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Letter to Levertov from Butte
Dear Denise: Long way from, long time since Boulder. I hope you and Mitch are doing OK. I get rumors. You’re in Moscow, Montreal. Whatever place I hear, it’s always one of glamor. I’m not anywhere glamorous. I’m in a town where children get hurt early. Degraded by drab homes. Beaten by drunken parents, by other children. Mitch might understand. It’s kind of a microscopic Brooklyn, if you can imagine Brooklyn with open pit mines, and more Irish than Jewish. I’ve heard from many of the students we had that summer. Even seen a dozen or so since then. They remember the conference fondly. So do I. Heard from Herb Gold twice and read now and then about Isaac Bashevis Singer who seems an enduring diamond. The mines here are not diamond. Nothing is. What endures is sadness and long memories of labor wars in the early part of the century. This is the town where you choose sides to die on, company or man, and both are losers. Because so many people died in mines and fights, early in history man said screw it and the fun began. More bars and whores per capita than any town in America. You live only for today. Let me go symbolic for a minute: great birds cross over you anyplace, here they grin and dive. Dashiell Hammett based Red Harvest here though he called it Personville and "person" he made sure to tell us was "poison" in the slang. I have ambiguous feelings coming from a place like this and having clawed my way away, thanks to a few weak gifts and psychiatry and the luck of living in a country where enough money floats to the top for the shipwrecked to hang on. On one hand, no matter what my salary is or title, I remain a common laborer, stained by the perpetual dust from loading flour or coal. I stay humble, inadequate inside. And my way of knowing how people get hurt, make my (damn this next word) heart go out through the stinking air into the shacks of Walkerville, to the wife who has turned forever to the wall, the husband sobbing at the kitchen table and the unwashed children taking it in and in and in until they are the wall, the table, even the dog the parents kill each month when the money’s gone. On the other hand, I know the cruelty of poverty, the embittering ways love is denied, and food, the mean near-insanity of being and being deprived, the trivial compensations of each day, recapturing old years in broadcast tunes you try to recall in bars, hunched over the beer you can’t afford, or bending to the bad job you’re lucky enough to have. How, finally, hate takes over, hippie, nigger, Indian, anyone you can lump like garbage in a pit, including women. And I don’t want to be part of it. I want to be what I am, a writer good enough to teach with you and Gold and Singer, even if only in some conference leader’s imagination. And I want my life inside to go on long as I do, though I only populate bare landscape with surrogate suffering, with lame men crippled by more than disease, and create finally a simple grief I can deal with, a pain the indigent can find acceptable. I do go on. Forgive this raving. Give my best to Mitch and keep plenty for yourself. Your rich friend, Dick.
Richard Hugo
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:hi:
RL
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