On Writing. Charles Bukowski
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track as if they have fallen out of step. For my money, Frost was always out of step and has gotten away with too much malarkey. And sure, they set him up like a dead dummy in the snow and let him blubber through his dying sight and insight at the inauguration. Very fine, indeed. And any more things like that and I’m going to try and look up a Communist party card or an old black arm band or some queer to flub me off any way he likes. I hope I never get so old that I can no longer remember, but, of course, Frost has always played the favorite, and if he ever did like a 60 to one longshot, he kept his mouth shut. [ . . . ]
There was the time in Atlanta when I could barely see the end of the light cord—it was cut off and there wasn’t any bulb and I was in a paper shack over the bridge—one dollar and 25 cents a week rent—and it was freezing and I was trying to write but mostly I wanted something to drink and my California sunlight was a long ways away, and I thought well hell, I’ll get a little warmth and I reached up and I grabbed the wires in my hand but they were dead and I walked outside and stood under a frozen tree and watched through a warm frosty glass window some grocer selling some woman a loaf of bread and they stood there for ten minutes talking about nothing, and I watched them and I said I swear I swear, to hell with it!, and I looked up at the frozen white tree and its branches didn’t point anywhere, only into a sky that didn’t know my name, and it told me then: I do not know you and you are nothing. And how I felt that. If there are gods, their business is not to torture and test us to see if we are fit for the future but to do us some god damned god good in the present. The future’s only a bad hunch; Shakespeare told us that—we’d all go flying there otherwise. But it’s only when a man gets to the point of a gun in his mouth that he can see the whole world inside of his head. Anything else is conjecture, conjecture and bullshit and pamphlets.
[To Jon Webb]
March 25, 1961
[ . . . ] what bothers me is when I read about the old Paris groups, or somebody who knew somebody in the old days. They did it then too, the names of old and now. I think Hemingway’s writing a book about it now. But in spite of it all, I can’t buy it. I can’t stand writers or editors or anybody who wants to talk Art. For 3 years I lived in a skid row hotel—before my hemorrhage—and got drunk every night with an x-con, the hotel maid, an Indian, a gal who looked like she wore a wig but didn’t, and 3 or 4 drifters. Nobody knew Shostakovich from Shelley Winters and we didn’t give a damn. The main thing was sending runners out for liquor when we ran dry. We’d start low on the line with our worst runner and if he failed—you must understand, most of the time there was little or no money—we’d go a little deeper with our next best man. I guess it’s bragging but I was top dog. And when the last one staggered through the door, pale and shamed, Bukowski would rise with an invective, don his ragged cloak and stroll with anger and assurance into the night, down to Dick’s Liquor Store, and I conned him and forced him and squeezed him until he was dizzy; I would walk in in big anger, not beggary, and ask for what I wanted. Dick never knew whether I had any money or not. Sometimes I fooled him and had money. But most of the time I didn’t. But anyhow, he’d slap the bottles in front of me, bag them, and then I’d pick them up with an angry, “Put ’em on my tab!”
And then he’d start the old dance—but, jesus, u owe me such and such already, and you haven’t paid anything off in a month and—
And then came the ACT OF ART. I already had the bottles in my hand. It would be nothing to walk out. But I’d slap them down again in front of him, ripping them out of the bag and shoving them toward him, saying, “Here, you want these things! I’ll take my god damned business somewhere else!”
“No, no,” he’d say, “take them. It’s all right.”
And then he’d get out that sad slip of paper and add onto the total.
“Lemme see that,” I’d demand.
And then I’d say, “For Christ’s sake! I don’t owe you this much! What’s this item here?”
All this was to make him believe that I was going to pay someday. And then he’d try to con me back: “You’re a gentleman. You’re not like the others. I trust you.”
He finally got sick and sold his business, and when the next one came in I started a new tab . . .
And what happened? At eight o’clock one Sunday morning—EIGHT O’CLOCK!!! gd damn it—there was a knock on the door—and I opened it and there stood an editor. “Ah, I’m so and so, editor of so and so, we got your short story and thought it most unusual; we are going to use it in our Spring number.” “Well, come on in,” I’d had to say, “but don’t stumble over the bottles.” And then I sat there while he told me about his wife who thought a lot of him and about his short story that had once been published in The Atlantic Monthly, and you know how they talk on. He finally left, and a month or so later the hall phone rang and somebody wanted Bukowski, and this time it was a woman’s voice, “Mr. Bukowski, we think you have a very unusual short story and the group was discussing it the other night, but we think it has one weakness and we thought you might want to correct the weakness. It was this: WHY DID THE CENTRAL CHARACTER BEGIN TO DRINK IN THE FIRST PLACE?”
I said, “Forget the whole thing and send the story back,” and I hung up.
When I walked back in the Indian looked up over his drink and asked “Who was it?”
I said, “Nobody,” which was the most accurate answer I could give.
[To John William Corrington]
April 21, 1961
It is evident that many of our present day editors still go by thumb of rulebook on what has preceded them. The sanctuary of the rule means nothing to the pure creator. There is an excuse for poor creation if we are dithered by camouflage or wine come down through staring eyes, but there isn’t any excuse for a creation crippled by directives of school and fashion, or the valetudinarian prayer book that says: form, form, form!! put it in a cage!
Let’s allow ourselves space and error, hysteria and grief. Let’s not round the edge until we have a ball that rolls neatly away like a trick. Things happen—the priest is shot in the john; hornets blow heroin without arrest; they take down your number; your wife runs off with an idiot who’s never read Kafka; the crushed cat, its guts glueing its skull to the pavement, is passed by traffic for hours; flowers grow in the smoke; children die at 9 and 97; flies are smashed from screens . . . the history of form is evident. I am the last to say we can start with zero, but let’s get out of 8 or 9 and upward into 11. We may repeat—as we have been doing—about what is true, and have, I suppose, been doing it quite well. But I would like to see us scream a little more hysterically—if we are men enough—about the untrue also and the unformed and the never-to-be-formed. Really, we must let the candle burn—pour gasoline on it if necessary. The sense of the ordinary is always ordinary, but there are screams from windows too . . . an artistic hysteria engendered out of breathing in the necropolis . . . sometimes when the music stops and leaves us 4 walls of rubber or glass or stone, or worse—no walls at all—poor and freezing in the Atlanta of the heart. To concentrate on form and logic, “the turning of the phrase” seems imbecility in the midst of the madness.
I can not tell you how much the careful boys rip me naked with their planned and worked-over creations. Creation is our gift and we are ill with it. It has sloshed about my bones and awakened me to stare at 5 a.m. walls. And musing leads to madness like a dog with a rag doll in an empty house. Look, says a voice, into and beyond terror—Cape Canaveral, Cape Canaveral has nothing on us. hell, jack, this is wise-time: we must insist on camouflage, they taught us that—gods coughed alive through the indistinct smoke of verse. Look, says another voice, we must carve from fresh marble . . . What does it matter, says a third, what does it matter? the light yellow mamas are gone, the garter high on the leg; the charm of 18 is 80, and the kisses—snakes darting liquid silver—the kisses have stopped. no man lives the magic long . .