Bukowski & Me
The Beast and the Bastard
A Memoir
by
Jory Sherman
Smashwords Edition
Bukowski & Me
Presented by Publishing by Rebecca J. Vickery
Digital ISBN: 978-1-4581-8277-7
Copyright © 2011 by Jory Sherman
Cover Art Copyright © 2011 by Laura Shinn
Cover Portrait provided by Jory V. Sherman
Produced by Rebecca J. Vickery
Design Consultation by Laura Shinn
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Bukowski & Me is a memoir based upon the remembrances of the author. It is not intended as a biographical work. All accounts, correspondence, and facts are the responsibility of the author and have been recounted as accurately as possible.
Dedication
This is for Charlotte,
who put up with both of us like the saint she is.
I can see the black and white lines
and some faces I don't care to discern;
but a thin illness overcomes me
at the sight of this portion of paper
and I look away
and try not to think
that much of our living life
is true to the little paper faces
that stare up from our feet
and grin and jump and gesture,
to be wrapped in tomorrow's garbage
and thrown away.
from The Paper on the Floor
by Charles Bukowski
FIRE STATION,
Capricorn Press 1970
Foreword
By Neeli Cherkovski
Jory Sherman delivers. In a tradition of literary memoir, he delivers a clear, informative, and entertaining portrait of his relationship with Charles Bukowski, stretching back to the waning years of the 1950s when both were publishing in the small poetry journals then proliferating over the country. Sherman tells of his own early beginnings, how poetry beguiled him and took hold, and of his first publications in homegrown journals. It was while visiting one of the editors, in a small Florida town, that he became aware of a then largely unknown writer in Los Angeles named Charles Bukowski. Back then, Sherman had no idea that this obscure poet, who spent much of his time at the racetrack placing bets, was destined to take his place as a world-renowned cult figure along with the likes of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac.
This memoir is not hero worship, nor is it an attempt to tear down an idol. It is, rather, a mesmerizing document of the literary life of an outsider, a poet who spent decades learning his craft, listening intently to the rhythms of the life around him, avoiding the academic world, and, more importantly, stepping out of the way of literary cliché. The Bukowski emerging out of these pages is 'the real deal,' the man who saw in poetry a way to reflect the lives of ordinary people, showing how luminous the sights and sounds of everyday life can be. The reader is fortunate that Sherman is able to offer first-hand accounts, told in vivid, unadorned language, of how Bukowski moved about in his day-by-day world of cheap neighborhoods and low-end jobs, and how he balanced his need for love with the life of a loner.
When Sherman first read Bukowski, the L.A. poet had yet to publish his first book. He only appeared in the "littles," as they were called, journals of forty or so pages that reached two or three hundred readers at most. It was only through the mid 1960s that Bukowski reached a larger audience, and by that time, Jory and "Hank," as Bukowski was known to his friends, was beginning to reach a wider readership, even in the academic community. By then, Sherman's own two books of poetry had taken on a legendary status in the underground poetry scene, and he had left his own indelible mark on the Beat scene in San Francisco. Some of this memoir gives us the flavor of the coffee houses of that era, when Sherman, a young poet, was shaping his own voice and defining a path forward.
Bukowski is one of the most widely read, and translated, of American poets. He has been the subject of a few biographies and book-length critical studies. It has taken some time, but now academic papers, and even Ph.D. theses are being written on his poetry and prose. His novels, from Post Office and Ham on Rye, to Factotum and Hollywood, are cult classics. His poetry has entered the canon and exerted a sustaining influence on poets world-wide. In Sherman's portrait of "the early Bukowski," we are given a chance to see where so much of 'the literary gold' came from, as well as to be entertained by pictures of a bygone era.
Introduction
By Tom Geddie
Our memories of our younger years when we've begun to find our own place in the world are among our best; the friendships we develop stay with us, in one way or another, forever. If we had the chance to spend those years in and around the North Beach area of San Francisco in the late 1950s and early 1960s, America's literary version of Paris in the 1920s, the memories must be even stronger.
This was the time and latter days of the so-called Beatnik generation. The Beats. A shortened form of Beatitudes, briefly meaning "blessed" or "happy," from the biblical notions of the poor in spirit inheriting the kingdom of heaven, that those who weep will laugh, that those who are hungry will be satisfied, etc.
This was North Beach. These were among the human creatures scraping a living from the physical poverty and the intellectual riches of the area: Richard Brautigan, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and so many more who shaped, and still shape, our literature.
Jory Sherman came onto this scene late, as did his friend Charles Bukowski.
It was Sherman, in this telling, who introduced Bukowski to the Beats, who read Bukowski's then-obscure works along with his own poems and a couple of Ferlinghetti's in the coffee houses and living rooms and other venues, who published Bukowski's work in the first issue of a periodical, "The Outsiders," that helped create and nurture Bukowski's fame; and who survived and often delighted in the 20-year friendship remembered in this book, "Bukowski & Me," provocatively subtitled "The Beast & the Bastard."
Bukowski died in 1994 after publishing thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, and six novels; he remains highly influential today because he wrote colorfully and freely about common life, about the down-and-out, and railed against academics.
Sherman is a bastard only by birth, since his parents never married. Prolific, persistent, and persevering, he's a Pulitzer Prize nominee who's published more than 350 books with Doubleday, Zebra, Avon, Berkley, Walker & Co., Tor, Forge, Bantam, Major Books, Pinnacle, The First Ozark Press, White Oak Press, and others. He has created and packaged series for Avon, Harlequin Gold Eagle, Pinnacle, Paperjacks, Zebra, Bantam, and others.
I came to know Sherman as a person as much as a writer, after he'd already reached what most people would call retirement but is just another workday for him at his Northeast Texas home near Lake Bob Sandlin. I know him as a quiet man who writes well, who's dedicated to his craft, who's dedicated to teaching and mentoring, and who's taken up – and already won awards for – painting.
Until two or three years ago, I'd never read his words. Now I'm a fan.
I've read Bukowski's words for years, but never met him; some people have compared my work to his, though I seldom see in mine what Sherman calls Bukowski's "raw meat, swarming with flies, oozing blood on a clean tablecloth, flies zizzing all around each morsel like miniature buzzards, the wild wolf and the rabid cur, inches away, slavering and snarling."
The energy and the insight of much of Bukowski's writing lure me like one of those beasts, but my own writing is, I hope, more like Sherman's, which he self-describes as strongly influenced by Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Federico Garcia Lorca concealing his emotions "behind surrealism, taking the language beyond ordinary load limits, coining words, combining words, wrapping the vowels in the cocoon of consonants until they danced across the page with breathless passion to an almost orgasmic climax."
This memoir, "Bukowski & Me," helps bring Bukowski to life and helps me better understand Sherman through their unlikely friendship when Bukowski, one of the ultimate outsiders, had few if any friends beyond the people he exchanged letters with. It was a friendship based on love of language, passion for life, and learning the ins and outs of coaxing money from small literary journals.
While Bukowski lurked mostly along the back roads and in the bars of Los Angeles, the young Sherman hitchhiked to San Francisco from Florida and checked into a ward for manic depressives at Fort Miley Veterans' Hospital. As an experimental treatment, a doctor gave Sherman a typewriter, paper, and a room to write in where, he recalls in the memoir, he discovered the music in language, in the words I strung together like magic beads on greased sinew, the lovely rhythms and melodies in the rise and fall of consonants and vowels in a cosmic harmony that spewed adrenaline and fiery ice through my veins, in the soft whisper of sibilants and the throb of life in every pentameter.
I exulted in the beautiful imagery, the startling wonders that opened up like a blazing crimson dawn on the wings of a dove at the completion of every poem. I had found life after years of slashed wrists and leaps from high windows. I had found life within my brain, within my wretched hopeless self."
It wasn't long before Sherman wound up on the North Beach scene, where he fit squarely except for his aversion to marijuana and other drugs, and came to fame, such as it is, because he failed to pay nearly 700 parking tickets. You'll have to read Chapter Seven, "So Many Rooms," for the details.
The local celebrity status helped Sherman get his own work noticed, and led to him editing the first issue of "The Outsider," where he featured Bukowski.
"There was a strong sense that his poetry owed some debt to Hemingway, and that stuck with me for some reason. Bukowski had a way of starting at one simple point, an observation of some ordinary event and take the poem in a new direction almost before one knew it," Sherman writes. "Bukowski's poems stayed with me long after I had read them, and they are still with me after more than fifty years. His poems struck deep chords in me and made me view all life as something to be feared and embraced, with passion and fervor, and to translate what I saw and heard and felt into impressionistic poetry of my own, poetry that was as unique as his, while quite different in style and content."
This memoir is, to use an overused word, compelling. It reads easy, almost like a long, vivid letter that opens doors, by invitation, into both Bukowski's and Sherman's personal lives, although Sherman manages to shine more of the light on Bukowski than himself.
"Bukowski was uncomfortable with the concept of friendship," Sherman writes. "He was as wary of people as a kicked and beaten cur. He valued his privacy very highly and visitors were an intrusion on that privacy. Yet, he was wise enough, and hungry enough for fame that he tolerated my attempts to widen his world by bringing editors and publishers to his door."
Eventually, with death, Bukowski's fame continued to grow. With life, Sherman's simmers comfortably.
Memories morph. Hard times become blessed and happy, memories take on lives of their own, and, if they are lucky, the hungry remain satisfied with their hunger. – Tom Geddie, Author of four collections: Stolen Lies, He Dreamed Fragments, What Texas Really Is, Love and Masks and Ghosts
The Beast and the Bastard
Chapter 1
That Fateful Path
Poet Charles Bukowski was the beast. That was his own appellation for himself.
I was born a bastard, and remain one to this day.
My parents, Keith and Mercedes Sherman, never married.
But this book is not a chronological narrative of my life and background. Rather, it is about a twenty-year friendship I had with Charles Bukowski, a friendship steeped in a love of language, a lusty passion for life with all its humiliation and degradation, to its minor triumphs, failures, and successes in love and human frailty. In particular, it chronicles those struggling years when we were both just beginning to publish our poems in the literary journals, the so-called "little magazines," where poets fought each other and the world in thousands of bloodless, but terribly wounding, battles. For it was in the literary journals, one in particular, where Bukowski and I met.
Our lives began to intertwine in 1956, when Bukowski was living on Mariposa Street, near Hollywood, and I was living in St. Petersburg, Florida. I had hitchhiked from San Francisco after my divorce from a Filipina movie actress, Remy Montes, to be near my two sons, Frank and Vic, who were being raised by my parents.
My divorce became final when Remy went to Las Vegas to establish residence, and I had checked into a special ward for manic-depressives at Ft. Miley Veterans Hospital in San Francisco. While on what we called the ding ward, my therapists asked if they could tape my individual psychotherapy sessions. They said that I had a "poetic way of describing complex emotions" and that they would like to record me for the rest of the staff. I agreed, and shortly after the tapings began, my therapist asked me: "How would you like to get out of O.T. (Occupational Therapy)?"
I told him I would kill out of O.T. where I made wallets and belts and felt truly mad among others doing useless tasks.
They gave me an unused office, a typewriter, and a ream of paper. This was a room with a single window masked by a Venetian blind. I never turned the light on, for I was still in that dark place where depression claimed my soul and the bright world existed only to maim and blind, to burn its searchlights into my heart where all was hidden, all life had turned meaningless and suicidal.
"We think you have the I.Q. and mentality to become a writer. We'd like to see you try to write as a way to overcome depression and the manic phases of your illness."
This special psychiatric ward at Ft. Miley was the brainstorm of Dr. Roland Levy, who headed a distinguished civilian clinic in the city. He reasoned that manic-depressives were very difficult to reach, much less cure, so he wanted to experiment with a select few, no more than ten, at Ft. Miley.
There were three requirements for patients to be accepted into Levy's ward.
One, you had to be diagnosed as manic-depressive.
Two, you had to want to be cured.
And, three, you had to have a high I.Q.
There were never more than six of us on the ward. We were not locked up and had the freedom to roam the hospital and its beautiful grounds with its trees and green lawns. One of the men on the ward told me he was a writer. His name was Ted Salinas.
I told him that my therapist wanted me to write and that they were giving me an office where I could have privacy.
"But, I don't know what to write."
"You have the makings of a poet," Ted told me.
For the first few times, I stared at a blank sheet of paper and couldn't think of a thing to write. Ted told me, "Just start writing anything, a letter, a poem, something you saw, or just how you feel."
I started writing, with no preconceived idea, in either form or content. I just began writing, and to my amazement, the words came in a rush, in odd, seemingly disconnected phrases. Images sprang from my mind to my fingers and from my fingers to the typewriter keys. Strange new worlds of linguistic landscapes began to open up. The words just flowed and my mind and body were gripped with a powerful feeling of exhilaration.
I was energized by the writing and began to look forward to those private moments in my own little O.T. Ted asked to see what I had written and I showed him the pages.
"You're a damned genius," he exclaimed and I didn't know how to handle that.
"It's poetry," he said.
But, I knew it was nothing. It was just words, words that had poured out of me, out of my illness, out of a manic phase of my depressed personality.
I began to read and study poetry. I had hated poetry at Regis High School in Denver. I had hated it because at the strict Jesuit school, we had to parse and diagram Edgar Allen Poe's long labyrinthian sentences, and when I was late returning to campus (I boarded there), the Jesuit prefect made me learn Poe's poem, The Raven, and recite it backwards before I would be allowed off-campus again.
From that time on, in Ft. Miley, poetry consumed me. My own formless writing was unpublishable, and most likely, unintelligible. But there was the memory of reading James Joyce's Ulysses, when I was ten years old, and reading it fifteen times before turning fifteen. There was the first story at age eight about my dog, Doopers, a puppy who barked at the wheels of my father's car on Cross Lake outside of Shreveport, Louisiana, whose head was crushed under the rubber tire of my father's car.
I cried and cried for three days, four days, five, and overcame my grief by immortalizing Doopers in a short story.
After I was released from Ft. Miley, I lived with my sister Kay and her husband, John Bell, in Monterey. John managed the Sancho Panza coffee house, which was also a bookstore and a meeting place for writers, painters, poets, and military men learning the Russian language at a nearby base.
Hank Ketchum used to come in at night, with Gus Arriola, who drew the syndicated cartoon, "Gordo", and an architect who lived in Big Sur. They had monthly meetings at Doc's lab on the wharf in honor of John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Henry Miller lived in Big Sur, and poet and bookseller, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, had a cabin there where Kerouac used to crash to dry out from San Francisco binges.
Next stop for me, after I probably wore out my welcome with Kay and John, was San Francisco.
Those were nights of Salvation Army, rat-infested, fifty-cent a night hotels on Skid Road; of beans and bread in seedy missions in the Mission District; abject poverty, learning how to sneak out of hotel rooms without paying; rooming with a down-and-out actor named Johnny Sugrue; running into friends I had worked with as a computer programmer at American President Lines in the financial district, who would invite me into a bar for a drink, but never to a restaurant for a meal.
The first thing I bought when I got out of Ft. Miley was a used Remington upright typewriter from a pawn shop.
Sometime during that hellish, scrambling period, I made a decision that was to change my life. I had discovered the music in language, in the words I strung together like magic beads on greased sinew, the lovely rhythms and melodies in the rise and fall of consonants and vowels in a cosmic harmony that spewed adrenaline and fiery ice through my veins, in the soft whisper of sibilants and the throb of life in every pentameter. I exulted in the beautiful imagery, the startling wonders that opened up like a blazing crimson dawn on the wings of a dove at the completion of every poem. I had found life after years of slashed wrists and leaps from high windows. I had found life within my brain, within my wretched hopeless self.
I realized that I had nothing. I was divorced from my first wife. I had two small boys who were in Florida. I was flat broke and had no job.
My decision was this: I will work at anything that enables me to write. Anything. I am a writer, now, and for the rest of my life.
That decision changed everything for me. It blew fresh air into my lungs, set my blood on fire, and stirred the ashes of a dead soul where a single tiny glow still lingered in that black abyss of despondency and depression.
That decision to devote my life to writing set me on a course to meet not only Charles Bukowski, but many of the leading poets and novelists in San Francisco. Metaphor and simile became my gods, and, like a drowning man, the straw I clutched to haul myself up from the depths, was poetry, those mystical lines of magic words that became a life saver and a life preserver on the shipwrecked sea of my life.
But our actual meeting did not take place right away. And even after we met, through letters, it was a long time before we met in person. But through our poems and letters to each other, we became friends in a complex brotherhood that spanned some twenty years.
Bukowski was in West Hollywood. I was in St. Petersburg.
We met each other, symbolically at least, through our craft and sullen art, poetry, in an unlikely place: Lake Como, Florida, in the pages of a literary journal called Epos.
Chapter 2
Epos
Evelyn Thorne was a very accomplished poet who wrote under at least five or six pseudonyms. She and her artist husband, Will Tullos, had created Epos magazine, which was one of the more distinguished literary magazines.
In Ft. Miley, I had learned something about myself. More importantly, I learned something about my mind, the way it was wired. Words were magic to me. Words held all the mystery and power of the mystical, of the ancient, of both the subconscious mind, the unconscious mind, and the collective unconscious. James Joyce, in both Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, showed me the wonderful power in language, in the coining of words, the odd juxtaposition of words that deepened the meaning in a sentence or a phrase.
In Monterey, I discovered the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who could make words dance and sing, cavort like acrobats, jump and run. Then there was Dylan Thomas who cast an almost hypnotic spell on me with his daring images, "altarwise by owlight", as well as plunge me deeper into the mystical aspects of language, and more importantly, the mystical depths of the human mind when obscure symbols come to life at the hands of a master.
But the most influential of the poets I read in Monterey, was Federico Garcia Lorca, whose energetic and powerful use of language was surrealistic in its dynamic landscape. Especially influential was his Poet In New York, as translated by Ben Bellitt. I read Lorca in both Spanish and English, and I marveled at the way Bellitt caught not only the essence of Lorca's exquisite voice in Spanish but rendered it beautifully in English. Here was poetry that stirred the soul and, in Promethean splendor, brought fire to my heart.
These poets, and others, e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Swinburne, Shakespeare, opened all the doors to me. They showed me that language had no limits, that it could be used in infinite variations to create a world in which the intellect was both the master and the breeder of ideas and images in the fertile garden of the imagination.
I had discovered the little magazines and began sending out a poem to each one. They all came with stock rejection slips, like leaves blown on an autumn wind. When Evelyn Thorne at Epos returned my submitted poem, there was a note attached.
"Well, you sound modern enough, but I need to see more of your work. Can you come up to Lake Como and bring all of your poems with you?"