Beerspit Night and Cursing (30 page)

there is life & there is art & it is our job to bring them together with setting the joint on fire…or drownin’ it in come…gib is an inert creature…that snatched a jet-propelled squid…quivering with life & that sends out a black ink screen when under attack/ gib’s inert…his super self that sees all & knows all wdn’t move if you cracked down the world on it; he wont move & he aint ever gonna…it is the quivering squid shed that gets us out of places & into new places…and changes every spot we get to…gib wont move for shit man & he wont fight or do anything else & he only works in order to escape from me for enough time to recover from the shock of the quivering intensity; his job is his sanity…well i am forced to use my mind for
fighting & that wont hurt it…gib wont fight with mind or body…

am mailin’ you herb co book where get frankenscense/ will mail you some got from east coast co but believe will be same; now must go—eat lunch in car with gib/ will drop jory a note but not right now—i want to be free to stop all the worldliness & be invisible again; then can see jory & co…when house is not full of paper & work & stuff…

this hotel reading room…will encl clip very interest. clip’d in 1956…only this yr this room got any time to read as nothin’ else to do…5 yrs haulin’ stuff around…now i cry for freedom…will finish work & be gypsy again…

ezra has my la martinelli soul in castle in italy—now let gypsy be free…the daughter of the pharaoh…La Farona…if i ever get to you i will make draw. then don’t need any fotos…you are a serious man now & not any more little boy; be as you are…we all mourn the first freshness but now if we are aware that the mummy is fast rotting & freeing us from this love task…if yew skin badtt yew mummy parchment is going to dust…no matter…you still second only to the pharaoh.

now go read on to tape & use those ruddy buggers…i go eat sandwiches & tea & mail out yo wocks this week & send you love…

& be good…

fo yo mamma

Sheri

Los Angeles, Calif. April 22, 1961

Sister in the Dust:

I
cannot
read and I
will
not read for their little dirty skins; I will not go on tape; I will not stand before a mike and spiel something into it that I have long ago written and forgotten; I will not be their dupe and their dummy; I will not have their handshake, or their women or their wine or their brotherhood. I stand alone and apart from the artists and the scribblers—I will have none of them. Every touch of them is death. I fear them
not because I am weak but because I am strong. I am a simple person.

You have no idea how your “innocent” Jory, the Riverboat Jordan Kid, hung me from the cross by the balls. Dragging editors, writers, in upon me. Or me upon them.—“Oh, come on, come on with me! I have an appointment with this guy! I don’t want to go. But it’s 6:30 now and I was supposed to be there at 5:30. But he’s treated me nicely. And I’ve got to go and I want you to come with me.”

“Jory, I’d rather not.”

“Oh, come on, Jesus Christ, man! Just this once…” and etc.

And so I weakened and went, and learned.

Or the next night on the phone: “I’m over at a little gathering at X, the painter’s place. You’ve heard of him? You haven’t? Well, anyhow, it’s just a small group of people, some drinks and some talk…”

This, of course, I threw out the window like a tarantula upon my worst enemy.

Drinks and talk, all of them rubbing together, telling each other that they are great, and later, like a bunch of over-the-fence neighborhood bitches, cutting each other down…Princess, or whoteverthehell you are, I have tested myself. Once in college I deliberately forced myself into the hell of a poetry class, and it was here that I learned what I already knew—that poetry was the most pretensive of all the Arts and dragged in the most slipshod practitioners out of the morass. I learned plenty but I would have learned more shooting down rooks.

I cannot speak on tape for a petty bunch of word-mongers who would really rather be fucked and praised than shape the word. It is not proper to bring in personal experience, but when you have crawled across the cold cement floor of a charity hospital with the blood spewing in great sick showers from your mouth and your ass, and nobody to answer. The doors closed, doors a foot thick so the nurses can’t hear the screams of those too poor to die nicely. And all the old men looking at me, white-haired sticks the ravens had picked dry. And finally an hour later—a nurse. “Oh, you’ve hemorrhaged
again
! Oh dear, I can’t pick you up.” She could have, there was nothing left but bone and skin. And 2 of them came and sat me in a chair and they slid the chair across the floor to my bed and
flicked
me in, like red wet garbage.

And then the head nurse came: “You need some transfusions, but you’ll either have to pay for them or have blood-credit, someplace you have donated blood, or we can’t give you any.”

And later, as I was getting well. “Who is that horrible woman who comes to see you? She was drunk. You are going to have to stay away from women like that and you must never drink again.”

And at the age of 13 I became covered with boils the size of baseballs. Not pimples, baseballs. And they sat me under the electric needle and drilled drillllled drilled deep into the flesh I could feel the little needle getting hot…like a wood drill punching into wood…and I could smell the oil…another charity hospital…“Jesus,” said the doc, “I never saw a guy go under the needle like that.”

“I’m used to it,” I told them, “every other day for 3 years.”

And you
do
get used to it. But not when you get on a streetcar and some kid tugs at his mother’s sleeve: “Mommy, what’s wrong with that man’s face?”

I could understand it now, but then it rocked to the center of me, cutting away whatever liberty I had built up in forgetting.

Other things, of course, that happen to us all. But now you want me to sputter a few god damned words I have written into a microphone while out in the audience 30 or 40 bitches feel “sorry” for me because I have a “soul,” and would like nothing better than to fuck me 3 or 4 times to let me see what they have and then marry me and turn me into something like anything that walks down the street, anybody you might pass at any time. It is not my intent to be different; it is my intent to remain myself. I have been taught by some very hard gods, some stone gods, and what I wring is from stone and iron.

Don’t set me up in front of a microphone like the silhouette of a duck to be shot down in a cheap shooting gallery. I don’t want any of their glory and I don’t want to “educate” the bastards. The world will turn on its own.
THE GROWING OF ONE MAN PROPERLY IS OFTEN MORE THAN ONE MAN OF THE GREATEST STRENGTH CAN HANDLE
. And by “properly” I do not mean the fixed targets of a society deadened with the massglue of its crawling. I mean the way we must pull up a shade in the morning and scratch our belly and yawn, and the way we must understand that what appears to be holy is often the
greatest evil and what appears to be evil…is the source.

H.D. fails.

What I mean, is this. We must ask ourselves, is this person trying to write
POETRY
or is this that we read—that we hear, see—coming unwinding from a self that is highly improbable and unwinding, say, like the thread from a spider’s gut?

H.D. tries too hard to write “poetry” and gives her weakness away, but in this respect she has much so-called good company: Shakespeare, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, Auden, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Burns, Robert Frost, Coleridge, Poe, Swinburne, Sandburg, Ransom, Aiken (although Aiken is the most glorious fake of the lot with Shake); Cummings, Graves, Hart Crane, C. Day Lewis, Eberhart, Spender, Shapiro, Henry Reed, and so forth.

There are very few poets of pure aspect: Chaucer, John Skelton, John Donne, Milton, Dryden, Blake, Edward Lear, Emily Bronte, Melville, Whitman, Christina Rossetti, Henley, Francis Thompson, Yeats, Walter De La Mare, D. H. Lawrence, Pound, Jeffers, and perhaps—George Barker.

Ginsburg is a complete ninny running up the mare’s ass for the pussy of fame. He throws up a big smokescreen but his soul is the size of one grain of salt and will wash away in the first faint sprinkle.

I disregard your constant slurs that I can’t write English and therefore you can’t read parts of my letters. You can
READ THEM ALL RIGHT BABY
,—it’s just that you don’t
WANNA READ WHAT IT SAYS BECAUSE IT HITS HEAD-ON INTO THE SOFT PARTS OF YOUR BELLY-WEAKNESS

H.D. gives herself away in
Epitaph
(last page) as a stringer of beads for others to see.
Stars Wheel in Purple
could well thrill all the lady readers of the
Ladies Home Journal
.

Hell yes, I’ll ask that question too: where is the nightingale? (Page 52)

Yeah, when they want to find out what makes me work I’ll
CRACK
them a can of beer and say: here it is: the nightingale. Here, Sherry, have a nightingale: 26 cents a can.

Perhaps nowhere does H.D. give away her strivings, simply, to write
POETRY
of such unmitigated vent as in
Heliodora
, page 43…

Well, enough. You drink your poisons and I’ll drink mine…

Now—
YOU WAIT A GOD DAMNED MINUTE ON PASCIN
!…I will tell you about Pascin. Pascin grew tired of the lump-colored blobs laid bare and naked upon the canvas ass…He wanted a woman like the one who passed him in the hall or on the street or sat across from him drinking wine. It is not a matter of immortalizing women. It is a matter of bringing them down to where you can see them and remember them in their small unnoticed magic, that only a man can notice. There is nothing more ugly than a completely naked woman. A woman is built to receive and reproduce; she is a machine blossomed and stored by man. A woman is ungainly: her ass is larger to bring forth birth and to engender the eye of man, and when her body bends naked, the hopeless breasts swing loose like things that want to fall away. See in nature who is the most beautiful. Eye the color the gods give to the smallest of birds—wren and sparrow, and all the way up, rooster, eagle, deer, lion…It is only at times when nature stores such inward female beauty in some…such as Sappho, Martinelli, Rossetti, and even H.D., in spite of herself, that man must reajust his judgments of the gift; and for it all, woman of the crudest sort must never be looked down upon unless they are vicious in a spirit beyond their female nature…And it was sometime after my thoughts on this subject that I came across in some reading…somebody asked Degas why he made his women so ugly, and he replied, in surprise, “But women
are
ugly.”

I don’t know if I’ve made myself quite clear on the value of Pascin, and the fact that you tell me…he was a Jew…of course makes little difference, except, I suppose, if a Jew can overcome his instincts to become an artist, he will probably become a good one. Except Ginsburg whose instincts keep dragging him back.

Now, Sherri, you sent me the Myrrh Gum…and thanks…and I enclose couple bucks for costs…but…what hell, baby, yam I supposed to do wit it? Eat it? Set it on fire? What wha wha? You gotta enclose instructions…I am like a child cut loose into a bush of cottonwillows.

Forgive me for moving so fk hard against yr H.D., I will still love you, Shed; it is only that we must move forward, and H.D., while she did her good part early, 3,000 female writers sound like H.D. now—which is not her fault but her strength,
but we who are on the edge of the present day creation…cannot see and, are in a sense, hard toward the past which gives us much of our heritage and strength to go on, but the going on overtakes us, and we must go on…just as those who swallow us up…will look back in a declining and indefferential sense upon our bones. It is sad, but right now…
we
are alive and the sound is ours. H.D. is unmistakably dead and she must realize it, and if she doesn’t…then she is less than she is.

You needn’t sketch my portrait. Enclose one sketched by myself.

Still working on small shack deal. Won over 500 dollars Monday. Tuesday lost 2 bets—one for 10 dollars on 9 to one shot and other for one hundred to win on 2 to 1 shot. Both horses won easily but they took down my number on inquiry of very minor technicalities by the stewards. took in 20, 30 dollars on succeeding days, hardly anything, but it rained today and I stayed here.

To hell with Ezra; I took him to my bosom early, when I needed strength, but now I’ve got strength. I’m going to carve my own jade. It’s very simple. If only they’ll give me a few more years. But I cannot stop drinking. Drinking fills me, it doesn’t empty me. I can’t explain. In some later years, if we are still here, somebody will come up with some very simple answers but I will be just so many more bones sitting under sod somewhere and the hot kisses and music and poetry will belong to someone else. It is a hard fact to take, in essence, if you look at it from the Life-side, which is all we can do, no matter how much we kid ourselves that we can see forward and that all will be okaydookay.

yes, yes, your paintings very good from little booklet you sent me…do not like your sketches…but paintings yes. I do not know what it is. But do not try to be
modern
, like the mostly
red and square-shaped thing
, I forget what you called it. You stay old. You are touched with a good dust and what you say about bones is true. I love you and I know what you are. Keep it moving. Your color shades call to the eye of the worm and forever. What you
think
you see in H.D. is only a small part of you. H.D. is only a small stopsign on your way. You see that Gib
keeps you stocked in paint and paper and gives you a few clothes because you can’t help being a woman. But don’t be too hard on Gib. He is not as mad as the rest of us. But then, who is?

lovekisses, baby, from one you’ll prob.
never see, and it doesn’t matter—

Buk