1985

    The book removed from the Nijmegen library, in the Netherlands, was Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.

[To Hans van den Broek]
January 22, 1985

Thank you for your letter telling me of the removal of one of my books from the Nijmegen library. And that it is accused of discrimination because of the black people, homosexuals and women. And that it is sadism because of the sadism.

The thing that I fear discriminating against is humor and truth.

If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because those who I met were that. There are many “bads”—bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see. If I write of “sadism” it is because it exists. I didn’t invent it, and if some terrible act occurs in my work it is because such things happen in our lives, I am not on the side of evil, if such a thing as evil abounds. In my writing I do not always agree with what occurs, nor do I linger in the mud for the sheer sake of it. Also, it is curious that people who rail against my work seem to overlook the sections of it which entail joy and love and hope, and there are such sections. My days, my years, my life have seen ups and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the “light” and never mentioned the other, then as an artist I would be a liar.

Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them, I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere, in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist.

I am not dismayed that one of my books has been hunted down and is dislodged from the shelves of a local library. In a sense, I am honored that I have written something that has awakened these from their non-ponderous depths. But I am hurt, yes, when somebody else’s book is censored, for that book usually is a great book and there are few of those, and throughout the ages that type of book has often generated into a classic, and what was once thought shocking and immoral is now required reading at many of our universities.

I am not saying that my book is one of those, but I am saying that in our time, at this moment when any moment may be the last for most of us, it’s damned galling and impossibly sad that we still have among us the small, bitter people, the witch-hunters and the declaimers against reality. Yet, these too belong with us, they are part of the whole, and if I haven’t written about them, I should, maybe have here, and that’s enough.

may we all get better together.

[To A. D. Winans]
February 22, 1985

[ . . . ] On quitting your job at 50, I don’t know what to say. I had to quit mine. My whole body was in pain, could no longer lift my arms. If somebody touched me, just that touch would send reams and shots of agony through me. I was finished. They had beat on my body and mind for decades. And I didn’t have a dime. I had to drink it away to free my mind from what was occurring. I decided that I would be better off on skid row. I mean that. It had come to a faltering end. My last day on the job, some guy let a remark fall as I walked by: “That old guy has a lot of guts to quit a job at his age.” I didn’t feel I had an age. The years had just added up and shitted away.

Yeah, I had fear. I had fear I could never make it as a writer, moneywise. Rent, child support. Food didn’t matter. I just drank and sat at the machine. Wrote my first novel (Post Office) in 19 nights. I drank beer and scotch and sat around in my shorts. I smoked cheap cigars and listened to the radio. I wrote dirty stories for the sex mags. It got the rent and also got the soft ones and the safe ones to say: He hates women. My income tax returns for those first years show ridiculously little money earned but somehow I was existing. The poetry readings came and I hated them but it was more $$$. It was a drunken wild fog of a time and I had some luck. And I wrote and wrote and wrote, I loved the banging of the typer. I was fighting for each day. And I lucked it with a good landlord and landlady. They thought I was crazy. I went down and drank with them every other night. They had a refrig. stacked with nothing but quart bottles of Eastside Beer. We drank out of the quarts, one after the other until 4 a.m., singing songs of the 20’s and 30’s. “You’re crazy,” my landlady kept saying, “you quit that good job in the post office.” “And now you’re going with that crazy woman. You know she’s crazy, don’t you?” the landlord would say.

Also, I got ten bucks a week for writing that column “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” And I mean, that ten bucks looked big sometimes.

I don’t know, A. D., I don’t quite know how I made it. The drinking always helped. It still does. And, frankly, I loved to write! THE SOUND OF THE TYPER. Sometimes I think it was only the sound of the typer that I wanted. And the drink there, beer with scotch, by the side of the machine. And finding cigar stubs, old ones, lighting them while drunk and burning my nose. It wasn’t so much that I was TRYING to be a writer, it was more like doing something that felt good to do.

The luck gradually mounted and I kept writing. The women got younger and more demanding. And certain writers began to hate me. They still do, only more so. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t die on that post office stool. Security? Security to what?

[To John Martin]
June 1985

You’ve made a living at it, and mostly have published what you’ve wanted to, perhaps not so much at the beginning when you tended to listen more to “literary” voices who wanted to point you toward “prestige,” but more and more you’ve become the gambler, one who gambles but still tends to win—out of style and knowledge, instinct. What sells is not necessarily good and what doesn’t sell can really be bad, rather than a misunderstood Art-form. There are all manners of this admixture. Running a good show takes an Eye which can separate the bull from the bullshit. You do your work with an energy which boggles the slack, lackadaisical wishes and dreams of those who think things might arrive without the good fight.

They talk you down for making things work when they can’t make things work; their envy is wrought out of their pitiful weakness. You simply go ahead, continue, while they rail at their seeming misfortune which is only brought about by a gross laziness and a licorice stick-like backbone.

You are the publisher, the editor, the script reader, the bill-collector, the publicist, and Christ knows what else, while you listen to the so-called Great Ones moaning and groaning over the telephone about all manners of trivial animosities, the tender two-bit troubles that trouble every living creature but which they feel particularly set-upon because of their very sensitive and chosen, so-called, God-given tenfold genius.

You do your fucking work and you do it well, very well, but what bothers me, even if it doesn’t bother you, is what I consider your almost lack of recognition for what you do, have done, continue to do, relentlessly and with force. I dare say you’ve published a body of literature for almost three decades that stands unsurpassed in the history of publishing in America. Yet, what is said about you? Not that you need it, only that I need it for you. I prefer Champions not to go unnoticed.

Your problem is that in doing your work you have forsaken the time to go to all the cocktail parties and to kiss the asses of the media and university creatures who would boost you into the circle of their dull and death-like prominence.

Don’t worry, the Bomb will be soon enough and if not, the record of your accomplishments will be there, Black Sparrow, you foolish wonderful kind son of a bitch.

    The books Bukowski discusses below are The Road to Los Angeles and The Wine of Youth, both published posthumously by Black Sparrow Press in 1985.

[To Joyce Fante]
December 18, 1985

I’m sorry you asked about John’s book and I have sat about for days and some nights wondering how to answer you and there’s no way I can do it but this way: I didn’t like it or the book which followed.

You know, there is a way of having rancor with style, and there is a way of indulging bitterness with humor but both of these books just made me feel very bad. It’s all right to ravage if your ravage takes courage but if it’s just ravage for the sake of ravage, well, that’s done every day in all of our lives, it happens on the freeways and alleys of our goings and comings and waitings.

John was my main influence, along with Celine and Dostoevsky and Sherwood Anderson, and he wrote some of the most feeling and grace-filled books of our time but I feel that these latter or earlier works would have been better left unpublished. I could be wrong, of course. I am often wrong.

That I was able to meet my hero (if you’ll pardon that term) late in his life and under the most painful conditions, was both a very sad and a very great thing for me. And I hope that the few words that I had with John helped him in the middle of that most terrible hell.

For it all, I will always remember reading Ask the Dust, which I still consider the finest novel written in all time, a novel which probably saved my life, for whatever it is worth.

Nobody is ever on top of their game at all times; in fact, few ever get very close. John did, and more than once. You lived with a very bitter man who overcame his bitterness, finally, with a love that rang and filled and jostled each line into a memorable miracle that said

yes in spite of no

yes because of no

which said

yes yes yes

and continued to say it, even as I met him as he was.

There will never be another John Fante . . .

He was a bulldog with heart, in hell.