The Bell Tolls for No One

City Lights Books | San Francisco

Copyright © 2015 by The Estate of Charles Bukowski

Introduction copyright © 2015 by David Calonne

All Rights Reserved

Cover illustration copyright © 1998 by Robert Crumb

Cover and interior design by Linda Ronan

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bukowski, Charles.

[Short stories. Selections]

Bell tolls for no one : stories / by Charles Bukowski ; edited with an introduction by David Stephen Calonne.

pages ; cm

ISBN 978-0-87286-682-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-87286-684-3 (e-book)

I. Title.

PS3552.U4A6 2015

813'.54—dc23

2015014714

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

www.citylights.com

Contents

Introduction

Introduction Notes

A Kind, Understanding Face

Save the World

The Way the Dead Love

The Looney Ward

Dancing Nina

A Piece of Cheese

A Day in the Life of an Adult Bookstore Clerk

An Affair of Very Little Importance

Break-In

Flying is the Safest Way to Travel

Fly the Friendly Skies

The Lady with the Legs

Won't You Be My Valentine?

A Dirty Trick on God

The Bell Tolls for No One

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

Charles Bukowski's Graphic and Pulp Fiction

David Stephen Calonne

C
harles Bukowski was devoted to “graphic fiction” from the beginning of his career: one of his earliest works, “The Reason Behind Reason,” published in 1946 in
Matrix
, is adorned with a lively drawing depicting the anti-hero Chelaski with legs flying, arms outstretched comically attempting to catch a flying baseball.
¹
During his years crisscrossing America between 1942 and 1947—a period in which he sometimes had to pawn his typewriter due to lack of funds—Bukowski also submitted to Whit Burnett, editor of the celebrated
Story
magazine, a series of hand-printed, illustrated short stories, including “A Kind, Understanding Face,” demonstrating that he often conceptualized text and image together in a complementary relationship. He wrote Burnett from Los Angeles in November 1948: “I thought the drawings came out especially well in this one and I hope you do not lose it.”
²
Burnett urged Bukowski to collect his drawings in book form and also repeatedly asked him to consider writing a novel. On October 9, 1946, from Philadelphia, Bukowski also composed an illustrated letter to Caresse Crosby, publisher of
Portfolio
. Already he had developed the clean line style of his charming, minimalist, Thurberesque drawings which could not but ingratiate him to prospective famous editors such as Crosby and Burnett. Here a stunned man with a bottle and lines for eyes drinks, smokes, and lies in bed with bare lightbulb, curtain with a drawstring, bottles on the floor. Later he would add sun, flying birds, companionable dogs. Psychologically, it is clear that these gently humorous drawings were one of the ways he had developed to deal with his considerable childhood wounds: his physical abuse by his father, the eruption of
acne vulgaris
, his status as misfit German-American. Here was a medium in which he could play and entertain, qualities he also strove for in his writing.

The autobiographical “A Kind, Understanding Face” (1948) begins with an epigraph describing a crippled spider being dismembered alive by ants and sets the theme for many later stories: Nature red in tooth and claw. The protagonist, Ralph, like the young Bukowski, avoids the draft, has journalistic ambitions, and wanders the country from Miami to New York to Atlanta. Though Ralph is in some respects a stand-in for the author, in the story his father and then his mother are deceased, while Bukowski's mother Katherine died in 1956 and his father Henry in 1958. The tale presents a series of odd, disjunctive events, concluding with three mysterious quotations, appended without citations: one from Rabelais's
Gargantua and Pantagruel
, Book Five, Chapter 30, “Our Visit to Satinland”; another from George Santayana's “Ultimate Religion” (1933); and finally a reference to René Warcollier (1881–1962), the French chemical engineer who developed a method of making precious stones synthetically and who also published
Experiments in Telepathy
(1938).
³
Given that there is a reference to copulating and defecating in public, it's possible that Bukowski by this time had also encountered the writings of Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 412 CE–323 CE). Just as the narrative itself is weirdly dissociative, these three allusions left in the suicide note of young Ralph seem a kind of fragmentary riddle or hidden message which the reader is meant to assemble and decode: What, if any, is the connection between Diogenes, that odd manticore, the lofty language of Santayana, and the making of jewels from fish scales? One recalls Vladimir Nabokov: “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” The range of these rather recherché allusions indicates the depth of Bukowski's reading, and placing them one after another may suggest the absurdity of the quest for meaning as well as the indecipherability of an obscure unfinished life.

From the beginning of his career, Bukowski depicted the terrible human encounter with the Other: insects (here spiders and ants) in particular pullulate through many of his early poems and stories. His work also shows the influence of Robinson Jeffers's hawks and herons as well as D.H. Lawrence, whose
Birds, Beasts and Flowers
can be heard echoing in the title of Bukowski's first book of poems,
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail
. Mockingbirds, wild horses, and dogs appear in three other poetry titles. In the stories in this volume, there is a frightening encounter with a hog, while another tale set in Bolivia depicts a man, a woman, and a monkey engaging in a bizarre psychological battle, a theme Bukowski would return in his late story “The Invader” (1986).
⁴
And in “The Bell Tolls for No One,” the narrative draws to a close on an awesome note: “Then in front of me there was an animal. It looked like a large dog, a wild dog. The moon was to my back and it shone into the beast's eyes. The eyes were red like burning coal.”

In the same issue of
Matrix
as “The Reason Behind Reason,” Bukowski's poem “Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses” appeared, recounting a love triangle involving a waitress, her husband, and her Greek lover; this suggests Bukowski most likely had read James M. Cain's
The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1934), in which the plot is very similar, though the restaurant owner is Greek and the other man steals his wife. Cain famously shaped the style of Albert Camus's
L'Etranger
—the French existentialists owed a debt to the cool, tough American private eyes—and Bukowski also acknowledged Cain's style as a significant influence on his own work.
⁵
Like Cain, Bukowski often takes a detached, clinical view of crime, and Los Angeles
noir
would be the style of his many “hardboiled” crime stories, culminating in his homage to the genre, his final novel,
Pulp
(1994).
⁶
When Irene in one of our tales tells the Bukowski-character that he is the “greatest thing since Hemingway,” he responds: “I'm closer to Thurber mixed with Mickey Spillane”: the hero of
Pulp
is tellingly named “Nick Belane,” obviously echoing “Mickey Spillane.” Of course, Bukowski's gift for dialogue, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and skeletal, pared-down prose derives from Hemingway, supplemented with elements he often said he found lacking in Hemingway: humor, as well as liberal doses of slang, swearing, scatology, and obscenity. The title “The Bell Tolls for No One” is an obvious reference to Hemingway's novel
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, while in another story a pornographer husband and his wife carry on a humorous dialogue about Hemingway.

Bukowski often returned nostalgically to the legendary outlaws of the 1930s, and in the poem “the lady in red” recalled: “the best time of all / was when John Dillinger escaped from jail, and one of the / saddest times of all was when the Lady in Red fingered him and / he was gunned down coming out of that movie. / Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma / Barker, Alvin Karpis, we loved them all.”
⁷
For Bukowski, as for a writer in every way his opposite, William S. Burroughs (one of whose favorite books was Jack Black's 1926 autobiography chronicling his adventures in the underworld,
You Can't Win
), the American power structure was criminal at its very core and found its mirror image in the violent figures who struggled against it.
⁸
Cain, Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler depicted a hard, amoral universe that shows no mercy and provided Bukowski a tradition within which to dramatize his mythicized autobiography. His 1947 meeting with Jane Cooney Baker at the Glenwood Bar on Alvarado Street becomes a tale endlessly told and retold, shaped and refined. In a 1967 story for
Open City
he declares that Jane “had delicious legs and a tight little gash and a face of powdered pain. And she knew me. She taught me more than the philosophy books of the ages”—casting Jane in the
film noir
role of
femme fatale
. And the violence of this broken world is continual. Wallace Fowlie once wrote about Henry Miller: “I believe the quality which first attracted me in Mr. Miller's writings was his violence. Not the violence of the things said, but the violence of the way in which they were said. The violence of feeling has become in his work the violence of style which has welded together all of his disparate passions and dispersed experiences into the one experience of language.”
⁹
Similarly, Bukowski evolved his own original finely modulated “language” to portray a modern world in which the redemptive power of love was under continual threat.

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” was a phrase of Hassan-i Sabbah (ca. 1050 CE–1124 CE), the Ismaili founder of the
Hashshashin
, repeated like a mantra by William Burroughs. In
The Brothers Karamazov
, Dostoevsky proclaims: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” and Karamazov is cited in “A Dirty Trick on God.” Another Bukowski favorite, Friedrich Nietzsche, declared in
The
Genealogy of Morals
:

“The labyrinthine consequences” of such a philosophy become the subject matter of Bukowski's repeated portrayals of his characters' encounters with the Minotaur of the cave of unrelenting chaos. Crime becomes a metaphor for an unjust universe in which reward and punishment often seem unrelated to virtue: The unyielding, brutal, and powerful “Break In” contains an explicit speech on the unfairness of society, and in Bukowski the narrator often observes the occurrences helplessly, without commentary. He is at once quasi-participant and observer.

Yet these stories also demonstrate Bukowski's wide range; he can be witty, casual, intimate, and ingratiating, and he tries his hand at a variety of genres: science fiction, a send-up of Westerns, stories of jockeys and football players. While he is devoted to chronicling the
Sturm und Drang
of his private, emotional life, the political and social upheavals of the mid to late sixties are frequently portrayed, as in “Save the World,” which depicts his relationship with his partner Frances Smith. Although he pokes fun at Frances's devotion to liberal causes, Bukowski had met—and liked—Dorothy Healey, giving her inscribed copies of
Cold Dogs in the Courtyard
and
Crucifix in a Deathhand
. He wrote Will Inman, editor of
Kauri
:
“Dorothy Healey, spokeswoman for the Communist Party, came to visit me. I was honored. I have no politics, but I was, nevertheless, honored.”
¹¹
One tale imagines an apocalyptic 1968 presidential victory of George Wallace and his vice-presidential choice, the Air Force general Curtis Le May; others make incisive comments on the return of American POWs following the end of the Vietnam War and allude to Bukowski's own questioning by the F.B.I. during the period he was under investigation for his supposedly incendiary writings for the underground press.

The political ferment of the period—from approximately 1967 to 1973—corresponds exactly with one of Bukowski's most brilliant and prolific phases. One might argue that the eruption of Dionysian sexual energy was directly related to the anti-war stance of the time: Make love not war. The gradual loosening of censorship restrictions allowed writers and artists new freedom for self-expression. Centered in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the “comix underground” had taken off with the appearance of the famous
Zap #1
in 1968.
¹²
Bukowski himself continued to draw and paint prolifically and would ultimately get to know personally or have professional association with the three major figures of underground comics: Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay Wilson.
¹³
An admirer of Bukowski's writing, Robert Crumb demonstrated his genius at capturing its German Expressionist tragicomic essence in his illustrations for
Bring Me Your Love
,
There's No Business
, and
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
.
¹⁴
Bukowski himself now began to draw cartoons for his stories in
Open City
and the
Los Angeles Free Press
. He also created several stand-alone comic strips such as “Dear Mr. Bukowski”—a hilarious account of a more-than-usually crazy day in his life—which appeared in the June 27, 1975, issue of the
Free Press
and was then printed as a silkscreen set of fifty signed copies in 1979, as well as a series titled “The Adventures of Clarence Hiram Sweetmeat,” which appeared in the October 24, 1974, and September 19, 1975, issues. The installment that appeared in the October 3, 1975,
Free Press
was published in 1986 in book form as
The Day It Snowed in L.A
.

Just as Burnett had in the forties, John Martin—who had begun publishing broadsides of Bukowski's poetry in 1966—urged Bukowski to write a novel. He worked on a manuscript titled
The Way the Dead Love
that was never completed, but several chapters were published in magazines.
¹⁵
One chapter, which appeared in
Congress
(1967), vividly described some sexual hijinks involving “Hank” (Bukowski), “Lou,” and a young lady in a cellar, and demonstrates Bukowski's newfound, jaunty, erotic style. In the early 1970s, it now seemed natural for him to begin writing for the men's magazines in order to supplement his income. Four stories in this volume—“The Looney Ward,” “Dancing Nina,” “No Quickies, Remember,” and “A Piece of Cheese”—were submitted to
Fling
, published by Arv Miller in Chicago. Bukowski created the title “Hairy Fist Tales” as the rubric for the series, and the phrase likely derived from a poem he had published in the
Grande Ronde Review
6 in 1966, “the hairy, hairy fist, and love will die,” a fierce and frightening description of total spiritual defeat: “your soul / filled with / mud and bats and curses, and the hammers will / go in / there will be hairy / hairy / fists and / love will / die.”
¹⁶
These tales, however, are light-hearted and rambunctious. Bukowski had read Boccaccio, and the
fabliau
technique of folk-story telling familiar from Chaucer can be seen as well in “No Quickies, Remember” in which, as in a joke, the same story is repeated several times, leading to a surprise ending.