It is almost impossible to write about writing. I remember once after giving a poetry reading I asked the students, “Any questions?” One of them asked me, “Why do you write?” And I answered, “Why do you wear that red shirt?”
Being a writer is damning and difficult. If you have a talent it can leave you forever while you are sleeping one night. What keeps you going in the game is not easy to answer. Too much success is destructive; no success at all is destructive. A little rejection is good for the soul but total rejection creates cranks and madmen, rapists, sadists, drunkards, and wife-beaters. Just as too much success does.
I too have been misled by the Romantic concept of writing. As a youth I saw too many movies of the great Artist, and the writer was always some tragic and very interesting chap with a fine goatee, blazing eyes, and inner truths springing to his tongue continually. What a way to be, I thought, ah. But it isn’t so. The best writers that I know talk very little, I mean those who are doing the good writing. In fact, there is nothing duller than a good writer. In a crowd or even with one other person, he is always busy (subconsciously) recording every goddamned thing. He is not interested in speechmaking or being the Life of the Party. He is greedy; he saves his juices for the typewriter. You can talk away inspiration, you can destroy god-given genius with your mouth. Energy will only spread so far. I too am greedy. One must be. The only juices that can be given up, the only time that can simply be given away is the time for Love. Love gives strength; it breaks down inbred hatreds and prejudices. It makes the writing more full. But all other things must be saved for the work. A writer should do most of his reading while he is young; as he starts to form, reading becomes destructive—it takes the needle off the record.
A writer must keep performing, hitting the high mark, or he is down on skid row. And there’s no way back up. For after some years of writing, the soul, the person, the creature becomes useless to operate in any other capacity. He is unemployable. He is a bird in a land of cats. I’d never advise anybody to become a writer, only if writing is the only thing which keeps you from going insane. Then, perhaps, it’s worth it.
Untitled Essay on d.a. levy
Why does a man destroy himself or what destroys him? I would have to judge that suicide is mostly the tool of the thinking man. The right to suicide should be the same as the right to love. The former certainly has more lasting qualities, which, in a sense, gives it more nobility. One suicide, many loves. One levy, many levies. What destroyed him? I didn’t know him that well. Many men are killed and still living. Only a living man can die. Most funerals are the dead burying the dead. levy buried himself. From scarce readings of his works I would have to guess that levy had yet to round out into a plausible talent. What killed him is the same thing which keeps us awake nights, is the same thing that grips our guts when we pass face after face upon the streets; what killed him is the same thing we love and hate, the same thing we eat, the same thing we fear. What killed him was life and lack of life; what killed him were cops, friends, poetry, Cleveland . . . belief and betrayal—this and that: a worm in an apple, a look in an eye . . . poetry, poetry, cops, and friends . . . maybe a woman, maybe a sonnet, maybe lack of proper diet.
A poet is simply too sharpened. The nature of his art makes survival almost impossible. levy printed some of my things in the M. Quarterly [Marrahwannah Quarterly], and his notes were always short but lively. The M. Quarterly was badly printed (mimeoed) and badly bound but still had the flavor of levy. Perhaps he was also badly printed and badly bound. They didn’t give him much chance. Perhaps he didn’t give himself much chance. Men have been killed for more and for less. levy also published a long poem of mine called The Genius of the Crowd, a nicely-done job using cut-up envelopes as pages. He wrote me, “You’ve said it here, you’ve said it almost all. And they’ll read it and still not know.” It was not long after, it seemed, that he was dead. I must guess that Kent State is certainly aware of death. Death keeps coming and running, one hell of a Sammy. It was last night that Louise Webb phoned me that Jon Webb had died. Jon Webb, editor of The Outsider and publisher of 2 of my books, and a friend and a beer-drinking companion. I was bombed when Lou phoned (other troubles), and here was death again and I walked about the room with a Coleman burner on and symphony music on the radio, and I thought, no, goddamn it, I was supposed to go first, I am always talking about suicide and death, and here I am, and hardly feeling fine, and today the letter came asking me to talk about levy. I can’t say anymore except that I get angry and sad when a good man dies or is killed, and that isn’t reasonable because we’re born to die, and maybe that helps make poetry and anger and sadness. The music plays; I smoke half a cigar stub, there’s a beer. . . . levy, levy, levy, you’re gone. jon, jon, jon, you’re gone too. My heart heaves out the belly of itself.
Henry Miller Lives in Pacific Palisades And I Live On Skid Row, Still Writing About Sex
If you think getting off one of these stories once or twice a week is an easy way of paying the rent, you’re insane. It worries me. “Listen,” I asked this woman I used to sleep with, “what am I going to write about when sex dries up inside of me?” “You’ll be a writer for the People, you’ll be a writer for the betterment of the Masses, that’s what you’ll be.”
“Listen,” I said, “when are you going home? I knew there was some reason I stopped sleeping with you.”
Right now as I sit here typing, my girlfriend sits behind me writing her mother: “Dear Mother: Bukowski wishes to thank you for borning me. He claims I am the best piece of ass he ever had. . . .” She laughs, types some more: “He says that he has given up on the landlady and even the landlady’s daughter and sends you his fond regards. . . .”
We have just finished making love and it was plenty good, but we do have our problems—every time we get into 69, we are interrupted. Today we were working away when somebody knocked on the door. We had to stop. I got up and looked. It was the landlady with two dresses for my seven-year-old daughter who lives in Santa Monica. The time before that we were into 69 and the phone rang. It was somebody telling me that Tiny Tim’s son was on TV right then. Another time we were into it, and the door was open, unlocked I mean, and this little black kid from the neighborhood walked in. “What the hell do you want, man?” I asked. “You got any empty bottles?” he asked me.
To me, sex is good and necessary—like food, sleep, music, creation, things you need to live well with—but it can get humorous. In fact, I was just going to tell you how humorous it can get but the phone just rang, a collect call from Florida. I took it. A girl. She had just moved out there. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “I don’t want the baby.” “Abort it, then,” I said. “Abortion’s only legal in California and New York; can you lend me some money?” “Hate to be a dog, kid, but I can’t help you.” As I said, sex is funny. I read in the paper today that a woman was convicted under a 1868 Florida law and faces twenty years for having an abortion.
Oh, ha ha ha.
I remember this one lady I shacked with for seven years. She had some very good qualities but she had one particularly bad one. I’d be asleep and this hand would come over and grab my penis and almost yank it from my body. Let me tell you, it is not a very good way to be awakened.
After I had finished screaming and pulling her hand off my penis I’d ask the lady, “Good Lord, woman, why did you do that?”
“You were playing with yourself, I caught you, I caught you!”
“You’re crazy! It’s soft. Listen, you almost ripped that thing from my body. I’ve only got one of them, you know. . . .”
She got on a streak and did it seven or eight times within two weeks. I learned to sleep on my belly. I was giving her more than enough sex; if I wanted to masturbate in between times, I considered it my right. This lady had another bad habit. She’d walk into the bathroom and scream.
“What’s the matter, babe?” I’d ask.
“Look at that tub!” she’d say.
“What’
s wrong with it?”
“Just look, look, you beast!”
“I’m looking.”
“Can’t you see it? Stuck to the edges? You’ve been playing with yourself in the bathtub!”
“You’re crazy.”
“Just look at it! Can’t you see it hanging there?”
“Where?” I’d ask.
“There! There!”
“Now look,” I’d ask, “when I put my finger there you tell me if that’s what you mean? Is it there?”
“No, further down. To the left.”
“Here?”
“No, just a bit further down.”
“Here?”
“Yes, there. You’re touching it now.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Yes, there is. You’re touching it, you’re touching it!”
She had this bathtub complex. And here we were going through it five times a week. I will admit I am oversexed but I didn’t use that bathtub as much as she claimed I did. Many of those little hangings were rough lumps in the enamel.
Then there’s this lady I know. She lives in a new apartment with swimming pool. It’s a nice swimming pool. But she can’t use it now, she tells me. You see, there is this fourteen-year-old girl who is making love to these four or five guys ranging from thirteen to fifteen years old. They make love when her mother is at work. Then they all go out and swim in the pool; they wash off in the pool. “I can’t swim in there,” she tells me, “all that come floating around.” The weather has been quite hot, too, going up to 115 degrees. There isn’t any lifeguard there but outside of that, it’s a very nice pool. I checked the water for sperm but I really couldn’t see any. Of course this lady is very afraid of sperm and I suppose there might be some reality in her thinking. She said her best girlfriend once got pregnant by getting into a bathtub and bathing after a male had masturbated in the same tub. You see I am not the only one who uses a bathtub for more than bathing.
I get letters in the mail from people saying that I am surely one of the greatest writers around. I don’t get too many of these letters because most people don’t know where I live. But I wonder about these letters and these people and wonder if they ever read all the things I write, things like I am writing now, for instance. Surely I am vulgar, obscene, and write much too obviously. I would suppose that anybody could yammer on about sex and seem fairly interesting. If I tried to write on ecology or world affairs or the Meaning of Life, I would be a very dull fellow indeed. I am clever and just work in all this dirty stuff. Now, let’s see, this piece isn’t long enough, let’s see if I can get more and more into my dirty mind.
You know, I wonder if Henry Miller is really all that good? I’ve tried to read his books on cross-country buses but when he gets into those long parts in between sex he is a very dull fellow indeed. On cross-country buses I usually have to put down my Henry Miller and try to find somebody’s legs to look up, preferably female. I am a fine one for looking up legs of ladies on cross-country buses . . . city buses, bus stop benches. . . . I must thank myself for buses. I’ve gotten hotter on and around buses than anywhere else. I often get hotter looking up legs than I do making love to the average woman.
I think I got hotter on a bus than I ever did in my life. I was a young man, poor, and not getting much and I was on this cross-country bus one night alone in my seat and this young girl got on. Well, you know how it is, you pretend you are sleeping. They turn the lights out. I have never been a bold one but after a while I felt this girl’s leg touching mine ever so slightly. She’ll pull away, I thought, but she didn’t pull away. She gradually put on more pressure, so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. I put on a little pressure myself. We were both sitting, seats back, and stretched facing upwards. Our flanks, our legs were pressed together from ankle to butt. There wasn’t a sound. People snored. I got hotter and hotter. It was a hotness that flowed through my entire body, never had I been so heated. The pressure increased. Why doesn’t she speak? I thought. Then we began moving our legs, rubbing them against each other in the silence and darkness. It was gross and mad, indecent. It went on and on and on, this rubbing and twisting . . . for hours. Then the bus would make a stop, the lights would go on and I would sit up and rub my eyes as if I had been asleep. I didn’t look at the girl, she didn’t look at me. She got up first and went in for her hamburger and coffee. I had to wait for my erection to go down. Then I got up and went in, sitting far away from the girl. After eating we re-entered the bus and sat there staring straight forward. As soon as the lights went out we began again. Pressing and rubbing. I tell you that it is hard to imagine the intense hotness I felt. It was all so deliciously rotten and stupid and fearful, riding along there rubbing together and not speaking. Then into another café, sitting apart, then getting back on that bus again. We never kissed, never spoke.
A more intelligent and less thwarted man than myself would have gotten acquainted, would have gotten addresses, phone numbers, names, perhaps would have gotten off with the girl and gone to a motel with her. But I was young and had lived a strange and bitter, involuted life. I couldn’t break through. I would break through now because I’ve learned certain ways through the years. But you see, I had all the luck then. For instance, I remember that ride and that girl much better than many of the women I have had sexual intercourse with and have long since forgotten. I remember the intense heat and I remember her leaving, getting off at her stop somewhere in the early morning before the sun came up. I watched her outside as she got her suitcase. I saw her for the first time, really, and she was a handsome girl, nicely built, nicely dressed, and intelligent-looking.
I rode cross-country buses a great deal when I was young. There was something that I needed, constant movement, somehow I needed this constant movement to survive what was happening to me inside and what the world was doing to me. I even came up with the theory that I might live on buses forever. But, of course, there were hindrances—lack of income, and I couldn’t sleep on buses, and they made me constipated, as well as hot.
I had a similar experience with another girl soon after but I began a conversation which led to kissing and an exchange of information. She said she wanted to study to be a dancer but her parents wouldn’t let her. I said, “Ah, that’s too bad.” And we rode along, kissing and friendly in the dark, and we ate and talked together and some of the heat vanished. It was not nearly as sneaky and dirty and foolish as the other. The girl even asked me to get off with her at her stop, which was in the middle of a plain in nowhere. It was very dark and empty out there. “Get out here?” I asked.
“Yes, my parents live in a farmhouse here. I want to introduce you. You can live with us.”
“What?” I asked. “Your father might beat me up.”
I wasn’t so much afraid of that as the fact that her father might put me to work on his farm and work all the soul out of me. Then I wouldn’t be the great and dirty writer that I am now.
I watched her walk away in the moonlight. There was a certain amount of sadness on my part. But it did look lonely out there. It’s good we did all that talking and kissing or I might have gotten off with her, and I’d be raising corn now and killing hogs. There you go. . . .
Writing stories about sex, humorously or otherwise, has had its effects upon my life. I suffer for my writing. Once in my early twenties, having come back home from the bum (and being charged room and board), I was coming down the hill, intoxicated, when my mother leaped out from behind a tree.
“What the hell’s wrong, old woman?” I asked.
“It’s your father, it’s your father!”
“Yeah? Whatsamatta?”
“He found your stories, he read your stories!”
“He shouldn’t have gone poking around my suitcase.”
“He’s in a rage, your stories infuriated him. Don’t go back, he’ll kill you, he’ll kill you!”
“I’ll kick his goddamned ass! I’ve done it before.”
“Please don’t go ba
ck. He’s thrown all your stories and clothes out on the lawn. I’ve never seen him so angry!”
“I’m going back and bust him up. Anything I hate, it’s these literary critics.”
“No, no, my son! Here, I’ll give you ten dollars not to go back. Please take this ten.”
“Okay, I won’t go back if you make it a twenty.”
“All right, my son, here’s a twenty.”
I put the bill in my front pocket and walked on down the hill. My shirts, pants, stockings, shorts, comb and brush, all the pages of my writings were spread across the front lawn. I was writing about sex then too. The wind had blown the pages of my stories all across the lawn and into the street and across the neighbors’ lawns. My suitcase was out there, too, thrown open. I walked about gathering my clothing and things, putting them into the suitcase. I picked up most of the pages of my writing except those in the street and on the neighbors’ lawns. I knew that I had plenty more of those good stories in me. My father watched me from behind a drape. I took my suitcase up the hill and waited for a streetcar. I got a place at Third and Flower, a small dirty room full of roaches and life and romance and freedom, and I went outside and sat in a cheap bar and drank for a few hours, then I got a bottle of wine and went back to my room with it and sat in bed with it and drank it in the dark. My father was a fool; how had he ever bred such a brilliant son? . . .
This writing of sex, it has cost me women too. It cost me the mother of my only child. I went to New Orleans for four weeks at one time. It was a most pleasant stay with the great editor Jon Edgar Webb and his wife. We had some fine nights on the town but I didn’t live with the Webbs. I had a place around the corner. Well, never mind. I got back to Los Angeles. The mother and baby were waiting for me as I came up in the taxicab. Everything was all right.
Then it was two weeks later. I came in one day. The lady was all packed. We hadn’t had an argument. It appeared to be the end. Well, I thought (being a male ch.p.), that’s women. But what it was, I didn’t find out until three or four years later when the lady happened by for her child support.