"Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way"
"More Notes of a Dirty Old Man," December 20, 1970
"The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun" (d.a. levy tribute)
***
"Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way"
I was going to begin this with a little rundown on the female but since the smoke on the local battlefront has cleared a bit I will relent, but there are 50,000 men in this nation who must sleep on their bellies for fear of losing their parts to women with wild-glazed eyes and knives. Brothers and sisters, I am 52 and there is a trail of females behind me, enough for 5 men's lives. Some of the ladies have claimed that I have betrayed them for drink; well, I'd like to see any man stick his pecker into a fifth of whiskey. Of course, you can get your tongue in there but the bottle doesn't respond. Well, haha among the trumpets, let's get back to the word.
The word. I'm on my way to the track, opening day at Hollywood Park, but I'll tell you about the word. To get the word down proper, that takes courage, seeing the form, living the life, and getting it into the line. Hemingway takes his critical blows now from people who can't write. There are hundreds of thousands of people who think they can write. They are the critics, the bellyachers and the mockers. To point to a good writer and call him a hunk of shit helps satisfy their loss as creators, and the better a man gets the more he is envied and, in turn, hated. You ought to hear them razz and demean Pincay and Shoemaker, two of the greatest jocks ever to steer a horse. There's a little man outside our local tracks who sells newspapers and he says, "Get your paper, get your info on Shoemaker the Faker." Here he is calling a man who has ridden more winners than any other jock alive (and he's still riding and riding well) and here's this newspaper guy selling papers for a dime and calling the Shoe a fraud. The Shoe is a millionaire, not that that's important, but he did get it with his talent and he could buy this guy's newspapers, all of them, for the rest of this guy's life and into a half dozen eternities. Hemingway, too, gets the sneers from the newspaper boys and girls of writing. They didn't like his exit. I thought his exit was quite fine. He created his own mercy killing. And he created some writing. Some of it depended too much on style but it was a style he broke through with; a style that ruined thousands of writers who attempted to use any portion of it. Once a style is evolved it is thought of as a simple thing, but style not only evolves through a method, it evolves through feeling, it is like laying a brush to canvas in a certain way and if you're not living along the path of power and flow, style vanishes. Hemingway's style did tend to vanish toward the end, progressively, but that's because he let down his guard and let people do things to him. But he gave us more than plenty. There is a minor poet I know who came over the other night. He is a learned man, and clever, he lets the ladies support him so you know he's good at something. He is a very powerful figure of a man growing soft around the edges, looks quite literary and carries these black notebooks around with him and he reads to you from them. This boy told me the other night, "Bukowski, I can write like you but you can't write like me." I didn't answer him because he needs his self-glory, but really, he only thinks he can write like me. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way. Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.
Hemingway studied the bullfights for form and meaning and courage and failure and the way. I go to boxing matches and attend horse races for the same reason. There is a feeling at the wrists and the shoulders and the temples. There is a manner of watching and recording that grows into the line and the form and the act and the fact and the flower, and the dog walking and the dirty panties under the bed, and the sound of the typewriter as you're sitting there, that's the big sound, the biggest sound in the world, when you're getting it down in your way, the right way, and no beautiful woman counts before it and nothing that you could paint or sculpt counts before it; it is the final art, this writing down of the word, and the reason for valor is all there, it is the finest gamble ever arranged and not many win.
Somebody asked me, "Bukowski, if you taught a course in writing what would you ask them to do?" I answered, "I'd send them all to the racetrack and force them to bet $5 on each race." This ass thought I was joking. The human race is very good at treachery and cheating and modifying a position. What people who want to be writers need is to be put in an area that they cannot maneuver out of by weak and dirty play. This is why groups of people at parties are so disgusting: all their envy and smallness and trickery surfaces. If you want to find out who your friends are you can do two things: invite them to a party or go to jail. You will soon find that you don't have any friends.
If you think I am wandering here, hold your tits or your balls or hold somebody else's. Everything fits here.
And since I must presume (I haven't seen any of it) that I am being honored and criticized in this issue I should say something about the little magazines, although I might have said some of it elsewhere? -at least over a row of beer bottles. Little magazines are useless perpetuators of useless talent. Back in the 20's and 30's there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity. One could trace the names from the littles and up through literary history; I mean, they began there and they went up, they became. They became books, novels, things. Now most little magazine people begin little and remain little. There are always exceptions. For instance, I remember first reading Truman Capote in a little named Decade, and I thought here is a man with some briskness, style and fairly original energy. But basically, like it or not, the large slick magazines print a much higher level of work than the littles―and most especially in prose. Every jackass in America pumps out countless and ineffectual poems. And a large number of them are published in the littles. Tra la la, another edition. Give us a grant, see what we are doing! I receive countless little magazines through the mail, unsolicited, un-asked for. I flip through them. Arid vast nothingness. I think that the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing, but they can do it, and they do it continually and relentlessly. I put out 3 issues of a little, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. The material received was so totally inept that the other editor and myself were forced to write most of the poems. He'd write the first half of one poem, then I'd finish it. Then I'd go [do?] the first half of another and he'd finish it. Then we'd sit around and get to the names: "Let's see, whatta we gonna call this cocksucker?"
And with the discovery of the mimeo machine everybody became an editor, all with great flair, very little expense and no results at all. Ole was an early exception and I might grant you one or two other exceptions if you corner me with the facts. As per the better printed (non-mimeo) mags one must grant The Wormwood Review (one half hundred issues now) as the outstanding work of our time in that area. Quietly and without weeping or ranting or bitching or quitting or pausing, or without writing braggadocio letters (as most do) about being arrested for driving drunk on a bicycle in Pacific Palisades or corn-holing one of the National Endowment for the Arts editors in a Portland hotel room, Malone has simply gone on and on and compiled an exact and lively talent, issue after issue after issue. Malone lets his issues speak for themselves and remains invisible. You won't find him beating on your door one night with a huge jug of cheap port wine saying, "Hey, I'm Marvin Malone, I printed your poem Catshit in a Bird's Nest in my last issue. I think I'm gonna kick me some ass. Ya got anything for me to fuck around here?"
A vast grinding lonely hearts club of no-talents, that's what the littles have evolved to, with the editors a worse breed than the writers. If you are a writer seriously interested in creating art instead of a foolishness, then there are, at any moment, a few littles to submit to, where the editing is professional instead of personal. I haven't read the mag that this piece is submitted to but I would suggest, along with Wormwood, as decent arenas: The New York Quarterly, Event, Second Aeon, Joe Dimaggio, Second Coming, The Little Magazine, and Hearse.
"You're supposed to be a writer," she says, "if you put all the energy into writing that you put into the racetack you'd be great." I think of something Wallace Stevens once said, "Success as a result of industry is a peasant's ideal." Or if he didn't say that he said something close to that. The writing arrives when it wants to. There is nothing you can do about it. You can't squeeze more writing out of the living than is there. Any attempt to do so creates a panic in the soul, diffuses and jars the line. There are stories that Hemingway would get up early in the morning and have all his work done at noon, but though I never met him personally I feel as if Hemingway were an alcoholic who wanted to get his work out of the way so he could get drunk.
What I have seen evolve in the littles with most new and fresh talent is an interesting first splash. I think, ah, here's finally one. Maybe we have something now. But the same mechanism begins over and over again. The fresh new talent, having splashed, begins to appear everywhere. He sleeps and bathes with the god damned typewrite and it's running all the time. His name is in every mimeo from Maine to Mexico and the work grows weaker and weaker and weaker and continues to appear. Somebody gets a book out for him (or her) and then they are reading at your local university. They read the 6 or 7 good early poems and all the bad ones. Then you have another little magazine "name" But what has happened is that instead of trying to create the poem they try for as many little mag appearances in as many little magazines as possible. It becomes a contest of publication rather than creation. This diffusion of talent usually occurs among writers in their twenties who don't have enough experience, who don't have enough meat to pick off the bone. You can't write without living and writing all the time is not living. Nor does drinking create a writer or brawling create a writer, and although I've done plenty of both, it's merely a fallacy and a sick romanticism to assume that these actions will make a better writer of one. Of course, there are times when you have to fight and times when you have to drink, but these times are really anti-creative and there's nothing you can do about them.
Writing, finally, even becomes work especially if you are trying to pay the rent and child support with it. But it is the finest work and the only work, and it's a work that boosts your ability to live and your ability to live pays you back with your ability to create. One feeds the other; it is all very magic. I quit a very dull job at the age of 50 (twas said I had security for life, ah!) and I sat down in front of the typewriter. There's no better way. There are moments of total flaming hell when you feel as if you're going mad; there are moments, days, weeks of no word, no sound, as if it had all vanished. Then it arrives and you sit smoking, pounding, pounding, it rolls and roars. You can get up at noon, you can work until 3 a.m. Some people will bother you. They will not understand what you are trying to do. They will knock on your door and sit in a chair and eat up your hours while giving you nothing. When too many nothing people arrive and keep arriving you must be cruel to them for they are being cruel to you. You must run their asses out on the street. There are some people who pay their way, they bring their own energy and their own light but most of the others are useless both to you and to themselves. It is not being humane to tolerate the dead, it only increases their deadness and they always leave plenty of it with you after they are gone.
And then, of course, there are the ladies. The ladies would rather go to bed with a poet than anything, even a German police dog, though I knew one lady who took very much delight in claiming she had fucked one President Kennedy. I had no way of knowing. So, if you're a good poet, I'd suggest you learn to be a good lover too, this is a creative act in itself, being a good lover, so learn how, learn how to do it very well because if you're a good poet you're going to get many opportunities, and though it's not like being a rock star, it will come along, so don't waste it like rock stars waste it by going at it rote and half-assed. Let the ladies know that you are really there. Then, of course, they will keep buying your books.
And let this be enough advice for a little while. Oh yes, I won $180 opening day, dropped $80 yesterday, so today is the day that counts. It's ten minutes to eleven. First post 2 p.m. I must start lining up my horse genes. There was a guy out there yesterday with a heart machine attached to himself and he was sitting in a wheelchair. He was making bets. Put him in a rest home and he'll be dead overnight. Saw another guy out there, blind. He must have had a better day than I did yesterday. I've got to phone Quagliano and tell him I've finished this article. Now there's a very strange son of a bitch. I don't know how he makes it and he won't tell me. I see him at the boxing matches sitting there with a beer and looking very relaxed. I wonder what he's got going. He's got me worried...
"More Notes of a Dirty Old Man," Candid Press, December 20, 1970
I swung three deep out of Vacantsville, like busting out of a herd of cow, and next thing I knew we had set down, the bird burst its stupid stewardesses and I was the last man out, to meet a teacher-student in a shag of yellow and he said, you Bukowski, and there was something about his car needing oil all along the way, 200 miles plus, and then I was standing in front of the students, drunk, and they all sat at little round tables, and I thought, shit, this is like any place else, and I hooked from the bottle and began on the poems, and I told them that I had death coming and that they had death coming but they didn't quite believe me, and I drank some more and I read them poems from way back and poems from recent and then I made one up, and it was dark in there, and I thought, this is lousy, I am reading at a university and I am getting away with everything, not because I am good but because nobody else is and there isn't anybody to correct me: wish Ezra were here or Confucius or somebody anybody to keep me in line―but there wasn't, so I read them my swill and hey swallowed it, and the I grew weary and I said,let's take 5.
Then I got down from the stage and walked over to one of the tables with my bottle. Some crazy-looking guy picked up my bottle and drank from it. I told him, take it easy, mother, I have 30 more minutes to go.
He picked up the bottle to hit it again. I ripped it out of his hand.
I told you, mother, the rest is mine.
They told me later that he was crazy, everybody was afraid of him, he was always on acid but hung around the university even thought they had kicked him out.
That showed his weakness.
I took the bottle from him and climbed back on stage.
The second half was better than the first. They gave me good applause, even the crazy one.
Then I got on out. Almost. The teacher who'd brought me in knew a prof and the prof was at the reading, and the next thing I was at a party at the prof's house. Sell-out Bukowski. The guy who hated profs drinking with them.
I'd signed a contract to read at another college 150 or 200 miles away. Anyhow, I was a literary hustler and I was stuck with it. I stood around at the party because my ride was there, the young guy with the shag of yellow hair, the nice guy, and to help myself along I drank myself into a standing stupidity. I had a reading at this other place at 11:30 a.m. in the morning but you wouldn't have known it looking at me, peeling off tens and twenties: "Hey, man, go down to the liquor store and stock up for these good people. Looks like we're running short."
My host was an English teacher who looked just like Ernest Hemingway. Of course, he wasn't. But I was drunk.
"Ernie," I staggered up to him, "I'll be a son of a bitch in hell! I thought you blew your head off!"
My Hemingway was a staid and rather dull member of the English department.
He just stood there talking about poets and poetry. He was insane. I walked over to the couch and started necking with his wife. She didn't resist. He just stood there over us, talking about poets and poetry. I stuck my tongue deep into her mouth, mauled her breasts.
"T.S. Eliot," he said, "was entirely too safe."
I ran my hand up under her dress.
"Auden had no lasting power."
She stuck her tongue deep into my mouth.
The party went on and on, but for it all, I awakened in bed alone. I was in an upper bedroom, hungover and sick. I turned over to go back to sleep.
"Bukowski! Wake up!" somebody said.
"Go away," I said.
"We've got to make that 11:30 a.m. reading. It'll take us 2 or 3 hours."
"What time is it now?"
"8:30."
"God o mighty!"
I turned over and climbed out of bed. It was my nice guy with the flax of yellow. I dressed as best I could and followed him down the steps. The prof and his wife were down there.
"Want breakfast, Bukowski?"
"Please, no."
The prof started in on literature again. He was really crazy.
"Look," his wife said to him, "why don't you shut up a while?"
"Look, we've got to go," I said,"thanks for putting me up."
The prof and flax walked out the front door. The prof's wife walked up to me. We embraced. She really gave herself over. That kiss was better than many lays I had had. I walked out, got into the car. And then we were moving, out in the country again, the green trees, the lakes. The kid had a pint of scotch. And a thermos bottle to drink it out of. The next place, he told me was a little more conservative.
It was a goodly crowd and these hot lights were on. I was told I was to be put on video tape. I was too sick to care. I started reading. I read a while, then decided I'd better dare the scotch again. I tried it. It stayed down. The reading improved.
I tried some more. The reading improved some more. I took the five, came back and finished them.
The kid and I walked back across campus.
"They'll mail you your check," he said.
"That's okay," I said. It was all over. Two readings. I'd picked up $375 in a night and a day.
We got back into the car. There were 3 or 4 hours before plane time, so we drove to his place out under the trees. His buddy followed us in his car. No women. Well.
We got there and drank beer all afternoon. Luckily they were easy fellows to like. They stayed away from literature and we talked about women and about survival. It was an easy afternoon and then we made the airport. I checked into the next flight and we sat at a table in the bar, and I bought the drinks. I'd made the money and felt obligated, besides, Flax had driven me all over the state, arranged the readings, propped me in front of the TV.
I kept imagining I heard my name over the intercom:
"C. Bukowski, C. Bukowski, please report..."
"Man," I said, "I must be going crazy. I keep hearing my name."
They laughed. Then we got up to go to the plane. It was just rolling down the runway.
I walked back to the ticket office, told them what had happened and they put me on the next flight. We went back into the bar.
"I'd better make the next one," I said, "this can go on for years."
Well, I made it. We were in the air, and I was waiting on that first drink. They were quite slow about it. I looked in my flight bag. There were 3 or 4 warm bottles of beer in there. I opened one. The stewardess saw me.
"Sir," she said, "that's not allowed. We can put you off, you know."
The pilot had just announced that we were at 35,000 feet.
"You better give me that bottle," she said.
I gave her my bottle. I was a bad boy. Everybody stared at me. I felt like a killer or a child rapist.
Then they brought their bar around. THAT was okay. I had my scotch on rocks and looked out the window. Nothing out there. It was over: I was no longer the poet conning the crowd, I was just another lousy passenger going somewhere.
The cabby didn't know the town. Very few of them did. They couldn't even drive. The worst drivers in the world are the L.A. cab drivers. He made it on in without killing us so I gave him a good tip and there I was standing outside my beaten court, a couple more poetry readings behind me. Ski bum. One-nighter. Strictly vaudeville.
"The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun"/Charles Bukowski
from D.A. Levy: A Tribute to the Man, an Anthology of His Poetry (Cleveland, Ghost Press, 1967).
It is not just levy, it is all of us, it is not just poets or spiders
or fleas or corncobs, it is all of us, it is the deliberate mashing
of the sun. sometimes you don't have to wait upon History to find
good from evil. sometimes acts are so vile, so contraband, so clearly snakes eating eyes out of skulls, that any unbiased study is something akin to studying a turn to see if it will ever grow into a flower. the roust of levy is such a stale turkeydeath badbreath smeartit deal that i imagine even the police treat it as a playact, a movement, a practice workout, a pinch to pinch something they figure can't bite back. what did levy say? What were the words that bothered them?: shit? fuck? cunt? DIRTY WORDS? OBSCENE? I am more afraid that they have been used and overused and could only bore the most ivorytower old maid. DOES LEVY USE THESE WORDS IN ATTEMPT TO SOMEHOW MAKE 89 cents a day? my ass! does levy uses these words as a dirty little boy? ah, he does? does he paste them on the side of his new Cadillac? does he put them on a big sign in front of his $60,000 home in suburbia? my ass! does he scratch them into doorbells of the people who set him out a plate of food, does he work them in with a pin while looking over his shoulder? your ass. DOES HE PUT THESE WORDS INTO HIS BEST-SELLING NOVEL? does he run around hissing them out of the side of his mouth at little girls aged 4,5,6,7? who in the hell is crazy in CLEVELAND? in the UNIVERSE? what bothers them then? you guessed it: POETRY. one of the last untrammeled fortresses where a good man can work out, holy and free and burning. WHAT BOTHERS THEM IS THAT WHEN A REAL ARTIST USES THE WORD "SHIT" IN POETRY THEY CAN SMELL IT, and they don't want to smell it: the shit of their lives or the shit of their shit. poets are not very careful―they are only interested in the dirtiest of words: TRUTH. corncob, sure. corny, sure. hardly pays a damn thing, BUT THE REAL WORKERS IIN POETRY WOULD PAY TO BE ABLE TO WRITE POETRY. I mean in dollars if they had them. NOW THEY ARE BEING MADE TO PAY IN ANOTHER WAY. all these bookstore raids, the pinching of poets that has come very close together these past few months, it is like a friends said to me in a very weary and sad voice, wondrous voice too in that he felt that nothing at all had been gained: "It's just HOWL all over again." "yeah," I said. meanwhile, the true users of FILTH FOR PROFIT know all the boundaries. what CAN BE SHOWN IN A PHOTO, what can or can't be suggested. what words you never use. what words you use to get around words. the BIG BUSINESS OF FILTH KNOWS ITS BUSINESS. the psychopathic homicide maniacs this business causes to bust loose in the back alleys and streets of cities is vast and numerically hideous. almost everybody likes a good piece of ass but what these uncontrollable smut nudey mags cause in borderline cases would be obvious to a psychiatrist or just even an average thinking human being. but to pinch a starving poet for 34 or 50 pure poems, and even the PURE BAD ONES SAY AS ART THEY ARE STILL ART, WHY SAY EVEN HERE IT IS LIKE TRYING TO PINCH THE SUN FOR GIVING YOU A SUNBURN, IT IS LIKE TRYING TO PINCH THE SEA FOR DROWNING A MAN, IT IS LIKE TO PINCH BEETHOVENS 9th BECAUSE A BRAIN DAMAGE CASE CANNOT UNDERSTAND IT.
Because what happened to levy could happen to me. I earn about 30 cents a day writing poetry. think of it. them busting down my door and ripping a poem from the typewriter and taking me in and setting a bail I couldn't pay. I've been pinched for drunk, for drunkdriving, and once for causing a traffic jam in the city of INGLEWOOD, I believe. I think I was in Inglewood. anyhow I went to a Culver City court. I had stretched out on the top step of a very well-lit mortuary at 2:30 a.m. in the morning upon one of the main streets. I was charged among other things with "blocking traffic." I took all this with a kind of fear and yet a good humored resignation. but think of them busting in here on top of my poems? "Bukowski?" "yeah?" "come with us." SOUNDS LUDICROUS LIKE A KID OF KATZENJAMMER NAZI MOVIE SCENE. yet if you try to run away they'll club you with a stick or shoot you in the back. when it happens to somebody else it is kind of mathematic, kind of a mistake, but when it happens to you it is very damn real VERY FUCKING REAL, and you leave that place, your typewriter sitting there, one bottle of beer in the refrigerator some old clothes on the floor, 3 days left on the rent, and you walk along between them and wonder what it is, you even make up vague things of safety for the puzzled mind: JUSTICE PREVAILS; THIS IS AMERICA; I'VE DONE NOTHING. only the last two thoughts are true, and then you get it―the thing, all the things going on, the neat little brutalities, the sluggings in dungeons, the internment camps....where? somewhere in Oregon? in Arizona? no need to get dramatic only Hitler shines an apple in Argentina and smiles. you walk down the stairs between them, trying to look like a young George Raft, a living H. Bogart. you already feel guilty and you are guilty BECAUSE THEY CARRY THE GUNS. WHERE IS THE JUDGE WHO WILL MAKE THEM GUILTY? WHEN WILL HE SHOW?
obscenity? god, you should see what they do to their wives! these big fat clean-clothes boys i walk between.
what else can I say? where are we? Levy, I once wrote a little book you published called THE GENIUS OF THE CROWD. I’d like to read it at your trial, but never mind, I’ll probably read it at mine. ---if they let me.
