Screams From the Balcony (15 page)

It’s a hell of a juncture to bust loose and I guess I’ll never bust loose, not writing poetry, and it appears I can’t even do that anymore, and I sure can’t go the novel, not the way I feel, the novel seems like nothing but
WORK
, a grandiose concept of saying a lot of nothing, and I guess the idea of the poems, good or bad, is to keep me from going crazier. I could pay money to hear some psychiatrist tell me this, and then we’d both feel better; only he’d feel better than I because he’d have my money and a nice secretary to look at walking around the room and to fuck. ah, wilderness, my wilderness. [* * *]

I reread Camus’
The Stranger
the other night and once again this appeared to me to be the perfect antidote for what was essentially wrong with the resolve in
Crime and Punishment
. It is so good that others do this work for us so that we do not have to do it ourselves.

Children outside gyrating, seeing grass and mystery and freedom, and parental tyranny too; but they (the holy children) will be melded down, they become me: an old man at 4 o’clock in the afternoon writing tea-leaf thoughts in a vestibule that smells of bacon and frogs and tumbling silence.

 

From now until the end of the book, the letters all bear the new address given in the following letter
.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 1, 1964

We have moved to—

5126 ¼ De Longpre Ave.

Los Angeles 27, Calif.

Old 1623 is gone and it was a magic number and a magic place, but after 6 years there
is
some wear and tear especially after no repairs or replacements of any sort. However, the landowners and their serfs (managers) always holler, charge too much and feel as if they were doing
you
a favor. Narrow-minded bigots that you have to sneak women past and not be seen drunk and not do this and not do that etc. etc.; all this time you are sharing the place with rats and bugs and old churchly women who poke and grovel and skitter and clog the halls of your brain, ugghg. They even called the police on me one night (a couple of years back) and I held them off through the door chain and talked them away. Anyway, don’t send any mail there as it may never reach me. They are pissed because I threw a few glasses of whiskey against the walls, bled on the rug & almost died several times and because the water pipes broke continually in the walls and they had to rip their walls open and I was there, usually in bed hungover sick unhappy with their pipes and their bodies their intrusions upon my tiniest of moments. May those whore-hating finks rot before they reach hell. I have spoken. [* * *]

I don’t know where to get a
Village Voice
; if you manage to get an extra copy do send on—this address. It is more difficult, I suppose, to be a
discovered
poet; you’ve got to carry the load on your soul-back and when you sit down to a typer you are supposed to
do
it. I’d rather be loose, even bad-loose. The name in lights thing is good, of course, especially when you’re feeling down—you let yourself taste a little, like a drink, only you know that it doesn’t change the
living
life…a few more door-knockers, but these soon go away when you don’t walk upside down from the ceiling. [* * *]

I tried to make a tape of poems a week or so ago. Started o.k. but got too drunk and started talking too much between poems and I didn’t care for it when I played it back. [* * *] I think it best to “talk” the poems instead of poeticizing them, make them “natural” as you suggested. [* * *]

 

The bookseller Jim Roman also published some books of poetry, among them Corrington’s
Anatomy of Love.

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 4, 1964

Got Corrington’s
Anatomy of Love
today. very
very
fine stuff in there, what I’ve read, he’s come along a lot, and it’s all much better than his novel and it seems a damned shame we can’t keep him always with the poem; the novel may eat him up—I hope not.

Very little today. The cats still walk around. One of them ate a bird the other day. I won’t talk to the son of a bitch for a week. As you know, I am sometimes not a realist. I can’t take it. [* * *]

[To Ann (Bauman) Menebroker]

May [6, 1964]

good on the marriage.

yes, those long-distance calls tho’ they cost us dearly in $$ were
MORALE
, and very odd and yet a fulfilling strange thing.

I am not married but might as well be. I am in strange country, fairly unhappy, dismantled but no need to be cruel. You can only save what you have left and if that is very little then to hell with it. The flowers die too.

Take care as they say around town, und don’t forget ye Muse.

 

The review by Frances Smith under the name S. S. Veri appeared in
Chat Noir Review,
vol. 2, no. 3. The Webbs’ new address was in Santa Fe, but they moved back to New Orleans after less than a week
(Hank).

 

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

May 12, 1964

aw right, I shoot you something pomes?? to yr new address to shew u I am still putting my socks on and also enclose knew
chat noir revue
wich Frances ast me to en clothes shee is part ed. and wrote review a
It Catches
wich mite bee pred. but so? und also she writes under name of S. S. Veri I think some quite good poems but some other stuff by other peeple in thair I don’ kare 4. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

June 12, 1964

[* * *] I think the oddest thing I have ever heard, I could call it funny but I have been drinking too much tonight today, was a woman editor-poetess, they were putting out a special issue or something of convict poets or what the hell, and she was disturbed because “these men could not rise, seemingly, above their circumstances…all they seemed to write about was wanting to get out of jail, and why they should not be there…”

my god, her pretty pussy should some night some years sit there not getting out, not even for the moon, not even for a walk down to the corner for a dull newspaper, does she know what it means to walk back and forth a certain space and
only
that space and that no matter what you say, no matter how you
SCREAM
, that that space will not widen except through death or pardon or insanity? and even then? fuck it. Jon, you know. when I by god get letters from cunts like this I near vomit, I look to the sun to make me well. that it grows these blind children.

[To Jim Roman]

[July 1, 1964]

yes, by god, no one is more pleased than I to be the victim of another magic book of the starving Webbs’ gutwork and pure glad madness. I don’t know about the poems. I know they could print a cookbook that would bring tears to the ears. (and eyes too!) Rexroth was right (in review) when he said my press was too good. but it’s like a beautiful woman asking to go to bed with you—what are you going to do? turn her away? ah no, not even at my age! [* * *]

I don’t hear any more from Willie [Corrington] and I guess he’s shipping in from England, all lost and hooded in the pages of his second novel. I just hope he doesn’t get too efficient about turning them out, but I’m a crank and a puritan and a nut this way: always carrying what’s left of my soul in a little glass jar in my pocket like a fishing worm. [* * *]

[To Kay Johnson, preceded by note to Jon and Louise Webb]

Dear Jon & Lou:

Letter I wrote to Kaja some time back. Forwarded all over

Europe, then came back to me.—B.

[
handwritten
:]

September 15, 1964

Dear Kaja—

All right, I know it was a drunken letter and you’ve got to stop stealing my stuff! Anyhow you said Copenhagen, so here I am writing to Copenhagen. [* * *]

[
typewritten
:]

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. anyhow, I am sitting around feeling my arms and legs and balls, trying to figure out if I am real or not. I must be: about 3 a.m. I wiped my ass. the sun is just right today, kind of an icy tired yellow, limp vain vaindog of a sky. bull. listen, do you know what we are trying to do? are we crazy or do we mean something with our poems, or is it children’s games, or tricks, or colored water? we gotta have blood! bloody shades in cheap hotels; mortar in the streets, shellholes! hoar-frosted wine! and young girls running wild down the streets chased by hungry dogs! my god my god, everything is so dull. even the bomb will be dull. it won’t last. we won’t last. this is profound.
YOU HAVE NO IDEA
HOW
profound
this is. all right, listen, don’t mess up too much in Cope.—I remain sitting in the sun, 44 years old, 3 or 4 blocks south of
HOLLYWOOD
, my god my god, and for it all it is a good day, I am not too sick today although I may hit the first man I meet on the street square in the face.

[To Ann Menebroker]

October 25, 1964

[* * *] have been reading
Saint Genet
by Sartre who turned down Nobel’s 52 grand while waiting on a cheese sandwich. S.G. badly written for most part, but good shafts of light there, involuted, and somewhat fascinating like a little box of rusty razor blades. If you have leisure to mull without tension you can pick up a big fat paperback copy for a dollar and a quarter. Genet, of course, was preceded as a robber-verse writer by Villon, who if I remember, was banned from Paris. Genet, more-like, has it made. [* * *]

 

“
Snow Bracero” and 3 other poems appeared in
Jacaranda
6, February 1965 (Dorbin C259-261
).

 

[To Joel Climenhaga]

October 26, 1964

I got your o.k. on the 5 poems and hope you will send me a copy of whichever Transient Press mag or mags these might appear in [* * *] “Snow Bracero” I had some fun writing, not fun but flew…something…I used to write the short story some time back but generally dislike short story on waste of wordage principle but if I can get a story line into what I consider a poem-form I am happy enough, or as happy as I will be? [* * *]

 

Douglas Blazek, notes Bukowski, “was, perhaps, the foremost leader of the Mimeo Revolution with his magazine
Ole.
He was also a good writer, quite prolific, and an excellent and interesting correspondent.” Blazek accepted three Bukowski poems for the first issue of
Ole,
initiating one of Bukowski’s most extensive and most sustaining correspondences of the 1960s
.

 

[To Douglas Blazek]

[October 28, 1964]

[* * *] fine, I got your o.k. on the 3 poems, and while I have a theory that rejection is good for the soul, the theory seems to work best when it applies to others.

bio: born 8-16-20. began writing poetry at age of 35. 5 collections of poetry with a 6th,
Crucifix in a Deathhand
to be issued by Loujon Press and Lyle Stuart, Inc. early, in 1965. That’s it.

Rough night in the pit last night, bastard on one side telling me how great he was and bastard on other side telling me how great he was, meanwhile the workwhip flashing like a cobra hung to a windmill. [* * *]

my neck hurts. I seem to be dying of something—maybe life—or maybe no young ass. well. listen: bottom of paper here. slipping out of typer. going. hold and luck.

[To Douglas Blazek]

late October 1964

got your letter, and poems enclosed for your consideration.

luck with your mad venture, but hope you get some hard knockers (eventually) because poetry is dying on the vine like a whore on the end stool on a Monday night.

I am snotted-up today, dismal, flu maybe, or maybe just 44 years, a lot of them drunk, anyhow all bent over and have had 2 shots for neuritis from a doc over Hollywood Blvd. who yachts to Catalina too much, and I straightened up a little. He keeps me waiting an hour each time and all I could do was peek at the cunt walking down on the street below and I got rocks but there was nothing he could give me for that.

the woman wants to put food on this table. I’ve got to get out.

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

October 31, 1964

well, since no pomes I mite as well untrundle the old bullshit harp, but it’s not bullshit when I say I got your tired card and know the job has you by the throat, and worn, and I send a white prayer of luck and love for whatever good it might or might not do, and yes, send a page if you get around to it, there’s nothing like being tired and tired and tired so you can’t sleep or think of hope, but if this book comes anywhere near what you did with
It Catches
I will know that the good angels are near you even if they refuse to do the slave-rote work of drudgery and guts. I wish I could say something to help you through except that I am so often in muddled state and tired too, but if it helps, and it might not,—a book like this lifts my life up into light whether I deserve it or not. 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. [* * *]