Mr. Noble. But his perturbation over things that do not seem like alikeness, perhaps points that the selfishness lies elsewhere. I have made the conservative journals with conservative verse but I have not bade them, “come, do my beckoning!” I’ve merely smiled, thought, I’ve landed in the camp of the enemy, laid their broads, played with breasts both flat and deliciously not-so-flat, and stolen away, unmarked, uncaged, still rapacious in nature, stag, snarling and ingenious. I suppose this is what Mr. Noble was referring to when he said “Mr. Bukowski has a talent.” It was very kind of him. And I enjoyed the less-flat breasts.
[To James Boyer May]
December 13, 1959
The other night I was visited by an editor and a writer (Stanley McNail of The Galley Sail Review and Alvaro Cardona-Hine) and the fact that they found me in a disordered and disheveled state is by no means completely my fault: the visit was as unannounced as an H-Bomb attack. My question is this: does a writer become public property to be ransacked without notice upon publication or does he still retain the rights of privacy as a tax-paying citizen? Would it be gross to say that the only eucharist of many an artist is (still) isolation from an only too-fast closing society, or is this simply a desuetude?
I do not feel it is pedantic or ignoble to demand freedom from the opiate of clannishness and leech-brotherhood that dominates many many of our so-called avant-garde publications.
. . . Well, the editor at least had a beer with me, although the writer would have none—so I drank for the both of us. We discussed Villon, Rimbaud and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. (It seemed a very French night with both of my visitors being very careful to use the French title for B’s works.) We also discussed J. B. May, Hedley, Poots, Cardona-Hine and Charles Bukowski. We impugned and maligned and encircled. Finally fatigued the editor and writer arose. I lied, said it had been nice to see them, the gillies and the morels, the gimblets and the glimpes, the lulling light of Lucifer. They left, and I cracked another beer, clouted with the rakishness of modern American editorialism. . . . If this be writing, if this be poesy, I ask a helminthagogun: I’ve earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I’ll take the encyst and paradise of rejection.
[To James Boyer May]
December 29, 1959
[ . . . ] I have often taken the isolationist stand that all that matters is the creation of the poem, the pure art form. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper. And if I can see more poetry in the Santa Anita stretch or drunk under the banana tree than in a smoky room of lavender rhyming, that is up to me and only time will judge which climate was proper, not some jackass second-rate editor afraid of a printer’s bill and trying to ham it on subscriptions and coddling contributions. If the boys are trying to make a million, there’s always the market, the lonely widows of the John Dillinger approach.
Let’s not find out some day that Dillinger’s poetry was better than ours and the Kenyon Review was right. Right now, under the banana tree, I’m beginning to see sparrows where I once saw hawks, and their song is not too bitter to me.
1960
[To James Boyer May]
January 2, 1960
[ . . . ] yes, the “littles” are all an irresponsible bunch (most of them) guided by young men, eager with the college flush, actually hoping to cut a buck from the thing, starting with fiery ideals and large ideas, long explanatory rejection slips, and dwindling down, finally, to letting the manuscripts stack behind the sofa or in the closet, some of them lost forever and never answered, and finally putting out a tacked-together, hacked-together poor selection of typographically botched poems before getting married and disappearing from the scene with some comment like “lack of support.” Lack of support? Who in the hell are they to get it? What have they done but camouflage themselves behind the façade of Art, think up the name of a magazine, get it listed and wait for submissions from the same 2 or 3 hundred tired names that seem to think they are the poets of America because some 22 year-old jackass with a bongo drum and a loose 50 dollar bill accepts their worst poetry.
[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
