1970

    The introduction below was originally published in Dronken Mirakels & Andere Offers, translated by Belart into Dutch, but it has never been printed in English.

[To Gerard Belart]
January 11, 1970

[ . . . ] “Introduction”

Looking over these poems—to put it simply and perhaps melodramatically: they were written with my blood. They were written out of fear and bravado and madness and not knowing what else to do. They were written as the walls stood, holding out the enemy. They were written as the walls fell and they came through and got hold of me and let me know of the sacred atrocity of my breathing. There is no out; there is no way of winning my particular war. Each step I take is a step through hell. I think the days are bad and then the night comes. The night comes and the lovely ladies sleep with other men—men with faces like rats, with faces like toads. I stare up at the ceiling and listen to the rain or the sound of nothing and I wait for my death. These poems came out of that. Something like that. I will not be entirely alone if one person in the world understands them. The pages are yours.

[To Marvin Malone]
April 4, 1970

[ . . . ] my hope is that the Wormwood Review goes on as long as you do. I have watched the magazines since around the late 30’s, so I can’t cover for Blast or the early Poetry, A Magazine of Verse. But I would place Wormwood on top along with the old Story magazine, The Outsider, Accent, Decade, a very definite force in the moulding of a lively and meaningful literature. if this sounds stuffy, let it. you’ve done a blockbuster job.

let me roll a smoke. there. yes, I understand your wish not to hear from the prima d’s, but I’d like you to know I’m not a p.d. you might have heard some shit and scam on me but I’d advise you to ignore gossip. I am a loner, always have been, and just because I’ve had a few madrigals published doesn’t mean I’m going to change my ways. I never did like the literary type, then or now. I drink with my landlady and landlord; I drink with x-cons, madmen, fascists, anarchists, thieves, but keep the literary away from me. christ, how they bitch and carry on and gossip and cry and suck. there are exceptions. Richmond is one. there’s no bullshit about him. I can drink 5 or ten cans of beer with Steve and he will never come up with the sad literary bullshit, or any kind of bullshit. you ought to hear him laugh. but there are other types. many other types. mothers’ boys. salesmen. pitchmen. weaklings. sucks. vicious little fawns. [ . . . ]

yes, I’m hustling via the typer and brush, what the fuck. and it has been a fine life—and I’ve made it writing and painting exactly the way I’ve felt like it. how long I can stay on top of the water, I don’t know. your offer of $10 for 2 poems, damn gracious. well, since I’m hustling, can we cut that in half? how about $5 for 2 poems? can you make that? that would make $20 on the 8 poems, when published. the reason I hustle is not only the kid—for that’s a sob story, after all, even if I do love her—but it’s hard to typewrite down on skid row, you know. so, Malone, if you can make the 20 I’ll take the 20, whenever, all right?

[To John Martin]
May 10, 1970

[ . . . ] I can’t agree with you on the dictionary idea for the novel [Post Office], but if you insist, we’ll go ahead, keep writing down words. I think though that most of the terms are obvious, even to an outsider. but I’m glad enough that you are probably going to do the novel, so I’ll compromise if nec. I do think the dictionary has a cheapening and commercial effect, however. Think it over a while.

[To John Martin]
[?July] 1970

[ . . . ] On Post Office, I have located the “perfect English” spot that (which?) bothered me. If you want to let it run that way, all right. But I hit my toe on it right away and it may have even been in the original manu. Page 5:

3rd line: “and did not get paid.” It seems a little precious. “and didn’t get paid” seems less precious. however, either way. every time I look at the novel it looks better. I think I got away with what I intended—that is not to preach but to record. yeah, it’d be nice if we got movie rights and we both got rich, how do we split 50/50? your contract. I can see you in a big office with full-paid staff. and me in an old shack in the hills living with 3 young girls at the same time. ah, the dream!

[To Carl Weissner]
July 11, 1970

[ . . . ] on Post Office I get a lot of delay action from John Martin, who is a good guy but who is doing too many things at once. he claims that I wrote Post Office while I was a little bit out of my head—that transition period after quitting the eleven year hitch. well, it’s true I was balled-up. he says it’s a good novel . . . maybe even a great one but that I got my tenses balled-up and have participles dangling, all that. he says he has to straighten out the grammar and then get some typescripts made. I don’t agree with that. I think it should read exactly as written. John has done a lot of good things for me but there’s a lot of square in him. he won’t admit it but all the writers he prints, except one, are not very dangerous or new; they are quite safe, but Martin makes money, so balls . . . that proves a point of some sort, he even wanted me to write a little dictionary-like thing in front explaining some postal terms. I wasn’t for this and tried to get him off that, but he wrote back and explained that I was just feeling bad because I had lost at the track. the man treats me much like an idiot of some sort. I was going on a radio program one night and he phoned me and tried to tell me what to SAY. “listen, John,” I had to tell him, “which one of us is Bukowski?” but writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

John says he wants to hold back on Post Office until The Days [Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills] has sold out. he says that when a new book comes out the old ones stop selling, so now we must wait. “I assure you,” he writes, “that the Germans would not accept Post Office in its present form.” what the hell is this? nobody corrected the grammar in Notes [of a Dirty Old Man]. I have signed a contract with him and he has an option on my next 3 books, so there’s that. and I don’t think he wants to turn loose of the typescripts until he’s ready to do the book himself in English. of course, if I’m still around and you and Meltzer are still around I’ll ship you and a couple of others over there a typescript and then we can hope for acceptance by somebody and some haggling? christ. and I’ll have to go over his grammar-corrected version and put some of myself back into it. he says the book will be out in the Fall or the Winter or something, but somehow I sense a drag-on. the books he has published have been pretty safe so far and in Post Office there is a lot of fucking and railing around and perhaps some madness. I think it is better than Notes and I wrote short machine-gun style chapters in hope of giving verve and pace and getting away from the novel atmosphere which I hate.

Don’t get me wrong, John is a fine person but I feel here that he is a little afraid of publishing the book. it is far more raw than literary and I think subconsciously he is afraid that it will spoil his rep. so there we have all this—a dead stale thing and I feel locked in. [ . . . ]

By the way, I have sold 3 or 4 chapters from the novel to the dirty mags, one of them out the other day; already paid for the others. that’s before I mailed the typescript to Martin, which is like sending one of your children to the fucking tombs. anyhow, I typed the stories right out of the typescript and I didn’t hear any complaints about dangling participles. I really ought to mail this letter to Martin instead of to you, but he’d only come on with the father advice. I even told him once, “Christ, you act like my father.” Then I told him, “Maybe I ought to name you co-author of Post Office.”

“O, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m not changing your style or anything. I want you to come through just as you are. But I assure you that the Germans would never . . .”

“Yes, father.”

“Look, I’ve been phoning you, Bukowski, but you’re never in. Have you been on a toot or playing the horses?”

“Both.”

So there it is, Carl, a rather greasy sticky mess. I have some scenes where flowerpots fall on the guy’s ass while fucking, taken from my life. my wife. a dirty place on a hill with flies and an idiot dog. part of the book. my wife vomiting while chewing the assholes of Chinese snails, myself hollering, “Everybody’s got assholes! Even trees have assholes, only you can’t see them!” so on and so on.

guy phoned me. “I read that bit in the dirty mag. is that from your novel?”

“yeh.”

“Christ, it’s rich! When’s the novel coming out?”

“There are some technical holdups.”

“Tell him to get it out. I can’t wait.”

“I’m afraid,” I tell him, “you’ll have to.” [“told” –ha ha ha! added in handwriting] [ . . . ]

all right, I guess I bitch too much tonight. I’m just some guy from Andernach. which somebody told me is a crappy square city. well, blame Andernach on me too. Andernach is a dangling participle, a dry pussy, a fly in the icewater . . . But I was born there and when somebody says, “Andernach” I grin and say, “yeh.” let them hang me for that. and that’s about that.

[To Robert Head and Darlene Fife]
August 19, 1970

It appears to me that some members of The Women’s Lib. are attempting to impose a censorship upon freedom of expression, a censorship which exceeds even the ambitions of some city, county, state and govt. groups out to practice the same ends and methods. A man can write a story about fucking or even lousy women without being a woman-hater. The sisters must realize that limitations on certain forms of writing will eventually lead to control and limitation of all forms of writing except that chosen by some sanctioned body. A writer must be allowed to touch upon everything. Celine was accused of being anti-semitic and when asked about a certain passage—“The Jew’s heavy footsteps . . . ,” he stated, “I just don’t like people. In this case it happened to be a Jew.” Certain groups are more sensitive to being mentioned than others. Certain people object to being used as models. After Thomas Wolfe’s first novel, he couldn’t go home again. Until later. Until he had been justified and sanctioned by the critics. Until he had made money. Then his people were proud to be in his novels. Creation can’t bear up under restrictions. Tell the sisters to keep their panties kool. we all need each other.

[To Harold Norse]
September 15, 1970

there’s nothing to write. I’m hung up by the balls. the stories come back as fast as I can write them. it’s over. of course, I land with poems. but you can’t pay rent with poems. I’m very down, that’s all. there’s nothing to write. no hope. no chance. finis. Neeli writes that he sees Notes of a Dirty Old Man and Penguin 13 everywhere. now Notes has been translated into the German, got a good review in Der Spiegel—German Newsweek—circulation one million, but for all that, my stuff might as well have been written by Jack the Ripper. very difficult to go on. first check in 2 months today—a lousy $50. story for a dirty magazine about a guy in a nuthouse who climbs the wall, gets on a bus, pulls a woman’s tit, jumps off, goes into drugstore, grabs a pack of smokes, lights up, tells everybody he’s God, then reaches over, lifts a little girl’s dress and pinches her butt. guess that’s my future. finis finis finis. Hal, I’m down. can’t write.

[To Lafayette Young]
October 25, 1970

[ . . . ] I have to drink and gamble to get away from this typewriter. Not that I don’t love this old machine when it’s working right. But knowing when to go to it and knowing when to stay away from it, that’s the trick. I really don’t want to be a professional writer, I wanna write what I wanna write. else, it’s all been wasted. I don’t want to sound holy about it; it’s not holy—it’s more like Popeye the Sailor Man. But Popeye knew when to move. So did Hemingway, until he started talking about “discipline”; Pound also talked about doing one’s “work.” that’s shit, but I’ve been luckier than both of them because I’ve worked the factories and slaughterhouses and park benches and I know that WORK and DISCIPLINE are dirty words. I know what they meant, but for me, it has to be a different game. it’s just like a good woman: if you fuck her 3 times a day, 7 days a week, it usually isn’t going to be much good. everything has to be set. of course, I remember one, it worked that way with her. of course, we were drinking wine and starving and had nothing else to do except worry about death and rent and the steel world, so it worked with us. (Jane.) but now I’m so old and ugly and the girls seldom come around anymore, so it’s horses and beer. and waiting. waiting on death. waiting on the typewriter. it’s easy to be smartass and brilliant when you’re 20. I wasn’t because I was always rather subnormal in my way. now I’m stronger and weaker, but now with the blade against my throat, my choice OR not, it’s there, very much. and I haven’t loved life very much; mostly it’s been a very dirty game. born set up to die. we’re nothing but bowling pins, my friend. [ . . . ]

Guy Williams tried to pump the English dept. for funds for a reading. Auden getting $2,000. others usually get 3 to 500. poor Williams. he musta caught a wagonload of shit. the English dept. didn’t want Bukowski. o.k., maybe they’re right. I got two “d’s” in English at L.A. City College. anyhow, Williams got $100 from the Art dept. funds to put me on a poetry reading! I hope it doesn’t jam him up. believe I’ve told you that readings are the purest of sweating hells for me, but I slipped myself out on the hustle trip when I laid down those god damned letters in the post office and nobody’s going to pay the rent for me because I’d rather lay around all day, drink beer and listen to Shostakovich, Handel, Mahler and Stravinsky. so, I read. my last reading, Cal State Long Beach, I vomited first, then read with drops of sweat dripping down on the table, which I wiped away with my fingertips. but there’s another part of me that sees it through. Well, if Auden’s worth 2 grand, maybe he’ll teach us something. probably how to be fucked.

    The short story Bukowski discusses below is “Christ with Barbecue Sauce,” published in a tabloid newspaper in 1970.

[To William and Ruth Wantling]
October 30, 1970

[ . . . ] I sent you the story because I thought you both might see. that cannibals can be human too, just as spiders are spiders. I mean, what you need you need, it’s implanted there. morals are merely the democratic or fascistic cling-together of minds that see the same picture, formula, code or whatever. it’s all basic; there’s no argument. good guys don’t suck their own dicks. do they?

the story was taken from a news dispatch which I didn’t see but which somebody told me about while I was drinking with him and his wife. he’s a prof now and I told him it wasn’t worth it, that they’d cut off his balls, not right away but eventually. of course, his wife likes it and I like his wife, which confuses everything. lots of profs I don’t even let in the door; I tell them I have the flu and I usually have, grab their god damn beer, say thanks, sit in the dark and hope for Mozart or Bach or Mahler, sp. Mahler, and drink the shit. where was I? o yeah, the news dispatch. I took the story from there. the way it went, I think, they picked these people up in Texas and as they pulled them over to the side, one of them was just nibbling the last of the meat from the fingerbones. well, I was drinking when I heard this and I thought it was very funny. I mean, yes. you know, babes, I’ve worked in a slaughterhouse twice, and when you see enough bleeding meat everywhere you know that just meat is meat and that meat somehow got trapped, that’s all. now I’m not begging to get caught and roasted and eaten. I’m old but I carry a good piece of steel in my left pocket and unless they catch me drunk or trusting (see Caesar) somebody is going to see a bit of their own blood. where were we? anyhow, I thought it was a very funny story. Cannibals in Texas. I think a lot of M.D.s, surgeons, esp. are cannibals but don’t have the balls to swing all the way over, so they just fuck and snip around. the story, the story. I’m drinking. moiled. lla lllaa, la la, all I tried to do was to tell what made it happen that way and to show that, basically, it was not a CRIME but a FUNCTION caused by SOMETHING.

it’s a humorous story because it admits to all human possibilities without guilt; the humour of it being that we are only taught the dignified conceptions and possibilities of a dreary mathematic called Life.

[To John Martin]
[?November] 1970

Enclosed some hack work. I don’t claim it to be anything else. Now that I’ve got these 4 columns up for Candid Press, let’s see what they do. I don’t mind making a little change writing off the elbow. I feel that I am too old to be destroyed—creatively—it’s ingrained like death, no shaking it off. But, basically, writing is a very hard hustle and I do like to see some $$$$ coming in. Good for the spirit.

Don’t get me wrong. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer. And your help has been a hell of a morale boost. You’ll never know how much. But writing takes discipline like everything else. The hours go by very fast, and even when I’m not writing, I’m jelling, and that’s why I don’t like people around bringing me beer and chatting. They cross my sights, get me out of flow. Of course, I can’t sit in front of the typer night and day, so the racetrack is a good place to let the juices FLOW BACK IN. I can understand why Hemingway needed his bull ring—it was a quick action trip to reset his sights. With the horses, it is the same with me. I have all these people in the bull ring and I must perform the movements. That is why when I lose I take it so hard. First, I can’t afford it; second, I realize that I have made the wrong movements. The horses can be beat if a man makes an art of it, but at the same time, horses eat your leisure time, and that’s what a writer needs. So, I try to play everything accordingly—the leisure time when it is proper and the juices flow and the typer hums. when the typer is still, it is back to the bull ring. to test my accuracy on the movements. I guess that I am not very clear here. ah, well.

[To Curt Johnson]
December 3, 1970

The byline leave-off o.k.

Just glad I could curve one by you guys. That $45 check didn’t bounce anyhow and allowed me to get some repairs on my old ’62 Comet to get it running again so I could get around to my chickenshit poetry readings where I read half-drunk and hustle up a few more bucks. Now listening to Haydn. I gotta be crazy. Enjoyed writing the story, though. Read in the paper where they had caught some cannibals somewhere—Texas I think—and when they pulled them over this gal was just cleaning the meat off the fingers of a hand, nibbling . . . I took it from there.

[To Gerard Belart]
December 4, 1970

[ . . . ] Somebody just gave me a copy of Castle to Castle the other night, so don’t send, but thanks. I’m reading it now. Not up to Journey . . . He’s got a good bitch going in the book but he’s standing too close to himself. It does lack the humour through horror of Journey . . . the truth always makes one laugh especially if it’s a truth put in a certain way and a certain style. But I guess he just got his ass kicked once too often; a man finally bends and breaks and loses that little touch . . . great Art is pure ranting in a golden cage. Here Celine just rather throws spoiled apples at us and bits of snot. Still, on the other hand, if Castle had been written by anybody but Celine, I would have said, “Say here, look, this isn’t bad at all!” But it’s like with Beiles—you compare only the best to the best. You can’t help it. Once a man has leaped 18 feet straight up into the air and then comes back and only leaps 13 feet, it’s just not enough for us.

[To Norman Moser]
December 15, 1970

Well, we’ve all come through our bits or we’re dead. Or we’re living and dead—“this man’s dead life / that man’s life dying /” Spender the Steven when he was going good . . . Now, hell, I’ve lost that thing you sent me, asked me to write something about something, so I’ve got to coast through in the form of a personal letter. Do with it what you like. We’ve come a long way, or have we?—since I laid that ten or twenty on you when you had the sleeping bag and your sheaf of poems, and I said that this poem was all right and that I didn’t care for that one, and the guy picked out one of your worst and said, “Now, this is a poem . . .” I didn’t understand that at all, and I guess we were drinking, and it all came down around that poem, you and the guy railing, and then he booted you out, and I remember your tears . . . your wrapping notebooks and dirty stockings all up with rope. It was sad, hell yes, it was sad. and we went down the stairway together and you said, “Bukowski, I don’t have any place to stay.” And I said, “Look, kid, I’m a loner. I can’t stand people, good people or bad people; I’ve got to be alone . . . Christ, get yourself a room . . .” and I slipped you a bill and ran away into the night. Bukowski, the great understander was a coward. Bought you off, I did. Just to be alone with my own bones. You looked more comfortable the last time I saw you, after my poetry reading at U[niversity of] N[ew] M[exico], even though I was a bit drunk you looked, I noticed, comfortable and calm enough, and you mentioned the old days, the bill I had slipped into your hand, and so it was a bit strange and funny there, so many miles and years from where it had first happened, both of us older, especially me, and both of us still alive. well.

So getting back to the sheaf mailed me and some questions asked or pondered or whatever . . . of course, these are monumental times . . . all our times have been monumental because each man’s life is, 1970, 1370, 1170 . . . Of course, there’s little doubt that the pitch has been stepped-up. There is the possibility that for the first time in history we are not in a war of nation against nation but color against color—White, Black, Brown, Yellow. There’s a fierceness in the streets, a hatred. The trouble with the White race is that too many of them hate each other; this is true in other races but not to our degree. We lack the cohesion of Brotherhood. The only thing we have is a certain terrible brain power and cleverness and the ability to fight at the proper time, the ability to out-trick, out-think, and even out-gut the opposition. No matter how much the White man may hate himself, he is simply gifted, but it may be ending for one reason or another. . . . Spengler’s The Decline of the West, written so many years ago . . . the signs are showing . . . Either Whitey’s finally got to get some SOUL or all his cleverness will be just so much spilled jism . . .

Perhaps this wasn’t what your sheaf was speaking of anyhow. I’ve had too many drunken nights and depressive days since I received it. And I always lose everything—jobs, women, ballpoint pens, fistfights, requests for grants from The National Foundation of the Arts, so forth . . . where was I?

Oh yes, I must say, anyhow, that it is dangerous for a poet to pose as prophet, a poet/writer to pose as prophet. Here in the U.S. most serious writers write for many years before they are heard from or recognized, if ever. Unfortunately, many damn fools are recognized because their minds are close to the public mind. Generally a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation, so therefore he starves, suicides, goes mad, and is only recognized if portions of his work are somehow found later, much later, in a shoebox or under the mattress of a whorehouse bed, you know.

All right, then. Let’s say a great U.S. writer finally makes it . . . meaning that he will finally not have to worry about paying the rent and will even go to bed with a pretty fair-looking hunk of woman now and then. Most of them have endured (the writer not the woman) anywhere from 5 to 25 years of non-recognition—and when they finally get their bit of recognition, they can’t control it. Ape? Hell, yes! This t.v. station? o.k? whatcha want me to talk about? yeah, I’ll talk. Whatta ya wanna know about? World history? The meaning of Man? Ecology? The Population Explosion? The Revolution? Whatcha wanna know? Life mag photographer? Sure, let him in!

Here’s a guy who’d been drinking cheap wine in a small room for 15 years, had to walk down the hall to the bathroom to take a crap. And when he typed, old ladies beat on their ceilings and floors with broom handles, scaring hell out of him . . .

“Shut it up, you fool!”

Suddenly out of some trick, he’s known . . . His work is banned, or he walked down Broadway with his pecker hanging out during the Santa Claus Parade and they found out he was a poet . . . Anything will do. Talent helps but it is not always necessary. One of the greatest sentences was said, not by a philosopher but by a baseball player who always had trouble keeping his average near .250 . . . Leo Durocher: “I’d rather be lucky than good . . .” This was because Durocher knew that ten or twelve lucky-bounce singles through the infield meant the difference between the minors and the majors.

So you’ve got the good old U.S.A. At this moment there are probably only a dozen writers who can write with verve and the grand fire. Of these, let’s say, two have been recognized (somehow, luck), 8 will go to their graves without ever being published anywhere. The other 2 will be found and dug-up later by some accident of chance.

So what happens when one of the dozen greats finally lucks it into the limelight? Easy. They kill him. He has lived in those small rooms and starved for so long that he believes he deserves everything that is coming to him—so he sells out, trying to fill in the blanks of the lonely years . . .

    “Dear Mr. Evans:

Will you write us something about the Black-White Question or Hippies or Where Are We Going in America Today? Something on that order. You may be quite assured that anything you write will be accepted. We will pay you, upon acceptance, anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 per article depending upon length. We’ve always been admirers of your work . . . By the bye, did you know that one of our associate editors, Virginia McAnally, sat next to you in English II at the University of . . . ?”

So, the man who has kept his style and his energy and his truth strictly within the Art-form is suddenly visited by wealth. He is offered readings at Universities from $5000 plus expenses to 2 grand plus expenses plus whatever he wishes to fuck if he is still sober enough to do so after the reading or after the party . . . It is most difficult to a man who has been hated by his landlady in an 8 dollar a week room to turn away from the easy way. Where before he had been a pure Artist saying it properly out of pain and madness and truth, now everybody is willing to listen to his babble when he no longer has anything to say. A name. A name! That’s all they want. And a beard if possible. The American Artist, so far as I know, with the exception of Jeffers and Pound, has always taken the bait. No names come to my mind immediately. But name-calling proves nothing. It happens! They are tricked and trapped, and, finally, though they don’t realize it, they will be thrown away. Because it was their original energy and truth that enticed the subnormal crowd anyhow . . .

I doubt that this is exactly what you wanted, Norm. I am hooked on my own cod-fish soul and do not claim exceptionality, although I probably have it, say, in my own certain fishy-way. When I’m hired to work as a staff writer for The New Yorker, I’ll let you know. Until then, balls away, bung-ho, and I sit here with all different colors of shoe polish . . . whoever breaks in here first, I’m with him . . . dab it on . . . I’ve got every color, every shade . . . oh wait, there’s one missing . . . oh, shit, I’ve got that already . . .

Luck with your guru issue. I think it’s going to be very dull and pontifical, however . . . all those mouths saying anything and everything. well, you asked for it.