The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski
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Название: The Bell Tolls for No One

Автор: Charles Bukowski

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Эротика, Секс

Серия:

isbn: 9780872866843

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ

      

      City Lights Books | San Francisco

      Copyright © 2015 by The Estate of Charles Bukowski

      Introduction copyright © 2015 by David Calonne

      All Rights Reserved

      Cover illustration copyright © 1998 by Robert Crumb

      Cover and interior design by Linda Ronan

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Bukowski, Charles.

      [Short stories. Selections]

      Bell tolls for no one : stories / by Charles Bukowski ; edited with an introduction by David Stephen Calonne.

      pages ; cm

      ISBN 978-0-87286-682-9 (paperback)

      ISBN 978-0-87286-684-3 (e-book)

      I. Title.

      PS3552.U4A6 2015

      813'.54—dc23

      2015014714

      City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore

      261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133

       www.citylights.com

       Contents

       Introduction

       Introduction Notes

       A Kind, Understanding Face

       Save the World

       The Way the Dead Love

       The Looney Ward

       Dancing Nina

       A Piece of Cheese

       A Day in the Life of an Adult Bookstore Clerk

       An Affair of Very Little Importance

       Break-In

       Flying is the Safest Way to Travel

       Fly the Friendly Skies

       The Lady with the Legs

       Won’t You Be My Valentine?

       A Dirty Trick on God

       The Bell Tolls for No One

       Bibliography

       INTRODUCTION

       Charles Bukowski’s Graphic and Pulp Fiction

       David Stephen Calonne

      Charles Bukowski was devoted to “graphic fiction” from the beginning of his career: one of his earliest works, “The Reason Behind Reason,” published in 1946 in Matrix, is adorned with a lively drawing depicting the anti-hero Chelaski with legs flying, arms outstretched comically attempting to catch a flying baseball.1 During his years crisscrossing America between 1942 and 1947—a period in which he sometimes had to pawn his typewriter due to lack of funds—Bukowski also submitted to Whit Burnett, editor of the celebrated Story magazine, a series of hand-printed, illustrated short stories, including “A Kind, Understanding Face,” demonstrating that he often conceptualized text and image together in a complementary relationship. He wrote Burnett from Los Angeles in November 1948: “I thought the drawings came out especially well in this one and I hope you do not lose it.”2 Burnett urged Bukowski to collect his drawings in book form and also repeatedly asked him to consider writing a novel. On October 9, 1946, from Philadelphia, Bukowski also composed an illustrated letter to Caresse Crosby, publisher of Portfolio. Already he had developed the clean line style of his charming, minimalist, Thurberesque drawings which could not but ingratiate him to prospective famous editors such as Crosby and Burnett. Here a stunned man with a bottle and lines for eyes drinks, smokes, and lies in bed with bare lightbulb, curtain with a drawstring, bottles on the floor. Later he would add sun, flying birds, companionable dogs. Psychologically, it is clear that these gently humorous drawings were one of the ways he had developed to deal with his considerable childhood wounds: his physical abuse by his father, the eruption of acne vulgaris, his status as misfit German-American. Here was a medium in which he could play and entertain, qualities he also strove for in his writing.

      The autobiographical “A Kind, Understanding Face” (1948) begins with an epigraph describing a crippled spider being dismembered alive by ants and sets the theme for many later stories: Nature red in tooth and claw. The protagonist, Ralph, like the young Bukowski, avoids the draft, has journalistic ambitions, and wanders the country from Miami to New York to Atlanta. Though Ralph is in some respects a stand-in for the author, in the story his father and then his mother are deceased, while Bukowski’s mother Katherine died in 1956 and his father Henry in 1958. The tale presents a series of odd, disjunctive events, concluding with three mysterious quotations, appended without citations: one from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book Five, Chapter 30, “Our Visit to Satinland”; another from George Santayana’s “Ultimate Religion” (1933); and finally a reference to René Warcollier (1881–1962), the French chemical engineer who developed a method of making precious stones synthetically and who also published Experiments in Telepathy (1938).3 Given that there is a reference to copulating and defecating in public, it’s possible that Bukowski by this time had also encountered the writings of Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 412 CE–323 CE). Just as the narrative itself is weirdly dissociative, these three allusions left СКАЧАТЬ