Read Online Screams From the Balcony by Charles Bukowski - Free Book Online Page B

and a sense of madness there, and yet not. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that on the phone the voice does not say as much what the mind is thinking as the typewriter does. Somewhere the thought in coming down from the mind and out into the voice, the thought becomes dispelled, distorted, petty and so forth. So, upon rec. #3, I thought it best to WRITE about it rather than TALK about it. Anyway, as I said, my section was done with a good, sure hand, a beautiful hand, and better and gentler and cleaner than I might have dreamed…. but this, mainly to say I’ve gone on reading more of #3, after getting Bukowski out of the way, and GOD !!! ya really laid the whip on Creeley!!! What you say I agree with, find true, but I’m afraid that as many teeth as you put into him I’d havta add another: CREELEY CAN’T WRITE , nor can the rest of them. They affect to write, and out of this affectation, of course, they need powers, groups, blather, underground lines, handshakes, imputations, delegations and barkers to make the thing go. However, I’m glad you took a swing at them: they need a spanking, these little pricks in their walking shorts and mountain cabins and goats and money and teaching positions. They are fondled enough by society without the rest of us having to put their spittle in cups before the shrine.
    Your story an odd one, Jon, but has the taste of air and being, kind of like Sherwood would do, Sherwood Anderson, and this is not a knock…I do not believe that the short story has gone forward beyond Anderson. He’s been dead a long time now, but the way he put down the word is not. I suppose Anderson has influenced me as much as Jeffers, but in a different way—the cleanliness he had of getting a line down, it is hard to beat.
    And it was quite a thing, of course, to read that Genet liked “Old Man Dead in a Room” best of all the poems in your #1. There were a lot of poems in #1. And I always get the unholy chills when I think of the language switch. Think of this Frenchman sitting in a room reading “Old Man” in French to Genet, the walls there, the chairs, while I am asleep at the time or betting on a horse. Life is oddly wild, full of miracles as well as horrors. [* * *]
    More thunder. Burroughs, of course, is important because he keeps the air-holes open. We need a Joyce or Burroughs or Gertrude S. every age to keep us loose and let us know that everything needn’t be so, the way it seems or the way the herd-writers want it to seem. These people are valuable, in a way, beyond their work—icebreakers, knockers down of policemen…. Yes, the Millerboy finally got around to working Walter over and he did put him straight enough on politics and Art, and it still stands today. I am not saying ART is going to save us…it might save me, for a little while…but politics isn’t going to either; politics got us this far, and see what we’re doing now: tossing the bomb back and forth, back and forth, and the first one to drop it: o, bla AAHHHHHHH ! [* * *]
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    [To Ann Bauman]
    Mid-March [1963]
     
    Know I have not written, and am bastard slob this way, drink, madness et al., but I always figure that I am no good for a woman anyhow, and any way I can save her from myself is all to her good. Meanwhile, as you might have guessed, I write for selfish reasons: I have a book on the press now, Selected Poems 1955-1963, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands …Loujon Press, 618 Ursuline st., New Orleans, 16, Louisiana. 2 bucks, baby, and an autograph, even. Christ, y’ve got 2 bucks somewhere, haven’t you? What I mean is, I don’t get any money out of the book at all—as if it mattered—but I am pumping for these people because 2 bucks to them might mean such a simple thing as eating on this day or not. They eat one meal a day and forward such bastards as I, and I figure if they can do this (and sometimes they don’t make the one meal), I figure I can forget immortality and carefulness and isolation and