On Writing. Charles Bukowski
Let us . . .
[To Anthony Linick]
April 22, 1959
[ . . . ] I must rush off now to catch the first race. Thank you for lessening the blow on my weakness of grammar by mentioning that some of your college friends have trouble with sentence structure. I think some writers do suffer this fate mainly because at heart they are rebellious and the rules of grammar like many of the other rules of our world call for a herding in and a confirmation that the natural writer instinctively abhors, and, furthermore, his interest lies in the wider scope of subject and spirit . . . Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Saroyan were a few that reshaped the rules, especially in punctuation and sentence flow and breakdown. And, of course, James Joyce went even further. We are interested in color, shape, meaning, force . . . the pigments that point up the soul. But I feel that there is a difference between being a non-grammarian and being unread, and it is the unread and the unprepared, those so hasty to splash into print that they have not reached into the ages for a sound and basic springboard, that I take task with. And most certainly the Kenyon Review school has the edge on us here, although they have gone so far overboard on this point that their creative edge is dulled.
James Boyer May edited and published Trace, where excerpts from Bukowski’s correspondence appeared in several issues.
[To James Boyer May]
Early June 1959
[ . . . ] As to those who have some doubt as to my psychological fitness, I feel this stems from a misconception of my poetic intent. I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize, at times, but this only for the grace and élan of the dance.
The four Bukowski poems published in Nomad 1 were unfavorably reviewed in Trace 32 by William J. Noble (1959).
[To Anthony Linick]
July 15, 1959
Privately now, I would like to comment to you on the Noble Bitch in Trace 32. Why this eltchl, this conservative from the halls of the ikons and holy rollers, the pluckers of rondeaux and smellers of lilies, why this spalpeen should set himself up as a special critic of literary know-how is more than I can dispense with with a quodlibet. I need a stronger antiseptic.
The field boils with literary journals, a great slough and pot-wash of them for those who wish to continue on the descensive, whether they be gnostics, pansies or grandmothers who keep canaries and goldfish. Why these reactionaries cannot be content with their lot, why they must lacerate us with their yellow-knuckled souls, the looming kraken of their god-head, is beyond me. I certainly do not give a magniloquent damn what they print in their journals: I beg no alms for modern verse. Yet they came bickering to us. Why? Because they smell life and cannot stand it, they want to plunge us into the same spume and sputum that has held them daft with the deism of stale 1890 verse.
Mr. Noble believes I am being brash and sexy when I speak of “fumbling with flat breasts.” There is nothing less sexy, though certainly there are things less brash. It is a tragedy of poetry and life, these flat breasts, and those of us who live life as well as write about it must realize that if we outstay our feelings on this we might as well ignore the fall of Rome, or ignore cancer, or the piano works of Chopin. And, “shooting craps with God” will be about the only game left when the air is regaled with purple flashes and the mountains open mouths to roar and the splendid rockets promise only a landing in hell.
Perhaps I’m being indiscriminate in not digesting Mr. Noble. But his perturbation over things that do not seem like alikeness, perhaps points that the selfishness lies elsewhere. I have made the conservative journals with conservative verse but I have not bade them, “come, do my beckoning!” I’ve merely smiled, thought, I’ve landed in the camp of the enemy, laid their broads, played with breasts both flat and deliciously not-so-flat, and stolen away, unmarked, uncaged, still rapacious in nature, stag, snarling and ingenious. I suppose this is what Mr. Noble was referring to when he said “Mr. Bukowski has a talent.” It was very kind of him. And I enjoyed the less-flat breasts.
[To James Boyer May]
December 13, 1959
The other night I was visited by an editor and a writer (Stanley McNail of The Galley Sail Review and Alvaro Cardona-Hine) and the fact that they found me in a disordered and disheveled state is by no means completely my fault: the visit was as unannounced as an H-Bomb attack. My question is this: does a writer become public property to be ransacked without notice upon publication or does he still retain the rights of privacy as a tax-paying citizen? Would it be gross to say that the only eucharist of many an artist is (still) isolation from an only too-fast closing society, or is this simply a desuetude?
I do not feel it is pedantic or ignoble to demand freedom from the opiate of clannishness and leech-brotherhood that dominates many many of our so-called avant-garde publications.
. . . Well, the editor at least had a beer with me, although the writer would have none—so I drank for the both of us. We discussed Villon, Rimbaud and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil. (It seemed a very French night with both of my visitors being very careful to use the French title for B’s works.) We also discussed J. B. May, Hedley, Poots, Cardona-Hine and Charles Bukowski. We impugned and maligned and encircled. Finally fatigued the editor and writer arose. I lied, said it had been nice to see them, the gillies and the morels, the gimblets and the glimpes, the lulling light of Lucifer. They left, and I cracked another beer, clouted with the rakishness of modern American editorialism. . . . If this be writing, if this be poesy, I ask a helminthagogun: I’ve earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I’ll take the encyst and paradise of rejection.
[To James Boyer May]
December 29, 1959
[ . . . ] I have often taken the isolationist stand that all that matters is the creation of the poem, the pure art form. What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper. And if I can see more poetry in the Santa Anita stretch or drunk under the banana tree than in a smoky room of lavender rhyming, that is up to me and only time will judge which climate was proper, not some jackass second-rate editor afraid of a printer’s bill and trying to ham it on subscriptions and coddling contributions. If the boys are trying to make a million, there’s always the market, the lonely widows of the John Dillinger approach.
Let’s not find out some day that Dillinger’s poetry was better than ours and the Kenyon Review was right. Right now, under the banana tree, I’m beginning to see sparrows where I once saw hawks, and their song is not too bitter to me.
1960
[To James Boyer May]
January 2, 1960
[ . . . ] yes, the “littles” are all an irresponsible bunch (most of them) guided by young men, eager with the college flush, actually hoping to cut a buck from the thing, starting with fiery ideals and large ideas, long explanatory rejection slips, and dwindling down, finally, to letting the manuscripts stack behind the sofa or in the closet, some of them lost forever and never