactly. But it helps a hell of a lot.”

  “Will you write a story about me, sometime?”

  “Maybe. Maybe I will.”

  “You see, I was born in Pittsburgh, PA. My father was a doctor but he drank too much and they took away his license—”

  The next morning as I turned over in bed, my freedom of movement was blocked by a very substantial mass of humanity: the scrubwoman.

  “Good mornin’, honey boy!”

  “Oh . . . hello, Helen.”

  “Ya sure had a load-on, Hanky. The minute I began tellin’ you my life story, you began pourin’ it down left and right.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember, honey boy?”

  I leaped out of bed and began donning my clothing.

  “Where ya goin’, honey boy?”

  “Down to a bar. Down to some bar somewhere.”

  “Ya comin’ back, honey boy?”

  “Not for three or four days, at least.”

  I moved toward the door with some acceleration, opened it, and then—

  “Ya know somethin’, honey boy?”

  “What?”

  “Ya know who the greatest writer is?”

  “I said ‘Homer’ but I really haven’t given it much thought.”

  “You are, honey boy, and ya don’t need any more development! I never met this Homer guy, but I know he can’t hold a candle ta YOU, honey boy!”

  I closed the door and went bar-ward to seek the solace of my ex-con friend. He could have it: Homer and Helen, Helen and Homer, and all the development it implied. With D.H. Lawrence thrown in.

  Manifesto: A Call for Our Own Critics

  The insurgency of criticism from a nosography on poetics to a censorious dictum by certain university groups who write the laws of poetry, and spawn, with sumptuous grace and style, their own puppeteers—these, and their half-brethren and their purlieu, form a most deadly and snobbish poetic fixation. They create, record, and argue their own history, charmed with the largesse of their chosen circumference.

  What the university critics have lost in pulling down the blinds around their little ivy world they have gained in direction and prestige. To the remainder of us, the unwashed, the loiterers in pool halls and back alleys, there remains a frustrated and discordant yammering. In order to inculcate a more heuristic force, perhaps a manifesto, a gesture . . . a gestation . . . is necessary. It is difficult for a single poet to stand against the university coterie. Perhaps we too must invent our own history and choose our own gods if our portion of American literature is to receive a hearing on some tomorrow.

  Our writers should acquaint themselves with the claustral intent and exorcises of the campus groups—and let us be fair here: many of our imprint are not only pretty well unwashed but rather damn shoddily read as well (damn shoddily read as readers and damn shoddily read as writers). Our saving factors are our lack of monstrous clannishness and a more hybrid emergence. Yet this eminence should be both shaped and amorphous, with its own critics guide-wiring and giving form and numerical integration, cultural insertion, to our writers. This does not mean confirmation or confinement but a transelementation of mixed voices into a more visible shape. The fresh air of a new culture, the magnetism and meaning and hope, the exactness of our energies—these things haven’t, in any sense, been harnessed or realized. And until they are . . . five or six old men, craggy and steatopygous in university chairs, will be the hierophants of our poetic universe.

  Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell

  Dear John Bryan:

  . . . Look, on the war-thing, I can give you nothing in poem form since I just wrote something about how I ducked the shells (WW2) for another magazine and rolled off with banana leaf and used car oil off a duck’s back, and now, after this, my pecker hangs limp. If you keep poeming about the same thing and in the same way, you become the same thing and the same way, which is—nothing.

  I can bullshit you a little about the subject, though. (There’s nothing like the oscillation of the balls in quiet complication.) How do you begin? I imagine it hurts like hell to be torn to pieces and die for something different . . . every century, every 50 years, every 20 years. I read someplace where Man will eventually be replaced by robots he builds that will be more intelligent than he. It about figures: all they’ve got to do is stay out of the rain and the lightning and replace the parts as they wear . . . they don’t have to worry about toothache or hemorrhoids, or fucking. They’ll just go on walking around the place looking for things to do, and there won’t be much to do because they won’t have to worry about eating and they won’t be stupid enough to pay rent, and if they make the drunktank, they’ll be smart enough to enjoy it. But I wonder if these babies, these unlamentable babies who will not know pain, pity, tenderness, the meaning of a lover walking away and into the arms of another, I wonder if these babies will be intelligent enough to avoid war? I’d like to think so—that these tin shadows of our past could sweep out the last disease. But I don’t know why—I’ve got pictures of these grappling masses of tin . . . crushed electric eyes . . . beautiful silver brains spread amongst their copper flowers. . . . Christ, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?

  Now, I’ll start right off and try and tell you why I have this vision and why it is so hard to stop war. This mainly being the rusty
side of the coin, the portico of recant, and it works badly, always has, because it is hard as hell to get emotional about peace, or religious about it, or sexual about it, or wave it around on the end of a flag, or whatever. You furnish the words; I am tired. I mean, padre, peace is as propitiatory as a Sunday bell. They don’t write national anthems about peace and girls don’t strip in front of you for peace, and you don’t see countries and waters and hills and sunsets and whores that you never would have seen, and you don’t get drunk in some tongue that is a town you do not speak and pinch the mayor’s wife because you’ve got nothing to lose. War even makes art. Without war, Hemingway would have been a wine-drinking pink-eyed picador for a fat and farting matador. War gave him the golden gate to point up some fairytale about guts for the cockeyed bats of the occident. Salique seems peace. Peace, baby, is hard sell. Why, why, why, why, hell, why???? Adjust your jock, and I’ll tell you. People don’t know what peace is because people (most people) have never had peace in times of so-called peace. Figure it yourself. Take a kid, a child. As soon as he gets so he can walk around pretty good, they shove him to a school while his brain is still soft and they get to him—they tell him that his country is the country. If he lives in Mexico, Mexico is the country. The beans are hard to take, but better things are coming. If he lives in Brazil, O.K., Brazil, what the hell ya think they’re going to tell him: Bermuda? They need their jobs. Germany equals Germany. Russia means Russia. Despite world ideology . . . Russia means to be the head, the rest the legs. . . . Just as we mean, through monetary control of other national industries. . . . We give them their freedom by letting them work for us. But let’s let go of this for awhile. Let’s get back to the punk kid. The nail we’re driving home that will end up in a juice joint slavering into a mirror wondering where he went. Next, the church grabs his soft little ass and tells him about The Man Above. Friend, this is a pretty frightening thing. Most of us have to go with it . . . strictly on under-the-table percentages . . . but on top of the table we spread our cards and call it faith. Now, then, this child, this kid, baby, small chunk of bologna is already spun out into the open plateau where they’ve got him dizzy, hardly a chance . . . he’s, frankly, out of the peace area altogether: his loyalty is sanctioned and his spirit is set along the rails where it is supposed to go. (You can shoot a barracuda between the eyes and it won’t go to hell because it doesn’t know where or what hell is. On the other hand, we’ve fixed ourselves fine. Finely. Fuck it.)

  I’m trying to tell you while I am laying here in bed at 3:55 A.M. in the morning, writing this in pencil in an Empire Wire-Glo notebook with a green cover and lined paper (price 49¢)—out of cigarettes and lighting short butts out of a teacupful on the old chair near the bed, I am trying to tell you that it is difficult to canonize and adore the pity of no-blood; I am trying to tell you why peace is so hard to sell, this mainly being because so very very very few so few so few dear christmice and rabbits running in moonlight know what peace is!!

  Let’s get back, if you’re not asleep, to our bastard kid. They teach the kid math. They tell him Washington crossed the Delaware. A fine thing, I’m sure. They have separate toilets for boys and girls. They hit his head with Brahms, Schubert, and that great steel fist Beethoven while he’s too small to seize it, and he remembers this, these large punches against his unprotected frame and he later goes to jazz in rebellion. It is easier to go to jazz in rebellion than it is to go to another country or another god. It’s safer, it’s cheaper, and there’s hardly any risk at all. They know this; it’s planned; they let them have the jazz. If they gave our bastard kid jazz first, he’d go to Beethoven later and then they’d have a mess on their hands, a danger. Baby, they know what they’re doing. There has been no such thing as peace. Now they let him out on a football field and tell him to knock somebody down. They teach him some more crap to narrow him down a niche and then rush him off to work—which is not peace either. They give him a couple of hours in which to sleep, eat, buy things, and mainly time to fuck, make more babies to keep the thing going, and then back to work.

  The mind has never been given a chance. You ask the average man, “Do you want war or peace?” and he’ll tell you, “I want peace, of course. War is stupid.”

  He says he wants peace but he doesn’t know what peace is. He’s never had it.

  He’s bred for war, he’s shucked into it, he’s shacked with it like a golden-legged whore who keeps reaching into his back pocket when his ass is to her face. O, my, he’ll go passionate for war, he’ll scream for war!! but he won’t fall in love with peace because he’s never had it from the moment he started wobbling on his tiny man-legs. It’s a christ-awful fishbowl pity and makes me so angry sometimes that I just smash my whiskeyglassfuls against the walls instead of drinking them; I often curse Man and his scab-blindness, his smallness, his monkey-sucking away of Everything. . . . But I’m wrong. What chance has the poor fuck?? And who am I to take his measure? O, demolished and demon-drained idiot, he argues with his old lady who gets a roll of fat around her gut and wears those flat-heeled shoes after the second kid. He gets fired 2 or 3 or 6 times, he gets scared. He drives with air in his brain and gets in a couple of automobile accidents. He’s taxed until his balls ache. No matter how much money he makes, he never has any money. He can never breathe free from day to day. Always a herd of horns ready to slash him into some back alley where they sit and split a wine bottle, unless he talks fast and fancy. Is this peace? Is he supposed to get excited about this? Then, sick with thin light and lying, he comes home early one night and finds his wife (rolls of fat and all) in bed with the gas-meter man . . . peace?—he’s never had it. He’d been geared like a bull to ram into somebody or something or somewhere from the start.

  What’s the answer? Well, I only know I am out of jail right now (which is good, and selfish); but not being a master of phrenology or even a master of the pooltable as is one of my dear friends out of the South who writes poetry like an exalted bull examining fire, the only answer is a breakdown of our normal educational concepts of upbringing into a vaster plane that excludes less and gives more choice . . . of gods, leaders, countries . . . music, loves, sports, hilarity, liquors, liqueurs, lectures . . . what I mean is the sea washing down to our ankles and with us . . . with time . . . to think of other things . . . beside fast bread, easy pussy, acquisition, ;;;;I think it’s too late for that . . . it’s almost too late for this . . . maybe this H. Bomb is big enough to scare the shit out of us, all of us, and may we realize that things like honor and country don’t mean anything—dark hymns in an empty chapel, and that we are letting the tin men in, the tin men of our minds, the tin men of a possible future, if we keep letting go to this war-thing as we have been trained to do.

  It’s time we learned to walk and talk like this big thing inside us tells us to do. It’s time for better and bigger miracles and talking about them, seeing how we have been wrong for so long . . . this is a beginning, not a begging. Peace begs nothing but realization.

  going now,

  peace on you,

  Charles Bukowski

  Examining My Peers

  All right:

  The poets who are getting it done are David Pearson Etter, Irving Layton, Al Purdy, Larry Eigner, Genet.

  The Ginsberg-Corso-Burroughs circle has been swallowed by the big whale of adulation and they have never quite recovered. But, alas, we have learned that the difference between an artist and a performer is the difference between God and a necktie salesman. Yet it is difficult for most of us not to take the bait of a lifetime erection. We are given the chance of dancing easily in the lights before the fools or going back to work as a dishwasher. Unfortunately, one can learn more by washing dishes than one can by debating with James Dickey, Jack Gilbert, Nemerov, and T. Weiss at 92nd St. and Lex Ave.

  Poetry Chi, once the thumper of the land with a young Ezra as European editor, has now diminished into the bones of its reputation; you can see one in any library, safely shining, saying nothi
ng, heralding the same safe names. It is much like going to a Friday night concert: they open with the overture to La Gazza Ladra, follow with L’Après-midi d’un Faune, slug them with Beethoven’s 5th, and then send them home happy with some Water Music by good old Handel.

  And now that I’ve buried Poetry Chi, let’s move on. Another particular bone in the poetic throat is the work of Robert Creeley. I have been told by professors of English (those with “Dr.” appended to their names) that Robert Creeley is the miraculous confessor of all of our talents. Me, I have tried Creeley again and again. And it was always much like falling asleep at the beach the time I tried to read Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus. Try this for your insomnia.

  But back to R.C. Usually as I return the books to the good professors with some such acidulous remark as: “It appears very thin. Nothing here.” Or: “What the hell are they trying to sell me?” I would always get the tender kindly smile through the beard, the hand-on-shoulder bit: “Oh, come now, he’s not that bad!” Which all infers that they understand, they understand something which such a crude one as I does not. (The niceties, you know, the pure unadulterated phrasing, etc., etc.) But the bearded Dr.’s in Creeley-shadows are good souls after all: they will forgive everything but their own convictions.

  And then too—I might be a bitter old man because I somehow get the feeling that they are afraid of Creeley. Why this should be, I do not know; but perhaps it is because I am closer to washing dishes than I am to teaching in any University.

  Creeley is just one of the horrors and outcroppings of the poetry-political powerhouses: “The School.” But The Age of the Bomb has taught us more than the mushroom; it has taught us not to swallow pap. “School” is out. The days of schools are over. Thank God, or whoever is up there. It is kind of intensifying in a banal sort of way to think back to the good old days when the “Imagists” drew up their manifesto with blood-stained fingers. But most schools are invented by the critics, or by photographers from Life magazine. Or by stodgy old men teaching English in Midwestern Universities while being driven mad by the knees and thighs of 19-year-old girls who do not pull their skirts down because they’d like to “make” a B in English; and, of course, the talk about Allen Tate, Dr. Williams, Wallace Stevens, Y. Winters, and John the Crow bores them.