Almost everyone to date who has attempted to write about Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski has gone up in smoke. Not so William Joyce. Joyce corrals Miller, Bukowski and Irving Stettner in one lean volume, rides each of them the full ten seconds without getting thrown, and then trots once around the rodeo arena waving his hat to the crowd. Still feeling his oats after a brief intermission in which he hogties four essays on the sad state of affairs in today's academic poetry scene, he saddles B. Traven and again goes the distance, all this in 138 hard-hitting pages. Miller, Bukowski & Their Enemies is a crucial book, a must-read that slashes away the fat of an overweight culture and cuts to the quick of what we neglect to nurture, what we need not simply to survive but to live. Mere survival, says Joyce, is hardly worth the trouble.

To emphasize this point, Joyce has, on more than one occasion, packed his bags and disappeared for long periods of time into the dark-skinned, hot-blooded, non-tourist strata of Central America and the Caribbean, living in shacks with goats in the yard and once--in his Fifties--defending the honor of a whore in Havana by punching out an undercover cop who had insulted her. Joyce wound up in a Cuban jail where friends smuggled in books and a man who worked an entire day to earn enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes gave this pack of cigarettes to Joyce, out a respect for his honor.

Personal honor and vitality are what Joyce focuses on, and in due course he makes it clear that these are the qualities Miller, Bukowski, Stettner and Traven have in common.

Part of what gives Joyce the muscle to write with authority about such diverse heavies as Miller and Bukowski is the diversity of his own life experience. He had a misfit childhood and adolescence in Pittsburgh, similar to Bukowski's in L.A. He was a runt who eventually got into body building--Bukowski kept a set of weights under his bed until the day he died. But unlike Bukowski and Miller, Joyce ingested the full lethal dose of formalized education and became an English professor. That should have been enough to drop him to his knees, but Joyce has this fire inside, this unrest, this Rasputin-like zest garnished with gargantuan appetites, and within the boundaries of academia and mainstream literature, he was like the last human wandering in thin disguise thru a world of body snatchers. He had a problem similar to that of Donn Pearce.

Pearce was a safe cracker, an ex-con who a long time ago wrote a best-seller, Cool Hand Luke . Yet when the dust and the hullabaloo had settled around his out-of-the-blue success, the in-crowd was still holding Pearce at arm's length--he may have written a best seller, but there was something not right with that boy. Giving the last hurrah, Pearce wrote Dying in the Sun, a work of heightened journalism that deals with the retirement/death industry in Florida and puts anything Mailer or Capote ever came up with in that genre flat on its back. But when you're not right, you can't win--the central message of Cool Hand Luke. Dying in the Sun drifted thru a review void straight into the shredder, and Pearce, seeing the handwriting on the wall, gave up writing, got a license to pack heat, and became a private eye in Tampa.

Joyce ran into his own moment of truth back in 1983 when James Dickey announced to a roomful of agents and editors that William Joyce (present among them) was "the only honest person in the room."

Seizing the moment, Joyce responded. "Why don't you hustle my work then?" Not exactly the body-snatcher gratitude called for: hollow hissing rolling down extended arms and out to the tips of pointing fingers; a squat little dog with a puggish human face bouncing up and down on all fours under the conference table, yapping the alarm.

"You can hustle your own work," said Dickey, tacking gracefully with the shifting wind back toward charted waters.

I do," chimed in Joyce gleefully, "and I use your name at every turn."

"That's dishonest," said Dickey, who wrote Deliverance on a bet made over cocktails at a social power gathering of publishers, editors and authors.

"Which is it?" said Joyce. "Honest or dishonest? I can't be both." The dog under the table sprang out into the open, sank its teeth into Joyce's calf, and all hell broke loose.

From that point on, Joyce was on his own.

Cut closer to the present--May, 1997. I'm sitting in a local cow-town restaurant over a cup of coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette. I'm killing time, waiting for the wash to be done. I've got a new book with me, one I never would have found on my own, sent by Ernst Richter, a German friend who did the cover art. The book is Miller, Bukowski & Their Enemies by William Joyce. I'd never heard of Joyce, but I cracked the cover and expected the worst--someone most certainly has bitten off more than he can chew.

Thirty pages later I've finished the piece on Miller and remember the wash. By the time everything is folded and ready to carry home, I've finished the piece on Bukowski, and by the time I put the light out in bed that night, I've finished the book. Ten minutes later I put the light back on and get out of bed. Throw on some sweat pants and sit on the dark porch smoking. How can I sleep after a book like that has punched me in the gut, whacked me alongside the head and resuscitated every reason I ever found in sixty years of life for not going along with whatever the going game plan is? I'm agitated, on fire, back on the front lines. I'm that fool again who at the age of 27, after a stint in the army and disastrous attempts at becoming a West Point cadet, a teacher, a journalist and a priest, piled all his belongings in a tenement courtyard, parked his spanking-new unpaid for VW bug out behind the public library on "K" Street in D.C., called Riggs Bank and told them where they could pick up their car, and then rode out of town on a Greyhound to catch an Icelandic flight out of New York for Brussels with a backpack, a portable typewriter, and $200 in his wallet. This was before I discovered Miller and Bukowski, it was sheer torment that drove me out of the loop. I discovered Miller while lying on a patch of grass along the Isar River in Munich, flat broke. I opened Tropic of Cancer, read the first page, and laughed straight up into the blue German sky. A month later I stumbled across Bukowski, and from that point on there was no turning back.

But here's the point: no one, not Miller, Bukowski, Traven or Joyce can do the footwork for you. I recognized something in Miller that I already knew in my blood, in my bones, something I'd had in me since childhood that should have been beaten out of me by that time but wasn't. Cut to the bone, and this is the sole aim of modern society--to beat the innocence, the joy, the harmony, the recognition out of every living soul on the planet. And for the most part, society is succeeding beyond its wildest expectations. Sameness is everywhere, the golden arches of McDonald's are like the flag of a world empire of soulless existence on which the sun never sets. Every now and then some madman goes berserk in a public place with an automatic weapon, but such eruptions are adroitly handled by the media to further obscure their root causes rather than unearth them.

Innocence is humanity's only hope, and in the modern world it gets snuffed at an early age by television, school and the absence of awe. If somehow an individual hangs on doggedly and instinctively to his innocence, it is imperative that somewhere along the line this early, natural innocence get converted into what Nelson Algren calls "acquired innocence". For this to happen, a beleaguered innocent needs to brush up against kindred spirits. Miller and Bukowski are BIG in this department, and for that reason, they are extremely dangerous to the established order. Mere contact with their writing can fry the wiring of twenty years of indoctrination, and down comes the house of cards. That's why no accolades are bestowed upon the likes of Miller and Bukowski, and that's why you won't find hide nor hair of them in high school anthologies or in the curricula of university lit courses. Ginsberg you'll find, because Ginsberg is a pet bad boy, he's good for making people think they have what they don't. Miller and Bukowski, to a lesser degree Traven, and less effectively Stettner are emancipated human beings, and anyone who is truly emancipated is a loose cannon on the deck. He's likely to go off without warning and blow whatever happens to be in front of him to smithereens. He's likely to say or do any goddamn thing that comes into his head. He's not likely to pursue a career or fight for his country, save for a rainy day or be adequately insured against sickness and death. He's more likely to spend hours, days, weeks and years, his whole life wandering aimlessly thru the world without giving a thought to the cut of his clothes, an aerobic exercise program or a balanced diet. He's not going to crave the bric-a-brac of a smoke and mirrors world, he won't have a credit card, and he'll be a lousy consumer. He's apt to make you feel ludicrous if you're around him too much. He seems to be in awe of his very existence, as if it were a miracle.

What more can I say? The magic of all the people Joyce writes about in this book is that they are more than the sum of their parts. It's not so much what they say that catches your heart in its hands, it's what they convey. And Joyce's considerable achievement is that he manages to convey the essence of all of them, capturing every nuance and quirk and then weaving the entire incongruous mess into one magnificent tapestry. This, I think, is a triumph.

The enemies of Miller and Bukowski? They're legion--anyone who smothers life, especially in the guise of enriching it. Joyce takes the time to slap the wrists of biographers and heads of creative writing programs and the N.E.A. He pummels things about, zooms in and out, cross references and quotes like a madman from the people he is writing about. He does all this without falling into any of the traps that are inherent in criticism, he does it with a full-head of steam, and he walks away from all the dreck he unearths and sails off south of the border. Much like Ambrose Bierce. But that's another story.

Are you someone whose acquired innocence has seen better days? Then buy this book, it will prime your pump. Are you someone who has never read Miller or Bukowski? You'll get no better introduction than from Joyce. Whoever you are, do what I did--buy ten copies. Pass them around. Blitzkrieg around the Maginot line that keeps treasures like Joyce a secret from ourselves.

The guts of this book consists of two interviews done in 1980 and 1984 at Bukowski's San Pedro home. Also included: fragments of a taped conversation between Bukowski and Marco Ferreri, who made a movie (Tales of Ordinary Madness) derived from Bukowski's writing; an evaluation of a number of Bukowski's books by Fernanda; notes on circumstances leading up to Fernanda's interviews and a summary after their completion.

A fine collection, rooted in hard, core life experience. What is impressive about the book is it strikes a tempered balance without skirting the experience or indulging it. The language of the poems has a quiet authority and authenticity that keeps you turning the pages.

FOUR D.A. LEVY BO0KS: Kirpan Press has released a limited series of 4 new editions of d.a. levy's early work and previously uncollected poems and artwork, and plans an additional 6 volumes of levy collages, correspondence, concrete poetry, artwork, rare poems, manuscripts and reprints of entire collections. The emphasis is on rare and lesser known work. These books are edited with great care and are beautifully produced. For those of you not familiar with levy, he is the legendary 60s Cleveland poet who ostensibly committed suicide under the pressure of severe police harassment. The first set of books includes:

Variations on Flip: "Variations on Flip" (a clear facsimile production of the rare ditto edition); "The Box Lunch of Fremont Gulch"; plus an envelope of concrete pieces.

Fragments of a Shattered Mirror: Includes the book "Fragments..." and assorted levy cover prints from various small press publications.

More Withdrawed or Less: The collection, plus prints levy produced for the book Permit Me Voyage.

Random Sightings: Poems and other writings by levy not reprinted elsewhere since their original appearance in a variety of small press publications. An invaluable collection.

$7 plus $2 shipping each. Or, the set of 4 for $30 (priority shipping included).

Order from:

A. Horvath
Kirpan Press
PO Box 2943
Vancouver, WA 98668-2943.

Make checks payable to A. Horvath.

*Thunder's Mouth Press, NYC, is planning a tribute to Bukowski featuring poets and people (occasionally one in the same entity) who knew him. For further info, contact Daniel Weizmann at 212.627.2963 or by e-mail at: DWeizmann@aol.com.

*Linda King, Bukowski's main squeeze for many a year and a poet and sculptress in her own right, has completed a book on her life with the Buk. She's looking for a publisher...

*Surregional Press has two New Orleans books out or coming out:
(1) PORTRAITS FROM MEMORY: New Orleans in the 60's by Darlene Fife (co-editor of the notorious New Orleans underground 60's paper, Nola Express). See more at her website
http://www.abebooks.com/home/bookstore/OURPUBLICATIONS.htm $15.
(2) OUTSIDERS: A TRIP INTO THE NEW ORLEANS UNDERGROUND.
A collection of interviews, incidental material, photos, flyers and researched material brought together by Dennis Formento. Interviews include: Gypsy Lou Webb (co-editor of the legendary Outsider Press that put out Bukowski's first two major books), Darlene Fife (see above) and such New Orleans and French Quarter notables as Tom Dent, Bob Cass, James Nolan and Jack Frazier. In production. Worth checking out. Contact for both books: Dennis Formento.

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