Читать книгу On Writing - Charles Bukowski - Страница 18

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 from the Balcony (1993).

[To John William Corrington]

Late April 1962

I got an idea, Willie. Let’s you and I put out an issue. Call it the The Toilet Paper Review. We won’t even need a duplicator. I will just get a roll and type it up in this typewriter. We will, just you and I, run all our old poems we can’t get rid of in The Toilet Paper Review. One copy to Trace, one copy to God, one copy for Sherman and one for Sherman’s whore who can take it. Anywhere. Anyhow.

The Toilet Paper Review

Edited by William Corrington and Charles Bukowski

Vol. I, #I

if ya wanna look at television

we don’t give a shit.

“I Kneel”

By William Corrington

these legs need to run

but I kneel

before female flowers—

catch the scent of forgetfulness

and grab it,

sure,

and evenings

hours of evenings

grey-headed evenings

nod

and afterwards

“Sculpture”

By Charles Bukowski

Harry, the habit, and then we made

this face, and then out of the Face

came: fish, elms, butternut candy,

and we went outside

and we went outside

and we—needle off, or

break the tape, I can’t stand

it anymore,

I walked 18 blocks,

came back, and the face

had grown to the size of the room

and I knew it was true:

I was mad.

“The Alley That Waits Us”

By William Corrington

I guess we must go on,

loss after loss,

we must go on,

until the final loss,

say in some alley,

blood running down like a

necktie ha ha, we are

tricked and slapped to death,

bargained out of any gain,

any love, any rest,

hands to walls, waa waaa!,

traffic (grr!!) going by,

filthy lovers making filthy

lover’s vows, fish sick fish

going out with the tide

waa waaa!! mah head a

falling now, we are almost

into the black dream,

never to be genius now,

sun brings tulips, rain brings

worms, God brings genius

and disposes genius tulip

worm so things begin again

new things forever

tiresome tiresome to think

body flat now

az small ratz run to my shoes

run off again

and I am seen by a small boy

and he too

runs runs

but they will catch him

like the tulips

like Poppa

like Belmonte

like large stones that break

into sand

that cuts where there is blood,

loss after loss

wherever we

are.

(and we still don’t give a shit whether u look at T.V. or not. We need subscribers. Please help.)

[To John William Corrington]

May 1962

[ . . . ] I received a letter from some woman today. She gives me Nietzsche: “what we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.” And then she says, “This must be what you meant when you spoke of the bad influence of praise in your letter. But, think—to be praised AND to be understood! There, my Friend, is the only type of practical paradise for the writer or the painter or the composer . . .” “Very true—the artist must certainly go from one creation to the next, but none of them are entire new beginnings—nothing ever really has a new beginning. One creation evolves from another. One purpose turns into ten thousand others. When you find an inspired thought, in your head, surely you can not believe it is breathlessly new? It came from centuries of submerged creations of ideas. But I do not mean to get started on a long dragged out ‘essay’ . . .”

Well, thank Christ for that.

what a bunch of fucking preconceptions, and what a dismal harnessed outlook. These intelligent people jaggle my nuts. Each beginning to me (TO ME!!!) is a NEW BEGINNING. God yas. How else do I know whether I am dead or not? what wiggles. what gives. the cunts. I must see the cunts. Each flower is a new flower. The others are dead. Good they were, but dead. I know that when I look at a bridge or a building that this thing is a COMPILATION of so-called knowledge. So fuck a horse. When I write a poem, I add a bolt, a red-nosed bolt with a sour middle and a bloody ass. Or maybe—better yet—I TAKE OUT A BOLT. But I don’t wanna be hamstrung with these purposeful essays. If this bitch wants to come down and ride the springs with me, o.k. Otherwise, my thoughts are not “inspired.”

Somebody says they saw Mailer on T.V. Says very neurotic and can’t finish a sentence. Mailer may not be much but what has this got to do with writing. If a person is very N. and cannot finish a sentence chances are he will be a better writer than the reversal. What’s wrong? Everybody sees backwards. [ . . . ]