[To Guy Owen]
Early March 1960
It is possible to be “conservative” and still publish good poetry. So much of the “modern” has a hard shell-like blatantness that can be done by young men without background or feeling (see Hearse). There are false poets in all schools, people who simply do not belong. But they eventually disappear because the forces of life absorb them with something else. Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master. And, I suppose, painters too. I am a little hesitant here, and though I paint, it is not my field. But I suppose it is similar, and I am thinking of an old French janitor at one of the last places I was employed. A part-time janitor, bent of back, wine-drinking. I found he painted. Painted through a mathematical formula, a philosophical computation of life. He wrote it down before he painted it. A gigantic plan, and painted to it. He spoke of conversations with Picasso. And I had to rather laugh. There we were, a shipping clerk and a janitor discussing theories in aesthetics while all about us men drawing 10 times our salaries were lost out on the limb reaching for rotten fruit. What does this say for the American way of life?
[To Jon E. Webb]
August 29, 1960
[ . . . ] In case you want bio . . . you can sift it down from this mess. Born 8-16-20, Andernach, Germany, can’t speak a word of German, English bad too. Editors say, no reason, Bukowski, you can’t spell or type correctly or have to keep using the same damned ribbon. Well, they don’t know that that ribbon got tangled with my navel cord and I’ve been trying to get back to the mother ever since. And I don’t feel like spelling . . . I think words more beautiful cannon power misspelled. Anyhow, I am old man now. 40. More mixed with mortar of scream and dizzy plight than when 14 and old man whipped ass to sundry unclassical tunes. Where were we? Let me tilt this beer again . . . heard from Targets this morning. Took 6 poems for December issue . . . “Horse on Fire,” “Pull Me Thru the Temples” and other crap. Have another poem, “Japanese Wife,” for Sept. issue. This is nice and will allow me to live 3 or 4 weeks longer. I mention this because it makes me happy in my way and I am drinking beer now. It is not so much for the fame of publication but more the good feeling that you are not perhaps insane and some of the things you say are understood. This beer is so damned good looking thru the sunny window, ho, ho, no damn women around, no short-nose horses, no cancer, no Rimbaud or DeMass rotting of siff, just orange flowers without bees and the rotting calif. grass over the rotting calif. bones. Now wait. Crack another beer. I’m going down to Del Mar for 3 or 4 days and get the rent money, figured out a new code for shortnoses.
Let’s start another paragraph. Ger[trude] Stein would have told me that. But what’s Ger St. is something else. We are all right in our ways only some of us have the help of the bees and the gods and the moons and the tigers yawning in the tremendous dark caves filled with Serg[ei] Rachmaninoff and César Franck and photos of [Aldous] Huxley talking to [D. H.] Lawrence over spilled wine. God dam it: bio, bio, bio . . . I hate myself, but must get on. This is blahbuk, well, christ, I dunno, I slugged the old man one night when I was drunk, 17, headed out of town. He didn’t fight back and it made me sick because that was part of me . . . staring up from the couch, weak coward. I traveled all over this rotten U. states working for nothing so others could have something. I am not a commy, I am nothing political but it is a bad setup. Worked in slaughterhouse, dog biscuit factory, Di Pinna’s of Miami beach, copy boy on the New Orleans’ Item, blood bank in Frisco, hung posters in New York subways 40 feet below the sky drunk hopping beautiful golden third rails, cotton in Berdo, tomatoes; shipping clerk, truck driver, horseplayer ordinary, holder down of barstools throughout a dull alarmclock nation, supported by shackjob whores; foreman for American newsco., New York, Sears-Roebuck stock boy, gas station attendant, mailman . . . I can’t remember them all, it’s all rather drab and common and any man you see next to you in the unemployment line has done the same things. [ . . . ]
Where were we??? Christ. Anyhow, during all this, I wrote a poem or 2, published in Matrix, and then lost interest in poetry. Started fucking with the short story. By the way, got a letter from [Evelyn] Thorne who prints a lot of my more fancy and classical poetry—ho shit, I can write any old way, I am no good—cussing me for ussing bad langwich. Now wait. Let’s see. The short story. Whit Burnett of the old Story mag printed my first one in 1944. I was a 24 year old kid then living in Greenwich Village and realizing the first day that the Village was dead, a signpost that someone had once been there. Shit, the mockery. Got a letter from a lady agent asking me to lunch and drinks . . . wants to talk to me and agent my stuff. Told her I couldn’t meet her, wasn’t ready, couldn’t write, and goodbye, had my own drink under bed in form of wine bottle. Ended up in a Father Divine place 6 o’clock in the morning, drunk, locked outa room, freezing in shirt sleeves. You didn’t ask for a bio, did you, Webb? In fact, whata hell, you ant even accepted onea ma pomes?
Well, anyhow, short story here and there, not too many accepted. I would send airmail to Atlantic Monthly and if not accepted would tear up. I don’t know how many thousand masterpieces I tore up. Pro none. Various people on way try to get me to do novel. Fuck ’em. I wouldn’t do novel for Khrushchev. Forget everything for awhile, 10, 15 years didn’t write. Couldn’t pass Cichristarist to get in Army. Good feeling. Had shorts on backwards but not intentional after 4 week drunk. They thot I was nuts, the crazy sunkabitches!
Well, look here, Wegg, I mean Webb, let me drag another beer. I am wondering about you going 21 days without a drink, this has to STOP. I ended up once in charity ward of general hospital . . . hemorrhaging blood out like fountain from ass and mouth . . . they let me lie for 2 days before they touched me, then got idea I had connections with the underworld and pumped 7 pints of blood and 8 pints of glucose into me without stopping. They told me if I ever drank again I was dead. 13 days later I was driving a truck, lifting 50 pound packages and drinking cheap wine full of sulphur. They missed the point: I wanted to die. And as some suicides have experienced: the human frame can be tougher than steel.
Now what a minute Webb w where we?
Anyhow, I came off this blackout 10, 15 year drunk, shack jobs, terror, walnuts in the sheets, walnut shells, mice leaping like rockets thru rooms 3 weeks behind in rent thru hangover dreams, green potatoes, purple bread, the love of fat grey women to make you cry their large potato bellies and dry love and rosary under pillow and photos of children impure . . . nothing to make a man feel savage and daring because he simply wants to strange himself. The women were better than we. Every last one of them. There is no such thing as a whore. I have been robbed and slugged and crabbed with the rest of them, I say, there is no such thing as a whore. Women are not built that way. Men are. The term is whoredom. I was one. Still am. But let’s get on.
Anyway, ten or 15 years later I began to write again . . . at age 35, but this time it came out all POETRY. What the hell? The way I saw it—it saved the words . . . Ger. would have liked that, altho I am wasting a lot of words here, I am sure I will be forgiven . . . because somebody has on his power mower and WHIRRRRR CLICKWHRRIRR, it is all right with all the sun coming in and there’s something on the radio . . . I don’t know what . . . might have heard it only once or 2twice, so tired of the same . . . Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, Tchaikovsky, etc . . .
Anyhow, I came on with the little pome because I liked it and it seemed ok. Now I am getting a little tired and don’t know quite what.
Anyhow, published here and there, drawer fulla little mags where shirts should be.
I