Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  The state of American poetry? U.S. poetry? Well, I’ve named you 2 Canadians and a Frenchman as good workmen. . . . But maybe somewhere on the farm there’s a boy working over a calf who might later do it for us with a hot typewriter. Right now, U.S.-wise, there’s about as much guts showing as at a tea for the Retired Ladies of the Auxiliary to Chase Phantoms out of the Closets of Dog Catchers. Whatever that means. Ah, right now a beer and a dose of salts. Chicago, where’s your Sandburg? The brave teeth and big hand of Mencken? Sandburg, where’s your banjo? Christ, christ, we need some music!

  If I Could Only Be Asleep

  We are in bed. I am reading the racing charts and she is reading Russian Icons from the 12th to the 15th Century. She turns a page.

  —See the Saint?

  No.

  —See him?

  Yes.

  —If I could only be asleep.

  What?

  —Everything would be all right.

  Why?

  —I see pretty pictures. Don’t you see pretty pictures when you dream?

  No.

  —The Ascensions . . . look, who went into Heaven?

  Christ, I don’t know.

  —What does the door mission of the Virgin mean?

  I don’t know.

  —Ooh . . . isn’t she pretty? You don’t like her?

  No.

  —You don’t like her because she can see into your soul.

  That’s enough. Sometimes I think religion is a giant Sadism.

  —See that?

  Yes, it’s a guy with a hole in his chest and another guy in the hole.

  —That’s the Virgin Mary and the infant Christ is represented by a medallion. Tretykov Gallery, Moscow. About 1200. It’s a painting of the Yaroslav school which wasn’t in Moscow.

  I see, I see.

  —I keep seeing pictures of people stealing babies. What does it mean?

  I don’t know.

  —That’s St. George and the dragon.

  I see.

  —Look at the tiny little legs; that’s the Novgorod School. Late 14th century, kinda nice. That’s a cute dragon.

  Goodnight, dear.

  —Oh, LOOK, there’s God!

  Goodnight.

  —Plate 6. No, that’s Elijah. I’m sorry, it isn’t God.

  Goodnight.

  —Here’s somebody in a red teddy-bear suit. Hey, look at those wigs!

  The book sells for 95 cents, MQ 455, introduction by Victor Lasareff. Keep your wife away from it.

  The Old Pro

  a kiss for a good and talented fucker

  getting old and older

  and only recognized by a few of the

  living, and so

  the closed eye in the sky

  marks us for our words—

  If you are lucky, you might see him, someday, if you hurry—this stocky myth, this ¼ immortal.

  If you are lucky you might see him in the streets of Athens, just after nightfall. He will be dressed in an old trenchcoat with buckle undone, belt dangling like a limp and lost elephant’s cock—he will be prowling the streets, owl-eyed, in search of his necessaries

  in search

  of the ghost, the god, the way, the luck.

  Harry Norse. Hal. American bum slipping through Europe, year after sad mangled year, slipping on through the shadows of dead cities. Cities bombed dead, rebuilt dead, lived dead. Dead cities, dead people, dead days, dead cats, dead volcanoes, living grief, living madness, living dullness, living butchery—all our lovely ladies grown old, roses shot to shit, the works. Hal. Writing poems and getting by. Just.

  He sleeps on a bed 6 inches off the ground and the fleas cry hallelujah as he waits for his check from Evergreen or the invisible hand slipping off the thighs of Mars. Meanwhile, he sleeps in fits and spurts, living under a temporarily inactive volcano (the rent’s cheaper there) which one of the best Greek geologists claims is on an eruption timetable of tomorrow morning. (You’ve met these Greeks in steambaths; they are not entirely to be ignored.)

  Sweet christ, you must know that a man will go further for any poem than for any woman ever born.

  Harold Norse. He can punch it out quietly. In style. Upside down. In grit. In fire. On fire. Tooth on tooth, hard. The smell of our butts. The cock of our shame. Light. Rabbit dream. The whole Bomb inside the head whistling Dixie.

  Norse. American bum:

  overheard

  on the bridge

  trucks are speeding under angels

  . . . . on the riverbank two people

  are breaking laws with their hips

  Most people, almost all people do not know how to write, say, including Shakespeare, who wrote such terrible stuff that he fooled the whole mob, top to bottom. Other bad writers who fooled nearly everybody were E.A. Poe, Ibsen, G.B. Shaw, William Faulkner, Tolstoy, and Gogol. Today they are fooled by Mailer and Pasternak. That men do not know how to write and not only get away with it but are also immortalized is no more surprising than the length of phonies who reach the top of the cream in all areas of life and enterprise. You can find them all the way from Washington to the back room of Sharkey’s.

  Hal can write. Umm. I once called him a “pro” but he took it a little wrong and spit back, “Jersey Joe.” That’s an old fighter of the past, that’s Wolcott. And I’ll always remember old Jersey Joe with a touch of heart, too. The way he could land the important one.

  Sometimes you’ve got to take a lot to land the important one. It’s all an act of Art. All good men have the act of Art in them. They can be plumbers or pimps but you can spot it soon enough. It’s a matter of grace and easiness and gut and Sight. I’ve met more good men in jails, in drunk tanks, in factories, at racetracks than I ever have in English classes, Art classes, or other writers knocking upon my door.

  Just because men work with the art form, this does not necessarily justify them or purify their gut. For the same reason, priests and dwarfs or legless men and whores are not to be elevated needlessly.

  When I call Norse a “pro” I only mean that he is

  the right man in the right place

  doing it more than properly

  and that’s done so little that it’s enough to make a man cry.

  We all exalt the cauliflower-ear belter. Norse. American bum:

  dante lived here

  & got kicked out

  now he’s worshipped

  like a saint

  Harold Norse: poet:

  kick him in the nuts

  until he leaps wildly

  among the dancing couples

  until he falls

  unconscious

  out of the dream.

  Christ, have you ever been in a hospital as much as I have? as much as Norse has? Laugh with us, the bedpan mewk, the Trojan horse.

  nurses/stealing my pens/&roses/snakebrained/nurses/with wrong

  medicine/they laugh/slamming doors/while fragile old/ladies gasp

  for breath/tubes stuck in their throats

  Perhaps it is a mistake to give you parts of these poems for if this bit is accepted, you might get these poems in total anyhow; I am simply trying to pinpoint for you how well, how simply, how like his honor old Hotshot Jersey Joe gets it across, like Braddock got it across, coming off the relief rolls, to one fat and cocky Max Baer one night many nights ago. You know. My god:

  ah go on

  bury your head

  in the bug-infested blanket

  let the fleas

  bounce in yr crotch

  there are no

  fuhrers of

  enlightenment

  baby

  and he’s right, we take it on the way in or out, sleeping under volcanoes or on park benches, it’s sweet stale shit, this poeming, and it isn’t that poeming is asking for sense or a chance or righteousness or $$$; it isn’t really that at all.

  None of us knows what it is. It’s like awakening in the morning with a boil on your back and it won’t go away. To ask a Patchenesque
donation upon the qualities of our Art would be chickenshit—there are too many other good men with bad backs or good Art. And some with worse backs, some with Better Art.

  But there sure as hell aren’t any fuhrers of enlightenment, baby. And sometimes it makes for long evenings, sharp razors, accidents while cleaning shotguns.

  Good writing, without fucking relent, is nothing but g.d. trying to bust through a wall of steel, and we are just not going to make it. But when I see the fade-outs, the flake-outs, the sell-outs, the chicken-livered punks of our age sucking it up, it’s good to see the old hard head—the pro, Jersey Joe, still bumming the European sideroads, missing the ski meets, the Olympic games, the rich sag-tit balloon-head broads, and still hammering hammering.

  the word.

  I am listening to something by Wagner tonight over the radio, which is all right, and my 20-month-old daughter is asleep in the other room—the woman left her here while she went to some kind of Trotskyite meeting. And my crazy drawings are all over the walls and I am not even drunk yet. So I guess I can safely say,

  old Pro Norse

  I think that with 5 or 6 less of you

  I might not have made it this

  long.

  man o man, that’s enough.

  —Charles Bukowski

  Los Angeles, 1966

  Reviews of Allen Ginsberg/Louis Zukofsky

  Empty Mirror. Early poems by Allen Ginsberg/Totem Corinth Books/17 W. 8th St./New York/N.Y./10011/$1.25

  It is not easy being Allen Ginsberg. Nor is it easy to review him. For in spite of his romantically-avowed homosexualism, we still subconsciously look up and expect top performance. The favorite parlor games of little magazine freaks (and big magazine freaks) is to knock Allen Ginsberg, and Mailer and Albee and Capote and and and—I know. I do it myself. Imagine, for instance, that these early poems had been written by somebody called Harry Wedge. I’d immediately have myself a new culture hero. But since they were written by Ginsberg and introduced by W.C. Williams, my typewriter teeth are already itching for the bite. What?

  Williams works around in the short foreword and I do not quite pick it up. It is a kind of a jogging through of his poetic formula of what good poetics should be and Ginsberg is his boy, “this young Jewish boy, already not so young any more.” There is some talk of Dante, of G. Chaucer. Williams says that the poet must speak to the crowd in their own language yet he must disguise his lines so that they will not offend. “With this, if it be possible, the hidden sweetness of the poem may alone survive and one day rouse a sleeping world.” Of course, since 1952, since this foreword was written, we have realized that no “hidden sweetness” is necessary. If Williams meant presentation (style) or humor or inventive distractions to jack-off boredom, then I will go along with him. It is possible that this is what he did mean.

  The poems themselves are simple, clear, very good poems—not yet diseased with the Whitmanesque prophet rantings of the later Ginsberg.

  I feel as if I am at a dead

  end and so I am finished.

  All spiritual facts I realize

  are true but I never escape

  the feeling of being closed in

  and the sordidness of self,

  the futility of all that I

  have seen and done and said.

  Maybe if I continued things

  would please me more but now

  I have no hope and I am tired.

  There are some borrowed and overused phrases here: “feeling of being closed in,” “sordidness of self,” but the last 3 lines are honest enough to perhaps save the whole poem.

  “. . . What a terrible future. I am twenty-three,” he says further on. And he was right. He had no way of knowing how he would use himself or how America would use him or make him use himself. But here he speaks of something else. Of madness. Of the feeling that his head is severed from his body. He realized it while lying sleepless on a couch.

  In “Psalm I” there is some hint of the biblical line, the Whitmanesque roar-plead and act. The lines still trickle between originality and the pose. In the end, in the last line, originality loses and the pose finishes off the poem: “This gossip is an eccentric document to be lost in a library and rediscovered when the Dove descends.”

  While writing this, I can’t help thinking how easy it is to be a reviewer, as if one (myself) held the candle of truth and was tossing light to the slobs. What horseshit, eh friends? Well, I’ll do what I can, or can’t. My head hurts tonight and I am out of beer and smokes and am too lazy to make coffee. Allen, you’re probably going to catch hell.

  Yes, “Cézanne’s Ports” is a bad poem.

  In the foreground we see time and life

  swept in a race

  I am afraid that the sweetness is not too well-hidden. It gets sweet enough for toothache later on. It doesn’t help me understand Cézanne nor “Heaven and Eternity” either. Ginsberg is a better writer than this. And Cézanne was a better painter. They should have met over a bottle of wine instead of in this fashion.

  When I sit before a paper

  writing my mind turns

  in a kind of feminine

  madness of chatter;

  These are what I like to call perfect lines, for lack of anything else to say. I mean perfect lines to me as to content and presentation. Ginsberg lays it in your lap and there it is, as real as a kitten. Or a lion. You know what I mean.

  “Fyodor” is a good poem not so much as a force but because I guess we all felt that way about Dostoyevsky, so it’s charming to hear it, good to hear it, but still being somewhat snappish we wish it were better written. But let us remember that Ginsberg was young here. I wonder how Allen looked when he was young? Have you ever wondered that? All we have now is this bearded half-monk, kind of lighted with bedroom infractions and stinking of nightmares of India and Cuba and coffeehouses, this flumping spread of hair that is Allen Ginsberg. He’d be holy if we’d let him, but it all falls through about halfway and everybody is confused. Yet he’s better to have around than not to have around. If I throw little mudballs at him it is because I can’t be bothered with that cat in the Jewish Delicatessen. Allen is some kind of blessed pickle down in a fat jar full of hair and yellow seeds. You’d want to buy it but you’d end up buying something else.

  “A Meaningless Institution,” a kind of Kafka-dream 1948 vintage is a fair piece of work. I feel it. Especially the ending where A.G. has to wander down empty corridors “in search of a toilet.” If you can’t find that toilet, man, all the poetry in the world isn’t worth a damn.

  In “Society, Dream 1947,” the poem is lighted with force and humor, genius, here is some of the stuff, the style, the bombast and flow that raised Ginsberg out of the muck. I mean this is the forerunner of things to come, Howl, the whole Howl ruckus that made Ginsberg, and the genius that allowed Ginsberg to continue making it even after he lost a part of it.

  And in “Hymn,” we have the biblical fire of poetic prayer done very well. When Ginsberg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen. It would be only the most unkind and jealous fink who would put a man down for his later showmanship when he could write as well as this early. Why must we scratch each other to pieces? The real enemy is elsewhere.

  “The Archetype Poem” which begins

  Joe Blow has decided

  he will no longer

  be a fairy.

  is a tragic-humorous drawing of the unworking and switched-off sex machinery. Sex is really funny as hell. We are all caught up with the damn thing and hardly know what to do. And I mean funny like slowly roasting to death might be funny—if you could watch yourself.

  The book ends on “The Shrouded Stranger,” which really doesn’t work. Although there are some good lines that nobody but Ginsberg could have written:

  “His broken heart’s a bag of shit.”

  Ginsberg is one of the few poets trying to destroy himself with unpoetic acts yet he still has not destroyed himself.
Let us say grace to his huge tank of reserve. Eliot has said it easier, Pound with more Art, Jeffers with more knowledge of forces, Auden with more precision, Blake louder, Rimbaud more subtle; William Carlos Williams had a better left jab, Dylan Thomas bigger screaming feet, this with this, that with that, but I think that Ginsberg belongs somewhere, early or late, and that without his coming through, none of us would be writing as well as we are doing now, which is not well enough, but we hang on in, watch old Allen, stare at his photos, and are still a little afraid of America, of him, of the workings of wax and sun and hangovers, we go to bed alone, finally, all of us.

  A Test of Poetry—Louis Zukofsky, $2.50, Corinth Books, c/o Eighth Street Bookshop, 17 W. 8th Street, New York 11, N.Y.

  Ah, Zukofsky, the magic name, the big name, talking about poetry! Maybe while working at the railroad yards or maybe even while fighting Sammy Zsweink behind the gym after high-school hours we heard of Zukofsky, something that might some day help us with people like Sammy or the railroad yard foreman who watched us scrub the sides of boxcars and streamliners. Damn you foreman, I’ve got Pound, I’ve got Zukofsky, I’ve got Poetry Chicago. Yeah, and thin tires on my car and flat tires. I think Sammy won the fight and Pound didn’t care. I’ve stopped reading Poetry Chicago. Now we have a test of poetry.

  The test of poetry, Zukofsky tells me, is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art.

  Further on, L.Z. tells us, “I believe that desirable teaching assumes intelligence that is free to be attracted from any consideration of every day living to always another phase of existence. Poetry, as other object matter, is after all for interested people.”