Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  Very little more. I went back to my whore who had once been such a cruel and beautiful woman, and who was no longer beautiful (as such) but who had, magically, become a warm and real person, but she could not stop drinking, she drank more than I, and she died.

  There is not much left now. I drink mostly alone and discourage company. People seem to be talking about things that don’t count. They are too eager or too vicious or too obvious.

  I hope this clears up some things and that I have not Ferlinghettied you. I can tell you things that happened like this and it takes nothing away because it is only a LISTING in a sense, and what happened, the living of it, it is still there. I have played some bad lutestrings and taken some knocks in the head, but it was the only way, there was only one path.

  As to the other, I like the EARLY Hemingway, and like the rest of us, was affected somewhat by T.S. and Auden, but not so much in a sense of content, but in a clean and easy way of saying. I like Wagner and Beethoven, Klee and Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff and rabbits. This is all pretty common, I realize. So is breathing. Then too, there’s Darius Milhaud, Verdi, Mussorgsky, Smetana, Shostakovich, Schumann, Bach, Massenet, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Menotti, Gluck, Mahler, Bruckner, Franck, Gounod, Handel and Zoltan Kodaly. Brahms and Tchaikovsky somehow become less and less to me. In Jeffers, I like the longer works, where the style is almost prose, but where everything is hard brick and breaking, where everything is up against the knife and very real. Jeffers almost admires his nonthinking man-brutes as opposed to etc…. that gives his work the touch of truth. He writes believably and the pages are in your hands like warm things, difficult to believe that type and machine also put them together. As to contemporaries, they do not do much for me. I do not mean the poets still living who have stopped writing, I mean those living now and writing now. I cannot see much. A great alikeness. A carefulness. What a stinking age! What a set of ass-lickers.

  Enough of that. [* * *]

  Got a letter from Germany today from some Heinie telling me that he has translated “Candidate Middle” and “The Life of Borodin” and that they will be used in a radio feature. This calls for cold chills all around. I, who can no longer speak or understand the language of my birthplace, will be going back into my own tongue from the place I left. This is some kind of magic, like black horses turned loose and running on a hill. [* * *]

  Weekend shot. Sherman haggling with Norman Mosher who studies under T. Roethke. Real bitter stuff. I have long ago said that I do not care for the poets. I would like to see one once in a while with a little self-doubt instead of this cockiness and the unsheathing of the nails. I am just about now getting over it. People climb into my mind, kick around, piss around, and it takes some time for them to leave.

  …a part of the ankle will not go down. I will be the club-ankle poet. Lord Byron, make way!

  I told Jon to let you have your head in the intro. If you want to go long, go long; if you want to go short, go short. It is a tough job at best. But you must know that I am honored to have you for my barker: “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we give you—,” and Bukowski steps out from behind the tent flap with 3 red hairs on his chest, and can of beer in one hand and a German shepherd pup in the other.

  Keep your bones in good motion, kid, and quietly consume and digest what is necessary. I think it is not so much important to build a literary thing as it is not to hurt things. I think it is important to be quiet and in love with park benches; solve whole areas of pain by walking across a rug.

  you got it.

  dip the brush in turpentine,

  p.s.—I asked Webb not to send proofs of the section. I’d rather see it all at once, quietly with a cold beer audience. And maybe think of other days & bad days to come, like all this is well, but the wall will be coming down. [* * *]

  * * *

  Arnold Kaye’s interview appeared in Literary Times for March 1963, under the title, “Charles Bukowski Speaks Out.”

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  [?February 1963]

  Enclosed copy of Literary Times. I might suggest when book comes out you send them a review copy. Arnold Kaye over last night to interview me, I suppose a la Ben Hecht. He gave me the old bullshit about me being a legend, and he had a list of questions. I was fairly drunk and don’t remember what I told him. Some of the questions rather vapid like: “What effect does Mickey Mouse have on the American public and culture?” I don’t know if they are going to run the interview; I might have been fairly bitter and vulgar. The guy had just come from Zahn’s where Curtis had babbled on and on, I am told. At least I kept it short and hot. Anyhow, what with the horses and interviews and the bottle and being a LEGEND…I have not written any poetry lately, and this is how we go down the drain: doing everything but creating. There are enough traps in this world to kill a man before he becomes five years old.

  At any rate I had sense enough to turn down an invite to be on a panel thing on the radio with Zahn and Kay and some editors. J. B. May etc. I still believe in more privacy and less talk. Badly hung over today but I see no broken furniture and my knuckles are not bruised so there was no fight. Good. May told this guy, “Bukowski’s kind of unfriendly.” These people don’t understand that the living takes time and that the talking about it is unnecessary. You do. I think that when they knock on your door you feel the same way I do. That’s why we pretty much get along.

  Anyhow, going now.

  I think the bastard took my pen.

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  Early March, 1963

  [* * *] As to dedication of book to you, Lou, it is all pretty simple. When I heard you over the phone and you did not give me a bunch of literary doubletalk, accent, etc. etc.—your complete sense of unfalsity, this led me to suggest the dedication to you. This, plus the fact that it being the first book in your series (you and Jon: Loujon), it seemed in a sense of history—and literary history is the only one that seems to have some sense—the only dedication. As to being on cover with you, great, but it does not seem real, it is a conjecture sort of thing and I will not know it, really, until the magazine is in my hand and I stand here in this room with it and something in my head says, it happened. I will have a drink on it, a good scotch and water, and I will think of myself down in the alleys again or in all the rooming houses in hell, and the jails, freezing, madness etc., and it will come through to me good. You know, for all this, I still feel pretty much outside of everything yet. It is as if, any moment, somebody is going to knock on my door and a couple of guys are going to enter some day, “All right, friend, we’ve come to cut off your arms.” Psychologically speaking, there might be a reason or a term for this, but we do not live with reason or terms, unfortunately. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 17, 1963

  starting to thunder…like a dark closet in here, but I’ve still got #3 to my right here, and I hope you people understand why I did not phone upon rec. copy, but rather wrote. The phone calls have been mostly when I was pretty high, and a sense of madness there, and yet not. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that on the phone the voice does not say as much what the mind is thinking as the typewriter does. Somewhere the thought in coming down from the mind and out into the voice, the thought becomes dispelled, distorted, petty and so forth. So, upon rec. #3, I thought it best to WRITE about it rather than TALK about it. Anyway, as I said, my section was done with a good, sure hand, a beautiful hand, and better and gentler and cleaner than I might have dreamed…. but this, mainly to say I’ve gone on reading more of #3, after getting Bukowski out of the way, and GOD!!! ya really laid the whip on Creeley!!! What you say I agree with, find true, but I’m afraid that as many teeth as you put into him I’d havta add another: CREELEY CAN’T WRITE, nor can the rest of them. They affect to write, and out of this affectation, of course, they need powers, groups, blather, underground lines, handshakes, imputations, delegations and barkers to make the thing go. However, I’m
glad you took a swing at them: they need a spanking, these little pricks in their walking shorts and mountain cabins and goats and money and teaching positions. They are fondled enough by society without the rest of us having to put their spittle in cups before the shrine.

  Your story an odd one, Jon, but has the taste of air and being, kind of like Sherwood would do, Sherwood Anderson, and this is not a knock…I do not believe that the short story has gone forward beyond Anderson. He’s been dead a long time now, but the way he put down the word is not. I suppose Anderson has influenced me as much as Jeffers, but in a different way—the cleanliness he had of getting a line down, it is hard to beat.

  And it was quite a thing, of course, to read that Genet liked “Old Man Dead in a Room” best of all the poems in your #1. There were a lot of poems in #1. And I always get the unholy chills when I think of the language switch. Think of this Frenchman sitting in a room reading “Old Man” in French to Genet, the walls there, the chairs, while I am asleep at the time or betting on a horse. Life is oddly wild, full of miracles as well as horrors. [* * *]

  More thunder. Burroughs, of course, is important because he keeps the air-holes open. We need a Joyce or Burroughs or Gertrude S. every age to keep us loose and let us know that everything needn’t be so, the way it seems or the way the herd-writers want it to seem. These people are valuable, in a way, beyond their work—icebreakers, knockers down of policemen…. Yes, the Millerboy finally got around to working Walter over and he did put him straight enough on politics and Art, and it still stands today. I am not saying ART is going to save us…it might save me, for a little while…but politics isn’t going to either; politics got us this far, and see what we’re doing now: tossing the bomb back and forth, back and forth, and the first one to drop it: o, blaAAHHHHHHH! [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Ann Bauman]

  Mid-March [1963]

  Know I have not written, and am bastard slob this way, drink, madness et al., but I always figure that I am no good for a woman anyhow, and any way I can save her from myself is all to her good. Meanwhile, as you might have guessed, I write for selfish reasons: I have a book on the press now, Selected Poems 1955-1963, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands…Loujon Press, 618 Ursuline st., New Orleans, 16, Louisiana. 2 bucks, baby, and an autograph, even. Christ, y’ve got 2 bucks somewhere, haven’t you? What I mean is, I don’t get any money out of the book at all—as if it mattered—but I am pumping for these people because 2 bucks to them might mean such a simple thing as eating on this day or not. They eat one meal a day and forward such bastards as I, and I figure if they can do this (and sometimes they don’t make the one meal), I figure I can forget immortality and carefulness and isolation and maybe even myself and go out and ask people to buy the g.d. book. If you think this is slick sales talk, it is not. I have thrown money into the fire. I have thrown my guts into the fire. I know more than this. But these people are the oddest set of living gods ya ever saw. She sells picture postcards on the sidewalks for meek coin and he stands 14 years hours a day poking paper into a cheap press he has hustled somewhere. I can’t tell you more than this, only that these people are giants in a world of ants. If you can get hold of The Outsider #3 (same address) (as book) perhaps you will understand more of what I mean.

  Meanwhile, glad your car running good. Mine lets up this cul de sac cloud of gaseous nauseous burning oil continually, until people stare as I go by…like a forest fire.

  I lost your photo. How could I do this? Ya don’t have another around, do you? Perhaps some day we will meet over a beer. It’s a long way to Sacramento, but perhaps a good horse…a little luck? And then we’d only be bored and disgusted with each other. Keep working with the poem; if you treat it right, it is the most faithful and truest of all.

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 26, 1963

  [* * *] If you think the interview with Kaye (Lit. Times) was rough for me in the sense of the poppyseed question, you should have heard afterwards…when we’d both had a bit more to drink:

  K: “Look, if the world were going to end in 15 minutes what would you do, what would you the tell the people?”

  B: “I wouldn’t tell ’em anything.”

  K: “Now LOOK, man, you’re not cooperating! If the world were going to end in 15 minutes, I wanna know what you would do!”

  B: “I’d lay down and rest, just like I’m doing now.”

  K: “But what would you tell the people, man, the PEOPLE!”

  B: “Don’t forget your streetcar transfer.”

  And the odd thing is, you tell these people the truth and they think you are not cooperating. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  March 28, 1963

  [* * *] I have already caught hell, in person, for #3, and I was going to spare you some of this, but it may prepare you for what’s to come. I bought him a bottle of wine and he arrived an hour later than he said he would—which is bad form; when I tell someone I will be there at a certain minute, I arrive on the minute. However, it gave his wine a chance to chill, and he fingered his drink and began, mostly telling me that there was another type of poverty that nobody knew about and he was going to write about it. What he means is that he has a $200 a week job and he somehow can’t MAKE IT! I told him that I had little sympathy with this type of poverty, that one hundred and sixty million out of 180,000,000 in this country lived that way. I think it an entirely different thing to want something to eat and not being able to eat, and a place to sleep and rest the tired body, and only having the benches, the streets, the ice, the rain. Because a man needs 2 cars, a tv set, 12 pairs of shoes for his wife, this signifies to me only an unhandsome sort of greed that is needed to fill a hole where something else should be. I did not tell him all this but let him talk. Then he got on his job, writing blurbs for the pictures in nudie magazines, and then he said, “Oh, I know you were offered the job first and you turned it down, X. told me about it and I am tired of hearing about it, and you were offered the job again, there was another opening and you turned it down again…but you could not have gone up the ladder the way I have!” What he means is that he has been promoted from writing the nudie blurbs for the magazines that lay around in barbershops chairs and that he has been elevated to writing books about legitimate nudism…nudist camps, etc. He is right: I would not have gone up the ladder. I wouldn’t have lasted one day writing blurbs. I would rather wash dishes and go at night to the glory of a small box-like room with swinging electric light and the other torn people walking up and down the halls, half out of their minds, miserable, waiting to die, wanting to get drunk. I let him talk on. I am not much of a talker. I think very slowly, very. I have some bad teeth and I lisp once in a while. But mainly, when you’re talking, you’re going OUT, burning away, and although I don’t mind much burning, I don’t care for haggle, argument, point and counter point. I am not a lawyer. I am not a movie star. I don’t know what I am. But as I go on, the feeling is toward a gentle center somewhere. Anyhow7, he went on and I listened, and he said, “I could have had my picture on the cover of The Outsider myself…. and then, there’s Corrington…you and Corrington. You dedicated a book to him and then he writes this stuff about you. Look at my face. Why don’t you look at my face? Are you afraid of me?”

  “That is not why I do not look at your face,” I told him.

  “I love you,” he said, “I guess I still do, but you are not the person you used to be. I mean, dedicating a book to an editoress. That’s cheap. And, in #3, The Editor’s Bit, it was too long and it cheapened everything.”

  “Don’t you think,” I asked, “that the way he tore up Creeley was a courageous thing?”

  “I threw Outsider 3) in the toilet,” he said, “I flushed it down the toilet.”

  (Cavelski [Kabalevsky?—ed.] on now. Something Brilliant Suite, so clean, so sharp. There have been men in the world, thank the gods, thank the tulips, thanks the dead horses, thank the Wint
ers and the midgets and the grass growing.)

  “I told my wife I would only be gone 10 minutes,” he said. “I have wasted a half hour. Well, these people think you’re GREAT, there’s a lot of space separating you from them, they don’t know you like I know you, so they’ll keep thinking you are great. You are safe.”

  Then he got up and moved toward the door. “Just keep on living your small, little insignificant life the way you are doing.”

  “Slam the door when you leave,” I asked him.

  He got in the last punch. “I’ll leave it for you to close,” he said and walked out leaving the door open.

  He won. I had to get up and close the door.

  Now, I can’t pretend that all this did not bother me. I am very full of self-doubt, self-doubt twists me in the vise forever, and I know that I often do badly and write badly and I don’t live exactly like a saint, but it does appear to me that I ought to be allowed to think along my own lines and live in my own way. The trouble with this writer is that he has built an image of me, probably from my poems, that I do not seem to stand up to in the flesh. Well, maybe I lie in my poems. I try not to. But if I do not present a flaming torch while sitting in a chair drinking a beer, I can’t help it. I don’t believe much in extra talk. I can talk for hours on paper because there is only the click of the keys and this brown torn shade pulled down in front of my face. It is a clean white thunder. That is why I do not like opera. Somebody I know pretty good and who knows I like the classical symphonies [* * *] asked me, “How come you do not like opera?” and I answered, “Because it contains the human voice.” “What’s wrong with that?” she asked. “I don’t know. I just don’t like the human voice. I think it’s fake. Almost anything that comes out in voice is fake. I don’t care if it is singing or the Gettysburg Ad., I don’t like it. Here you have some bitch singing ultra-soprano who beats her kids and squats over a bowl and drops turds like the rest of us, and she is through the Art-form trying to become purified and trying to purify the rest of us. I just don’t like the human voice: it drags down, it wears, it will simply not let things alone.”