Living on Luck
[To Gerald Locklin]
September 19, 1979
[***] I am honored that you are laying the Piano on some of your students for a week. The idea, of course, might be to let them know that writing needn’t be hard work; the hard work is getting out of bed in the morning or at noon; the hard work is looking at people’s faces in long supermarket lines; the hard work is working for somebody else who is making money using your life’s hours and years. The typing comes easy, especially with the chilled wine in the thermos to the left of the machine. [***]
[To Hank Malone]
October 15, 1979
So you’re still in Highland Park with Sharon—she seemed a good one, might do you well to stick around. I’ve been with one almost 3 years, basically good sort, although some of her ideas on the Hereafter and her particular god seem to me to be pretty assy, her other qualities seem to overcome most of that. She’s the “Sara” of the novel Women. Linda Lee, actually. [***]
No, I didn’t vomit on national tv in France. I just got stinking drunk, said a few things and walked off, pulled my knife on a security guard. Actually it was good luck. All of the newspapers in France gave it a good write-up except one. It went over good with the people of the streets. Went to Nice next day, was sitting getting drunk with Linda Lee at outside table and 6 French waiters waved, then walked up in a line, stood and bowed. I write better of the incident in a book due out in November via City Lights, Shakespeare Never Did This, all about the European trip. Actually, it’s two European trips jammed into one with photos. I think it might be lively writing.
Finished a screenplay called Barfly for Barbet Schroeder and he claims he’s going to do it, although at the moment he’s only pulled in $200,000 for production and it takes maybe 5 times that but he’s good at that sort of thing. Meanwhile, Women and Factotum have a good chance to become movies. Di Fonzi of Italy says he is going to produce it here in America (them) and he seems to mean it. So it’s contract time and lawyers, all that shit. I drink with strange people now, including James Woods of Holocaust and The Onion Field. He wants to be the Chinaski of Barfly and I think he’s a good actor…Meanwhile, I still write 15 poems a week. I’ve got this room upstairs overlooking the harbor and I drink 2 or 3 bottles of wine and tap it out. NYQ just accepted 12 poems. So I’m not finished yet…
Just back from Vancouver. Read to 680 at Viking Inn, standing room only. Drank before reading and 4 bottles of red wine during. Got back to hotel, fell and cracked my head open real damn good on the heater. Probably my best poem of the night. [***]
[To John Martin]
October 25, 1979
It takes about two weeks to get over one of those readings. I don’t understand how the poets can go on reading, some of them giving two or three readings a month…Yes, I know how they can do it: vanity. And also, lack of energy: when they read they sound as if they were lisping into teacups.
Back at the track, trying to forget all that nonsense. I play the horses like the average man plays chess or maybe like an extra average man plays chess. I know all the traps, bad plays, panic plays. I’ve only had time to attend the meet 6 days, won 5, lost one day. I bet moderately. I’ve averaged about $90 profit a day. I suppose if I were a desperate man playing for the rent and the baby food I would lose. But going to the track, making my bets, following my knowledge, this teaches me movement. A cutting through the fog. I can understand why Hemingway went to the bullfights. There is death at the track too and there is life and sometimes victory. All the women I have known have been incensed with my horseplaying. They think it is very foolish and when they attend the races with me they become angry because I usually win and they usually lose. The problem is that they don’t put any effort into the game, they are listless and distracted. And it’s strange that most of them believe in some kind of God. That doesn’t take any effort either. At the track one must overcome a 15 percent take.
Well, it’s been about 20 years since my first book, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail was published when I was 40. I think it’s been a good twenty years of creation and I think it’s still coming. And even if it should stop now, I’d feel particularly lucky. And I was lucky when the Sparrow came by and you printed my stuff when it wasn’t particularly literary, you know what I mean. I’m sure you’ve heard plenty about it from some quarters. So it’s been a good show. Let them rage, let them weep, let them bitch. o.k.
Poems enclosed.
[To Carl Weissner]
November 9, 1979
[***] Back from Canadian reading. Took Linda. Have video tapes of the thing in color, runs about two hours. Saw it a couple nights back. Not bad. Much fighting with the audience. New poems. Dirty stuff and the other kind. Drank before the reading and 3 bottles of red wine during but read the poems out. Dumb party afterwards. I fell down several times while dancing. They got me on the elevator back at the hotel and I kept hollering for another bottle. Poor Linda. Afterwards in hotel room, kept falling. Finally fell against the radiator and cracked a 6 inch gash in skull. Blood everywhere. Hell of a trip. [***] Nice Canadian people who set up reading, though. Not poet types at all. All in all, a good show.
Thanks for sending rundowns on monies. Have rec. all. All is well. Mortgage half paid for. I figure if I get this place paid I can make a stand here after the talent diminishes and they start closing in. It’s a great place, Carl. I wish your gang were here in that downstairs bedroom. You’d all like the harbor, and the people. San Pedro and Mannheim are my two favorite places. [***]
[To A. D. Winans]
December 29, 1979
I don’t see how you’ve stood the little mag game as long as you have, but no, I can’t read, I don’t know which is worse, that Frisco gang or the so-called New York School. [***]
It’s not true, as per rumor, that I have purchased a sports car; it’s a 1979 BMW and now it is in my poems instead of the 69 Volks. About buying a house, it’s not that easy; I’ve got a mortgage around my neck. Both investments were made to help avoid some of the tax bite out of European royalties. Here in America, if you don’t lay the money off, they take it. I offer no excuses for buying a car or living in a house. Although some may take this as a sign that I am losing my soul, most of these same have been saying for years that I am losing, have lost, my soul. If these would pay as much heed to their typewriters as they did to my soul (or lack of) they might (?) get some work done. [***]
[To John Martin]
December 29, 1979
There won’t be any poems for a little while. It won’t mean I’ve died. Barbet laying some more money on me and I’m going to re-work Barfly a bit. It shouldn’t take too long.
We had one large producer willing to make Barfly into a major motion picture. Only one catch—he wanted to use Chris Christoferson [sic] as Chinaski, and in the part where Chinaski comes back to the room and lays in the dark listing to classical music, he wants Chris Chris to break out his guitar and start singing. We told him, no.
1980. It’s been a long war. We’re rushing in fresh troops. Enemy still everywhere.
Happy new 365,
your boy, Henry
Index of Principal Names
Adler, Lottie
Aiken, Conrad
Alta
Altrice, Janice
Andersen, Hans Christian
Arnaz, Desi
Artaud, Antonin
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Baker, Jane Cooney
Ball, Lucille
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Beighle, Linda Lee
Bennett, John
Bergé, Carol
Berryman, John
Blair, Ed
Blatt, Veryl
Blaufus, Bix
Blazek, Douglas
Boccaccio, Giovanni
Bogart, Humphrey
Bonaparte, Napoléon
Boswell, James
Boyle, Kay
Brahms, Johannes
Brandes, Pamela
Braun, Eva
&n
bsp; Bremser, Ray
Bronstein, Lynne
Bruckner, Anton
Buck, Pearl S.
Bukowski, Marina
Bull, Joanna
Burroughs, William
Cagney, James
Camus, Albert
Catullus, Gaius Valerius
Cervantes, Miguel de
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand
Chandler, Raymond
Chatterton, Thomas
Cherkovski, Neeli. See Neeli Cherry
Cherry, Neeli
Ciereaex, Listade
Clark, Tom
Clayborn
Connell, Patricia
Conte, Joseph
Corman, Cid
Corrington, John William
Corso, Gregory
Creeley, Robert
Crews, Judson
Cummings, E. E.
Cynthia
DeFreeze
De la Mare, Walter
DeLoach, Allen
DeMaria, Robert
Derschau, Renate
Di Fonzi
Dickens, Charles
Dickey, James
Dillinger, John
DiPrima, Diane
Dombrowski, Gerard
Dorbin, Sanford
Dos Passos, John
Dostoevski, Fedor
Eliot, T.S.
Eshleman, Clayton
Fante, John
Faulkner, William
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
Fett, Heinrich (uncle)
Fife, Darlene
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Zelda
Flynt, Larry
Ford, Henry
Ford, Robert
Foreman, George
Forrest, Bernard
Fox, Hugh
Franck, César
Freud, Sigmund
Frost, Robert
Fry, Barbara
Fulton, Len
Galiano
Garnier
Gauguin, Paul
Georgakas, Dan
Ginsberg, Allen
Glière, Reinhold Moritzovich
Graham, Billy
Grapes, Marcus
Graves, Robert
Gray, Thomas
Griffith, E.V.
Grosz, George
Hackford, Taylor
Hageman, William
Hammett, Dashiell
Hamsun, Knut
Hardluck Bob
Harrison, Jim
Hayakawa, Barbara
Head, Robert
Hearst, Patty
Hemingway, Ernest
Hemingway, Mary
Hendrix, Jimi
Hirschman, Jack
Hitler, Adolf
Hooton, Harry
Hope, Bob
Ibsen, Henrik
Jack the Ripper
Jeffers, Robinson
Joan of Arc
Johnson, Lyndon B.
Jones, LeRoi
Jones, Tom
Joplin, Janice
Joris
Joyce, James
Juarez, Ebenezer
Kafka, Franz
Katherine
Katz, Bill
Keats, John
Kelly, Robert
Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald
King, Linda
King sisters
Klopp, Karyl
Koertge, Ron
Kosinski, Jerzy
Kristofferson, Kris
Lamantia, Philip
Larouche
Larsen, Carl
Lawrence, D. H.
Laxness, Halldor
Leithauser, Brad (note)
Lincoln, Abraham
Locklin, Gerald
Loewinsohn, Ron
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Lowell, Robert
Lutz
Lytle
Mahak, Orlane
Mahler, Gustav
Mailer, Norman
Malanga, Gerard
Malone, Hank
Maronick, Gregory
Martin, Barbara
Martin, John
Martinelli, Sheri
Marx, Karl
Marx, Zeppo
Matthaei, Renate
Maugham, Somerset
May, James Boyar
McCullers, Carson
McGillan, Tommy
McKuen, Rod
Meltzer, David
Mencken, Henry
Menebroker, Ann
Micheline, Jack
Mike
Miller, Henry
Miller, Larry
Montfort, Michael
Monroe, Marilyn
Moore, Archie
Morley, Christopher
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
Namath, Joe
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nixon, Richard
Norse, Harold
O’Doul, Lefty
Olson, Charles
Orlovsky, Peter
Osterlund, Steve
Oswald, Lee Harvey
Packard, William
Pascal, Blaise
Patchen, Kenneth
Peters, Bob
Peters, Nancy
Picasso, Pablo
Pissarro, Camille
Pitts, Jimmy
Plato
Pleasants, Ben
Plymell, Charles
Polanski, Roman
Pollak, Felix
Potts, Charles
Pound, Ezra
Presley, Elvis
Purdy, A. W.
Quag
Reed, Scott
Reznikoff, Charles
Richmond, Steve
Robson, Bill
Rogers, Will
Roman, Jim
Roosevelt, Franklin D.
Rosenbaum, Veryl. See Veryl Blatt
Ruby, Jack
Sanders, Ed
Saroyan, William
Sartre, Jean Paul
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Schroeder, Barbet
Scott, Walter
Sedricks, Andre
Segal, Erich
Sesar, Carl
Shakespeare, William
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Sherman, Jory
Shostakovitch, Dmitri
Smith, Frances
Smith, Harry
Snyder, Gary
Spock, Benjamin
Stangos, Nikos
Stein, Gertrude
Steinbeck, John
Steiner, George
Stetson, William
Stevens, Wallace
Stone, Oliver
Stravinsky, Igor
Sullivan, Frank
Swastek, Joe
Tate, Allen
Thomas, Dylan
Thomas, John
Thurber, James
Tibbs, Ben
Tolstoy, Leo
Torregian
Truffaut, François
Truman, Harry
Turgenev, Ivan
Vallee, Rudy
Vallejo, César
Vangelisti, Paul
Van Gogh, Vincent
Vaughn, Robert
Vivaldi, Antonio
Wagner, Richard
Wakoski, Diane
Wantling, Ruthie
Wantling, William
Warhol, Andy
Webb, Jon
Webb, Jon and Louise
Webb, Louise
Weissner, Carl
Weissner, Michael
Weissner, Voltrout
West, Linda
Whitaker, James
Whitman, Walt
Wilkofsky, Roth
Williams, Liza
Williams, Williams Carlos
Willie
Winans, A. D.
Winski
Wolfe, Tom
Woods, James
Woolf, Douglas
Yeats, William Butler
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny
Young, Lafayette
Young, N
iki
Zahrnde, Mollie
Acknowledgments
The editor and publisher thank the following institutions for supplying copies of some of the letters in this volume:
University of Arizona, Special Collections
Brown University, Providence, John Hay Library
The University of California, Los Angeles, Special
Collections
The University of California, Santa Barbara, Special
Collections
Centenary College, Samuel Peters Research Library,
Shreveport, Louisiana
The State University of New York at Buffalo, Poetry/
Rare Book Collection
The University of Southern California, Rare Books
Collection
Temple University Library, Special Collections
A section of photographs follows page 138.
About the Authors
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. He was born in Andernach, Germany to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994 at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994).
During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). His most recent books are the posthumous editions of Bone Palace Ballet: New Poems (1997); The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (1998) which is illustrated by Robert Crumb; Reach for the Sun: Selected Letters 1978—1994 (1999); and What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999).