Screams From the Balcony (11 page)

 

The review mentioned here is not listed in Dorbin’s bibliography
.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

June 24, 1963

A little good news. Yesterday, Sunday, in the
Los Angeles Times
book review section, we,
LOUJON PRESS
and Buk and
It Catches
was mentioned by Jack Hirschman. Some bit about my style of writing (according to Hirschman); that the book was on the press, price of book and address of
LOUJON PRESS
given. Also several other books reviewed and a kind of eulogy for Creeley by Hirschman. Anyhow, we have been mentioned, and maybe a few sales because of it? It might pay to send Hirschman a review copy when the book comes out? [* * *]

The U. gave Corrington a grand ($1,000) to lay around and write so he wouldn’t have to teach Summer School. Well, this is o.k. if you can work it. Also, I think, a $2,500 advance on his novel. He’s now thinking about going to Europe. I guess they all do that. They start running around the world. (See Ginsberg, Corso, Kaja, Burroughs, etc., etc.) I don’t know quite what it means, but I’d rather side with Faulkner who g.d. figured there was more than enough just around his doorstep. This culture hunt smacks too much of a Cadillac sort of acquisition.

All right, hang in tough.

 

Corrington published “Charles Bukowski and the Savage Surfaces” in
Northwest Review
for fall 1963
.

 

[To John William Corrington]

[June 1963]

Don’t worry yourself shitty on the
Northwest Review
article, I understand, and I hold to the savage side with the honor of my teeth. I know damn well I don’t wax the golden poetic and I don’t try to because I believe it to be essentially outside of life—like lace gloves for a coal-stoker. On the other hand, I don’t believe in being tough because life is tough. I like my sunlight and beer and cigars and occasional pussy just like any matador or prelim boy, but there’s still room for a good symphony written in 1700 or 1800 or the disgust-strike of sadness at seeing a cat crushed flat by wheels upon asphalt. There’s room for things, and I once tried to straighten these things into
REASON
by reading Plato and Schope and F.N., Hegel, the whole host of boys, but I only found that they were tilting silver water, getting lost in it, and as long as I was getting lost I figured it might as well be in a cheap bar where I could listen to sounds that were not being written, and if I found love it was some other old dog’s bone. Because if the answer isn’t at the top, it isn’t at the middle, and you’ll find just as much at the bottom which was where I was at anyhow. It’s not so much savage as it is discarding the whole facade of knowledge and education and looking as directly as you can into your own sun. You can get blinded this way but at least a lot of it is your own doing. Like suicide or betting the 9 horse. The next cold drink is God, and the next cigarette isn’t cancer; it’s the next one after, the one you haven’t gotten to. And you realize all along that you are not getting very near anything, but if it’s not the razor, you toddle along like a kid shitting in its pants, and the game is corncobs and dollars and buttons and an occasional Easter candle. [* * *]

I get touches and hints of the book from Jon, and this man and his wife weave things like a golden dream, touching it, tasting it, adding, subtracting, loving, o loving, they touch again and again the thing they are working with, it takes design, it takes them, they heave to it like good steak or a visitation by the angels; these people are blessed beyond blessedness, and my unholy mad luck has made this work of mine fall into their hands and I look through the curtains, and the cars on the street and the people and the sidewalks have become real and carved and yet soft like pillows because these people have touched me with the wand. All my luck came at once, and it won’t last, I don’t want it to. There will be a time of looking back, and I am ready. I came out of absurdity and I will go back, back, but now now all the dogs and flowers and windows laugh with me, and it is a stirring a stirring like an approaching army marching or a butterfly coming out of the cocoon. [* * *]

I await the
K. Review
, and your probable 18th century sonnet. This is all right. The
K. Review
is good fat book, stirs with a kind of dusty knowledge and unreality, but some of the critical articles hold little strokes of lightning, the taste and stir of the good long word mixed with the near-slang. This beholds one in an amusing sort of way. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

[mid-June, 1963]

if you come to LA someday I hope you come to see me, part of that time anyhow. The only problem being that I work about half the weekends and the other I don’t. If you come by bus, would be glad to meet you at bus stop, or drive you anywhere around town you want to go, or if you don’t want to go anywhere we can have a beer at my place and make dull and polite conversation. However, I know that your idea is only half-resolved, a thought in between many other thoughts while things are going on, and that it prob. will not be followed through.

I am signing pages for the book, a huge stack of purple pages arrived in a box with instructions and this Sunday I will quietly drink beer and smoke and listen to my radio and look out the window and sign the pages.

Webb sent me a dummy copy of the book and it is a real thing of beauty—the paper, the type, the cover etc. etc. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

July 1, 1963

[* * *] If you are serious about a 2nd book to follow
Outsider
#4, I can say no more than that the miracles are still coming, the honor laid out like all the horses dancing in my dreams. Should you people change your minds—because of circumstances or conditions later, that will be o.k. too. I’ve got to go with you.
YOU HAVE EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS TO PUBLISH THE NEXT BOOK AFTER
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
[
dated and signed
].

This is real nice to say—as if I were giving
you
a break or something, after you break your backs to make me known! Don’t worry about a notary: my word is good, and when my word is no longer any good then my poetry won’t be either. I’m glad to go with you, much more than glad; you are my kind of people. Not a bunch of phoney literary bullshit or slick-assed business people, but people in love with their work and their lives, asking nothing but enough to continue to stay alive in order to continue to do the thing.

Your danger after putting me out in such fine style in
It Catches
would not be from the little chapbook operators but from the big boys, the bigger publishers, who might think I would go. But they can go to hell. I’m with you, and same arrangements with 2nd book, no royalties, but would like some copies. I’m afraid, tho, we will never come up with such a good title again, but meanwhile I will be thinking, gently thinking of one, as I go in and out of bars or watch them run. [* * *]

I don’t write letters…too much…anymore, because it was simply it is simply a time of no letters. It may change. But I get to thinking
IT IS THE ART-FORM THAT COUNTS
, and all the letter-writing in the world won’t excuse a bad poem or make it any better. Then I am still drinking, and the drinking often takes over and I don’t know quite where I am or what I am anymore. Right now this place has newspapers in it that date 3 weeks back, onion stems, beer-cans, coffeepots on the floor. This woman comes over once in a while and straightens up but then she starts in with
THE INTELLIGENT TALK
, and I let her win her precious little arguments, I hate haggle, but just the same I get a little sick with how
PROUD
people are with the mind, how they want to ram it through you like a sword, how they want to talk talk talk. Don’t they know that there is simply something nice about sitting in a room and drinking a beer and not saying much, feeling the world out there, and sitting there, sitting there, resting? [* * *]

I will send you a tape of a poetry reading of mine I made on my machine and which was broadcast over KPFK in August 1962. Of course, they deleted a lot of vulgarity, had to, so it is not quite the same thing I sent them. They asked me to come to their studios, which is like asking me to go to church with a hangover, so instead I mailed them what I had made in my room among the beer-cans, and, lo, they accepted it and played it over the air. Jack Hirschman’s wife runs the literary and drama end of KPFK. Anyhow, when the thing finally came on over the radio…at 11:15 p.m…. I was drunk and did not hear it, but somebody retaped it off the radio and I was able to hear it afterward. [* * *]

 

Bukowski had three poems in
El Corno Emplumado
no. 7 (July 1963), published in Mexico City. He had previously appeared in no. 3
.

 

[To John William Corrington]

July [22], 1963

shd. change ribbon but I am too tired—
Mutiny
editors are correct: I am a bastard: would rather kiss the king’s ass than change a ribbon.

Heard from Jon. His spirits seem high, which does me good, as I would hate him to bite into the book and get this bad taste in his mouth…. Got copy #7 of
El Corno
. They seem to be falling off from a good start. Of course, I can’t read Spanish or Mexican either, so it doesn’t help my broad-minded eye. I got to figure that what I can’t read isn’t any good. That’s how flies get fat. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

July [28], 1963

[* * *] In case you decide to send a copy of
the book
to Jack Hirschman for review for
L.A. Times
, his address is 10543 Bradbury Rd., Los Angeles, Calif. I know, I broke all rules and went there for dinner once, drunk. He thinks Creeley is God and Robert Frost ¾s God but then he teaches at a University and therefore some of this is understandable. They see the underside softside of the wing. But he may have ordered the book anyway, and we may be in trouble, but I kind of like trouble sometimes—I mean, in my rather long foreword to Sherman’s book (out July 21st, I believe), along with other ramblings, I take to task Karl Shapiro for writing a misleading introduction to Jack Hirschman’s book. Names are not mentioned but, I guess, rather obvious. And at the dinner I told Jack that the introduction was bad but he told me that the book would have never been published without it, that there was only one good poem in there. Which might have been modesty but let’s not pick at bones. This is the trouble with getting involved with literary talk; soon you are covered with slime and haggle, and creation is forgotten, So far, I have often forgotten creation because of drink or gamble or plain forget, but so far, very little shit-paddle has stopped me and I hope I remain as lucky.

When I took this woman home today she showed me a collection of the early poems of Ernie Hem. Out of the
Little Review
etc., but although most of them were not very good, they were not very bad either, and there was one poem in there…after the style of Ger. Stein and you can see how much this woman
did
affect him, which we all know but which we tend to forget after Hem and Stein are both gone and Hem more or less remains. However, these poems are encouraging to any young (or old) writer to show that something almost can come out of almost nothing. It is simply buttoning a button right and knowing how to open a door. It is easy as hell, really, it is so easy that almost nobody can do it. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

August 6, 1963

[* * *] Then there’s the bush down there, the same bush with orange blossoms forever, and the old man down there poking in his wooden mailbox. He must be a writer or a madman; he keeps looking in there as if some long-limbed thing sheathed in nylon is going to take him back to the full bright dream. I’m hungry. It’s good to be hungry when you can afford to eat. Right now, I can afford. I like crab. You can get a big crab down at one of the stores for around 80 cents and it takes you all day to eat him and you don’t feel very sorry for the crab. That makes it nice. Although they say they boil them alive? But they boil me every time I walk out the door. Swosh. sure. I’m lucky to have a rented door to walk out of. haven’t read a book in ten years or seen a movie in fifteen and don’t give a damn. Airplanes and sirens now. Do you think it is going to rain this Winter? I’ve got to throw out the cans again. There’s the mailman. Hot damn, look at the ol’ man run!! [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

[August 14, 1963]

[* * *] I was jailed for common drunk 6 a.m. Monday morning, bailed out 8 p.m. Monday night. went to court this afternoon (Wednesday). judge gave me choice 3 days vs. $30. I figure easier to lose money than mind.

…I must be more careful. I am all right if I drink where I live. Good manager here, good people. But when I go out on the street,
BANG
.

Anyhow, I am alive yet. Maybe.

I do not even feel depressed. It is all so very odd. my god, what they’ll do to a man, over and over again, for nothing.

I never understood society. I understand that it works somehow and that it functions as a reality and that its realities are necessary to keep us from worse realities. But all I sense are that there are plenty of police and jails and judges and laws and that what is meant to protect me is breaking me down. I know that I am not much good in the network and the miracle is that I have remained around this long.