The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

by Charles Bukowski

  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 tarpaper 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,” Th
e 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.

  MANIFESTO

  Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

  I was going to begin this with a little rundown on the female but since the smoke on the local battlefront has cleared a bit I will relent, but there are 50,000 men in this nation who must sleep on their bellies for fear of losing their parts to women with wild-glazed eyes and knives. Brothers and sisters, I am 52 and there is a trail of females behind me, enough for five men’s lives. Some of the ladies have claimed that I have betrayed them for drink; well, I’d like to see any man stick his pecker into a fifth of whiskey. Of course, you can get your tongue in there but the bottle doesn’t respond. Well, haha among the trumpets, let’s get back to the word.

  The word. I’m on my way to the track, opening day at Hollywood Park, but I’ll tell you about the word. To get the word down proper, that takes courage, seeing the form, living the life, and getting it into the line. Hemingway takes his critical blows now from people who can’t write. There are hundreds of thousands of people who think they can write. They are the critics, the bellyachers and the mockers. To point to a good writer and call him a hunk of shit helps satisfy their loss as creators, and the better a man gets the more he is envied and, in turn, hated. You ought to hear them razz and demean Pincay and Shoemaker, two of the greatest jocks ever to steer a horse. There’s a little man outside our local tracks who sells newspapers and he says, “Get your paper, get your info on Shoemaker the Faker.” Here he is calling a man who has ridden more winners than any other jock alive (and he’s still riding and riding well) and here’s this newspaper guy selling papers for a dime and calling the Shoe a fraud. The Shoe is a millionaire, not that that’s important, but he did get it with his talent and he could buy this guy’s newspapers, all of them, for the rest of this guy’s life and into a half-dozen eternities. Hemingway, too, gets the sneers from the newspaper boys and girls of writing. They didn’t like his exit. I thought his exit was quite fine. He created his own mercy killing. And he created some writing. Some of it depended too much on style but it was a style he broke through with; a style that ruined thousands of writers who attempted to use any portion of it. Once a style is evolved it is thought of as a simple thing, but style not only evolves through a method, it evolves through feeling, it is like laying a brush to canvas in a certain way and if you’re not living along the path of power and flow, style vanishes. Hemingway’s style did tend to vanish toward the end, progressively, but that’s because he let down his guard and let people do things to him. But he gave us more than plenty. There is a minor poet I know who came over the other night. He is a learned man, and clever, he lets the ladies support him so you know he’s good at something. He is a very powerful figure of a man growing soft around the edges, looks quite literary and carries these black notebooks around with him and he reads to you from them. This boy told me the other night, “Bukowski, I can write like you but you can’t write like me.” I didn’t answer him because he needs his self-glory, but really, he only thinks he can write like me. Genius could be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way, or even to say a simple thing in a simpler way. Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

  Hemingway studied the bullfights for form and meaning and courage and failure and the way. I go to boxing matches and attend horse races for the same reason. There is a feeling at the wrists and the shoulders and the temples. There is a manner of watching and recording that grows into the line and the form and the act and the fact and the flower, and the dog walking and the dirty panties under the bed, and the sound of the typewriter as you’re sitting there, that’s the big sound, the biggest sound in the world, when you’re getting it down in your way, the right way, and no beautiful woman counts before it and nothing that you could paint or sculpt counts before it; it is the final art, this writing down of the word, and the reason for valor is all there; it is the finest gamble ever arranged and not many win.

  Somebody asked me, “Bukowski, if you taught a course in writing what would you ask them to do?” I answered, “I’d send them all to the racetrack and force them to bet $5 on each race.” This ass thought I was joking. The human race is very good at treachery and cheating and modifying a position. What people who want to be writers need is to be put in an area that they cannot maneuver out of by weak and dirty play. This is why groups of people at parties are so disgusting: all their envy and smallness and trickery surfaces. If you want to find out who your friends are you can do two things: invite them to a party or go to jail. You will soon find that you don’t have any friends.

  If you think I am wandering here, hold your tits or your balls or hold somebody else’s. Everything fits here.

  And since I must presume (I haven’t seen any of it) that I am being honored and criticized in this issue I should say something about the little magazines, although I might have said some of it elsewhere?—at least over a row of beer bottles. Little magazines are useless perpetuators of useless talent. Back in the ’20s and ’30s there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity. One could trace the names from the littles and up through literary history; I mean, they began there and they went up, they became. They became books, novels, things. Now most little magazine people begin little and remain little. There are always exceptions. For instance, I remember first reading Truman Capote in a little named Decade, and I thought here is a man with some briskness, style and fairly original energy. But basically, like it or not, the large slick magazines print a much higher level of work than the littles—and most especially in prose. Every jackass in America pumps out countless and ineffectual poems. And a large number of them are published in the littles. Tra la la, another edition. Give us a grant, see what we are doing! I receive countless little magazines through the mail, unsolicited, un-asked-for. I flip through them. Arid vast nothingness. I think that the miracle of our times is that so many people can write down so many words that mean absolutely nothing, but they can do it, and they do it continually and relentlessly. I put out 3 issues of a little, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. The material received was so totally inept that the other editor and myself were forced to write most of the poems. He’d write the first half of one poem, then I’d finish it. Then I’d go the first half of another and he’d finish it. Then we’d sit around and get to the names: “Let’s see, whatta we gonna call this cocksucker?”

  And with the discovery of the mimeo machine everybody became an editor, all with great flair, very little expense and no results at all. Ole was an early exception and I might grant you one or two other exceptions if you corner me with the facts. As per the better printed (non-mimeo) mags one must grant The Wormwood Review (one-half hundred issues now) as the outstanding work of our time in that area. Quietly and without weeping or ranting or bitching or quitting or pausing, or without writing braggadocio letters (as most do) about being arrested for driving drunk on a bicycle in Pacific Palisades or corn-holing one of the National Endowment for the Arts editors in a Portland hotel room, Malone has simply gone on and on and compiled an exact and lively talent, issue after issue after issue. Malone let
s his issues speak for themselves and remains invisible. You won’t find him beating on your door one night with a huge jug of cheap port wine saying, “Hey, I’m Marvin Malone, I printed your poem Catshit in a Bird’s Nest in my last issue. I think I’m gonna kick me some ass. Ya got anything for me to fuck around here?”

  A vast grinding lonely hearts club of no-talents, that’s what the littles have evolved to, with the editors a worse breed than the writers. If you are a writer seriously interested in creating art instead of foolishness, then there are, at any moment, a few littles to submit to, where the editing is professional instead of personal. I haven’t read the mag that this piece is submitted to but I would suggest, along with Wormwood, as decent arenas: The New York Quarterly, Event, Second Aeon, Joe DiMaggio, Second Coming, The Little Magazine, and Hearse.

  “You’re supposed to be a writer,” she says, “if you put all the energy into writing that you put into the racetrack you’d be great.” I think of something Wallace Stevens once said, “Success as a result of industry is a peasant’s ideal.” Or if he didn’t say that he said something close to that. The writing arrives when it wants to. There is nothing you can do about it. You can’t squeeze more writing out of the living than is there. Any attempt to do so creates a panic in the soul, diffuses and jars the line. There are stories that Hemingway would get up early in the morning and have all his work done at noon, but though I never met him personally I feel as if Hemingway were an alcoholic who wanted to get his work out of the way so he could get drunk.