Living on Luck

by Charles Bukowski

  I have been visiting people lately, which is only mostly to explore that they are not there mostly and to see if I can sit still and listen to TALK. Hit Jack Hirschman’s for burned steak and scotch, and next night went to—rather a week later—Orlane Mahak’s big picture window that overlooks the sickening Sunset Strip, had Brazilian chicken and rice, but brought a woman along who liked to TALK and so she talked and I sat there mostly which saved me. I talk quite stupidly, you see; I cannot get the thought out of my mind into proper order to be made into sound for the air. In fact, I don’t want to. I am like a child hiding what he thinks is a hell of a hell of a hell of a jewel in my back pocket, and I don’t want to show it to anybody. If I do, it will be in the proper temple. But after one visit people don’t bother me anymore and I don’t bother them. That’s the sweet part, daddy. When I walk out the door the first thing the good people do is look at each other and say, “Jesus, was THAT Charles Bukowski?” If I knew how to talk I’d sell all the old streetcar tracks in this town to the Black Muslims.

  [***] Somebody at one of these places, I think Mahak’s, asked me: “What do you do? How do you write, create?” You don’t, I told them. You don’t try. That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.

  Then this woman who likes to TALK jumped in: “You can’t make RULES! That’s all right for YOU to say ‘don’t try’ but you can’t make a rule like that for everybody. It’s like saying—”

  “O.K.,” I said, “I quit.”

  I’ve heard all these things centuries ago and I still hear them, the same old sayings and terms, things like…well, they like the word CULTURE and they like the word MIDDLE-CLASS and when they put them together like MIDDLE-CLASS CULTURE, this really sounds like something and it makes them feel good but it doesn’t mean anything, it is like CIVIL RIGHTS or FREEDOM, words long ago washed way away and left meaningless by abuse and overuse. [***]

  President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd.

  “The book” is It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, published by the Webbs’ Loujon Press with a foreword by Corrington.

  [To John William Corrington]

  November 27, 1963

  I have been putting off writing thinking maybe the book would come and it did come—the day after Kennedy was assassinated, and now I have the book on my right side and the beer on my left and I am king prince lightning Ruth in ’28, Nap at the top, Hitler in Paris [***]

  Your foreword is more honor, and quite prophetic: “the marksman will not be long in coming.” I don’t look into myself to see why certain wheels turn; I feel this is dangerous. First, if you get to know what you are doing you are apt to keep doing it, or second you might become so self-conscious you end up sounding like an old Rudy Vallee recording. Both are bad. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  December 7, 1963

  [***] Somebody told me tonight when I said that the real men work in fish factories, somebody told me that men that work in fish factories are too tired to write, I told this person that English teachers are too untired to write, she told me, or started to, this broad, she started to tell me about the agonies of an English teacher, but having known English teachers, having looked upon their faces, and having worked in slaughter houses, cake factories, railroad gangs, madmen, I told her not to tell me about the agonies of an English teacher…correcting essays, planning midterms, grading by the albatross scale, and writing poetry in between all this agony of deciding whether they are homosexual or whether Clayborn who teaches Advanced E. 2 is a punk [***]

  You aske’ me what I think a tha Kennedy. I don’t think anything of the K. Down where I work they have a black sign under his picture: MARTYRED. Do you really think so? Harvard? A fine piece of ass that starved herself to keep a figure that would kill babies. Do you think a man is martyred because he follows the open downhill path? Is it really HELL to be born with more money than you can ever spend? Is it hell to never think about where the rent is coming from? Is it HELL TO HAVE SOMEBODY ELSE PUT A BULLET INTO YOUR HEAD INSTEAD OF YOURSELF PUTTING THE BULLET THERE? Where does hell come from and how do you spell it? Do only the top-figure people suffer? How many dead were buried on the same day K. was buried? Who bull-like bleeds from a sword? Hell, ace, who gets cut when they are shaving? Kennedy followed the wigwam in. He could have turned the presidency down. I WOULD HAVE. Oswald was a fink, true. He read too many books and lived too little. He was never in love with the sunlight or watching a cat walk across the rug. Kennedy was, a little. Ruby, he never saw anything. And now, being alive now, I think of Lincoln, he got it too, but I keep thinking, for all the turning he caused, could we not through the years of not-knowing, of awayness, [have] over-evaluated this man? Huh? What ya think, Willie? Maybe I only got beer running out of my oyster ears. [***]

  Willie, you prick, I am drunk, but this instance of burning, these dry ash tears rolling down my fat arms and belly, I thank you for the good foreword, and only hope you are partly right; I remember once talking to the old man over the phone when he told me he was going to put my photo on cover of Outsider #3, and I asked him, “How do you know that this isn’t going to give me the fat head?” And he answered, “That’s the chance I’ve got to take.” Which was very kind. Anything I hate, it’s a sense of false humility. Saying such things as, “Oh, I really don’t deserve this.” But almost worse, is feeling that you do deserve it. I hope that my evenings, nights, mad-drunk in drunken alleys, g.d. jails, hospitals, I hope I remember these things, I hope I remember the broken-winged bird in the cat’s mouth, I hope I remember the rifle poking out of a 5th story window, I hope that I remember what I should remember, I hope I do not ever become a Will Rogers plying humanity through his simple and lovely face that the only thing to do is to love humanity because it is the only thing to do, win big the big love, I am lifting another beer and hoping I remain the same and grow the same as whatever seed was planted within me from a hateful father and an indifferent mother. See here, you Freudianists, get out your notebooks, and you have the ANSWER. Well, I’ve read Freud too. He had enough sex but not enough climaxes; his brain was too far above and, at the same time, too far below his belt. Love, which I hardly know and am very afraid of, Freud never considered. I am not speaking Christianity which is shit also. I am speaking shit commonsense living wherein we, you and I and she and Oswald-ex, are all involved in. Thanks for good foreword. And when I am dead, bad enough, worse enough, when I am living somebody will tear the mind of my chicken limbs apart for burning, and they will be right, we are all wrong forever, there is an unanswered question, some face burning in the night, and for a time I thought too it was Marxism we needed or Plato or a rereading of Shakespeare or the alls of anything, ugg pal, it appears Willie we are all irrevocably lost forever and like Tom Wolfe, Mencken, Ruby, we do we do the best we can.

  · 1964 ·

  [To John William Corrington]

  March 6, 1964

  I divined that you had turned on me out of some mysterious nature inherent in x-English teachers, all of whom I trust very little, I g.d. being crabbed by nature and busted by a heft of drizzly and ignoble Southern California sunsets, I felt that when you did not respond to my last letter…Then too, some English mailman may have stuck the letter into a snow bank. Anyhow, you louse, I am still alive and I feel that my head is no fatter than usual in spite of articles on one Bukowski in Northwest Review, Descant, Americas the, and Polish American Studies. The latter written by the Rev. Joe Swastek, Librarian of Alumni Memorial Library, SS. Cyril & Methodius Seminary, St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s Preparatory, Orchard Lake, Michigan. I got a letter from him this morning wondering if I had done much beside the poems and drawings in the Epos number. He wants to fuck up the library with it, which is very nice, I
think. I’ll send him on to various. [***]

  Bukowski was now living with Frances Smith, who was pregnant with their daughter Marina.

  [To John William Corrington]

  April 2, 1964

  [***] Well, I have got me a pregnant woman and I thought she was too old and that I was too old, and I can’t understand it [***]

  I sit here now with pains above the stomach and wonder what’s left, what a man can do when he’s been slugged by the years and the bad jobs and the bad job now and maybe nothing later, I mean when you walk out, when you can’t go through that door anymore to look at the impossible faces, the tiny continual hell of doing an idiotic boring searing task at a rate almost beyond bodily endurance, and, getting paid very little, very. Sometimes they forget what they are doing; sometimes they even go insane and take pride in what they are doing, or in what they are not doing. I wrote a poem about this called “The Workers.” I don’t know if I got it down right, I think I might have; anyway, I felt g.d. better for 5 or 10 minutes after I wrote it. [***]

  Corrington’s novel, And Wait for the Night, was published by Putnam’s, New York.

  [To John William Corrington]

  May 1, 1964

  [***] I got your book for which, you know, thanks surely, and your book sits on the shelf on top of Twenty Poems of Cesar Vallejo, which is pretty good, I guess, and alongside another book, Gray’s Elegy, which was bought in a used bookstore for 49 cents and is inscribed in very faint pencil: “Miss Mollie Zahrnde. Elkader, Iowa, Dec. 9, 1903.” Copyright 1893, by Estes and Lauriat.

  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

  [***]

  Corrington’s The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems was published by Roman Books, Fort Lauderdale.

  [To John William Corrington]

  May [?8], 1964

  o my I got Anatomy from Roman and

  this is it. You are writing better and better and better, what the hell are you trying to do? push us all down on skid-row? You’ve got a kind of a classical style that talks human language here, and believe me it makes me feel good to tell you how good you are, baby. There is not a fag line in the whole book. You’d look good in the ring, bull or square, I’d say you’d take the ears and tail home in your pocket & the other man’s gotta fall; you’d look good reading Hans Christian Anderson; you’d look good painting a flagpole for a children’s Maypole dance…U iz now what the criticizers kall—a major poet of impact. You are there. Willie, I keep reading the book and it’s a good thing like a good fuck all over again, but more, of course. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  May 16, 1964

  [***] Listen, baby, not to hurt, I know it is so hard to do—like fighting a bull, and I am not even doing it; but to say, I liked novel very good but felt middle section dragged a bit. I’ve got to say, on the other hand, that Anatomy of Love is a major work of poetry and/or art and that I am proud to receive a letter occasionally from you from England, Texas and/or Louisiana and/or in Hell where u undoubtedly are occasionally. No man could write that well from a continual heaven. [***]

  Veryl Blatt (later Veryl Rosenbaum) is the author of The Way It Was (Torrance, Calif., Hors Commerce Press, 1964) and other books.

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  October 11, 1964

  [***] Yes, the world’s a cat’s ass, a real driveling disgust, and the sweetest thing is getting away from them, their sounds, their decayed unlaughing laughter & faces as brutal and ugly and impossible as any matter you can dream up,…and the eyes, the eyes, no eyes at all. I can well understand men who run into caves and stay there. I don’t have the guts or the know-how. I walk through their streets, lighting cigarettes and getting drunk and buying their newspapers. but nothing anywhere really. Going to sleep is getting to be the finest thing, and death itself, aside from physical pain, will not be so hard. Well, this is a lot of loose talk for a Sunday but I have to go into a cement building full of 4,000 people and work tonight when I’d rather suck on beer, smoke a cigar and listen to Stravinsky. When is the world going to be arranged for the people to do as they wish to do? [***]

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  November 19, 1964

  [***] after dinner—our Frances has picked up and gone into the other room. These broads mash me. table talk. I asked what they would do to a man who said (to the authorities) that he was a coward, that he thought war might possibly kill him and that he didn’t want to die. He would not state that it was against his morals or his religion. Just that he didn’t want the thing to kill him. Frances said that they would probably consider him an idiot. maybe I resented this because this was the very inference I made to the psychiatrist without saying the words when I faced this situation. And then I told her that if a man were really a coward he would have lied about his reasons anyhow, giving religion or morals as an excuse. Then I added that honest men were not truly cowards. F. then said that that was not so, that we all had fears. I said she was picking at words, distorting what I had meant for the sake of argument. Then F.: “Well, if Charles Bukowski says it’s so, then it’s so. Isn’t that it?” I said, “You and I have had done with each other for tonight. I don’t know whose fault it is, yours or mine, but something’s wrong here.” Then she went into the other room.

  most of the time I attempt to avoid this type of talk and/or yak because I am not interested. I know that her groups become heated and gabble, DISCUSS, they simply love to DISCUSS, and F. is trained in this ping-pong type of thing. Actually most of these people have just lived on the edge of living and so they are full of a bilious sort of stale and clotted energy which they must expel as a sort of poison. I am too tired to argue. It doesn’t matter. Let them win; I just don’t want to hear it. I didn’t even want to hear it in Junior High school, these little mouths with papers in their palms, saying, DEFINE that! ah well, we go on. but no wonder I layed drunk in the alleys, no wonder I lived with the whores.

  “If Charles Bukowski says it’s so, then it must be so.”

  Maybe she’s got something there. But it is the first time she has attacked me through my name—meaning that since I have gotten a lot of poems published that this has distorted my ego or made me a bad judge of any meaning. It is possible, of course, yet I am unhappy with her technique. Also little comments on my playing the horses and drinking but as I see it I was doing this when she met me and if it weren’t for the child I would not be with her now. I have lived with many many women and it all ends up the same: they want to shave you down to a wooden dummy to do their bidding, and, after all, I’m CHARLES BUKOWSKI!!!!

  so to hell with it. [***]

  [To Veryl Blatt]

  November 23, 1964

  [***] the baby is like a shiny apple, except the eyes, loops of eyes extracting signs from the air, and look, there it sits knitted in all that skin, a child, a girl, and outside—the bucktooth world, ah, myself sucking on a cigar and wonder, wondering.

  there are too many ways to drown even if you don’t want to drown.

  it is terrible

  staring down at a red and white

  checkerboard oilcloth and

  wondering.

  The “2 books” are It Catches My Heart in Its Hands and Crucifix in a Deathhand, which would be published in mid-1965. Ed Blair was a New Orleans poet, collector, and patron of the Loujon Press.

  [To Jon and Louise Webb]

  December 25, 1964

  [***] That the N. Y. Times has put us with the big publishers and The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence etc. for rec. Xmas reading is fine—we 3 small tough beer-drinkers, sidewalk painters, criers in the dark. Hell, we put one over, didn’t we? And you’re right: the fat head is for the rest; we’ll just go about our business.

  You two people are almost myths now, almost literary history and you’re still alive. The love of my luck was falling into your hands for these 2 books. No other poet of this century or any other has been so blessed.

  Blair speaks of the envy of the others. Let them god
damn envy! Those Black Mountain School snobs, let them smell their own turds! The Kenyon boys, let them write their celluloid senseless inoffensive poems; the Corringtons—let them write their novels of incest and beetle love and honor and refuse to answer their mail; and all the others: let them go to hell too.

  I am for the small man who has not forgotten, for the man who loves his beer and his women and his sunlight but who is not quite wise enough (ever) to know where next month’s rent is coming from. [***]

  · 1965 ·

  Cherkovsky’s Hank (pp. 145-149) reports that Bukowski finally met Corrington during his sojourn in New Orleans with the Webbs in March 1965. The meeting was not a success and left Bukowski with “disdain” for his former correspondent, who had now turned to the novel as being more important than poetry.

  [To John William Corrington]

  March 1, 1965

  I wrote 2 some year back and no response so I gave it up thinking that the England thing and the novel and James Joyce had you by the balls. However, I will soon be 45 and don’t care to argue about it. I always answer my mail, tho’, whether it’s a whore from East Kansas City or Dr. Spock. [***]