Beerspit Night and Cursing (4 page)

That blessing “brought tears to Sheri Martinelli’s eyes on the Pacific Ocean edge a year later, ’68.”

One night at the beginning of November 1972, Sheri went out to check on the caretaker of the cabins when “a terrible wind came up. A bad wind. A whistling wind,” she later wrote. “One recalled that in Hawaii, not too far off westerly, such a wind is reported to come up when royal persons or sacred persons are about to die…One thought there was a talking sound something like: ‘Think ye hard on Ezra Pound’ but it didn’t make sense.” The next morning Sheri learned Pound had died the night before.

There had been little or no contact between them in the fourteen years since they parted at St. Elizabeths, but for the rest of her life Sheri would think of Pound almost daily, endlessly rereading
The Cantos
, writing poems about him, sketching him, and trying to live up to the example he set of purposeful creative activity. She continued to produce poetry and drawings, periodically gathering them up into photocopied booklets, which she would send to friends. She apparently made no effort to publish her work through conventional channels or promote her art in any way, or apply for grants. That is, she had no interest in becoming a
professional
writer or artist. She did become something of a professional widow, however; in the late seventies she attended a Pound session at an MLA meeting in San Francisco dressed in black weeds like an Edwardian widow. When she thought Pound was slighted in an article in
Paideuma
in 1977 by her old acquaintance Reno Odlin (actually an attack on the academic Pound industry), Sheri fired off an enraged Mailgram to the journal demanding an apology (which was reprinted in facsimile in its winter 1977 issue). She also began to appreciate all the Pound materials she had saved—letters from Pound, drafts of “her” cantos, inscribed books—and began organizing all this material, both for her own continuing studies and for eventual sale to a library. (Yale’s Beinecke Library finally bought her papers from Gilbert in 1999.) As Pound studies proliferated in the seventies and eighties, she began to be approached by critics seeking information, but she regarded most of them with a wary eye. She felt their neglect of the anagogic possibilities of
The Cantos
in favor of more mundane matters was wrongheaded; she also felt slighted by their neglect of her art, especially the paintings mentioned in
The Cantos
.

In 1983, at the age of sixty-five, Sheri decided it was time to retire and return back East. Both she and Gilbert had ailing mothers there to attend, so they left the Creek and drove out to New Jersey; after staying with relatives for a year or so, they finally settled in Falls Church, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, where they lived for the rest of Sheri’s life. Organizing Pound’s papers became the primary activity of her days, interrupted often by family concerns and her own failing health. She took the time to contribute a brief statement to a festschrift for Allen Ginsberg’s sixtieth birthday, and remained interested in some Pound events, attending a Pound-Yeats conference at the University of Maine in 1990 that featured her art.

In her final years Sheri liked to park her camper in front of the local supermarket and watch the people come and go. It was there that she died on 3 November 1996, almost twenty-four years to the day after the death of her beloved Maestro, and forty years after he transformed the fisherman’s granddaughter into a goddess: “Ra-Set in her barge now / over deep sapphire” (92/638).

Had Bukowski received a typical form-letter rejection from Martinelli when he first submitted his poems in 1960, he would probably have tossed it aside and moved on to the next magazine. But Sheri presumed to give him some advice, and he bristled at that. “I can’t be bothered with gash trying to realign my outlook,” he wrote to Jory Sherman in characteristically coarse fashion (
SB
21). He defended his aesthetics in his response to Sheri’s rejection letter, and so began a rambunctious correspondence that lasted for seven years. It’s surprising they had anything to say to each other, for they were complete opposites in almost every way. Though roughly the same age—Martinelli was forty-two, Bukowski turned forty that year—Sheri was emotional, idealistic, and quick to embrace metaphysical systems and conspiracy theories, while he was sensible, pessimistic, and down to earth. She admired the literary classics, while Bukowski had little use for them. She studied the
I Ching
, while he studied the racing form. She was very health-conscious and paid close attention to dietary matters, whereas Bukowski couldn’t be bothered with such things. There was even a marked physical difference: Sheri, the ex-
Vogue
model, was what Bukowski called “a looker,” while he admitted he was an ugly man. (“Beauty and the Beast,” Alexander Theroux has called them.) And, most important, they held diametrically opposed views on the purpose of poetry. For Bukowski, it was solely a means of self-expression and followed no rules but his own, while for Martinelli poetry was a guide to civilized behavior and a vehicle for the exploration of spiritual truths, with a long tradition to be respected and followed. It’s the romantic outlook versus the classical: the difference between Keats and Pope, Whitman and Eliot, or—to use the authors championed by Bukowski and Martinelli—between Robinson Jeffers and H.D. Sheri accused Bukowski of building “ass-hole palaces” in his poems, of wallowing in the mud rather than turning his mind to higher matters (
SB
21, 134). The only writer they admired in common was Ezra Pound, though for different reasons.

And yet each recognized the other as a true individual, a person of spirit. Within weeks of their first exchange of letters they were writing regularly, opening up to each other as soul-mates, sharing intimate secrets and confessing to their desperate attempts to find meaningful activity in life. Sheri recognized Bukowski’s talent, even though she deplored his subject matter, and he praised her as “one woman in 90 million women,” no matter how harshly she criticized him. He was proud to be in correspondence with her: in a 1965 letter to writer William Wantling, Bukowski reported: “Pound’s x-girl friend Martinelli trying to cough up my whore-O-scope. stars, something. just think, somebody Pound went to bed with is now writing me, has been for years. my, my” (
SB
234). Several times Bukowski talked of driving up to visit her, and Sheri once considered coming down (with her husband) to move in with him. However, they never met, and both realized this was probably for the best.

The bulk of these letters were written during the first year of their acquaintance. From 1962 onward the correspondence dwindled considerably; Bukowski understandably grew tired of Sheri’s constant carping, and she suffered a variety of personal crises in the early sixties that distracted her. They kept in touch, but the fire had gone out of their epistolary relationship. She also became increasingly annoyed by his references to her in some of his poems, which she considered an invasion of her privacy. The end came in April 1967, when Bukowski wrote her a rather impersonal letter mentioning that a new acquaintance of his, a speed freak with a Nazi fetish named John Thomas, claimed Sheri couldn’t have known Pound at St. Elizabeths. This stupid accusation, along with Bukowski’s distant tone and Sheri’s own increasing withdrawal from the world, ended their correspondence.

The survival of these letters is due almost entirely to Sheri’s foresight. She not only saved and dated all of Bukowski’s letters to her, but made carbons of most of her letters to him. (Bukowski saved only about a dozen of her letters, mostly later ones.) Their publication is due to Gilbert Lee’s generosity in sharing these letters with me, and John Martin’s willingness to print them. All surviving letters have been included and are printed in full.

Seamus Cooney has described the difficulties of reproducing Bukowski’s correspondence in his editions of Bukowski’s selected letters, and I have followed his editorial principles in transcribing these letters. Thus, words that were typed in all capital letters are set in small caps, or in italics if they are books or poetry titles. Deliberate misspellings have been retained, and a good number of unintended ones as well. (Bukowski consistently misspelled his first wife’s surname, for example, and never could get Allen Ginsberg’s surname right, no matter how often Sheri spelled it correctly.) Bukowski was often drunk or hung over when he typed these letters, so many of his irregularities can be attributed to drink rather than an inability to spell. Consequently, only meaningless misstrikes and typos, and a few misleading misspellings, have been corrected. (Bukowski would sometimes type a word three or four times until he got it right; in such instances, only the final attempt has been retained.) His punctuation, even when drunk, is fairly good, and has not been amended.

Sheri’s letters present a different challenge: a better typist than Bukowski—though she too sometimes wrote under the influence of alcohol or other substances—she had her own system of punctuation and, like Pound, constantly indented lines so that her letters look more like pages from
The Cantos
than normal letters. (Also like Pound, she often used British spelling and punctuation and had the tiresome habit of using dialect for comic effect.) She wrote in phrases rather than in sentences, and separated her phrases either with virgules/ like this/ or with sawed-off suspension points.. like this.. (using only two periods instead of the usual three). I have retained her idiosyncratic punctuation—though using the standard three suspension points—but have run most of her phrases together, breaking for new paragraphs when it seemed called for (and when she seemed to be doing so, though her erratic spacing often makes this difficult to ascertain). I hope the effect of her prose is thus preserved while making it easier on the eyes. As in Bukowski’s case, some of her trivial or misleading misspellings have been corrected, though not all.

Conventional indented paragraphing has been imposed throughout—Bukowski usually began his paragraphs flush left, separated by line spaces, and Martinelli began hers wherever the typewriter carriage landed—except in those instances where the writers deliberately departed from conventional form. Handwritten signatures at the end of letters have been italicized. Both correspondents sometimes illustrated their letters—Bukowski with line drawings, and Sheri sometimes with more elaborate drawings, her pages taped together to form illustrated scrolls—but the illustrations haven’t been reproduced here. A few abbreviated words have been spelled out within brackets; also enclosed in brackets are dates to some of Bukowski’s letters, which Sheri notated after receiving them. She sometimes complained how difficult it was to read Bukowski’s letters—a clear case of the pot calling the kettle black—so despite the editing I’ve done, it would be appropriate for the reader to experience a little of the same difficulty in order to savor the full flavor of this wild correspondence.

—
Steven Moore
      Littleton, CO, Summer 2000

1

A&P
=
Anagogic & Paideumic Review

CB = Charles Bukowski

SM = Sheri Martinelli

Charles Bukowski Works Cited

BW
=
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973
(Black Sparrow, 1974).

DRA
=
The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills
(Black Sparrow, 1969).

LL
=
Living on Luck: Selected Letters 1960s-1970s
. Edited by Seamus Cooney (Black Sparrow, 1995).

RM
=
The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems 1946-1966
(Black Sparrow, 1988).

SB
=
Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960-1970
. Edited by Seamus Cooney (Black Sparrow, 1993).

Other Works Cited

Cherkovski, Neeli.
Bukowski: A Life
(Steerforth Press, 1997).

Dorbin, Sanford.
A Bibliography of Charles Bukowski
(Black Sparrow, 1969).

Krumhansl, Aaron.
A Descriptive Bibliography of the Primary Publications of Charles Bukowski
(Black Sparrow, 1999).

Pound, Ezra.
The Cantos
. New Directions, 1995 (13th printing); cited by canto/page number.

Sounes, Howard.
Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
(Grove Press, 1998).

5/june/60 sheri martinelli 15 lynch st. s.f.calif/

my dear charles bukowski/ have no idea when the next a & p will be done as one is madly busy—hence i return yr verse & retain yr address in case i do new a & p/ if you spec. wanted
rob’t stock
to read it i give his address/ i wont take respons. to mail it over as rob’t might not answer you & you’d wonder where hell was work/

rob’t stock 41b peralta pl s.f.calif

i want to say that i don’t find a “thump” in yr work—i understand the subject matter since that is life; i suggest you keep writing it down; i suggest you go to the old boys—the greeks/ latins/ a good translation in library & discover that life has never been any different…then awakens in the soul…a desire to leave a message of help for those who come after us/ & not to list what life does & is doing to us/ maestro ezra pound kept telling me “now don’t dump yr garbage can on my head…” so I learned this lesson the hard way…

of course chopin would be at his piano…that was his
JOB
—find your job/ or become that which you want to exist & that is it/

if you want to walk in the company of poets & painters I rec. that you acquaint yrself with the tradition of art; that you know of other subject matters than yrself because we have all walked that way & we still do; life does not spare any of us—
read Wyndham Lewis
Rotting Hill
The Room Without A Telephone & that is a portrait of Mr. Eliot our great poet & an account of his eyes & Wyndham—at the library—

now do shave off yr whiskuhs; stop irritating the cops; remain sober; stop trying to figure it all out for yrself—other minds have been here—avail yrself of them; they are called ‘classics’ which
AINT ACADEMIC
; brush yr teeth; find a way to pay th’ rent & join the free public library & obey the chinese command: “walk in the courtyard as if alone…not seeing the rest of them…” & repeat the magic formula:

“now it is my time to walk on thin ice & face tigers”
& recall the poem the greek sailor left for us:

      “
I bid you
take ship & set sail, for many a ship, when ours was lost,

weathered the gale…”

or words to effect/however did you see the A & P Review?

most cordially

SM

Los Angeles, Fire in the Balcony JadeJune [8] ’60

Dear Sheri Martinelli:

Holey possible there is no thump in my poems, and, in me. A degrading and disgusting position, eternally reproved by the gods for not saying enough or well enough or their way. Christ, I have read your classics, I have wasted a life in libraries, turning pages, looking for blood. It seems to me that there has not been
ENOUGH
garbage dumped, the pages do not scream;

always the effected dignity and know-all and dry page sun-burned and listless as wheat.

By the way, must all you so-called moderns use i i i i and no caps? this was effective once but is now simply a hollowdrag.

Pound? Part of Pound was all right, of course, but much circus and blather, maestro maestro throwing spagetwopchink and rolling with the punch,
effect
of doing, appears walking straight while lying down. I don’t have whiskers, I brush my teeth, but do not obey Chinese commands, I obey my commands and hate cops because most of them are young and wear black and carry clubs and guns and wiggle their little conceited asses and don’t understand Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or any or all the Russian musicians and writers. There is much truth in your saying I am listing life merely and there is much truth that I am not saying much and that I am saying too much in the subjective sense, that there is some garbage, but simply on the basis of the classics and the knowledge that I am not doing right, I cannot free myself. The work itself must find its own conclusion from myself and myself as a base alone, set free from what
has
happened or upon what others have done. I will be 40 in August and I am still, perhaps, living like a child and writing like one but this must continue as long as it is the natural thing for me to do.

Critics tend to overevaluate or underevaluate a work treading in the subsoil, seeing the line in the sforzando of their history. If God pissed some would call it a yellow blessing while others would mount their pea-shooters and snarl in their wine.

I have had time to think while laying halfdead in the charity wards and standing in the racetrack sun and sleeping with the fat whores, their sweaty feet pressed flat against my heart. It’s no good reading any more, the machinery has burned out, will not take the glib façade. Do you prefer that I eliminate experience entirely from the poem?
Li Po
liked to burn his up and watch them float down the river, and LP too, liked his wine. I cannot change my flow to criticism. I do not love my poems, really entirely hate them, yet still cannot seethe to do handsprings for the sake of making it. I remember many Chinese poems of the woman waiting for her man to come back from
the wars, torn for love of man and simply waiting, the awful gap of wait, looking at the hill, the flower moving in the sun and nobody there, yet understanding and willing to give her man to the gods. Poems 5 and 6 lines long, experience indeed, and yet if I may use the hollow word: beautiful. Ah, I know, yes yes yes, all this in the classical mould. No, no, no. Experience. I don’t like people who say this has all happened before, we cannot write it. It is happening now.
NOW
. The dead are dead, and believe it or not, because they are dead their words, in a sense are dead too. Blind Milton is not nearly as tragic as when he was living. Art only preserves a portion and is overrated. I can see my fingers on the keys, a half dead plant with a leaf like a rabbit ear bent left faces me, the women of the world walk in my brain, a rat gnaws my stomach and kicks his feet, an icecream truck passes bing bing bing bong bing bong bong, and Art, Art is nothing, it’s my fingers on the keys
NOW
carving and crying Chopin and music and rebellion, to hell with the classics, to hell with form, to hell with Pound, go out, go out and bleed, bleed limitlessly against the mob, the halfRome, halfpoem, half-fire, halfkiss. Go out, go out, go out.

Truly, Charles Bukowski

Charles

Lost Angels
mid-June ’60

Dear Sherimar:

Recvd yrs on
Matz,
Atlantic Ave., Gloucester, Mass., which seems to me to be an incomplete address; however, if I do not hear from you on correction in couple of weeks I will send something if I have something.

I am not a “young poet”. Will be 40, Aug. 16, this year. Have been writing poetry for 5 years, before that: 10 year drunk; before that, short story. Some history there but unimportant. Tired today, drained; blackbirds whirling outside
window, a mass of nonsense.
Hearse
to bring out chapbook of mine,
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail
, month or so. Heard from
Light Year
, said “hell-poems”, “powerful”, “2 dark too dark”. Same thing from others on and on. Suppose yes when smoke has all cleared Pound will still be there, langwiddge-ear, knifepage flur. Boy can cut the jab, hoy and wan.

re solitude: I am complete isolationist, smer the people. music, paint, sound of paint, red music.

but this is mainly on the Matz address. All right. Li Po, uh yes, living on short sound of song, each moment too small for him. what can we do? Contempt and scrabble and illness.

Spoom, and spondee

Charles

Charles Bukowski

let the curious be damned and the damned be curious: the essence of poetry is malarky crossed with bullwhip…

Los Angeles, Calif.
July 2, 1960

Dear Sheri:

I am enclosing a letter I got from
Pain
today. It might amuse you. It slightly sickened me. He preaches so damned much and his lines lack solidity, they hang in the air, driveling, bickering, begging.

He words…without
being
there. And all this coat-tail hanging to the great. Miles wants to be something or other, or not be
something or other, wants to reach something, but to me he appears to lack any strength at all.

I said he would make a good lawyer. He would come closer to making a bad preacher.

Well, anyhow, I answered him. I have enclosed a copy of
my answer
.

Anyhow, enclosed, the stuff.

yours and what,

Charles

Charles Bukowski

ps
^*
You needn’t return any of this crap. just throw it w rest a garbage.

c.b.

early July [7] 60, kowski, one6two3 North Maryposa

yes, dear cous’:

much to feaze in yr letters but u are coming thru like a good thing which is not easy with the gimbals and rooks distorting polysyndeton and prayer, but off the fancy langwich and let me tell u I cannot send to
Pearson
at Yale U because, cous’ I only have mostly one copy of that in which I appear and in some cases none. Wuz once in beautiful thing called
Portfolio
II, $10 an issue, large reproduction paintings modern, me story wit
Sartre, Lorca everybody else, pollock in big promenade, drunk one night in Filly Pa, needing drink broke no home no love no lemonade, told certain persons I writer, hole bar laughed: you writer, ah ha ha ha, so they promised me drinks and I went and drug out huge
Portfolio
and there in bar I showed them me with the famous, only it skidrow bar and they never hearda nobody, but print and all big drawings, red bulls with ears and tails and horns that stuck up outa pages, and the drinks came and I went outside to fight somebody or what the hell and I took the book with me and it was winding and raining and the pages flew flap flip all edge and whirl bulls with wings and matadors in the rain and everybody ran around ketching the pages,
HERE, OH HEY, I GOT ONE HERE
! Bam would go a foot, bam, big foot of window-washer,
HERE’S ONE
! and he handed it to me, a big muddy footprint right in the middle of the beautiful page and I said,
OH CHRIST LET THEM GO, LET THEM FLY, MY WORDS, LORCA, EVERYBODY, LET THEM GO TO HELL IN THE WIND
! and they laughed and, by god, they did let them go, and I dropped the yellow portfolio cover and we all went in and had a drink for dear dead Lorca and whatever.

ye[ah], I want to go on record merely listing my ills, snakebite-carnaval thistle, dilucidate.

Pound had green eyes? Lo, that makes twoa us! Now, if I only had the rest!

No, cous’, I am
not
at top now; this gallimaufry is a beginning. I always knew, even when I was very young that it would take a long time, perhaps too long and that the years might run out before I got there. It is like having a baby. He is kicking in my belly now, but I cannot bring him out. I used to watch the sunlight thro my hangover in New Orleans down on the hanging dishpans and upon the breathing of the rats and all the slivers and dead French souls and me walking second floor railing outside lost, the words worms in my brain, helljelly mess wanting to lay down on paper and be good real thing, but too young, and still, at 40, too young, not, no, at “top”.

I understand where I am. I am in hell: the faces tell me that altho they do not bother me so much now because they have been there so long and I know now that they will never say anything or do anything, make either love or sound or hate that will last, and it is my business to dispossess them by treating them kindly because they are only what they are, but it still feels so
much like a prince without snuffle to be alone in a room again. I mention things sometimes through nerves and the flow of word that is not entirely felt by the socket and
shekinah
of self…wal, hell.

Fry
’s admonition of
Cantos
not against Pound, against me, figuring all I felt holy was no damn good: Like D. H. Lawrence, Chikowsky or Franck’s Symphony in D. Fought me thru last half of marriage; she nympho, held not against her, did best I could, but she laughed and claimed that sexually I was a “puritan” because I would not do the extra special things, and guess she was right. I think a woman much more beautiful fully clothed than naked, but let’s get off of this, I feel lost already.

no ho no, wat do u do wen u want to rite a poem and a woman is sitting in a chair reading the funnypapers across from u, u cant get up and simply go over and sit at a typewriter. everything is too difficult and I do not want to ever hurt anybody.

I do not read a female face; I read a female ass. This is cruel, Sheri, and I am sorry, but that’s where man gets his message. I don’t know where woman gets hers.

Cannot yu say u have lived:
Canto XX
to
Rockdrill
, read by P
OUND
. and, by god, now u are writing me, so in a way I am one with Pound too, and I feel better already. Jesus, I knew something must come out of them grinding my meat. another story of sorrow here, the wood-drills driving into the flesh, 16, other young man and men dancing in the streets, halo u uh harry hurrah but me down on belly drill drill drill into boils as big as apples god damn u god I said come down here into this room and I will crash u right in the face and drill drill drill the first of the old charity ward before the blood the alky cry god damn bastard world, so many sorrow stories so many whores jails lies skirts that wiggled and kissed with heads as empty as these beer cans that sit strewn all about my kitchen, god damn kitchen beautiful music bang bang bang coming out of radio now, the paint of love, the paint of music, not the rotten Miles Payne
front
but crawling up without a name, without
a reason, like an apple, like a slipper sitting by itself in the closet, like a cat chasing its tail, not thinking of birds; like Pound, like ontology, like bang bang bang.

Cous’, let’s not make any “national minds”. U sound like a republican convention. I can see I am going to have to take on where
gramps
left off, even tho u are learning me because I can see much of ur attitude is more embracing flatwise and soundwise than mine and already u have given me some good lessons and I am humble student but must at times say what must much be said. u u. this business of the future an onerary burden. Remember whar ol’ buddy mine
D.H.Law
said: “We should build our statues of wood.” This takes great strength. we will be in t dark, in t dark don u understand cous’? ware we belong, lets lev the earth if thers any levins to thos luckun to cum after and wonder. ya, even the
Cantos
, they must go, tho I do not have the strength, time will. that is the marvelous cry of ours, that all is lost forever why do we god damn go on livin writin letters to cous’ Sheri M.
Po Li
because only because only only nothin’. We humans have more courage than locomotives crushing snow.