Beerspit Night and Cursing

by Charles Bukowski

  “Poor Undine!” H.D. laments in her book. “They don’t want you, they really don’t. How shall we reconcile ourselves to this?”—remembering that a half-century earlier Pound had likewise abandoned her to go to Europe. Sheri had commented on the “sea-girls” section of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in an anthology she sent to H.D., and the older poet’s last vision of Sheri is of “our little Undine on her sea-rocks with her wind-blown hair,” utterly forlorn.

  At Pound’s suggestion, José Vasquez-Amaral, another member of the Ezuversity who would eventually translate The Cantos into Spanish, had arranged for an art scholarship for Sheri in Jalisco. He also arranged for her and Gilbert to stay with a friend at his country house in Cuernavaca “in case the Jalisco scholarship fell through. It did,” Vasquez-Amaral later wrote. “After a while the fiery and imaginative Sheri was also unwelcome at the Cuernavaca place.” The Mexican authorities expected someone who would paint pretty landscapes and glorify the republic, but Sheri was more interested in sketching beggar girls and exploring Aztec temples. After about six months Sheri and Gilbert left Mexico for San Francisco.

  The best thing to have come out of her Mexican odyssey was a newfound interest in writing. Vasquez-Amaral was dazzled by a piece she wrote on Mexico in 1958: “The title is Mexico, his Thrust Renews; the subtitle is Cheap Hollywood Movie. In little over 7 pages, Sheri manages to give one of the strongest and most vivid impressions I have ever read on a trip to Mexico from the border to Mexico. It is all there. I don’t say that her painting is to be sneezed at but I still maintain that if given half a chance, Sheri—the Sheri of 1958—would have given Kerouac, Bellow and all the others who have ventured on the quicksands of Mexico some very worthy competition.” A portion of this work, entitled “The Beggar Girl of Queretaro,” was published in 1960 and is indeed a remarkable piece of writing.

  It was published in the Anagogic & Paideumic Review, a periodical (what we’d now call a ’zine) she started in 1959 after settling in San Francisco. Pound encouraged his disciples to start magazines, resulting in such periodicals as Noel Stock’s Edge and William Cookson’s Agenda. Sheri had forgiven Pound by this time and began the journal to fulfil a promise she made him to help raise the level of culture in this country. (Its motto: “to promote civilisation.”) In issue number 4 she gave this explanation of its forbidding title: “A = the direction of the will UP & P = the kulchur born in one’s head or wotever/ authority is E.P.—one might have not been listening for real but more or less that is wot one recalls.” The anagogic is a spiritual interpretation of a text, and paideumic derives from paideuma, a term Pound picked up from ethnologist Leo Frobenius to describe “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas of any period” (or, more simply, the culture taught by educators). Typed by Sheri and mimeographed in purple ink, the magazine was sold at City Lights bookstore and mailed to select friends and libraries. She usually ran off only fifty copies of each issue, so not surprisingly few copies exist anymore, and few if any libraries have a complete set of all nine published.

  A typical issue would consist partly of contributions by others and partly of Sheri’s own writings, drawings, and commentaries on the other contributions. Pound is frequently quoted—the first issue, in fact, reprinted a 1928 essay of his entitled “Bureaucracy and the Flail of Jehovah”—and two issues were devoted to H.D.’s work. Four issues were published between September 1959 and March 1960, but publication lagged after that; numbers 5 and 6 appeared in 1961, but number 7 didn’t appear until April 1966. Two final issues, unnumbered and consisting mostly of Sheri’s own work, appeared in 1970. The places of publication track Sheri and Gilbert’s movements during that period: the first four issues were produced in their cottage at 15 Lynch Street on top of Nob Hill, number 5 was issued from San Gregorio, and number 6 from Half Moon Bay, both small towns down the coast from San Francisco.

  While still in San Francisco Sheri reestablished her connection with the Beat Generation, especially since many of the Beats she had known earlier in Greenwich Village migrated to San Francisco in the late fifties. She was introduced to Jack Kerouac during one of his visits there, though he apparently already knew who she was, and Allen Ginsberg visited when in town. Sheri became friends with most of the major Beat writers in San Francisco—Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman (with whom Sheri was especially impressed)—and dabbled in the North Beach scene, a mother hen to the younger beatniks. But mostly she kept to herself, drinking vodka and producing her magazine.

  In the early sixties Sheri decided she wanted to get out of the city (though Gilbert would continue to work there as an auto mechanic). She first moved down to a cabin in La Honda, but found the towering redwoods too oppressive, so instead moved into some cabins on the coast about halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz, where Tunitas Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean. She would live there at “the Creek” for the next twenty years, though for a mailing addresses she rented a post office box up in Pacifica, about twenty miles north. While Gilbert worked in the city Sheri spent her days writing, drawing, painting, and making jewelry, at night studying The Cantos by the light of an old kerosene lamp.

  In 1964 Sheri gave her first and only one-woman show. A Cleveland advertising copywriter named Reid B. Johnson had developed an interest in her work when making a documentary radio program on Pound while he was still incarcerated at St. Elizabeths. In the course of corresponding with him, Pound sent Johnson a copy of La Martinelli, which so impressed him that a few years later he decided to organize an exhibit. The show ran for a month in September 1964 at the Severance Center in Cleveland, and was the subject of a photo-essay in the local paper.

  Details are sketchy on Sheri’s life during the second half of the sixties. She developed a strong interest in astrology, drawing up charts of friends, and delved deeper into the occult philosophy of mystics like Swedenborg and Edgar Cayce. Allen Ginsberg visited whenever he could, often bringing along a friend like Peter Orlovsky or Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In his 1966 poem “Iron Horse” Ginsberg recalls

  On Pacific cliff-edge

  Sheri Martinelli’s little house with combs and shells

  Since February fear, she saw LSD

  Zodiac in earth grass, stood

  palm to cheek, scraped her toe

  looking aside, & said

  “Too disturbed to see you

  old friend w/ so much Power”

  A year later Ginsberg visited Pound in Venice and asked a favor:

  “I’d like you to give me your blessing to take to Sheri Martinelli”—for I’d described her late history Big Sur, eyes seeing Zodiac everywhere hair bound up like Marianne Moore—which gossip perhaps he hadn’t even heard—“To at least say hello to her, I’ll tell her, so I can tell her,” and stood looking in his eyes. “Please…because it’s worth a lot of happiness to her, now…” and so he looked at me impassive for a moment and then without speaking, smiling slightly, also, slight redness of cheeks awrinkle, nodded up and down, affirm, looking me in eye, clear no mistake, ok.

  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 a
nd 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 suspe
nsion 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