Screams From the Balcony (19 page)

 

Both sides of the correspondence with Al Purdy, the Canadian poet, have been published their entirety in
The Bukowski/Purdy Letters.
The relationship began in 1964 with a favorable review by Purdy of
It Catches My Heart in Its Hands
and with Bukowski’s enthusiastic response to Purdy’s own work. This next letter was written during Bukowski’s visit to the Webbs
.

 

[To Al Purdy]
New Orleans

March 14, 1965

This won’t be much of a letter. Sick, sick, sitting here shaking & frightened & cowardly & depressed. I have hurt almost everybody’s feelings. I am not a very good drunk. And it’s the same when I awaken here as anywhere. I only want sweet peace and kindliness when I awaken—but there’s always some finger pointing, telling me some terrible deed I committed during the night. It seems I make a lot of mistakes and it seems that I am not allowed any. The finger used to belong to my father, or to some shack-job, and now it’s an editor’s finger. But it’s the same. For Christ’s sake, Al, I don’t understand people, never will. It looks like I got to travel pretty much alone.

[To Douglas Blazek]

March 24, 1965

[* * *] they continue to build highrise apts. all around here, and little men with hammers and steel helmets crawl around fuck around, talk baseball and sex in the smokey sunlight and I stare out the window at them like a demented man, watching their movements, wandering about them as the kid screams behind me and the old woman asks me, “Have you seen my comb?” “No, I haven’t seen your comb,” I tell her as a man walks by the window and his face contains the monsterism and brutality and sleepiness and false braveness of a million faces of a million million faces and I want to cry too like the kid but all I think is,—I’m outa beer and I’m broke and the world is burning shit and the flowers are ashamed. something like that. not all like that. just mostly the first part, and the rest crawling in my brain like some beetle. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

March 25? 26? 1965

[* * *] I had a few bad days in N.O. but after 2 weeks we had each adjusted to various madnesses and ignored each other enough to be comfortable. I signed 3,000 pages plus, which was painful, yes.
The Outsider
has not expired and will come out with #4 shortly after
Crucifix
which is finished now and has to be collated and so forth, a big job, slow, but you should have your book soon. They are going to another town. where, I don’t know. [* * *]

no, I don’t sleep either. I used to shack with a broad who claimed I never slept. she also claimed I jacked-off in the bathroom which I didn’t because the explosion of her body across my sight was all I needed to leap and drive home. she drank too much, she drank more than I did, and you know that’s too much. [* * *]

[To Douglas Blazek]

[?early April 1965]

[* * *] I remember getting ten page letters from my old man while I was starving in cardboard shacks trying to write the
GREAT AMERICAN SHORT STORY
and when I first got the letter I’d always flip through the pages and riffle them and search them but nothing green nothing green and I’d be freezing my whole soul in a pitch of vomit darkness and he’d write ten fucking vindictive pages about
AMERICA and MAKING GOOD
, and it was worse than silence because he was rubbing it in—he had a place to shit, beans, turkey, a warm bed, a lawn to mow, names of neighbors, a seeming place to go each morning

and he rubbed it in good. and here I am an old fuck myself, probably on a ten pager telling you how I feel and what I mean to myself. anyhow, a little green, I wish I had put more on that 17 to one shot this afternoon but I didn’t, and so a $5 for dogfood and for which I expect a lifetime subscription to
Ole
if it ever manages to continue??

I remember one time I was on a suicide kick and drinking myself sick hoping I wouldn’t do it somehow, or however a man thinks at such time. all nerves shot. all everything deepening. the human face and way a horror forever. crouched under my blankets like a worm and wishing I could be. anything but what was attached to me. grisly factotum of high-steeped blues. God damn God’s breath and understanding. I wrote a letter with some English prof’s name to it and I verily had at one time almost sensed an understanding. he had written me how some kid had hit him over the head with a brick when he was young and how he understood violence and horror. I was staring pretty much at pretty knife blades way up high in a 3rd. floor place, esp. when the stomach got sick and the blood came and I had to lay low for a couple of hours because I wanted to kill myself my own way, or maybe as a voice from the back would say (I hate voices from the back!) maybe I didn’t want to die. anyhow, I wrote him the circumstances of my soul and also my penury (which was secondary) and what happened? this reader of all philosophers, this understander, this guy who got hit by a brick, this teacher of children, this man who drove into a place with his car marked out for
FACULTY PARKING
…what happened???

he didn’t answer. for 5 months.

you’ve got to hand it to me, baby, at least I answered, dig it anyway you want, sometimes even sound helps, it would have helped me when sunshine looked like shit and still often does, but you gift me with letters of genius, open and swimming blood real, no writer that I know of has ever written letters such as you do and I am keeping them and if grace and God and luck be kind some other eye and eyes will fall upon them beside mine.

YOU TELL YOUR WIFE AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR DOGS AND YOUR LANDLORD AND YOUR GROCER AND YOUR ARCHANGEL AND YOUR FUCK-ANGEL AND YOUR UNION MAN TO BE VERY KIND TO YOU CONTINUALLY
for you have a touch of grace and damnation and beauty that the world should try to preserve.

and yes all I can say is “hold, hold.” please try to understand what this means.

…might amuse you…the prof who didn’t write. I met him in New Orleans one night at Webb’s place. he still wouldn’t speak to me. he talked to everybody else. so what? who wants to talk?

…McNamara? seems a little standard…yet seems lifted by something. I can’t ignore his wanting to be real…whatever that means. christ, how phoney we sound, I sound! well, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t have

FACULTY PARKING

ONLY

I hope you remain alive in order to keep sending me the good letters—your letters mean more to me than any poetry I have ever read because your plain and even and screaming and clear voice talking certainly beats T. S. Eliot, Pound, Shakespeare, John Fante, even Jeffers…for me. how do you do it? how many poems
DO YOU WASTE
by wasting letters on me??

god damn you, then.

look, you asked some puzzling and rather melodramatic and taboo really questions on writing and witchcraft of poetry, for each man is some kind of weird nut, brotherly as a hatchet, and he’d rather keep his balls to himself than spread the flesh for hungry chipmunks of whore shit flaking through clouds of radium. all right, eyow, ok, well, I need some teeth pulled anyhow.—

to wit: “do you ever get the lousy feeling of where the hell the next poem is coming from—that perhaps you can’t see anything worth writing about anymore?”

Answer: no.

“What kind of stage or period or interim do you think yr in?”

I don’t know. I am afraid of thinking. I have seen what thinking does to men. I watch my girl-child look at an orange in the sunlight and know that she is all right. I look at our President Johnson who tries so hard to think, so hard to be right, a leader, and I know that through trying that he is a madman. I forgive him. but, like you: who feeds the dogs?

yet, like Hon. Johnson I think I am getting better, I think I am doing better…
I THINK. I THINK
.

 

I think I can be another Cervantes

another Warren Spahn

Jersey Joe

Braddock

Laxative Lazarus shit shouting

lazarus…

 

 

but don’t make me write a novel now

or ever

unless I g.d. truly feel like

it—and

not just for a space on the

shelf.

 

 

so the way I feel now I guess I won’t ever write one, I am terribly lazy and more terribly tired

 

 

 

I need rest to gather

and they keep the sandpaper on me.

lack of guts?

of course.

 

[* * *]

—please, you don’t bother me talking suicide. suicide is a rat running thru my hair continually. in fact, it’s the only way I can get out of my present position. these 2 small rooms. no money. all the time I am writing to you I am holding a conversation with a woman scraping a dish, and if only she were washing the dishes, all right, but she’s just fucking around and nothing gets done, all is dead, and the girl-child is a foot to my left and every now and then I reach out she reaches out, we make faces, and I love it, she’s round flesh of young madness, but really I am stuck in this center, and the very beginning was an act of kindness, something I did not want, and now more kindness kindness and there is a love for both of them, a mad gambling sort of thing, but they are killing me, not the poetry in me, fuck that, but me, and they don’t know it

 

and this is the worst:

to be eaten up

day by day

piece by piece and you are the only one

 

 

who knows

while they play jokes with

celery sticks

and a good night’s sleep for

them.

 

I don’t think I sleep more than one or 2 hours a night. I know that there are many nights that I never sleep at all, many many nights.

 

and it is not that I am having profound thots

I am not having any thots at

all.

just looking at the shades

this wall

a drape

a side of a dresser

the invasion of ants

the wind like a mother’s voice dead

to a sissy like me,

covers shaped like

matzos

the holy ghost of

Pain

 

 

I can’t sleep

 

 

I used to live with an old whore with

a very wisdom sort of

wisdom and she’d always say

 

 

“You tell me to shut my mouth so

you can get some sleep;

well, let me tell ya, bastard,

I KNOW YOU
:

YOU NEVER SLEEP
!!

 

 

so don’t tell me ta shut up!”

[* * * ]

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[April, 1965]

[* * *] oh yes, well, on slipsheets and all the stuff, I don’t care; I rather like the paper you use. F. likes to act intelligent and knowing, only she’s really all fallen apart, and it’s kind of an act and she runs with these poets who have workshop meetings and read their stuff to each other and chatter, and they go to things like “pot-luck” dinners and long church drools on Sundays and they meet for coffee and cake at Fay’s or Marty’s and they may even have a martini and they all
STINK
, and sometimes they come here and sit around and I try to be decent but they chat like monkeys fingering their crotches and I find it less and less easy to be graceful because they eat up my one or 2 hours of peace that each day away from the mill allows me before I go in again that night or on a day off they might stay for hours, and so at times I have gotten a little hard, they will be sitting yammering in the small front room and they will see this figure in his shorts, cock peeking out, pounding in beerswill rhythm on the hall boards making for the kitchen, saying nothing, ignoring all, not worried about Selma, not worried about Viet Nam, just trying to shake people and ideas from the ratskull and suck down another beer and maybe think about blasting out for a fifth of
CUTTY
. They may be fucking F. physically as well. I don’t care too much. We are not married. the kid came along and I did the thing, moved her in. I think the kid is mine. I thought she was too old, I thought I was too old. the gods fooled me and reamed it home. one more hotpoker for good old Bukowski! Anyway, don’t worry about postcards from F. she’s that way.

I would be honored if you pumped out a book of selected B. bullshit letters. I don’t know if the people kept the letters or if they were assholes. Must rush off to work, so must shorten bullshit and just pump out names, say in order of the people I have written the most letter to. [* * *]

 

Tom McNamara, editor of
Down Here,
responding to the
Ole
essay, wrote to Bukowski from Greenwich Village
.

 

[To Tom McNamara]

April 9, 1965

yeah, sweetheart, life is a spider, we can only dance in the web so long, the thing is gonna get us, you know that. I am pretty well hooked-in now, have fallen into some traps. and speak mostly from the bent bone, the flogged spirit. I’ve had some wild and horrible years & electric & lucky years, and if I sit and stare out the window now at the rain, I allow myself the final gift of some temporary easiness before they throw the dirt on. Yet, even being trapped I know I am trapped and that there’s a difference between oranges and rocks. there’s a difference between hard retreat and puling surrender. O, I save what I can; I never give anything away—I mean to the shits and chopppers & the clock & the buildings and the mad masters, the cock-sucking bloodsuckers. yet it’s like one man fighting an army without help; yet when they tape me to the wall I will spit in their eyes; when they cut my balls off I will drip blood on their shoes…so forth, on and on, endlessly….