Screams From the Balcony (49 page)

my little daughter is so beautiful, Karl, Carl, you never met her did you? she’s singing
London Bridge Is Falling Down
from the bedroom. the woman thinks London B. is corrupt. she’s a radical. o.k. when the sun hops we will be the first to record it.

[To Jim Roman]

January 11, 1970

[* * *] I am a member of the unemployed now with nothing but a typer and a couple of paint brushes to hold off the world. So keep your fingers crossed for me and hope the gods are on my side. There’s my 5 year old daughter involved and if I lost her, that would do me in. But things sometimes have a way of working. There’s no need to lay it down yet. There’s a novel in mind and
The Days Run Away
…moving very nicely. but but but…

This letter is so gloomy, Jim, that I can’t ever write it, finish it. I’ll write when things are looking better.

It’s easy, reading these letters, to see why Bukowski’s correspondents saved them. Apart from the sometimes striking idiosyncrasies of format which gave them an unusual impact (and which we mostly can’t see in book form), their often searing vividness—a stream of feeling and suffering more than stream of consciousness—gives them an impact which must have been easy to recognize. Besides, during these years all of those addressed in the letters printed here were aware of Bukowski’s poetry and already valued it for similar vividness of impact.

Bukowski’s letters have an unusual immediacy, compared to those of other noteworthy modern literary correspondents. (Think of Lawrence, Pound, Fante, or Creeley and Olson; all are variously fascinating as letter writers but give infinitely less by way of self-portrayal.) Bukowski seems, with trusted correspondents, to pour himself forth with little forethought or purpose other than to render his immediate experience. Only a small minority of surviving letters have a mainly conventional kind of purpose—answering or posing questions, conducting literary business. More often, even when the letter accompanies submissions of poems or other writing, there is a full outpouring of the self in its present situation, generally incorporating notations of the immediate mundane circumstances: people passing or working outside, activities in the apartment, toothache, hangover, radio sounds, etc.

It is a cliché to lament the decline of the personal letter in our telephone age, but Bukowski never doubted its value. “I think the letter is an important form,” he writes early on.

 

You can touch about everything as you run around. It lets you out of the straight jacket 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 [* * *]. (22)

 

He escapes from the straightjacket of pure Art, we note, not by self-indulgence but by a
discipline
(“my business”) of writing designed to earn the freedom with word and idea. Yet even so, the personal letter offers a welcome further relief: no worries about unity, shaping a whole, or revision, for instance. Still, it’s a form it would be dangerous to grow self-conscious about. When Tom MacNamara proposed quoting from both past and future Bukowski letters, Bukowski sensed a danger.

 

Letters? god damn, man, let’s be careful. all right at outset, esp. for tightheads who have been working in sonnet form, writing critical articles, so forth; it gives them (letters) the facility and excuse for wallowing in the easiness of their farts and yawns without pressure. [* * *] then the next thing you know instead of being an o.k. thing, a natural form, it simply becomes another form for the expulsion of the creative, artistic, fucked-up Ego [* * *] and soon a lot of the boys end up working as hard or harder on the letters than they do on their poems. wherever the payoff lies, what? (103)

 

Self-consciousness and posing are the enemy, in all their guises and whether in writing or personal behavior. It is his suspicion of such posing that makes much traditionally admired literature unpersuasive to Bukowski:

 

“I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don’t know who’s at fault; maybe it’s the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say,
look
at me!” (14)

 

(His recurrent jeering at the coteries and mutual admiration societies of the “creative writing” crowd provides many amusing passages of invective throughout the decade.) Against such falseness there is unself-conscious “natural form,” whether of the letter or of the kind of poem Bukowski writes. Bad poetry, false poetry, is the self-important ego on display: “I am not primarily a poet, I hate god gooey damned people poets messing the smears of their lives against the sniveling world [* * *].” (47)

The letter form is liberating when unselfconsciously undertaken—and undertaken at the typewriter, essentially. Technology helps, not inhibits, his epistolary self-expression. To Kaye Johnson he explained: “you know, u really kant get the ingress into a
WORD
without the typer, the typer is the carver, the ax, the cleaver, the thing with the mouth that hollers about the bloody dice. it machineguns the mind out of penury. fuck the pen.” (75) When his machine broke down, he said he felt “like a man without a cock having a spiritual hard-on and nothing to ram it home with. I can’t spin anything without the keys, the keys have a way of cutting out the fat and retaining the easiness.” (101) Bukowski’s handwritten letters are done in large printing and seem laborious; the machine allowed him speed and copiousness with less effort.
¹
Spontaneity meant occasional whimsical spellings (and infrequent misspellings), it meant free play with capitalization (almost always the first person pronoun retains its capital, however) and sometimes with layout. But Bukowski is surprisingly fastidious about punctuation, consistently using the semi-colon in the traditional way, for example. Spontaneity also allowed improvisation in vocabulary: we find quite a few nonce words and coinages enlivening these letters, with only rarely a loss of intelligibility. The improvisation co-exists with a certain purity of diction: taboos on obscenity, of course, are not respected, but there is a remarkable absence of clichés, catch phrases, or ephemeral slang.
²
Perhaps most strikingly, spontaneity meant a rich inventiveness of imagery, as in the phrases just quoted.

The Bukowski letter, then, has something in common with the “spontaneous prose” described by Kerouac in 1957.
³
Or it may be seen as a kind of performance art, an improvisation analogous to that of a jazz soloist. The mood of the moment, whether exhilarated or suicidal, comradely or belligerent, is the essential subject matter. Bukowski kept no carbons of his letters, and writing with self-abandonment meant that he often professed not to remember what he had said in prior letters (as in interviews, phone calls, etc.). Responding to earlier prospects of seeing some of his letter in print, Bukowski agreed enthusiastically: “I’d like to see what I have written too” (September 30, 1965; to Blazek). But even without knowing what he might have said, he always gave permission to present the authentically embodied self warts and all, with no censorship: “I’ve got nothing to hide,” he told the Webbs. “That I drink or play the ponies or have been in jail is of no shame to me.” (31)

If the letters render and project a self with striking vividness and uninhibited fullness, we can yet remark on how narrow the focus is, how painfully constricted the life. The constriction is the price of the intensity. For Bukowski in the sixties, after periods of omnivorous reading in earlier years and after decades of wandering (see
Factotum
), the
Racing Form
would seem to be the main reading material, the hated job alternating with drinking-and-writing and playing the horses the main activities. For the now settled Bukowski, it was a period of intense physical and mental suffering and intense productivity. Writing poems and letters—he tells us as much—was what kept him from suicide or insanity: that and drink. A man too self-conscious and inarticulate to enjoy most forms of face to face meeting, especially with literary people, he found in his intense exchanges with a few kindred spirits (Jon Webb, Doug Blazek and Carl Weissner most notably) the sense of community that we all need, and the impetus to keep writing. Russell Harrison puts this well:

 

the very fact that Bukowski is engaged in an extensive and ongoing correspondence is significant. It bespeaks a social need that we would not at first suspect in a writer who, in his fiction and poetry, has placed an unusual emphasis on his protagonist as an isolated individual, a loner. That the correspondence was important is evidence by his promptness in responding.
⁴

 

Bukowski told Want-ling in 1965, “Sometimes I am corresponding with 15 or more people at once, but finally after I work them over a few rounds they have their way and edge off.”
⁵
By 1967 he was slacking off a bit: “it’s all right to be a good guy and to send 12 page drunken letters to 40 different people but after a while there just isn’t enough Bukowski to go around any more.”
⁶

Writing letters fed the impulse to write poems and indeed sometimes (especially to Blazek) the letters themselves modulate into verse as they go. And while Bukowski was never too much interested in literary chitchat, criticism, theory, or analysis, the letter form allows him to throw off a number of passing evaluative remarks about other writers, from Hamsun and Kafka to Ginsburg and Creeley, and about his sense of what literature is for, what makes it good. He never quotes Pound’s phrase to name the function of literature: “nutriment of impulse” (indeed he rarely quotes at all), but he seems to agree with it. Clearly he hates any sense of literature as an accomplishment or of literary education as what gives polish to a man or woman. The literature that matters is what keeps you from dying. If he seems (to someone like me, of more conventional tastes) narrow in the range of his appreciation, he makes up for it in the passionate existential seriousness of his approach: “Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter. I think a man should be forced to write in a roomful of skulls [* * *]” (14) Such an impatience with literature as “belles lettres” (“this fiddle,” in Marianne Moore’s phrase) has a long pedigree. Wordsworth, for one, the revolutionary who wanted to write like “a man speaking to men,” would have agreed.

A final word should be said on the consistency and integrity of the self so vividly and dramatically presented in this book. The man who cheerfully quotes Popeye’s “I am what I am” reminds me of Lawrence’s jaunty citing of “The Miller of Dee”:

 

There was a jolly miller once,

Lived on the River Dee.

He laughed and sang from morn till night,

No man more blithe than he.

And this the burden of his song

Forever used to be:

I care for nobody, no not I,

Since nobody cares for me.

 

It hardly needs saying that the insoucient attitude in both cases is only one element of a more complex stance in the world, balanced by (perhaps protective of) other instances of great sensibility. Bukowski was never without sensitivity to the uniqueness of the person he was addressing. The letters to Ann Menebroker, among those here present, are particularly revealing in this respect: their delicacy of tone contrasts markedly with the more macho strutting sometimes heard (e.g. in the letter to Marvin Malone of August 1962, a letter which refers crudely to the same Menebroker he could write so self-revealingly to). More painfully amusing, as revealing different “voices” of Bukowski’s letter writing, is the early series sent to the publisher of his first chapbook, E. V. Griffith, progressing from the impersonal to the totally exasperated to the abjectly apologetic. Towards the end of the decade we find an extremely long letter to Carl Weissner provoked by his comic embarrassment at having identified Weissner in a snapshot as a girl. The tenderness of feeling for his baby daughter is another recurrent note that fills in the self-portrayal. So does a remark he made in response to the joy given him by the Webbs’ publication of his second large scale book collection. “[A] book like this lifts my life up into light whether I deserve it or not,” he writes, adding:

 

I used to have a theory that if I could just make one person’s life happy or real that would have been otherwise, then my own life would not have failed. It was a good theory but a few whores ran me through the wringer for it, but I do think that for a while a few of them enjoyed not being spit on for a while, and so this made it o.k. for me. (77)

 

We come back to the literary vocation which in the long run is what makes these letters valuable to a wider public than their addressees. “[* * *] it’s up to a man to create art if he’s able, and not to talk about it, which, it seems, he’s always more than able.” (174) Deprecating, as usual, his own public persona, Bukowski writes:

 

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. (25)

 

It was D. H. Lawrence who said, “Art speech is the only speech,” and these declarations by Bukowski put the emphasis finally in the same place—on the achieved writing. The ability to be buoyantly stoic, to declare, “I have nothing to hide and anything I say in a letter goes anywhere anytime, and if they don’t like the taste of it, let them suck empty beer bottles” (86), is a liberating and enabling self-sufficiency. The letter writer and the poet are a single, coherent entity. One result is that, while we may find a difference of emphasis and tone in references to the same person over time, we don’t find here the kind of bad faith recently noticed in the letters of Philip Larkin:

 

a warm and appreciative letter to X is followed, often on the same day, by a warm and appreciative letter to Y in jeering dispraise of X, and so on. Bad faith was a form of good faith; it meant that Larkin was still keeping his options open.
⁷

 

Bukowski’s letters give us a whole self in many moods. His courage and endurance and sheer hard work at his writing are exemplary. He told a correspondent that “it is good to have your own courage but it is also good to take hope and courage from the ways of others. this I haven’t been able to do until lately.” (185) The encouragement he found in his correspondence can be shared by us. “I wrote letters to many in those days,” he has said, “it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.” It is gratifying for the reader of these sometimes agonized “screams” to know that the decade ends with his escape from the Post Office into a successful career of living by his writing alone.