Screams From the Balcony (13 page)

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 19, 1963

[* * *] Some outfit in Frisco wants me to give a reading in Feb., offer of
²
/
₃
rds of house but I can’t see myself on the boards in front of the yak hyenas, lonely hearts and homos. Not yet. If I were starving, maybe so. But I am not yet starving. People keep explaining to me that I am really lonely, and this makes my ass bleed too. What they are talking about really is themselves and they figure my machinery has to be set the same way. There is nothing sweeter to me than closing the door on the world, having the walls again. Generally, I am too
TIRED
to be lonely: a hangover or bucking the horses or the job or some woman and when the time is finally given to me I like to duck under the table and hide rather than go get myself the wet nurse of the crowd. You remember the poem I wrote of the man who dug a hole in the ground and crawled down into it? And he didn’t tell the people why when they asked why, he only smiled because he knew that they wouldn’t understand, he knew that he was odd-fish out—Outsider of the year, Outsider of the world. I too have learned not to explain anymore. Let them win the word-games of the air; if I have anything to say I hope to put it into a rock with a fork. Maybe it will last through a few rains or maybe they’ll throw it into a cesspool, endurability is not so much the matter anyhow as is waste and nonsense and yak yak yak. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 27, 1963

[* * *] Wild telegram from Orlani Mahak. Perhaps she needs…friendship?…but she appears to be supporting a very young poet and thinker (I only know as David) and it so happens I like David and would also have to work around the stuff I have on hand now and I don’t like to tiptoe or to spoil somebody else’s game. Besides, all this has very little to do with writing the poem, and I am still interested in that, and I realize that if I had not written the poem the Orlani Mahaks would not be telegramming me, but it is the stuff of my own kind of life I am interested in, and what this other stuff is I don’t quite know. I don’t want to become anybody’s pet. I know that Henry Miller was good at it. Henry, like the rest of us, hated to work for somebody else; but I hate to be petted by somebody else. Which does not make me a better Artist than Henry Miller, just a different person, and not nearly so famous, thank the gods! [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 10, 1963

[* * *] No poems lately, although I may knock off a couple to send with this, I doubt it, I’ve got to be alone and the woman has just come back [* * *]

Now she sings, “There is no Christ upon the Cross

 

and we are sad…”

 

She makes these songs up. You see why I drink?

Now she sings, “Buk is bleeding from the asshole,

Buk is bleeding from the asshole,

and we don’t give a

damn

damn

damn…!”

You see why I drink? You see? You see?

Get some drawings out of Patchen…those upside down soft elephant creatures asking us to save the world of flowers and baby’s hands, they’re good like sunlight on putty in the window says. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 26, 1963:
THE DAY

I came back from the store and there was the package against the door “don’t open ’til Xmas,” but to hell with that, I
have been
waiting, and I tore the paper off, saw the miracle: jacket, cover, skeleton in sand, the works the works…peeling back the pages I ate the whole insides, read the poems I have forgotten, the good Corrington, back page wherein you describe paper, type etc., the humor-agony bug-rat breakdown struggle which goes so well along with the author. And to say you’ve come through is nothing; that you’ve come through in this way…page by page, inch by inch, breakdown by breakdown, cut fingers, landladies, the street corner, the hours, my god, if the poems have been wasted the
BOOK
has not been wasted, little calm and precious beauties and loves of doing like a garden of good, like mountains, like everything that counts…by god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it, and I’m proud and struck and awed that you have—the both of you—caught me up in it.

This is the kind of book that grows on you in days not minutes; this is the kind of book that you remember like you remember war or birth or love or fire, this singing in my darkest dark—the photo of Buk with cigarette, everything, everything, there is no beginning, I don’t know where to touch the book next—first I think the jacket is impossibly impossibly true, then I go elsewhere, it’s like walking through a forest with wine at high noon and everything gone except the soaring. my god, you’ve done it, you’ve done it! Never such a book! Where? Where?? in all the libraries, in all the cities I have never seen such a book put together in such a way, inventive creativeness and love. Where have the publishers been for centuries? You’ve done it.

you’ve done it.

The books will sit and grow on me, they will enter me, it is a part, a beholden and miraculous part. It does little to say more: the whole thing wells and turns in me almost impossibly. My thanks my thanks for all the love and honor and pain and beauty; the pain yours, the others you’ve passed to me. Going now, going.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 26, 1963

Sitting here smoking a ¼ last night’s cigar and savoring the book—as I will always savor it, it is endless with endless little touches, and looking at the jacket now—the way it works around the cover, the marble paper over our sandman skeleton, and do thank (for me) Chevrier and Salantrie for their fine work. The jacket I cannot figure out, how it has this antique quality and I do not figure it out, it would be like tearing a rose, formulas do not interest me, it is the thing being there like the sun that warms me. I do not think there will ever be another event in my life like this book, and I keep thinking of the years drunk in the alleys, of the 3 years I sat in the same Philly bar on the same barstool from 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning until 2 a.m. the next morning, staring down at the wood, listening to nothing, maybe, and now7 this book, this book, this book out of nothing like somebody saying, see, it is not nearly
all
bad. I know how close you must come to dying in fighting from all nothingness of poverty, hoping on luck, a break from the sky, kinder landlords, praying typefaces do not break, that somebody will send a dollar for paper, that somebody will buy a postcard or a painting from Gypsy, that the body will hold up, that the landlord will smile, that cars will not run you over, everything everything, so please do not say that your blood is “more like the pseudo-stuff that bleeds from the
madras
tissue between pages 96 and 97.” I know better and the living people of the world know better. Don’t make me sad; the miracle is yours; you have drowned me in honor, and no matter what cheap hotel, what jail, what grave is there for me, they can never take away the miracle.

I would like to say that the people who have seen the book are as taken with it as I and that the last page which begins “777 copies of this book…” is one of the best poems, if not the best poem in the book.

A little sadness here—and I thought I’d tell you before anybody else told you—in the poem “Dinner, Rain & Transport”, one line was left out, “I can prophecy evil,” this was to proceed “with the force of a jackhammer.” And when I say a little sadness I know it will be mostly yours, for to me the book is so much that this makes no difference, so please don’t blame yourself for being also real enough to error. [* * *]

[To Ann Bauman]

December 4, 1963

Like the American provincial, I start my letter: “I have been meaning to write but—”

It’s good you liked the book; I feel that Webb has surrounded me with more than the poems deserve, and he will hear this from many quarters, but for it all, he has created a book such as I have never seen, and he (
they
really!) have done it out of absolute poverty and the force of their beings. [* * *]

The book has lifted me high over the branches, building, etc., but they are still there, and I go on, actually tired physically as if I had been wrestling a bear for 43 years, and I slept ten hours today and wish I could sleep ten more but after I type this I must go to the place and the place will have its way. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

December 7, 1963

[* * *] Enclosed the article Robt. Fink was speaking of, mentioning
Outsider
, and lucky the papers lay on the floor with the beer-cans for days or I would have long ago thrown this bit away, but enclosed. Lipton gained his golden head through the
BEATS
but the beats through their artifact of so-called brawny and courageous poeticism did more damage to the pure poem trying to breathe than Poetry Chicago has done accepting the accepted. The trouble with the
BEATS
: they gathered in crowds to gather
SOLACE
and when you take the gang-form you become the gang—i.e., the same as CORE or Congress or
STANDARD OIL
or American Banana and their assorted $ ventures and assassinations and cries. You’ve got to rise from the floor alone or fall back alone. What I mean is: conceive the Art-form and forget it, and conceive it again if you have the blue blood and the red blood the bull blood to carry you past the matador the god whatever so and whosoforever stands in the way. I told you I was drinking beer. [* * *]

Corrington writes me to ask what I think of the Kennedy thing. So, after I finish with this letter I must write and tell my oh my I must tell him, and he’s tough but he might not like what I say, and to you I say although I do not hold K. martyred as most, I do not like the dissolution of K. on down to a
RUBY
. The only thing that could be low enough to kill Ruby, a Ruby, would be a turd, and maybe one of them will stick into a stone mortuary within his intestines, but I doubt that—shit generally gets along with shit.

[* * *] If Henry Miller reviews me and it comes out bad, don’t worry. I once reviewed Henry Miller. I was in a little bus station in the middle of Texas and some gal who had been ramming her tongue down my throat went into the ladies’ room and I walked over to the newsstand with my hair down in my eyes and I bought one of the
Cancers
, I forget which, and Henry understood that the only way to get to a man was to speak the language of the day, the present tongue, but he got to a part where he talked about a guy with a big cock and how he made it with all the women with
THIS BIG COCK
, and he went on and on with this and I began getting sleepy and worse…worse than
ANYTHING
, I got the idea that Henry Miller the
ALL-KNOWING
didn’t know much more about fucking than to talk about it, and that’s the way most non-fuckers are. But then, it’s easy and simple to knock great names or kill ¼ great men, and I remember when I was very young, Hem used to work out in the ring, you know, and I always dreamed that I would volunteer to sit in the opposite corner, and in my dream, of course, I kayoed
HEMINGWAY
, and therefore I was a greater writer, I was a greater everything. Which is pure shit, and a kind of Oswald-Ruby thing. But Hemingway was partly responsible for it because—for all his hardcore writing which was good and needed to be done—he did build, at times, this sort of Hollywood plastic-image sort of thing, and what many call his greatest work, the thing that appeared in LIFE week by week installments, was a returning to his youthful formula of strength and victory and death and bravado straight on down the line, the only thing being he was no longer young, the snows had melted, and when he put the gun to his head he was putting the death to ungrowing cancer, and that the public (
Life
) was ready at the same time as he was ready, this was sad.

And, now having neatly disposed of Hem and Miller, which is a kind of a bitchy thing, but all writers are bitches clothed in articles of the sun, and I am sad because we are all such bitches, all so unreal, and maybe it comes back to the thing I was thinking during the then years drunken blackness: that real men don’t
WRITE
. But, if they don’t,
WHERE ARE THEY
? I have looked, everywhere. [* * *]

p.s. I guess
The Old Man and the Sea
was presented in
ONE
installment in
Life
. no matter; same god damn thing.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

December 18, 1963

I, too, am shot. They have machine gunned me down with their labors and I have bought their plan, god damn them, I’ve got to get the horses moving, no rich women around I can bear…12 hours of madness a night, left shoulder, arm and neck, I mean right shoulder arm and neck about paralyzed and then insomnia, go back moth-eyed and white to the spider mouth and they suck again, and as you can see all this is making me a withered crank…. Like the old poem, or something like it: we need time to stop and stare
*
and blow cigar smoke in the air. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

December 25, 1963

Christmas night and they’ve battered their heads together until they are silly and they’ve smiled themselves silly and vomited on the floor, 98% of them amateur drinkers, amateur Christians, amateur human beings; and I got 4 more books yesterday and lined them up with the other, they stand there, each one different, each one a piece of something, and they are
FOR SALE
, anybody can have one for $10, double the price on the jacket, for this is the cost of the paper alone (to me), and the labor and the poems and all else is
FREE
. Yet how can you put a price on anything like this? [* * *] You and I don’t have much to do with money because we know that money is beside the point, except enough of it to keep you alive so that you can do something else
BESIDE
$$$. This is what you’ve done bringing out this book in this way, and when I hang a $10 on it, it is not an insult, just enough to allow me to
KEEP ALL THE BOOKS
because I like them lined up against the wall, although I did give one away to Sherman because I am supposed to get one back of his wherein I did the foreword and I wonder what in the hell I said in the foreword like some John William Corrington who did o.k. but luckily I do not wear hats.