thot there weren’t any openings for him and that he had to make his own openings. I suppose each man attacks it differently. Although I see where Grove issued his Tropic, and now that it is a safe thing, it is falling pretty flat in most quarters. Also note that Life mag and others gave it to Hem. pretty good in the ass. Which he deserved, having pretty much sold out after his early works, which I always knew but which I never heard anybody say until after his suicide. Why did they wait?
Faulkner is, in essence, much like Hem. The public has swallowed him with one big gulp and the critics, having something a little more subtle, feel safe and egg them on, but a lot of Faulkner’s pure shit, but it’s clever shit, cleverly dressed, and when he goes they will have trouble rubbing him out because they don’t quite understand him, and not understanding him, the dull and vacant parts, the mass of italics, they will think this to mean genius.
[To John William Corrington]
Late August 1961
[ . . . ] As you know, I am very sloppy. I don’t keep carbons. Stuff that’s out and accepted I have no copies of. Stuff that’s out and not coming back I have no copies of. Sometimes I find a piece of paper with something written on it, or a typewritten paper but I don’t know if it’s accepted or if I ever sent it out. I’ve even lost a sheet of paper I used to keep that told me where I had sent some poems or where some had been accepted, but what the titles of the poems were, I didn’t know. And now I’ve lost the piece of paper. I had a wife once [Barbara Fry] who really amazed me. She’d write a poem and send it out, write down the name of the poem, date, where sent . . . She had a large bookkeeping book, a beautiful thing, and in it she had a list of magazines, and the magazine list crossed screw-wise or blue lines over orange or something and she made little asterisk **** that webbed it all together. It was one hell of a beautiful thing. She could run the same poem down thru 20 or 30 magazines just by ******************* *********** and never send to the same mag twice, hurrah. She had a book for me but I drew dirty pictures and things in mine. And when she wrought a poem, each one she wrote wd be typed again on special paper and then pasted in a notebook (with date). I could use a little of this moxie but really I think it would make me feel a little too much like I was selling form-fit bras from door to door.
1962
[To John William Corrington]
April 1962
[ . . . ] Fry once egged me on to make a bunch of cartoons with captions, the joke bit, and I stayed up all night, drinking and making these cartoons, laughing at my own madness. There were so many of them by morning that I couldn’t get them in an envelope, none large enough, so I made a big thing out of cardboard, and mailed it to either the New Yorker or Esquire, putting another cardboard thing inside with proper postage. Well, hell, they could prob. see I was either amateur or mad. It never came back. I wrote about my 45 cartoons and they never came back. “No such item rec. from you,” wrote back some editor. But sitting in a barbershop a couple of months later I came across one of my jokes in some mag, I believe Man, showing a guy, a jock whipping a horse with one of those round balls with spikes on the end of a chain, and one guy along the rail is telling another, “He’s a very rude boy but somehow effective.” The words were changed just a little and the drawing a little, but it sure seemed just like mine. Well, hell, you can imagine anything if you want to imagine anything. But I don’t know, I wasn’t even looking, I usually don’t even look into magazines or maybe I do but don’t realize it, but I kept popping across my same ideas and drawings just altered a touch; it was all too close, all too much the same to be anything but mine, only I felt that mine were better executed, and I do not mean killed, they killed that. And when I came across one of my largest no-caption drawings (I mean, the idea of it, it was not my drawing) upon the FRONT COVER OF THE NEW YORKER, then, I knew I’d had it—it was the same damn thing: a large lake on a moonlit night with all these dozens of canoes filled with male and female, and in each the male was playing a guitar and serenading his female—except in one boat right in the center of the lake was this guy standing up in his canoe and blowing this very huge horn. I forgot whether I put a broad in his canoe or not, I prob. did, but now as I am older I see it would have given an extra laugh to leave the gash out. Anyhow, it was all wasted and I didn’t cartoon no more until Ben Tibbs kinda fucked up on what was supposed to be a cover for Longshot Pomes and I told [Carl] Larsen jesus I think I can do better. What I mean is, like with the cartoons, the novel, I don’t know the mechanics of doing and I do not want to waste a lot of words doing everything backwards that some sycophant will twist and turn to his own use. I thought the Art world and things like that would be clean. That’s shit. There are more evil and unscrupulous octopus people in the Art world than you’ll find in any business house because in a business house the guy’s minnow imagination is just on getting a bigger house and a bigger car and an extra whore but usually the drive does not come from some twisted inside that cries for RECOGNITION OF SELF beyond all decency and straightness, no matter how it’s gotten. That’s why some of these editors are such damn buggers: they can’t carve it themselves so they try to associate themselves with those who hack and carve at a little clean marble . . . that’s why a lot of them won’t answer letters of inquiry about submitted work: all the lights within them have fucked themselves to pieces and out.
I went to nightschool once, on Fry’s insistence, took what you call it? commercial Art. This guy who taught worked for some outfit that did comm. art and taught school at night. We’d bring our work to class and he’d line it along the blackboard, and one time just before the Christmas season he said, “Now my company has to do a sign for the TEXACO gas stations, and I want you to make this your problem. Give us something for a xmas ad.” Well, the time came around and he was passing along the board looking at the drawings until he came to mine, and with a great fury and anger he turned to the class and roared: “WHO DID THIS ONE???!!!” “I did,” I admitted, “I thought the TEXACO star, the idea of having the TEXACO star and emblem at the top of the tree was a good one.” “No Christmas trees, please. This is no good. I want you to make me another drawing.” He walked on.
A couple of weeks later he stood before the class. “Well, my company and the TEXACO executives have chosen our Christmas ad.” And he held it up. And as he did so, just a moment after he did so, I saw his eyes search me out. You know what he held up: A Christmas tree with a TEXACO emblem star at the top, only they had put a little service station man inside the tree . . . I didn’t say anything. I could have made him look bad. But I am not for arguing, bitching. I felt that he knew that I knew and that was sufficient. I dropped out of class and got drunk. Later, during the Xmas season, when we’d pass a Texaco station I’d tell Fry, “Look, baby, my drawing . . . aren’t you proud of me?”
what I mean is if I wrote this novel on toilet paper somebody wd wipe his ass on it. I wrote the Ape thing as a short story some 15 years ago or so and IT NEVER CAME BACK EITHER. and no carbons. but I doubt John Collier copied it. He prob. has more talent than I and needn’t do such things. The ape story has done me good, though; I usually tell it to ladies in bed after everything else has been done and we are more or less relaxed. Fry thought the telling was wonderful, and another lady cried, “oh, I’m going to cry, I’m going to cry, it was so sad and beautiful.” and she cried. I guess the reason it didn’t come back (the story) was that I was broke and drinking at the time and was hand-printing my stuff in ink. I finally got so that I could print faster than I could write in longhand and whenever I wrote something down I printed it and people would say, “What the hell’s wrong with you? Don’t you know how to write?” I can’t answer that. I don’t know if I can write or not. But I’m sure laying on the bologna tonight . . . blue true bologna and a bellyfull.
This Toilet Paper Review predates the version published in Screams
