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INTRODUCTION

Charles Bukowski on Writers and Writing

David Stephen Calonne

Although many modern authors have made writing itself a central theme in their works—“metafiction” is a ubiquitous example—Charles Bukowski was particularly obsessive in defining himself constantly as a writer in his texts while simultaneously questioning what this might signify: he exists in a purely literary universe that spins out of and around the idea of writing. Experience exists in order to be turned into poetry and prose, but he also is constantly mocking himself and the pretensions of the “artist.” In The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, he tells us: “Old Writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into computer screen and writes about life. How holy can we get?”—a scene masterfully portrayed by R. Crumb.¹ The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing presents a variety of Bukowski’s introductions and essays on authors, explorations of his poetics, and other samples of the ways he continually incorporates writerly themes in his fiction.

The earliest work included here—Bukowski’s 1957 story “A Dollar for Carl Larsen”—is an example of his experimentation with combining fiction and illustration: he submitted several “graphic fictions” to Whit Burnett’s celebrated Story magazine. While it ostensibly treats an encounter with a “big blonde” at the racetrack, the tale begins and ends with mysterious literary, extra-textual allusions. The epigraph reads: “dedicated to Carl Larsen, owed to Carl Larsen, paid to Carl Larsen,” and at the close we are told: “I thought about Carl Larsen down at the beach rubbing the sand from between his toes and drinking stale beer with Curtis Zahn and J.B. May. I thought about the dollar I owed Larsen. I thought maybe I’d better pay it. He might tell J.B.” Larsen was actually the publisher of Existaria, a little magazine in Hermosa Beach, Southern California, hence the “sand from between his toes”; three Bukowski poems appeared in the September/October 1957 issue. Later Larsen would launch Seven Poets Press, which published Bukowski’s Longshot Pomes for Broke Players (1961).² Readers are left to speculate that Bukowski may have owed money to Larsen, perhaps for a subscription to Existaria. In any case, it is noteworthy that the intertextuality here to the little magazines is brought directly into the narrative, indicating Bukowski’s later practice of constantly foregrounding the fact that for him, reality exists in order to be turned into literature. Another person mentioned—Curtis Zahn (1912–1990)—had been incarcerated for a year as a conscientious objector against WWII and was a journalist and playwright; John Boyer May (1904–1981) was the editor of Trace magazine—which began as a little magazine directory in 1951 in Los Angeles—until 1970.³ Bukowski submitted several letters/brief essays to Trace, which was extremely important for him during his early career because this directory provided outlets to which he would send his poetry.

Bukowski also produced a number of literary “manifestoes,” and “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way”—first published in Tony Quagliano’s Small Press Review in 1973—is one the strongest essays in this genre, in which Bukowski explores the connections between daily life and the transformation of experience into poetry.⁴ And in his several introductions to fellow poets’ works, he often takes the opportunity not only to praise the author, but also to adumbrate further aspects of his own poetics. For example, in his introduction to Doug Blazek’s Skull Juices, Bukowski declares:

It is not easy to realize that you are dying in your twenties. It is much easier not to know that you are dying in your twenties as is the case with most young men, almost all young men, their faces already oaken slabs, shined puke. They only imagine that death might happen in some jungle war of nobody’s business. Blazek can see death and life in a shabby piece of curling wallpaper, in a roach wandering through the beercans of a tired and sad and rented kitchen. Blazek, although he would be the last to realize it and is not conscious of it at all, is one of the leading, most mangling, most lovely (yes, I said, “lovely”)! Sledges of the new way— The Poetic Revolution. It is difficult to say exactly when the Revolution began, but roughly I’d judge about 1955, which is more than ten years, and the effect of it has reached into and over the sacred ivy walls and even out into the streets of Man. Poetry has turned from a diffuse and careful voice of formula and studied ineffectiveness to a voice of clarity and burnt toast and spilled olives and me and you and the spider in the corner. By this, I mean the most living poetry; there will always be the other kind.

In announcing a new “Poetic Revolution,” which he dates as beginning in the mid-Fifties—interestingly, about the time Allen Ginsberg’s Howl appeared—Bukowski is also describing the so-called “Meat School” of poetry which began to loosely coalesce around him with the appearance of Blazek’s Ole magazine and with which poets William Wantling and Steve Richmond were associated. In Ole Anthology (1967), Blazek declares the rationale for the new poetry:

But remember, there are still things to celebrate & the best celebration is expressed in song & the logical extension of song is a shout. So, don’t be timid. If you still care, if that goddamned sun strikes you in the eye right & you feel jubilant, THEN SHOUT! Put your teeth into those words. Lift some weights. Get that blood to cooking. Sneak in a peek between your crotch & see if you still have hair there. If there is hair, say there is hair. Don’t hide the balls either. If there are balls then include the balls & make them look like balls, know they are balls. POETRY WITH BALLS! POETRY THAT IS DANGEROUS! MEAT POETRY! Juice to make the ears jump . . . SOMETHING! as Bukowski says.⁵

Although Bukowski himself never acknowledged being either a founder or member of such a movement, it is clear that both he and the poets he inspired attempted to loosely formulate an aesthetic position which distinguished them from the other “schools” of American poetry: Confessional, Black Mountain, Deep Image, New York, Objectivist, Imagist.

Another distinguishing feature of Bukowski’s autobiographical prose/fiction is its structure as an extended roman à clef. Fellow writers continually appear under different names and he settles scores with them—as D.H. Lawrence often did in his satirical portraits of friends and acquaintances—while also often portraying himself in the worst possible light. For example, “Tony Kinnard” is Kenneth Patchen, and although the story carried a disclaimer— “Note: There is no intent to hurt or malign living persons with this story. I am sincere when I say this. There is enough hurt now. I doubt that anything happened as happened in this story. The author was only caught in the inventiveness of his own mind. If this is a sin, then all creators of all times have sinned . . . c.b.”—Kenneth Rexroth was reportedly infuriated by the tale, vowing that he would cause physical injury to Bukowski were they ever to meet.⁶ Bukowski’s relationship with another poet—William Wantling, here named “Jim”—forms the background of the story involving the woman “Helen,” actually Ruth Wantling, the poet’s widow. Bukowski picks Helen up at the airport and then spends several odd days and nights in boorish emotional combat with her. Again, Bukowski describes his own boorish behavior as he attempts to get Helen into bed. Yet another example is the story about “June” and “Clyde,” editors of the magazine Dustbird—clearly Jon and Louise “Gypsy Lou” Webb, editors of The Outsider and publishers of two Bukowski poetry collections, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963) and Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965).⁷ Here again he makes a pass at Gypsy Lou, another widow of a close friend. In other stories not included in this volume, John Bryan—editor of Open City—is pilloried, as is Harold Norse. Clearly, Bukowski lavishly criticizes others, but he also holds himself up for ridicule. Like Henry Miller, he enjoys magnifying his faults and madness, delighting in caricatures of sins of all kinds.

During the early 1970s, Bukowski’s fame increased following the premiere of Taylor Hackford’s documentary on public television and his readings in San Francisco. Linda King figures in the story describing his reading at City Lights: here literary figures again proliferate as we find allusions to Ginsberg, McClure, and Ferlinghetti. Furthermore, a story dealing with the early days of his relationship with Linda King—some of which reappears in Bukowski’s novel Women (1977)—is entirely composed and shaped within a literary framework. The tale begins with an allusion to W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and to the composition of Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office; he then meets Linda at a poetry reading. King has read Bukowski’s writings about women and critiqued them; they write letters to each other; he writes a poem about her; and finally writes the story itself. In fact, several of the most important women in Bukowski’s life were connected to him through his writing. Barbara Frye was editor of Harlequin, where his early work was published; Frances Smith was herself a poet who became curious about him after reading his work; Linda Lee Beighle also knew of Bukowski through his writings and met him for the first time at a poetry reading.

After quitting his job at the post office, Bukowski began to earn his living by giving poetry readings, as well as from his royalties, book sales, and writing for periodicals. His account describing two readings at university campuses, which appeared in Candid Press, December 20, 1970, opens with a bravura non-stop paragraph containing not a single period: “I swung three deep out of Vacantsville, like bursting out of a herd of cow, and next thing I knew we had set down, the bird burst its stupid stewardesses, and I was the last man out, to meet a teacher-student in a shag of yellow and he said, you, Bukowski, and there was something about his car needing oil . . .” and the energetic sentence continues unimpeded on its way. Several of our selections depict him in a typical scenario: arriving on a college or university campus, drinking, giving his reading, and ending up in bed with a usually admiring female. Again the role of “writer” is both celebrated and lampooned as he exaggerates, jokes, and gives comical answers to ponderous questions: “I mean, I write poems, stories, novels. The poems are basically true, the rest is truth mixed with fiction. Do you know what fiction is? . . . Fiction is an improvement on life.” The poetry reading becomes the scene of raucous insults and the post-reading party provides opportunities for the lofty poetic impulse to be brought back down to one of its purposes: the song, like a bird’s, to attract a female.

Bukowski the journalist and book reviewer is also represented in these selections. In one of his earliest columns for the Los Angeles Free Press, on March 17, 1967—“Bukowski Meets a Merry Drunk”—the narrator reveals at the close that his “little talk” with the “merry drunk” might appear in the LAFP.⁸ In his essay concerning the Rolling Stones, we can see Bukowski the journalist at work. He also reviewed a Rolling Stones concert in “Jaggernaut,” an essay published in Creem: here he narrates the same event but takes a different approach, dramatizing the experience from a fresh angle.⁹ This is of course his method as an autobiographical writer: he constantly tells and retells his life history from a variety of viewpoints throughout his prose and poetry. Bukowski describes his adventures writing for erotic magazines, describing a trip to an adult bookstore where he is nonplussed by the sophomoric level of the content of these productions, while in “Politics and Love,” he depicts a hapless journalist sent to interview a violent South American dictator.

Ernest Hemingway returns like a leitmotif throughout Bukowski’s work. In his “Introduction” to Horsemeat, Bukowski points out that “Hemingway liked the bullfights, right? He saw the life-death factors out there. He saw men reacting to these factors with style—or the other way. Dostoevsky needed the roulette wheel even though it always took his meager royalties and he ended up subsisting on milk.” This theme returns in a seminal essay “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way,” a central document of Bukowski’s poetics in which he speaks of the centrality of the struggle of the horserace as metaphor for the act of creation. In the preface to one of his early plays, William Saroyan—an influence on Bukowski and an author to whom he frequently alludes—noted that the writer “must put his inner force, and the inner force of all living and all energy into the contest with non-existence. He simply must do so.”¹⁰ For Bukowski, Saroyan’s “contest with non-existence” is the horserace, which confronts him with the contingency of chance and luck in their confrontation with free will, determinism, and the mystery of time. In his review of Hemingway’s posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970), Bukowski asserts: “This book does not make it. I wanted this book to make it. I have been pulling for Hemingway to hit one out of the lot for a long time now. I wanted another novel like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or To Have and Have Not. I’ve been waiting a long time. . . .”¹¹ Bukowski admired the later section Islands in the Stream, which he calls “the best part of the book”—the section chasing the German submarine—and presciently remarks that “there’s a movie in this part, and a good one”: the novel was indeed made into a film starring George C. Scott in 1977, seven years after his review appeared. Hemingway was a wounded man whose work charts a continual drama of revealing and concealing his own vulnerability, a clear pattern in Bukowski as well.¹²

Bukowski also produced a number of essays, reviews, and introductions to the work of other writers. As we have seen above, he often used his introductions as places to espouse his own poetics. For example, in his “Introduction” to Jory Sherman’s My Face in Wax, Bukowski writes: “When I run my hand across a page of poetry, I do not want oil or onionskin. I do not want slick bullshit; I want my hand to come away with blood on it. And goddamn you if you are otherwise.” One of Bukowski’s finest essays on poetry is his introduction to Steve Richmond’s Hitler Painted Roses. Richmond earned a law degree from UCLA , worked in his father’s lucrative real estate business in Santa Monica, became friends with Jim Morrison, and published Bukowski in his magazine Earth Rose. Here again, Bukowski declares: “There is just one man thrown upon the earth, belly-naked, and seeing with his eye. Yes, I said ‘eye.’ Most of us are born poets. It is only when our elders get to us and begin to teach us what they teach us that the poet dies.”¹³ Bukowski also composed two essays celebrating d.a. levy, a central poet of the mimeograph revolution who committed suicide. levy’s 7 Flowers Press in Cleveland had published Bukowski’s The Genius of the Crowd (1966), and when levy was indicted for “obscenity,” Bukowski responded with two essays registering strong support of his bravery.¹⁴ Bukowski also admired Canadian poets Irving Layton and Al Purdy as well as the work of actor Macdonald Carey, for whose book Beyond That Further Hill he contributed a “Foreword.” Bukowski’s preface to The Cockroach Hotel by “Willie” requires a brief explanation: “Willie” is William Hageman, with whom Bukowski corresponded and who appears in Bukowski’s short story “Beer and Poets and Talk.”

Bukowski was consistent through the years in his list of favorite writers: Hemingway, Hamsun, Céline, and the early work of William Saroyan. Saroyan appears in “Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb”—first published in Quixote in 1958—along with a fugitive allusion to the Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938). As we see in his review of Islands in the Stream, and in scattered comments throughout the essays and stories presented here, he objected to Hemingway’s lack of humor. Bukowski was also heavily influenced by the Russians Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Gorky, as well as by Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, in which the protagonist wanders the streets of Kristiania on the verge of starvation. The novel opens: “It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him.” Bukowski’s many poems about his hellish encounters with landladies also find an analogue in Hamsun as we learn in Hunger that our starving writer “stole quietly down the stairs to avoid attracting the attention of my landlady; my rent had been due a few days ago and I had nothing to pay her with anymore.”¹⁵ Hunger became a central text for Bukowski, who himself recounts eating candy bars in a floorless tar-paper shack in Atlanta and writing his stories on the edges of newspapers. In his essay “About Aftermath,” we see how Bukowski recounted his early years of starving and writing. William Saroyan’s famous short story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” and Arturo Bandini in John Fante’s Ask the Dust continue this line of sensitive, impoverished writers who provided models for the ways Bukowski would portray himself. Starving leaves no room for self-delusion: one encounters the bedrock self which engenders a bedrock literary style.

In the interviews we also learn about Bukowski’s writing rituals: symphony music on the radio, a bottle of wine and cigarettes nearby. In his interview with Chris Hodenfield, he reveals how much of the screenplay of Barfly was indebted to his times in that famous bar in Philadelphia where “We had a roaring time. And we’d be sitting there, eight guys. And suddenly somebody would make a statement, a sentence. And it would glue everything we were doing together. It would fit the outside world in—just a flick of a thing, then we’d smile and go back to our drinking. Say nothing. It was an honorable place, with a high sense of honor, and it was intelligent. Strangely intelligent. Those minds were quick. But given up on life. They weren’t in it, but they knew something. I got a screenplay out of it and never thought I would, sitting there.” Bukowski often affirmed that he did not want to be taken as a guru, and in his Lizard’s Eyelid interview, he declares: “I have no message to the world. I am not wise enough to lead, yet I am wise enough not to follow.” Bukowski also describes his life during the early seventies when he began work on his second novel:

It’s called Factotum, and it’s about my ten years on the bum. I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, and it’s a pretty good book, but I said “This guy hasn’t been through anything—I can play the piano better than that, as far as experience goes.” He had some rough trips but he didn’t have as many as I did. So, it’ll be an interesting book, I think. We’ll see. So I’ve been making it on my writing the last three years, since I quit the Post Office. It’s all right, I can’t complain. Little checks come in, royalties . . . I’m a professional writer, man, get up at noon, get up at six, get up at three, hell, my life’s my own. But that can get rough too, you know, you have to face yourself, it’s all sitting on you. But it’s lively.

Thus we can see how throughout his work, Bukowski’s first love perhaps was neither women nor alcohol, but rather writing. From his very first short story, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” to his final poems, stories, and essays, he returns obsessively to the primal question: “Old Writer puts on sweater, sits down, leers into computer screen and writes about life. How holy can we get?”

INTRODUCTION NOTES

1. Charles Bukowski, The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1998).

2. On Bukowski and Trace, see David Stephen Calonne, Charles Bukowski (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 42.

3. On Zahn, see Brian Kim Stefans, “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras” in A History of California Literature, ed. Blake Allmendinger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 264-65; James Boyer May, “On Trace” in The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History, eds. Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie (Yonkers, NY: The Pushcart Press, 1978), 376-387. Also see Bill Mohr, “Scenes and Movements in Southern California Poetry” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158; and Bill Mohr, Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 37-9.

4. On Bukowski’s manifestoes, see Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), “Introduction,” xii-xiii.

5. Ole Anthology, 6, ed. Doug Blazek, 1967.

6. Rexroth had reviewed Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart in Its Hands in the New York Times Book Review, calling him a “substantial writer.” He told James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions in a letter of July 25, 1967: “Why don’t you publish [Charles] Bukowski? He is by far the best to come up in recent years, though he’s near as old as you. I think he is great and would love to do an introduction.” See Kenneth Rexroth and James Laughlin: Selected Letters, ed. Lee Bartlett (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 242. On the episode involving Ruth Wantling, see Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), 137-39.

7. On the Webbs, see Jeff Weddle, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007).

8. See Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008), 49-53.

9. Ibid., “Jaggernaut,” 156-61.

10. William Saroyan, “Preface” to Opera, Opera in Razzle-Dazzle (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), 118.

11. Previously, Bukowski had reviewed A.E. Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway (New York: Random House, 1966). See “An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck,” Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook,” 54-56.

12. Hemingway was significant in the work of several poets. See Ron McFarland, “Hemingway and the Poets,” The Hemingway Review, Vol. 20, no. 2, Spring 2001.

13. On Richmond, see Gagaku Reader: The Life and Poetry of Steve Richmond (Smithville, TX: Busted Dharma Books, 2016).

14. The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle: The Selected Poetry & Art of d.a. levy, ed. Mike Golden (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999). Also see Len Fulton, “Anima Rising: Little Magazines in the Sixties” in Print, Image and Sound: Essays on Media, ed. John Gordon Burke (Chicago: American Library Association, 1972), 128-29, 134; Gary Snyder, “The Dharma Eye of d.a. levy” in The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights, 1977). For Bukowski’s other (untitled) essay on levy, see Absence of the Hero, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), 115-16.

15. Knut Hamsun, Hunger, trans. Sverre Lyngstad (New York: Penguin, 1998), 3, 5.