[To John Martin]
May 7, 1979
Well, I hope everybody’s feeling better and that we can get on with the game.
I understand that now there’s a paper strike going on. I went out and bought 6 packs of 200 pgs of typer paper. How’s that for a 6-pack? So that ought to last me a month or two…but how are you going to print books? The little darlings will think that you don’t like them…
[To John Martin]
May 8, 1979
Here’s a copy of Barfly, the screenplay. As you know, I did quite a bit of barstool duty between the ages of 25 and 35. This screenplay takes in 4 or 5 nights or days (or maybe more) from that time. Right now Barbet is off to Europe looking for various sources of money to get it into motion and unto film. He claims he can do it for a half million. I have an idea he will get the money and that he will direct the film and get it done. he seems to know how to do such things.
Anyhow, the screenplay is available for book production. There are no restrictions in the contract on this and Barbet says he has no objections, and there is no money to be paid to him, although, of course, credits must be given.
So read it when you get time and if you like it and want to publish it, fine. Of course, I understand that you are overloaded on Bukowski, but I always want you to have first look. If, for any reasons, you don’t want to, or can’t, do it, please return as I only have 3 copies of the play. I’ll try City Lights. Financially it has really helped to have 2 U.S. publishers, especially in the European market. I think rather than let Barfly lay fallow, I should get it out. Yes, I suppose there are dangers of overexposure but then I think I write too much for one publisher to keep up with me, and from a different viewpoint it might not be fair to plow half of it under. Or so I’d like to think.
So lemme know whatcha think…
[To Carl Weissner]
May 21, 1979, drinking zinfandel, 1975, via Louis M. Martini, St. Helena, Napa County…
Thanks for yours. Well, The Rats of Thirst has been changed back to the original title, Barfly. Barbet says this more fits the motion picture world, and he knows more about that than I do. Of course, I am more literary and prefer The Rats but since Barbet is on the run for money he has enough troubles without me fighting him about it. I got ten thousand dollars for writing the damn thing and there’s more to come when and if it gets into shooting and then the 5%, and so I am sitting here (as you know) a long ways from the days of starvation but there still remains enough madness and confusion to carry me through. I was born a misfit and remain so. Simple acts of life that most men can carry off without a thought can and do befuddle me. Luckily I have gotten paid for being an ass, and only the angels can bring one that. [***]
Martin has some guy Fonzi (?) offering a great movie contract for some of the Sparrow books…the contract is so good it’s almost frightening. It seems a long time back since I was freezing in that $1.25 a week paper shack in Atlanta, starving and waving at an overhanging electric light cord (shredded) with my hand, seeing how close I could come…I might be back there yet.
Shit, look, I just bought a new 1979 BMW, sunroof and all the bits, $16,000 cash. The tax accountant says I can get a 52% tax write-off, which means instead of giving the 16 grand to Sam I only give him 8 and I got me a new car. No, it doesn’t quite work that way, but almost. The idea is to keep yourself down from the upper tax brackets one way or another and if you put all the money in the bank and don’t come up with tax write-offs the damn govt. just walks in and takes almost all of it, and so they force you to spend, they force you into a different life style, and I guess that can harm the writing but if I’m a good enough writer I can overcome that; if I’m not a good enough writer then I’m going to get what I’ve got coming to me. o.k.
I guess the d.a. [Los Angeles District Attorney] is worried about the pocketbook because it reaches more people at a smaller price, and it’s nice to be accused of “obscenity” and “advocating violence.” it puts me in the same camp as a lot of immortals. not that I am concerned with being immortal, only that there were some good word-throwers among them.
for you, I imagine translating can really be hell because one thing it does is keep your energy from getting at and doing your own work but it also keeps you out of the factories and/or teaching literature at some fucking university with the girls in the front rows flashing their thighs at you for grades. and what is really important, I think about the ways you can improve on these writers (including me) by putting them into German; part of your personality does enter and that’s a creative act, my friend.
thanks for letting me know all the things, and as always luck and love to Voltrout and Mike, and to you too, from Linda Lee and me. Christ, we’ve just found a small tree and it’s bearing apples! and the roses are pounding into the sky, it’s dangerous and beautiful, and there’s no gasoline in California and we wait in two hour long lines in our cars listening to rock music, drinking beer, getting angry and shooting and knifing each other. this Rome is falling, tottering, insipid. I don’t care; if anybody’s got it coming, we have.
[To John Martin]
May 31, 1979
I got the 2nd printing of Women today. Looks fine, thanks. People keep commenting on what a good job Barbara did on the cover. [***]
Well, the apricot tree is full and there’s even a little apple tree going at it, and the horses are going well, and Linda and I are not fighting.
[To John Martin]
June 10, 1979
I know you have the movie on your mind right now. That’s fine. But, meanwhile, here’s more poems, good or bad.
I know you do a lot of work on the side to protect my ass, to see that I don’t get burned, and I want you to know that I’m aware of that and grateful for that.
Don’t worry, I’ll never be as rich as you are; you are running an industry; I am a member of this particular asylum, you know.
[To John Martin]
June 18, 1979
We’ll just have to forget about “the image.” I never hide anything.
The car is a 1979 black BMW, sun roof and all. 320I. (52% tax write-off.) [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
July 14, 1979
Actually, I am glad the Jan. tour has been called off. When I think of freezing my bunghole and reading 5 times in one week I don’t miss it. If I were alone I would never have said “yes” to it. Linda is so crazy for travel I was doing it for her. And you know the first rule: never do anything for anybody else. So I’m glad it’s called off. [***]
I seem to be writing only poems now, ten to twenty a week, they seem to be all right, the New York Quarterly and Wormwood taking some and not returning the rest—yet. The Quarterly is going to publish a “craft interview” with Bukowski in issue #27, I think. I tell ’em my craft is to get drunk and write, mostly after the racetrack. I more or less tell them to jam it, but they don’t seem to mind. I think the editor is partial to crazies. o.k. [***]
A couple of movie deals swinging in the wind. If one of them goes through I’ll have to see my tax man and figure out how to spend it so the U.S. tax man doesn’t get most of it. Like I get 52% off on the old (1979) black BMW. Now I may have to get the house painted and put in a jacuzzi. First, let’s see. You know, writing is a strange thing: IT CAN STOP. So I’m always precautionary, figuring out how I can pull it out if the roof falls in. I can see myself in a tiny room sucking on a beercan and staring [?starting] all over again. It would make a good story. As always, there’s no rest in my mind, no matter what kind of life it is. The cemetery is the best bet on the board; all we do is stall that number off as long as we can. I’d like to hang around a bit longer, I still love the sound of this typer, the drink to my left, the cigarette to the right, the radio sending me music that is centuries old.
The horses have been lucky lately. Only a week left and the track closes. Don’t know what I’ll do then. Probably sleep all day. Sometimes I get this urge to go to bed for a week and stay there. I used to do it.
It’s great. When you get up you are powerful as a polar bear and everything looks great and different. It lasts about 2 days. Then it’s back to shit in the streets and in the heart and in the stratosphere.
Linda sends love to all and wants to know if there is anything we can mail you folks from good old Southern California? An oil well? The Queen Mary?
[To John Martin]
August 2, 1979
[***] Behind on a lot of standard paper work here; have to get it done; it ain’t poetic but if you don’t do it, they send in the troops. I am fighting against computer errors from the Authorities right now. It’s amazing: you write them back a factual truth and the machine is off-feed and it spits it all out and says, no, no, no. And that’s all they go by. Almost every day, besides some demented fan mail, I get some sort of letter claiming that I owe something for something that I never purchased, like 3 greyhounds and a washing machine propelled by wild goldfish….
Weissner’s translations were published as Western Avenue: Gedichte aus über 20 Jahren 1955-1977 by Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt.
[To Carl Weissner]
August 2, 1979
yes, all the people who see Western Ave. marvel at it, and I know the translation is epic and gutsy. see ya ended with Bogart, you romantic. good. quite. I know you ought to win the war of awards, but “ought to” and politics are different things.
on the Italian thing, I just looked at the list of 21 American poets and knew it was a puke situation—little flamboyant sweeties who love to croon into the mike. the vanity of these types is only exceeded by their lack of talent.
over here, still going upstairs with the wine and typing out poems almost every night. the disease appears to be permanent. After Women, Shakespeare, and Barfly, I just fall back onto and into the poem like a champagne bath. on Barfly, Schroeder appears to be reeling in a backer and also is considering using this fellow Woods who was the only compelling force in a film which failed for me: The Onion Field. The schedule is that we get drunk with him and attempt to make him over into a Chinaski. no easy thing. the fellow talks very fast, seems desperate enough but not tired enough. we could re-do him a bit. I think that Barfly, properly done, should shake some asses in the theater seats. I don’t trust Hollywood, of course, but this thing ain’t exactly Hollywood…meanwhile, some of the Italians came by (Di Fonzi and crew) and we got drunk with them, and they ain’t hardly Hollywood either, so I’m not dead yet. but so far there’s been more talk than money. [***]
[To John Martin]
August 18, 1979
This is 60 buck portable so in case I ever go to Europe I’ll have something to escape to besides the bottle. But it just doesn’t have the soul of the old…Olympia, which is still being fixed. Delay, of course. Yes, nobody can do anything…poets can’t write poetry, cabbies can’t drive, so on…Got car out of garage…2 day wait…drove one block, had to take it back in again…The people are bothered with nerves, they don’t want to do what they are doing but they don’t want to starve either so they just pretend to be doing something, but they can only back off from it because it’s just rote and dizziness, they want the money without the effort. The thing has even spread into professional sports. The artistry has gone out of everything; it’s all being done on a very dull and low level. The tax man fucks up, the waitress fucks up, the cop shoots the wrong guy…on and on it goes. I don’t mind so much what they do, humanity has hardly been one of my loves, but when what they do gets in the way of my existence, when I have to take hours and days to straighten out their errors and malfunctions, then what I am trying to do becomes affected and I begin to fail somewhat because they fail entirely, and we are all stuck in the same bog. o.k.
I hear through the vine that Galiano has already shot Rape Rape, that he is getting Polanski (Roman the child-fucker) ready to direct another…meanwhile, no monies, not even option money. contract signed for $44,000. sometimes I feel like getting an m.g. and walking into an office and gunning these bastards down, and within my nature I am perfectly capable of doing that. Nothing miffs me like lying and cheating and outright stealing, plus indifference and silence about matters…
[***] In the future the money won’t be like this because now (if it comes) it comes off of a mass of work already published and they have just about caught up with us. [***]
[To John Martin]
September 7, 1979
Yes, the world’s at war and they don’t know it. You’re right. And it can get irritating at times when they scratch the back of their necks and get ready to pick the best bowling ball. Not that a person shouldn’t enjoy himself when his house is burning down, it’s only what they select for enjoyment that (which) puzzles me. So? Well, it’s like Schopenhauer basically said in a certain place: I certainly seem to suffer like a son of a bitch most of the time, living among them and this, but, for it all, I have one thing that I am glad for and that is that I am not them….
I’ve walked up the railroad tracks and I’m still walking up them. The essence doesn’t change. There are still things to be handled; there will always be things to be handled. Nobody ever gets caught up and finished on what there is to do. And even if you do, for a moment, feel a central peace, there is always somebody walking behind you with a switchblade. The philosophers of the centuries have probably said the same thing but in, and with, such an involuted and private and dead language that they themselves were part of the failure they were speaking of.
Women are strange, they are positive: they want to build swimming pools while you wonder who the hell and how the hell the water bill is going to be paid? They are thinking about next Saturday night while you are thinking about 3 years from now, if you are here. Somebody has to be the wolf, somebody has to be the hunting dog, somebody has to drill the 3 and 2 pitch between first and second. When you slow down a step, the good times are over. Good times? There were never good times. There were bad times and times not as bad. People like to talk about the Brotherhood of Man. Two types: those who have nothing and would like a Brotherhood because they think that would bring them something; and those who have everything (materially) and speak of the Brotherhood of Man as now because they think it’s working for them at the moment.
As far as relaxing goes in the midstream of the dangerous tempo, I’ve done it. I got drunk for ten years without doing anything. Anybody can be a slob but to be a deliberate slob takes some doing, well, at least a minor inventiveness.
There is something about these now, they simply don’t have the hardness and/or the honor of those who grew up in the 30’s. Even their body movements, their speech is putty-soft and irreverent to the Fact. And the Fact is what occurs when you face something head-on. I once spoke of the Absence of the Hero, that was sad enough. I now speak of the absence of a human among humans, one face in a crowd of no-faces. Now it’s feces and a flavescent flatulence. Nobody scares me anymore; a cop pulls me over, gets off his bike, he has a valentine ass and an english toffee face; no matter if he pulls his gun and blasts my brains out, he can’t even do it with style and aplomb, he’s just a mechanism, a test-tube baby, doing his thing to protect a neurotic wife playing with cheap coke in a housing development in Dijo Valley.
Sometimes there’s a small chance, you can see it for a moment in the face of a waitress in a cheap cafe, an old waitress, beaten, nowhere to go, there is some truth in that face, which is more than there is in the truth of the face of your landlord or your president. Of course, she can’t speak to you and you can’t speak to her. Words would mutilate, words have too long been used the wrong way. You put in your order and wait. Sometimes you see it in the face of a boxer, a prize fighter, sometimes in the face of an old newsboy. But you don’t see it too often, and you see it less and less.
So, this isn’t really a letter and it isn’t really a poem; it’s good not to fit the form, always. The two bottles of wine have been good, and sleep is good too, lately I’ve gone toward sleep like I’ve gone towards drunkenness. Here’s the last glass. Let me pick it
up, drink it. It’s gone. I light the last cigarette, and once again I think of my boy John Dillinger. Now look, you see, I’m going to piss and then to sleep it off….
your boy, Henry
[To John Martin]
September 17, 1979
Yes, it goes on and on….
I was in a health food store with Linda the other day and there were 3 or 4 lines snaking around and the clerks at the counter were chatting limply with the customers at hand and the customers at hand were chatting limply with the clerks, and even those others waiting didn’t sense that time was being mutilated, that silliness and ineptness were dripping from the walls. There was no fire or motion anywhere. And it just wasn’t a physical stagnation, you could sense their wilted cottonball spirits…zeroes giving off horrifying death-rays.
I told Linda, “I’ll bet John Martin and I would have these lines worked down and away in no time at all.”
“Sure you would,” she said, “but you see, people just aren’t like that nowadays.”
oh, my god…. [***]
[To Carl Weissner]
September 17, 1979
The ecce homo book by George Grosz was an astonishing birthday gift. You certainly know my taste. Some of this man’s work reminds me of my own short stories. It is some book and one that can be looked at over and over again. But, Carl, you needn’t remember my birthday, you are doing too many things at once, take it easy. [***]
Smog and heat have descended; this area usually all right, fairly smog-free but the Santa Ana winds blew it in from the inner city and we’ve had it for two days…Linda downstairs looking at an anti-war movie, Coming Home. I don’t bother with those. I don’t think any artist is being daring and original when they state that War is Bad. That takes as much courage as hitting grandma behind the neck with a two-by-four. [***]
Living on Luck Page 25
