Screams From the Balcony (5 page)

[To Jon Webb]

September 4, 1962

Regarding the death of my woman last Jan. 22, there is not much to say except I will never be the same again. I might attempt to write it sometimes but it is still too close, may always be too close. But that time in the charity ward years ago a little Mexican girl who changed the sheets told me that she was going to shack up with me as soon as I got well, and I began feeling better right away. I had one visitor: a drunken woman, red and puffy-faced, a bedmate of the past who reeled against the bed a few times, said nothing and walked out. Six days later I was driving a truck, lifting 50-lb packages and wondering if the blood would come again. A couple of days later I had the first drink, the one they said would kill me. A week or so later I got a typewriter, and after a ten-year blank, after selling to
Story
& others, I found my fingers making the poem. Or rather the bar-talk. The non-lyrical, non-singing thing. The rejects came quickly enough. But they made no indentation, for I felt in each line as if I were talking the thing out. Not for them, but for myself. Now I can read very little other poetry or very little other anything. Anyway, the drunk lady who reeled against my bed, I buried her last Jan. 22. And I never did see my little Mexican girl. I saw others, but somehow she would have been right. Today, I am alone, almost outside all of them: the buttocks, the breasts, the clean live dresses like unused and new dishtowels on the rack. But don’t get me wrong—I’m still 6 feet tall with 200 lbs. of ableness, but I was able best with the one that’s gone.

 

Bukowski’s “WW 2” appeared in
Mica
7 (November 1962). Previously, three poems were published in
Mica
5 (Winter 1962). The magazine was edited by Helmut Bonheim and Raymond Federman from Santa Barbara
.

 

[To Helmut Bonheim]

September 28, [1962]

Thanks the stamps, and good you like “WW 2” which is more factual than inventive, but what the fuck, you’ve got to give me credit for putting it down anyhow because it’s what to know what to leave out that makes me different from the garage mechanic, if we are too much different. There is another story I have written—about a man who murders a blanket. Sent it to
Evergreen
, 6 months now, no response. Wrote stamped, self-add. thing. No response. I don’t keep carbons. I suppose I’ll see it in print some day under the name of Francios Marcios or Francis Francis or F. Villon. I keep getting reamed this way. But it is good for me. It reminds me that the world is pretty shitty. and this keeps me deftly abdulah and stasher of cannons. Anyhow, on “WW 2,” change and shift lines at your will…to fit page or to help readability;—although I personally garbled it a little, voices and ideas running together—to throw nails.

I’ll send you more poems since you ask for them, but haven’t written any, and they don’t come back. I don’t mean they are accepted; I mean the swine simply do not return them; they sit on them like pillows, friend. aye.

This is garbage talk.

I have come through a green and red war these last 2 month. My side lost but I am still more alive than ever, in a sense. We have to pass through these things, again, again—arguing with a knife blade, a bottle, weeping like a frigging cunt in menopause, afraid to step out a door…afraid of birds, fleas, mice…encircled by a clock, a typewriter, a half-open closet door full of ghouls, killers, horrors like sea-bottoms. And then it ends. You are calm again. As calm as…a garage mechanic. I think of a D. H. Lawrence title:
Look We Have Come Through
.

Anyhow, I’ll try you with some poems, although I don’t know if they can be like the
Mica
things. They will just have to be what they are…If you read somewhere that I cursed editors and other critters, you prob. read correctly. I deal pretty much alone and don’t care for ties. Tits, yes. Ties, no. I never wear ties. Creation and flow are the factors. Survival is not too important to me, either in any sense of immortality or in any sense of today—paying the rent, eating a sandwich, dreaming of a good fuck etc. etc. Although I get pretty scared sometimes when the world tries to kill me. Not the death-part, for as Socrates explained, this cannot be too bad. It is the getting there. The eyes. The flies. the ties. rubber tires. dead fish. fat landladies. buttons falling off shirt. dirty laundry. garage mechanics….

savannah and eggplant

 

The Webbs were preparing the third issue of their magazine
, The Outsider,
which would be devoted mainly to Bukowski, whom Webb proclaimed recipient of a special award as “Outsider of the Year.” The issue would include tributes to Bukowski as well as photographs of him and poems and letters by him. It was to be followed by the publication of a “Loujon Press Award Book” collecting Bukowski’s poetry
.

 

[To Jon Webb]

September 28, [1962]

[* * *] I have been doing some thinking. I would like to write you another letter of acceptance re the
OUTSIDER OF YEAR
62 thing, and I will anyhow, and it should be arriving in a day or 2 [* * *]

As per writing more letters, as you know, this can’t be done just like that any more than a poem can; in fact, a letter is tougher because the letter mood seems to fall less upon me than the poem thing. Yet I think the letter is an important form. You can touch about everything as you run around. It lets you out of the straightjacket of pure Art, and you’ve
got
to get out once in a while. Of course, I don’t restrict myself as much in the poem as most do, but I have made this my business, this freedom with the word and idea, because…to be perfectly corny…I know I’ll only be around once and I want to make it easy on myself. [* * *]

[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. [* * *]

 

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 probably 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.