The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

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Charles Bukowski. The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

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Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. At the forefront of American counter-culture, his Beat Generation writing is widely celebrated. He was born in Germany in 1920 to an American soldier father and a German mother and was brought to the United States at the age of three. He grew up in Los Angeles and lived there for the majority of his life.

During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books, including novels such as Factotum, Post Office and Ham on Rye. He died in 1994 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

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“Well, you usually don’t have to live so long. Almost all my drinking buddies and my ladies are dead. The stuff is fairly destructive to the body. I have been in and out of hospitals all my life. But drink has allowed me to survive under conditions that are almost intolerable: rat-infested rooms, months of no income, no jobs. The pressure becomes almost unbearable. One could go mad thinking about his state of affairs. Yet if you are able to get hold of a bottle of wine, your worries decrease for a couple of hours.”

“Was it because of drinking that you couldn’t hold jobs or did being unemployed lead to drinking?”

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