CHARLES BUKOWSKI
LIVING ON LUCK
SELECTED LETTERS 1960s—1970s VOLUME 2
EDITED BY SEAMUS COONEY
Contents
Editor’s Note
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
Index of Principal Names
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Other Books by Charles Bukowski
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
EDITOR’S NOTE
This second volume of Bukowski’s letters begins, like volume 1, in the 1960s, thanks to the recovery of additional interesting letters from that decade. As that decade ends, Bukowski is liberated from the drudgery of his post office job and embarks with some trepidation on his career as a professional writer, encouraged by a small regular stipend from his publisher John Martin, who undertook to pay him $100 a month to enable him to write fulltime. Throughout the 1970s, as royalties begin to overtake the stipend and he gradually gains confidence that he will be able not merely to survive but to prosper in this new career, the letters return again and again with wonder to his sense of how lucky he is to enjoy being able to live by writing. By the end of the decade, he’s the owner of a comfortable house and a new BMW. His worries now are how to protect his fruit trees from frost, how to lower his tax liability, and how to deal with Hollywood directors and stars.
As in volume 1, the letters have been selected and transcribed from photocopies furnished by libraries and individuals. Bukowski’s correspondence was astonishingly voluminous, and only selections are given from most letters. Editorial omissions are indicated by asterisks in square brackets, thus: [***]. Ellipses in the original letters are indicated by three dots. Bukowski often typed in CAPITALS for emphasis or for titles. Here, book titles are printed in italics, poem titles in quotes, and emphatic capitals in SMALL CAPS.
Dates are regularized and sometimes supplied from postmarks or guessed at from other evidence. A few spelling errors have been silently corrected. Salutations and signatures are for the most part omitted, except for a few examples that give the characteristic flavor. Some attempt is made to preserve Bukowski’s layout, which at times includes multiple margins, but a printed book cannot reproduce such effects unaltered. As in the previous volume, a few letters have been printed verbatim to give the flavor of a completely unedited letter.
References to Hank in the editorial matter are to Neeli Cherkovsky’s biography of Bukowski, published by Random House in 1991.
· 1961 ·
[To John William Corrington]
January 17, 1961
Hello Mr. Corrington:
Well, it helps sometimes to receive a letter such as yours. This makes two. A young man out of San Francisco wrote me that someday they would write books about me, if that would be any help. Well, I’m not looking for help, or praise either, and I’m not trying to play tough. But I had a game I used to play with myself, a game called Desert Island and while I was laying around in jail or art class or walking toward the ten dollar window at the track, I’d ask myself, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island by yourself, never to be found, except by the birds and the maggots, would you take a stick and scratch words in the sand? I had to say “no,” and for a while this solved a lot of things and let me go ahead and do a lot of things I didn’t want to do, and it got me away from the typewriter and it put me in the charity ward of the county hospital, the blood charging out of my ears and my mouth and my ass, and they waited for me to die but nothing happened. And when I got out I asked myself again, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island and etc.; and do you know, I guess it was because the blood had left my brain or something, I said, YES, yes, I would. I would take a stick and I would scratch words in the sand. Well, this solved a lot of things because it allowed me to go ahead and do the things, all the things I didn’t want to do, and it let me have the typewriter too; and since they told me another drink would kill me, I now hold it down to 2 gallons of beer a day.
But writing, of course, like marriage or snowfall or automobile tires, does not always last. You can go to bed on Wednesday night being a writer and wake up on Thursday morning being something else altogether. Or you can go to bed on Wednesday night being a plumber and wake up on Thursday morning being a writer. This is the best kind of writer.
…Most of them die, of course, because they try too hard; or, on the other hand, they get famous, and everything they write is published and they don’t have to try at all. Death works a lot of avenues, and although you say you like my stuff, I want to let you know that if it turns to rot, it was not because I tried too hard or too little but because I either ran out of beer or blood. [***]
For what it’s worth, I can afford to wait: I have my stick and I have my sand.
The mention of Frost below alludes to his reciting of his poem “The Gift Outright” (“The land was ours before we were the land’s. /…(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)…”) at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961.
[To John William Corrington]
[ca. February 1,] 1961
I am listening to “Belly up to the bar, boys!” and I took the ponies for $150 today, so what the hell, Cor, I will answer, tho this letter-writing is not my meat, except to maybe gently laugh at the cliffs coming down. And it has to end sometimes, even though it has just begun. I’d rather you were the one who finally didn’t answer. And I’d never kick a man out because he was drunk, although I’ve kicked out a few women for it, and the “wives-to-pinch,” they are gone, mental cruelty, they say; at least the last one, the editoress of Harlequin said that, and I said, ok. my mind was cruel to yours…
I think it is perfectly ok to write short short stories and think they’re poems, mostly because short stories waste so many words. So we violate the so-called poem form with the non-false short story word and we violate the story form by saying a lot in the little time of the poem form. We may be in between by borrowing from each BUT BECAUSE WE CANNOT ANSWER A PRECONCEIVED FORMULA OF EITHER STORY OR POEM, does this mean we are necessarily wrong? When Picasso stuck pinches of cardboard and extensions of space upon the flat surface of his paper
did we accuse him of
being a sculptor
or an architect?
A man’s either an artist or a flat tire and what he does need not answer to anything, I’d say, except the energy of his creation.
I’d say that a lot of abstract poetry lets a man off the hook with a can of polish. Now being subtle (which might be another word for “original”) and being abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a different way and not knowing and saying it as if you sounded like you might possibly know. This is what most poetry classes are for: the teaching of the application of the polish, the rubbing out of dirty doubt between writer and reader as to any flaws between the understanding of what a poem ought to be.
Culture and knowledge are too often taken as things that please or do not disturb or say it in a way that sounds kindly. It’s time to end this bullshit. I am thinking now of Frost slavering over his poems, blind, the old rabbit hair in his eyes, everybody smiling kindly, and Frost grateful, saying some lie, part of it: “…the deed of gift was the deed of many wars”…An abstract way of saying something kind about something that was not kind at all.
Christ, I don’t call for cranks or misanthr
opes or people who knock knock knock because their spleen has a burr in it or because their grandmother once fucked the iceman, but let’s try to use just a little bit of sense. And I don’t expect too much; but when a blind blubbering poet in his white years is USED…I don’t know by WHAT OR WHO…himself, they, something…it ills me even to drink a glass of water and I guess that makes me the greatest crank of all time. [***]
Robert Vaughan, whose essay in Trace Bukowski responds to below, edited a short-lived magazine called Element, published in Glendora, California.
[To John William Corrington]
February 14, 1961
[***] Now, Bill, since we are discussing poetry and what makes it or doesn’t make it, and I think it is important to attempt to figure out just what we are or aren’t doing, and along this line I have written a letter to James Boyar May of Trace regarding an article that appeared in the Jan-Mar 1961 edition. And since Mr. May probably will not publish this I would like to repeat the letter here, because, in a manner, it falls in with our discussion…Well, it goes like this:
Dear Mr. May:
In regards to Robert Vaughan’s “Essay on the Recent History of Immortality,” I really don’t know where to begin. I rather imagine Robert V. as an intellectual and serious person (I know that he edits a magazine), and that his morals are proper and his study of the poem is more complete, certainly, than mine. And it’s just here where the difficulty begins. If anybody has ever been forced to attend a poetry class or made the mistake of attending a poetry party, one is made to realize what is “proper” in poetic and artistic approach, and if I may use a discarded term…I don’t give a SHIT about either. Mr. Vaughan and the class professors make much of the fact that PROSE IS CREEPING INTO POETRY! God damn it, here we work with our IMAGES and some guy comes along and says…all that matters is a red wheelbarrow in the back yard, gathering rain. These are not the exact words but I don’t have time to look up my Williams. It was Williams, wasn’t it? Oh well…Anyhow, the prose statement in a poem seems to bother the editors (“This is excellent, but it is not a poem!”) and it seems to bother the Vaughans and the professors. But I say, why not? What the hell’s wrong with a 6 or 7 or 37 line long prose statement that is broken into the readable advantage and clearness of the poem-form? As long as it says what it must and says it as well or better than the mould and sound that says THIS IS A POEM, SO LISTEN TO ME. What’s wrong with a 7 line short story or a 37 line novel which is placed within the poem-form, if this form makes it read better than it would if chunked together as a regular sentence or paragraph of regular English prose? Must we always DEFINE AND CLASSIFY what is done? Can’t, for God’s sake, can’t ART be ART without a program and numbers?
There is NOTHING “basically immoral about a poetry that does not attempt to communicate emotions or dredge up from the reader’s subconscious a prior experience.” In fact, I would be tempted to say that a poetry that DOES ATTEMPT to do this is…Christ, I don’t like to use the word “immoral,” just let me say that this type of poetry (“that attempts”) is apt to be confused and repetitive and dull, except to the school of holy rollers who have LEARNED THE RULES and yap and holler when they see the face of their god in the mirror. I know that much poetry is a hand-holding of the lonely at heart. But hell, there are clubs for these people, dances, and bashful kisses upon the terrace. Great poetry sharpens its swords for larger game.
“If the creator does not have, for his firm foothold, a moral attitude or ethical approach—” etc. Let me say that there are no firm footholds in creation. Ask Van Gogh who blew his brains out among the blackbirds with a borrowed shotgun beneath the hot sun that moved the hand that moved the color. Although Van believed in God there wasn’t any APPROACH here except the approach of the unknown, THE PROSE PAINT OF HIS COLORS that made Gauguin and Pissaro and other post-impressionists, great as they were, laugh at him because they painted down through the learned rule, the POEM within the line—if I may stretch a point to lay bare these similarities. And when Tolstoy found God his lines went limp, and Turgenev on his deathbed grieved for him because although Tolstoy had given up his land and his coppers for God, he had also given up something else. And although Dostoevski ended up on believing in Christ, he took the long road to get there, a most interesting and perhaps unwholesome road over roulette tables, raping a small child, standing before a wall waiting for the rifles to fire, he found that “adversity is the main-spring of self-realism,” he found his Christ, but what a most interesting Christ, a self-made Christ, and I bow to him.
Now I realize that in the (and within the) word “Morals” Mr. Vaughan does not specifically mean religion, but more the religion of thinking and writing in the way that we should. Morals transferred down to 1961 mean a way of thinking and acting that is acceptable upon a fund of realistic and humane reaction to what has happened and what will probably happen. But actually, although the Robert Vaughans mean well, and I have nothing but respect for them, they clutter the way of forwardness. Give me men of apparent evil, for they are the forerunners of a future good—much of what was evil at 5:30 p.m. yesterday is something else today.
I think sometimes of the great symphonies that we have accepted today that were hissed at and walked out upon when first heard.
“Writing poems is difficult: sweating out the coming of the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…”
Writing poems is not difficult; living them is. Let’s be realistic: every time you say “good morning” to somebody and you do not mean “good morning,” you are that much less alive. And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying “good morning” in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could…instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought…simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let’s make poetry the way we make love; let’s make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let’s make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I’ll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry.
Well, that’s the letter, more or less, Cor, although I’ve changed and added a few words in transposing. I thought, though, that you might want to hear it. Poetry can be such a depressing thing, such a dead thing. How they want to run the chains around us! Why? I really don’t understand. It seems as if they are trying to make it…well, like learning to weld or be an engineer. Always this is right and this is wrong, meanwhile not getting to the core at all. [***]
[To John William Corrington]
February 23, 1961
This is a short one. I am on a tear, ill and shaky; no complaints, I guess it’s something I must burn out of my system, and if I make it, I make it. I don’t want to short-circuit you but your last letter shed more light than a powerhouse. That sentence makes me sick. You see how easy it is to roll off a log and just say something? I hate to do you a disservice with an ill description…I only repeat, I can barely see out of the front of my eyes this morning.
There was another one who wrote me for a while. But about what? New listings of magazines, about how he met an editor on the street. This guy lives with editors, sleeps with them, goes to the parties, snudges [sic] his nose up all the blind spots—and in a manner, for him, it pays off. He makes a lot of pages and his poems are full of words like STAR SEA NIGHT DEATH LOVE WOUND and you name the rest. What his name is doesn’t matter and you can multiply him by the hairs of grass that look so sickly up at me from my 3rd floor rented window. I had to sock him down in a poem to stop him from nibbling the eternal edge of my guts. [***]
Cummings, yes, sometimes. His weakness is t
hat he has devised a form that is easy to fall into. What I mean is that he can say almost anything or nothing and run it through his form and he has a lot of people believing it. This is Cummings, they say, the way they say, this is a Van Gogh, and all critical faculties fall lax because they have been pre-sold. People are pretty hard to sell, but once they believe, they believe and you cannot make them say no with a hammer. That’s not good. Cummings must be made to produce every time he sits down, and not merely sign his name. For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of the poorest novels ever written but nobody knows it because Hem wrote it. Nobody knows but another writer who is close enough to smell it. Nobody knows that a smaller work like To Have and Have Not was really art. And I don’t like the word “art.” How they sound on words and drivel on them and drive us away from them. I had a wife once who divorced me because more in essence than reality I would never say I loved her. How could I say this without dragging in Hollywood and my next door neighbor and patriotism and the barber’s cough and the cat’s ass?