[To Jon and Louise Webb]
March 18, 1968
[***] and, I’m having problems with the Penguin royalty dept. god damn. first the guy writes and says you must fill out enclosed forms before we can begin to process your check. he doesn’t enclose the forms. a few weeks go by and I write him, “you didn’t enclose the forms.” he sends the forms. 2 months go by. I finally get myself to fill the god damned things out. go to a notary public. all that shit. drop letter with forms into mail. the other day I got another letter from royalty dept. “sorry, but we sent improper forms. would you mind filling out the enclosed forms?” now I sit around and look at them. if I fill them out, it works like this: I mail them to the Dept. of Internal Revenue U.S.A. there are 2 copies. then the Dept. of Internal Revenue is supposed to mail one of the copies to the United Kingdom Income Tax dept. and then I don’t know what they do. inform Penguin that I am in the clear or something? it looks like a process that will take months or a year. I don’t suppose this would bother anybody but me. I can imagine a guy like Corrington blithely filling out the forms with hardly a thought, and even feeling good about it. [***]
[To William Hageman]
June 21, 1968
[***] write-up on Ginsberg meeting Pound in current Evergreen. Ginsberg comes on poetic and phoney. Pound talks straight English without the lacy bullshit. Pound I think has found out he had style but the content was educational, a kind of structural flow that took care of itself, sounding well but not ever really ever saying. too much of anything. that’s what always pleased the college boys—the whole thing was a very stylish yawn—which takes some doing, don’t get me wrong. Pound was worthy. but I think he knows now that he was just making a good pudding instead of hellfire. esp. now that everybody is bullshitting him on how great he is; a kind of ass-kissing before a death that must be very near. for us, too, maybe. but he’s older, surely. [***]
by the way, certain things I don’t like—that is, the new boys coming up and thinking that they are changing the language. I’ve been watching this since 1932: “&” instead of “and.” “laffing” instead of “laughing.” I don’t even want to go into it. it becomes boring. not that it might be wrong, only that the boys hu r duing it thinks its sompin gnew…not their fault that they are not as old as me and the woodwork. (by the way, when you see an “&” in one of my poems it is put there by some damned editor.) [***]
The third correspondent mentioned below was Douglas Blazek, who later did in fact return Bukowski’s many letters to him (see Volume 1). Corrington apparently never did so.
[To John William Corrington]
October 15, 1968
well, how to begin? I wrote you a lot of letters one time and NOW I want them back. now, wait wait. a certain Univ. is offering me quite a bit for my little mags, notebooks, paintings, books and letters that I have written to others. a lot hinges on the latter. the letters. there would be enough money for me to take a year or two off and simply write instead of dying on that post office stool where I have been for ELEVEN YEARS. often nights down there I’ve felt like I’m actually going CRAZY. or I get these dizzy spells where I hold to the case as everything spins. the old soul is simply saying, no, no, no, no more please! I do need more time to write [***] I need the letters to get free, break into the open and get some downfield blocking. I’m 48; I’ve played the tough drunk who spits blood out of the side of his mouth long enough. I need a little breather. o.k.
yeah, o.k. so I have written these various poets, 2 or 3, so far that I have written letters to. one, no answer. the second just sent me back a kind of literary essay, badly written, with no mention of my request for letters. the 3rd just sent me a kind of juvenile bit about how he rather kept those letters under his soul’s pillow and how they saved his life when he had to put in those 6 tough years at the foundry. he just can’t part with them now! oh, no no no, ask me ANYTHING but that! his wife now works while he pounds out reams of poetry that is getting duller and duller.
so, it all works out. I’ve said for 3 decades that the poets were shits and they keep proving me right. and if I ever write any fucking memoirs I’m going to name names and shits. it’s about time we bombed the stinkers out of their closets. anyhow, there are 3 or 4 more to write to, one or two women, say 6 more all told. if I get completely shut out I don’t ever want to hear the word POET in the same room I am sitting in. I have explained to all these people, will explain, have written a couple again who didn’t seem to hear well the first time—I’ve explained exactly what this will mean to me. these fuckers write about LIFE but it’s all shuck. that’s why some of them write so badly. they’d rather kill life than live it—mine or theirs.
so, Willie, for Christ’s sake mail me the letters, set me free. I remember returning all yours upon request one time when I lived at 1623 N. Mariposa. lining the things up on the rug and trying to get them in order of date before sticking them in the envelope. I’m not playing angel, Willie, but when you asked for your letters back it never occurred to me to say “no.” it wouldn’t make sense. that’s just the way my head works. I hope yours works the same way. [***]
well, man, curve ball or straight?
[To John William Corrington]
November [?28], 1968
all right, I am a shit and of the breed, but at least you had class enough to say you’d send the letters, so fine, it means a lot, a break, I’ve got this collector-editor working with the univ. library, and he’s a good boy, I mean he knows how to talk to these librarians, I don’t, so I leave it in his hands, and he’s doing the whole thing without fee, the guy simply likes me, but of course it means giving up many things I have: tapes, paintings, notebooks, magazines, books, typescripts—really cleaning out the closet, and I’ll prob. feel better after everything’s gone—like a bad woman you think you needed, ya know. so, do send the letters. it’s fine of you, and will prob. help me get a year or so off from the grind, and much going on now, I need the TIME—[***]
p.s.—oh yes, also, if you could send your own letters back, the ones you wrote to me, that would help too. think of it, man, it’s almost like being dead—the scholars pawing over us, and it wasn’t so long ago that I was running errands from the corner bar stool for sandwiches and newspapers. don’t return this letter. it’s for the bathroom wall. yours. and listen, thanks again for all.
· 1969 ·
Hugh Fox, then teaching at Loyola University, Los Angeles, wrote Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Bibliographical Study (Los Angeles: Abyss Publications, 1969), a mimeo-graphed book on his work. Gerard Dombrowski was editor of Abyss.
[To Gerard Dombrowski]
January 3, 1969
[***] Well, you asked me about the Fox book on me. You want it straight? It was dull, straight, academic and uncourageous. It was textbook frogs hopping their dull lilypad hops. Dull; I said it twice; I’ll say it thrice: dull, dull, dull. THE POEM-MESSAGE or FORCE was completely overlooked in the mama-taught thing of this belongs here and that belongs there—: this is this school, and that is that school. Fuck that. I used to g.d. have to fight the bullies all the way home from grammar school to college, and they used to follow me, mocking me, daring me, but there was always more than one, and I was one, and they knew I had something packed in me somewhere. They hated it; still do.
Very well mum, you printed the Fox book on me. In a sense, it was congratulatory, but as a man who has lived in the worst circumstances of life, often not eating and not caring to; often wanting to eat and not being able to; often living for a month behind pulled shades and eating green potatoes and listening to the works of Bach and the footsteps of my landlady—knowing that almost everything was impossible and sickening—getting drunk on rotgut wine; being drunk at 12 noon and laying in alleys behind bars hoping trucks would run the life out of my body; being poked in the back with sticks by small black children as I lay senseless like some dying piece of meat; while working the factories, the slaughterhouses of the world, while being kicked off the back-end o
f tomato-picking trucks by those who sensed that I did not belong there; while traveling with the railroad track gangs from New Orleans to Sacramento and having to fight them one-on-fifty; while living in a scorpion-filled paper shack in Atlanta, while all the things I could go on and on with—do you REALLY THINK that I could accept the soft-Fox fucking dissertation on when I was an Existentialist or a Burroughs or an immortalist or a whatever??? I have your book around the corner, and I’m sure almost that he called me none of these—but what I mean is—he pasted his chickenshit labels all over me. This poem is this. This poem is that.
How the hell can Fox know what a poem is? He is/was taught what a poem was/is.
I am a poem.
There is no way out.
I doubt that I can match Dr. Fox’s degrees. But his poems begin to sound more and more like mine. But there’s a catch—ability plus experience can never match a shadow, and that’s what Fox is—a SHADOW of Buk. It just ain’t gonna work, no matter how hard he works. Or they. All the Bukowski copyists. Every time I get a free copy of a little in the mails, I open it and it all sounds like Bukowski—very bad Bukowski.
That’s their problem.
But I do hope that some other bellowing, water-mouthed prick comes along to take the heat off of me so that I may/can go about and do what I have to do. [***]
Accompanying money order and letter to Frances Smith, Marina’s mother.
[To Marina Bukowski]
September 16, 1969
Hello Marina, little one:
Every time you phone me, it is so very good to hear your voice. You have the most beautiful voice in the world. Thanks very much for phoning me. I always feel good for days and days after you talk to me. And I feel that I will see you again some day and that keeps me going. Sometimes when I get sick I think about you and it makes me well again. PLEASE BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN YOU CROSS ANY STREET. LOOK BOTH WAYS. I think about you all the time and love you more than the sky or the mountains or the ocean or anybody or anything. Please stay well and happy and don’t worry about me.
all my love, little one,
Hank.
· 1970 ·
Carl Weissner, editor of a German little magazine, became Bukowski’s German translator and literary agent, as well as regular correspondent and friend.
[To Carl Weissner]
January 20, 1970
[***] I am out of the god damned post office and I am playing typewriter-boy and painter. If I fall flat it is my own fault—the child support, the rent, the utilities still come due, and I do love the child, would hate to lose her. 12 years on the job, and then to finally quit it, cold, half a century old. The first ten days I damn near went outa my skull—didn’t know what to do with my hands, my feet, my mind. I almost cracked. And after a series of drunks at wild parties and alone, I ended up in bed deathly sick, shivering, depressed all the way to hell and almost to the kitchen butcher knife. I sweated it, staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep—shades down, I stared at the ceiling while being an inch from bottom. At the same time, the bathroom and kitchen sinks clogged up, and I vomited, trembling, into the toilet and it rained outside, and then some people came by with guitars and threw all the wine bottles, beer bottles, whiskey bottles in the trash, dumped the garbage. They made me laugh, they made me get off that stinking gloom bed. And I went out into the rain with them. Nothing to eat for 3 or 4 days—my stomach raw. And I ended up drunk again…
Now I seem to have pulled together (I hope), and it seems to be going easier as each day goes by. I suppose it was a transition from the 12 year thing, and when you look at it, maybe ten days shot going from one to the other isn’t too bad, what? Christ, I even give poetry readings now. [***]
See Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley, a transcript of the reading discussed here, made by Zoe Brown and published by Coyote, San Francisco, 1966.
[To Carl Weissner]
February 16, 1970
[***] Yes, I saw the transcript of the Olson reading in Berkeley. Frankly, man, it was sickening. He was begging to the audience, sitting in their laps like a baby. And his poems are so straight-laced. He broke out of his laces and slobbered all over everybody. He even begged people who were leaving to come back. Then a woman told him they had to close the auditorium at midnight, and he begged for a few minutes more, and then went on longer and longer. Something wrong with a man like that, sucking at the cunt of an audience. Thank god, I hate to read [***].
What the hell you doing reading the Nola Express? Lively little rag, though, courage, but young young. The govt. will finally bust them in half. All these undergrounds have this suicide complex. I think they really want to get spanked by papa instead of replacing him. I could be wrong. But sometimes they swing those roundhouse glory rights, and miss, when the steady left jab might take the whole fight. [***]
Dr. Renate Matthaei was editor for Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, in Köln. The fake Henry Miller blurb invented by Weissner for the German edition of Notes of a Dirty Old Man and that Bukowski finds “quite accurate” reads as follows: “Each line in Bukowski is infected by the terror of the American nightmare. He articulates the fears & agonies of that vast minority in the no-man’s-land between inhuman brutalisation and helpless despair.”
The novel Post Office was eventually published in February 1971.
[To Carl Weissner]
February 23, 1970
[***] glad you got hold of Dr. Matthaei, and I would prefer you to translate Post Office, of course. [***] The money thing does become important when writing is your only income and you want to go on writing without diluting your style or missing too many meals. Also, the beer bill rises when you sit by the typer near the window and things begin to move in toward you from out there.
I want to thank you for some of your suggestions—you’ve been a great moral support. In looking over the contracts in the drawer I see I’ve signed quite a few. There is that tangled word horror where I sold away movie rights to these guys for $50 while I was drunk. I think I told you about that. 2 year option. I’ve got to sweat another year and 5 months. That’s on Notes. [***]
I think you’ll like Post Office, maybe even better than Notes. There’s plenty of sex in there for laughs and enough horror and madness to float the typescript to you across the Atlantic. I try to photograph rather than preach. [***]
I’m not too happy with the fake H[enry] M[iller] quote, and I would not tell Martin about it or he’d flip—maybe. But if you think it will make a difference in selling 2,000 or 5,000, go ahead. It’s best that we survive. By the way, I like the blurb itself. Quite accurate. So what the hell, go ahead. [***]
[To John Martin]
February 23, 1970
I answered Weissner but I enclose his letter so you’ll get some idea of the German scene. I told him to go ahead with the Henry Miller blurb but not to tell you or you’d flip, and now here I am sending you the letter. So you must pretend not to read the H.M. blurb part. These Germans may save my ass yet. I do trust Weissner because he lays everything in the open, and is one of the better writers in Germany, and I think can do a better job of translating than anybody. Also met him personally, you know.
Now you lay off the beer, keep your feet on the ground, Sparrow. Remember what ol’ Franky D. said: “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Neeli Cherkovski, then known as Neeli Cherry, was a poet and editor of Black Cat Review. He later was to write Bukowski’s biography, Hank.
[To Neeli Cherry]
[ca. April 12, 1970]
I figured they’d run you out of Germany fast enough. But you’re living without working and that is an acceptable state. I sit here by the window, drinking coffee and rolling cigarettes and watching the long-legged nurses stroll home. They check their mailboxes and quickly lock themselves into their plastic cubicles. Let them; they shit, have monthlies, fart, scream. There’s a new movement here now—The Women’s Liberation Movement—there are a lot of clever lesbians in it and some man-haters, and they have
certain piteous points—like their breasts, but damn if I don’t think the ladies have rather ruled the cock-and-ball set right along. But they claim they are not represented with dignity—not enough female doctors, so forth, and then some guy says, there aren’t enough female garbage collectors, and then it goes around and around. Everybody everywhere is screaming for dignity and representation but their minds and souls are mud and shit, and how can you give dignity to shit? Guy over here other day said, “I think everybody who writes should have a guaranteed income.” Why just everybody who writes? I’d like to see most writers put into those ovens you were looking at. guaranteed. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
April 14, 1970
great, my friend. I’m glad one of the Melzers finally stirred into action. [***]
sorry all this bitching and money talk shit, Carl. but it is part of the stew. but I felt all along that whether I got the advance from Meltzer or not would be the thing that made me or broke me. it’s just one of those things, Carl. once I get rolling here, learn how to better operate the ship, I feel I might go on, in spite of all. now that Meltzer is coming through the scene changes to one of hope. I mean hope of survival. there should be a way to get hold of my health, and the writing is coming along like a stampede—no dizzy spells there—wrote 35 new poems in the last 2 weeks. as good or better than any I have written. have also started a second novel, The Horseplayer. I am writing it in a more leisurely fashion than Post Office, which was quick-paced because I wanted it to be—because I didn’t want to preach, only tell. first 2 chapters on the Horseplayer all right; in fact, the first chapter is a classic. I even had to laugh myself. I may never finish the H.P. or I might. Not pressing it.
Living on Luck Page 8
