On Writing. Charles Bukowski

crawls like a mouse in an empty pantry. if you were Greco or even a watersnake, something could be done.

      another drink. well, rub your hands and prove that you are alive. seriousness will not do. walk the floor.

      this is the gift, this is the gift . . .

      Certainly the charm in dying lies in the fact that nothing is lost.

      [To Hilda Doolittle]

      June 29, 1961

      Have heard from Sheri M. that you are very ill. You are almost a legend with most of us. Have read your latest collected poems (Evergreen). I hope I will not sound foolish in wishing you well, and writing again.

      Love,

      [To Jon Webb]

      Late July 1961

      [ . . . ] Heard some of my poems read on the radio the other night. I wouldn’t have even known, but [Jory] Sherman who keeps up with such told me over the phone, so I got drunk and listened. Very odd to hear own words coming back through speaker of radio that has told you news reports, freeway jams, played Beethoven and professional football games. One poem, the first of 15 was the roses poem in Outsider. Also read parts of my letters regarding editors and poetry readings and critics or something like that, and had audience, at times, laughing, as did a couple of the poems, so I did not feel so bad, but when I got up to get another beer I stepped on a 3 inch piece of glass on the floor (my place a mess) and glass went straight up into heel, and I yanked it out and bled for a couple of hours. I limped around for a week and then one day woke up covered with sweat, burning hot, vomiting . . . for a while, thought it was a hangover, but after a while decided it was not, and drove down Hollywood Blvd. to some Dr. Landers and got a shot. Got back, opened a beer, and immediately stepped on another piece of glass.

      Jesus, I read in Outsider that the early [Henry] Miller made carbons of his work and shipped it to people. To me, this is inconceivable, but suppose Miller thot there weren’t any openings for him and that he had to make his own openings. I suppose each man attacks it differently. Although I see where Grove issued his Tropic, and now that it is a safe thing, it is falling pretty flat in most quarters. Also note that Life mag and others gave it to Hem. pretty good in the ass. Which he deserved, having pretty much sold out after his early works, which I always knew but which I never heard anybody say until after his suicide. Why did they wait?

      Faulkner is, in essence, much like Hem. The public has swallowed him with one big gulp and the critics, having something a little more subtle, feel safe and egg them on, but a lot of Faulkner’s pure shit, but it’s clever shit, cleverly dressed, and when he goes they will have trouble rubbing him out because they don’t quite understand him, and not understanding him, the dull and vacant parts, the mass of italics, they will think this to mean genius.

      [To John William Corrington]

      Late August 1961

      [ . . . ] As you know, I am very sloppy. I don’t keep carbons. Stuff that’s out and accepted I have no copies of. Stuff that’s out and not coming back I have no copies of. Sometimes I find a piece of paper with something written on it, or a typewritten paper but I don’t know if it’s accepted or if I ever sent it out. I’ve even lost a sheet of paper I used to keep that told me where I had sent some poems or where some had been accepted, but what the titles of the poems were, I didn’t know. And now I’ve lost the piece of paper. I had a wife once [Barbara Fry] who really amazed me. She’d write a poem and send it out, write down the name of the poem, date, where sent . . . She had a large bookkeeping book, a beautiful thing, and in it she had a list of magazines, and the magazine list crossed screw-wise or blue lines over orange or something and she made little asterisk **** that webbed it all together. It was one hell of a beautiful thing. She could run the same poem down thru 20 or 30 magazines just by ******************* *********** and never send to the same mag twice, hurrah. She had a book for me but I drew dirty pictures and things in mine. And when she wrought a poem, each one she wrote wd be typed again on special paper and then pasted in a notebook (with date). I could use a little of this moxie but really I think it would make me feel a little too much like I was selling form-fit bras from door to door.

      1962

      [To John William Corrington]

      April 1962

      [ . . . ] Fry once egged me on to make a bunch of cartoons with captions, the joke bit, and I stayed up all night, drinking and making these cartoons, laughing at my own madness. There were so many of them by morning that I couldn’t get them in an envelope, none large enough, so I made a big thing out of cardboard, and mailed it to either the New Yorker or Esquire, putting another cardboard thing inside with proper postage. Well, hell, they could prob. see I was either amateur or mad. It never came back. I wrote about my 45 cartoons and they never came back. “No such item rec. from you,” wrote back some editor. But sitting in a barbershop a couple of months later I came across one of my jokes in some mag, I believe Man, showing a guy, a jock whipping a horse with one of those round balls with spikes on the end of a chain, and one guy along the rail is telling another, “He’s a very rude boy but somehow effective.” The words were changed just a little and the drawing a little, but it sure seemed just like mine. Well, hell, you can imagine anything if you want to imagine anything. But I don’t know, I wasn’t even looking, I usually don’t even look into magazines or maybe I do but don’t realize it, but I kept popping across my same ideas and drawings just altered a touch; it was all too close, all too much the same to be anything but mine, only I felt that mine were better executed, and I do not mean killed, they killed that. And when I came across one of my largest no-caption drawings (I mean, the idea of it, it was not my drawing) upon the FRONT COVER OF THE NEW YORKER, then, I knew I’d had it—it was the same damn thing: a large lake on a moonlit night with all these dozens of canoes filled with male and female, and in each the male was playing a guitar and serenading his female—except in one boat right in the center of the lake was this guy standing up in his canoe and blowing this very huge horn. I forgot whether I put a broad in his canoe or not, I prob. did, but now as I am older I see it would have given an extra laugh to leave the gash out. Anyhow, it was all wasted and I didn’t cartoon no more until Ben Tibbs kinda fucked up on what was supposed to be a cover for Longshot Pomes and I told [Carl] Larsen jesus I think I can do better. What I mean is, like with the cartoons, the novel, I don’t know the mechanics of doing and I do not want to waste a lot of words doing everything backwards that some sycophant will twist and turn to his own use. I thought the Art world and things like that would be clean. That’s shit. There are more evil and unscrupulous octopus people in the Art world than you’ll find in any business house because in a business house the guy’s minnow imagination is just on getting a bigger house and a bigger car and an extra whore but usually the drive does not come from some twisted inside that cries for RECOGNITION OF SELF beyond all decency and straightness, no matter how it’s gotten. That’s why some of these editors are such damn buggers: they can’t carve it themselves so they try to associate themselves with those who hack and carve at a little clean marble . . . that’s why a lot of them won’t answer letters of inquiry about submitted work: all the lights within them have fucked themselves to pieces and out.

      I went to nightschool once, on Fry’s insistence, took what you call it? commercial Art. This guy who taught worked for some outfit that did comm. art and taught school at night. We’d bring our work to class and he’d line it along the blackboard, and one time just before the Christmas season he said, “Now my company has to do a sign for the TEXACO gas stations, and I want you to make this your problem. Give us something for a xmas ad.” Well, the time came around and he was passing along the board looking at the drawings until he came to mine, and with a great fury and anger he turned to the class and roared: “WHO DID THIS ONE???!!!” “I did,” I admitted, “I thought the TEXACO