Screams From the Balcony

by Charles Bukowski

  * * *

  Norman Winski was editor of the little magazine Breakthru.

  [To Jory Sherman]

  June 28, [1960]

  [* * *] Winski, he’s been phoning and I’ve been ducking. Jesus, I can’t see any sense in it but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. He pinned me down and I told him I’d be over to his place last night, but at last minute I phoned his wife and told her something had come up, I couldn’t make it. She sounded pretty hurt and in about 10 minutes the phone started ringing, Winski I suppose and I just laid there slugging down the beer. I guess I’m insane, a mess-up. He told me to bring over some of my poems, wanted me to read something. Jesus, I can’t do that sort of thing, Jory!

  [* * *] Do, if you see Sheri, tell her I said hello. She wrote me a wonderful 3 page letter bout Pound and things, almost a poem, the whole thing. Deserves answer but I can’t get untracked. [* * *]

  * * *

  [To Jory Sherman]

  [July 9, 1960]

  u in bed weigh & I am answering right off altho I do not know if I have anything to say but will let the keys roll and see what comes off. not me, I hope. No women around. One lugcow just left, sitting on couch all old out of shape red in face fat, jesus I told her I’m really going to heave a big one, one old big shitsigh when u drag it outa here. I’ll have a brew and fall on the springs and begin to dream sweet dreams, only I did not say it in exactly this manner and she laughed. old women everywhere, lord. [* * *]

  Spicer stupid to ask if you have read Lorca. Everybody has read Lorca. Everybody has read anything, everything. Why ask. I hate these meetings. Have u read. oh yeah. he’s good. how about. o yeah. he’s good too. [* * *]

  Stan phoned yesterday. told him I was going to races. phone me, see me that night. I didn’t hear. guess he pissed. well, what is there to see…me…old man on couch or edge of chair trying to think of something to say, and all the time everybody thinking, is this the guy who wrote those poems? No, it can’t be!

  WHAT PEOPLE FORGET IS THAT YOU WRITE THE POEM, YOU DON’T TALK IT.

  to hell with everybody but Jory Sherman, S. Martinelli, Pound, Jeffers, T. Williams and the racing form. you are not a bastard and I do not like to hear yourself call urself one, and I am not a saint. let’s go with the poem, straight down the stretch to the wire, first. sure.

  Hearse Chapbook no. 4 was Mason Jordan Mason’s A Legionere (1960). Bukowski’s book would be no. 5 in the series.

  * * *

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  August 1, 1960

  Again the long silence from Eureka, although I see in Trace 38 you are coming on with more Mason Jordan Mason as fast as Crews can write it, also a couple of more editors. Well, that’s all right. What you do is yours. I hate to bitch, but is anything happening with the Flower and the Fist etc. I have told a couple of more magazines, and few people and I am beginning to feel foolish because as you know, this is the second time around with the same act. Let me hear something or other. Stamped self-addressed enclosed.

  Marvin Bell and a couple of others seem to think my “Death of a Roach” in Epos, Winter 1959, is a pretty good poem? Too late to work it in? More loot? You don’t care for poem? Anyway, I’ll be glad when it’s all over. The thing has become more than a few pages of my poems. It has been going on so long that it has become like a disease, an obsession, purgatory, Alcatraz…. how long has it been? 2 years? 3? Please, E.V., be reasonable. Let’s get this thing out of the way. Let Mason screw his lambs for a while. I am beginning to talk to myself in the mirror.

  ps—I see where Witt crossed you up on “Lowdermilk,” having appeared with it in Decade 1953. How they want their fame! over and over again! instead of writing something new. Frankly, E.V., I’m getting pretty sick of the literary world but I don’t know where else to go. Yeah. I know. I can go to hell. I dropped a hundred and fifty on the ponies Saturday. Riding back on the train drunk, all the women looking at somebody else. Bukowski old and grey and shrunk. all the rivers dry. all the pockets empty. best anyhow, damn it, they haven’t dropped the bomb yet.

  The broadside referred to in the next letter was the first separate Bukowski publication, a poem called “His Wife the Painter,” published by E. V. Griffith and included as an insert in the magazine Coffin, no. 1 (1960).

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  August 6, 1960

  Thank you for the quick response on inquiry. Hope I have not piqued you.

  Yes, this little mag game discouraging and that is why I try to keep quiet and not scratch at editors, just write the poem. When I bitch occasionally it’s just the nerves reaching the throat, mine really, and I’m eating at myself rather than anybody else.

  Thank you for broadsides: they are beautiful type jobs. I have at least a half dozen friends, places in mind that I’d like to see these. Tonight I am mailing out the ones you send. They are wonderfully presented, can’t quite get over that. Do you have a few more sets? [* * *]

  No, I don’t have any particular mags in mind for review copies. I don’t have any particular feuds going nor, on the other hand, any strong supporters who would swing for me. [* * *]

  Nice to hear from you Griff and I promise not to cry anymore.

  A little outa the way, but I rec. a note from Ann Reynolds of the Sixties this morn. little photo a duff and bly. I roasted Duffy and he ducked out and joined the French Foreign Legion. Who says I’m not a tough baby? [* * *]

  P.S.—If this works out ok, perhaps sometime in the future—the far future—we can work out another half-and-half deal. I think right now we have both suffered too much with it…. [* * *]

  * * *

  The next letter records the first contact with Outsider magazine and its editors and publishers, Jon and Louise Webb, a connection which was to prove so beneficial to Bukowski. It also, like the preceding letter, notes his incompatibility with the kind of poetry being furthered by Robert Bly’s magazine The Sixties (formerly The Fifties). Bukowski had eleven poems in Outsider No. 1 (Fall 1961), under the collective title “A Charles Bukowski Album.”

  [To Jory Sherman]

  August 17, 1960

  [* * *] Martinelli called me down something…called me a “prick,” said I built “asshole palaces,” called me “bug-job,” I can’t remember all. [* * *] I can’t be bothered with gash trying to realign my outlook. And Pound may have been “lonely” and “fell in love with a great sSSPLLLANGggg” “like a rain in a dry dusty summer,” but I am not Pound and I am not lonely. The last thing I wanna see is more gash and more people.

  No, regarding Griff, broadsides not of book, but insert style thing to be slipped into pages of Coffin and Hearse loosely, later to be assembled into collection of some sort. I am broadside #1, Hearse. Tibbs freelance pen ink sketcher who fulfills frus[trations] by playing little mag pages with scratchy pen. Rather ordinary talent, I think, but not too much compo[sition]. Think I could do better but I am supposed to be a poet.

  No, I’m not in Sixties. One reject they sent me, trying to place me in Evergreen Review class, had hangover and straightened them. Hence this bit of corres., photo etc., which I am not going to answer, my point already have b. made, and I don’t care too much to leave the poem and jaw unless it is crit. article. Ann Reynolds sounds like somebody to fill Duffy-gap. [* * *]

  Thanks for word on Outsider Finally got card from them through Coastlines. Asking me for contributions. Ah, well.

  * * *

  Bukowski’s birthday is August 16th.

  [To Jory Sherman]

  August 17, 1960

  it’s all over, I’m 40, over the hill, down the other side…made the rounds Sunday nite…alone…sat in strip joint, watched them shake and wiggle like something going on…bored…$1.25 for beer, but drank em like water. water hell. I don’t drink much water. Place after place…faces sitting there empty as jugs. shit. shit. oh, I got a lovely buncha coconuts! nothing. woke up with cracked toe, blood, couldn’t walk. oh I got a lovely buncha, a lovely buncha coconuts!

 
old girlfriend sent over huge buncha flowers, all kinds, quite nicea her. like a funeral, like a beautiful funeral, buried at 40…

  sick today. [* * *]

  Do you mind if I sign myself Charles? it is old habit. when I write or when somebody writes me I am Charles. When they talk to me in a room I am Hank. This, my solidification. A chunk of 40 stone.

  * * *

  [To Jory Sherman]

  [August 22, 1960]

  black day, they have kicked my horse-ass good. 3 rejects, San Fran. Review, White Dove, and Oak Leaves. [* * *]

  Girlfriend said I was as drunk the other night as she’d ever seen me. I used vile lang. and yanked the mattress off her bed and then leaned back in chair and gave 2 hours lecture (while drinking) on the arts and what they meant or didn’t mean, and who was what and why.

  Kid, I am definitely cracking. These last 3 or 4 months have ended me. I think I’m written out. I’ve said it all. What the hell else? I don’t care. I’ve still got the horses and the whores and Schlitz. Let these 19 year old editors gobble the gugga of rooster.

  I’m going to try to buy a shack somewhere and give everything up. Just be dirty old man waiting to die. I’m sick of all the 8 hour faces and laughter and babble, Dodger talk and pussy-talk and zero-talk. A roof, no rent. That’s my aim. Pick up enough washing dishes 3 times a week or pimping. Lord, I’m sick of it all. And poetry too. No wonder Van Gogh blasted his head off. Crows and sunlight. Idle zero. Zero eating your guts like an animal inside, letting you shit and fuck and blink your eyes, but nothing, a nothing. I couldn’t die stretched in a blizzard because I’m already dead. So let Pound have it. And Keats. and Shelley. and belly. piss. the mailman with his smirking white rejectee envelopes, and all the grass growing and the cars going by as if it all doesn’t matter. Christ, I’m watching a guy water his lawn now. His mind is as empty as a department store flowerbowl. Water. water. water. make the grass grow green. GREAT. G R E A T.[* * *]

  * * *

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  [September 19, 1960]

  Got you plug in Quagga vol. I, no. 2, just off the press: “Charles Bukowski’s new book will be off the press early next month, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. It is being published by Hearse Chapbooks in California.” So you see, I’m working at it. Pretty lively poem in Quagga about a riot that occurred while I was in Moyamensing Prison. Might instigate the sale of a couple of chapbooks. I feel that you have been somehow reluctant to put out the Wail, perhaps feeling it would not move, since I am an isolationist socially speaking and have only enemies, but life is sometimes odd Griff, and it might be that this thing will put some dough in your pockets. I feel I am a more lively writer than Crews, Creeley, Mason, etc., Eckman, but we’ll see.

  * * *

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  Mid September, [1960]

  Got your note on chapbook progress the other day. It appears to me that you are doing too much at once, getting out too many chapbooks at once, and although mine was started long ago others seem to be coming out ahead of me. I don’t know what the hell to make of it all and often wonder how another writer would have taken it. From my experiences as an editor I found they wail and bitch pretty much, and can be quite damned nasty. This thing is even beginning to get me. Now the pages have come out wrong sequenced…what kind of a printer is that?

  Well, I hope this thing does get done…sometime…somehow. The strain is getting unbearable.

  * * *

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  October 7, 1960

  My dear E. V. Griffith:

  Since you have failed to contact me since about last August—“and I should have something in your hands by the end of the month”—and then the note about wrong sequenced pages—“and I should have something in your hands in just a few more days,” I haven’t heard and we are now sailing well into October.

  It seem to me that all mistakes could have been rectified by now! My famed patience, has at last, after a 2 years wait, had it.

  And in case you have forgotten, I finally sent you some money—between 30 and 40 bucks—to help you get this thing rolling.

  You have put me out on the limb by again asking me to make announcements to the magazines that Hearse is to issue Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. This is getting to be the joke of the literary world, but I am no longer laughing.

  I am going to wait a short period longer and if no results are achieved I am going to write Trace, the San Francisco newspapers and the editors of other literary magazines of the whole history of this notorious and impossible chapbook nightmare. I can not see it that sloppy and amateur editorialism, a downright horror of coldness and cruelty and ineptness go unchallenged.

  If you feel that I am being unfair, hasty or unreasonable, I would be most glad to get any statements from you. However, further silence or delay, would be construed to mean that you intend to continue your slipshod policies and the writer be damned.

  We of the literary world, we like to feel that we are not here to wrangle or to claw, but to create. Protest is more a political and worldly thing, but even as a poet, I feel I have a right and a duty, in this case, to make public protest.

  [To E. V. Griffith]

  October 14, 1960

  I went down to the post office this morning with card left in my box yesterday—and yowl!—there it was, set of Hearse chapbooks by one Charles Bukowski. I opened the package right in the street, sunlight coming down, and there it was: Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, never a baby born in more pain, but finally brought through by the good Doctor Griffith—a beautiful baby, beautiful! The first collected poems of a man of 40, who began writing late.

  Griff, this was an event! Right in the middle of the street between the post office and a new car agency.

  But then the qualms came on and the fear and the shame. I remembered my last letter to you when I had finally cracked, scratching and blaming and cursing, and the sickness came.

  I DON’T KNOW HOW IN THE HELL TO APOLOGIZE, E. V., BUT JESUS I ASK FORGIVENESS. That’s all I can say.

  It’s a beautiful job, clean and pure, poem arrangement perfect. I’m mailing out copies to some people who think I am alive, but first off with this letter to you.

  I hope I can live down any disgust I have caused you.

  * * *

  • 1961 •

  [To Jory Sherman]

  [1961?]

  [* * *] The fact that the poets of the world are drunk is a damn good indication of its shape. Cresspoolcrews says something about the essence of poetry being in the shape of a woman’s body. It must be wonderful to be so beautifully simple and uninvolved. Sex is the final trap, the closing of the steel-kissed door. Lawrence was closer in seeking muliebrity from flesh to soul, and to perstringe [sic] the awkward-working and the ugly. Crews simply swallows sex in great drunken drafts because he doesn’t know what else to do, which, of course, is common Americana: thinking about it, simpering about it, carrying dirty pictures in the back pocket, and yet this country, for it all, is the most puritanical you can find. Women here have put the price too high and the boys go behind the barn with the cow. Which makes it tough on boys, cows, and women.

  I have just read the immortal poems of the ages and come away dull. I don’t know who’s at fault; maybe it’s the weather, but I sense a lot of pretense and poesy footwork: I am writing a poem, they seem to say, look at me! Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter. I think a man should be forced to write in a roomful of skulls, bits of raw meat hanging, nibbled by fat slothy rats, the sockets musicless staring into the wet ether-sogged, love-sogged, hate-sogged brain, and forevermore the rockets and flares and chains of history winging like bats, bat-flap and smoke and skulls ringing in the beer. Yes. [* * *]

  Ben Tibbs, a printer, a poet and artist who published alongside Bukowski in many little magazines, lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He did the cover art for Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail.

  [To Ben Tibbs]

  June 8, 1961

>   Sorry I can only ship one copy but I am down to the end of mine. Other people have written me that Griffith does not respond either to money or written request. I have attempted to send copies to all those who asked for them but Griffith only sent me a limited number. What has gone wrong up in Eureka I really don’t know.

  Thank you for doing the Art work on Flower, Fist. I think you caught the spirit of the poems and the title quite well.

  * * *

  • 1962 •

  Carl Larsen published Bukowski’s third book, Longshot Poems for Broke Players, at his 7 Poets Press in New York early in 1962.

  [To Ben Tibbs]

  [early 1962]

  I had meant to ask you not to send dollar; certainly this is one hell of a price to pay to see the fine cover you did for Griffith. But instead of sending the dollar back, I am going to suffer you with a copy of Longshot Poems for Broke Players. Am sending the buck on to Larsen for this purpose, but am having the beers anyhow. Many thanks for your graciousness and understanding.