Living on Luck

by Charles Bukowski

  Really, Bill, I am sick this morning. Must stop. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  March 1, 1961

  [***] The problem is, Corr, that as we work toward a purer, looser, more holy warmth of expression and creation, the critics are going to have to work a little harder to find out whether it’s water or piss in the holy grail, and even then they might end up wrong. You know the old comic strip joke about the painting hung upside down or etc., well, there’s a lot of practical truth in this. But pure creation will always have its own answer finally, and it will neither be a set of disciplines or undisciplines, it will simply be. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  April 12, 1961

  [***] There are some men who can create with a perception of what they are doing and what is happening not only to them but to those around them. I am not one of those. Sometimes the poem wans on me, everything wans on me. The sense of excitement, of explosion is gone. I have been sent a couple of free journals by editors these last few days and reading through them I am disturbed by the fact that we are all writing pretty much alike. It could well be one man’s voice under 36 different names. I do not care for this at all. I had long ago given up hope of being an extraordinary poet, and most of the time I do not think of myself as a poet at all; but when I do think of it, at least I would like to think I have failed with a more or less individual voice, but it seems as if we have pared everything down to a ghastly likeness. Whether this is caused by a simplification of language, a cutting out of extremes, a sidewalk grammar I don’t know. You can look at the new buildings going up and the old buildings going down. Everything is now a straight line and a square corner. Ornament is gone. It is a reaction. Falsity can breed in ornamentation. But falsity can also breed in the flat voice. Steiner, I believe the name is, says in this quarterly Kenyon Review that we are drifting toward mathematics and away from the word, and to this I must agree. By the way, I know that the Kenyon Review is supposed to be our enemy…but the articles are, in most cases, sound, and I would almost say, poetic and vibrant; the poetry, of course, remains almost unbelievably flat and lifeless. It seems that forever in the university circles we are allowed truth in the article or the discussion, but when it comes down to the old brass tracks [sic] of actual creation we are supposed to take it easy and look the other way. [***]

  In the following, Bukowski defends his earlier favorable mention (in a letter not included here) of an article by Harry Hooton, an Australian poet, in a recent issue of Trace.

  [To John William Corrington]

  April 26, 1961

  [***] Hooton, of course, overstates his case. Why must they be such holy-rollers about everything? Your enemy or the devil might turn out to be a pretty good guy if you could learn his language and drink beer with him and pinch his wife when he goes to the bathroom. He has Yeats “sneering.” Hooton beats a loud drum. Yeats could have told him, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” This is most certainly a “message”…but without preaching; or from the same poem:

  “…what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”

  Yeats died in 1939. [***]

  Eliot, of course, began well, then got fancy with the Four Quartets, took on Catholicism and Criticism, was listened to by everybody, and paled off because he sold too many things at once and was not essentially a fighter or strong enough to stand firm. And yet Eliot did leave us something, perhaps a clearer flowing diction, and if Hooton says he voted with Yeats, that should make him (T.S.) pretty strong. About Stevens, I don’t know. The Kenyon school, of course. Stevens tries very hard to be bright by saying nothing in a manner that would seem to imply something if only you were intelligent enough to understand, but, of course, since you aren’t, you should be god damned glad to god damn read the shape of the words anyhow. Tate is another dry as dust faker who has had no more than one or two toothaches of the soul…and although Hooton did not mention Tate, and it is getting out of bounds to do so, I get out of bounds anyhow. I would never like Tate if I drank beer with him for 40 years or I pinched his wife’s autographed copy of Wallace Stevens.

  To hell with Hooton.

  Give me Conrad Aiken, Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound and Yeats. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  June 8, 1961

  Just got out of jail, I must see judge Friday, 1 p.m. [***] I will be 41 in August and I don’t know whether the courage is gone or what, but the sight of jails that once meant nothing to me now sickens me to the roots. I don’t like people messing with me and closing doors on me and throwing me on the floor with a bunch of other silverfish. A common drunk rap, of course, calls for no shame, just, of course, as murder calls for no shame if you murder the right one, Crime and Punishment be damned. The worst is, this might cause me to lose my job and I have no training of any sort and the job as a job means nothing, of course, only to keep me breathing and eating in order to write a poem. My old girl friend, who was with me, has a knot on her hard Irish head that would have killed the less hardy; believe we were walking down the street and she kept falling and I kept trying to catch her when the fuzz netted us both in their wily civic net. Her landlady finally bailed us out and I guess the reason is that I have been giving her the flirt on the side, kissing her behind the ear and filling it with idle banter. If I were the writer of The Hostage they would have greeted me with a brass band but since I was Charles Bukowski, they threw me in and I sat there and a fat Mexican gave me 2 cigarettes and advice. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it doesn’t matter. Since you are with the Feds you probably will be out in 4 hours.” I hadn’t finished my 2nd cigarette when my name was called, I shoved some cash upon a trusty with slow typewriter fingers and the release was speeded up. Outside I met Irish and hardluck Bob who I’d seen at the track earlier that day. I gave him 7 one dollar bills, tipped the cabby a buck and we sailed across the silken 5 a.m. skies that had no bars and no locks. I gave Frenchy a 50 buck bill (bail money), a kiss behind the ear, and there went my profits from the track. But you were right when you said you somehow had the idea that I was destroying myself or trying to go goofy, but maybe my soul is tough as an Irish head or maybe my luck will hold.

  [To John William Corrington]

  November 17, 1961

  [***] I am soft. Deer I cannot do in. I was riding with this gal in the car and it was Sunday and I was looking for a liquor store and we saw this sign, CHICKEN, and she said, oh, let’s get a chicken, we’ll have a nice roast chicken, and I said sure, and I drove up to the place and they had chicken all right, only it was standing up and it had white feathers, 60 or 70 strong had white feathers and when I walked in a couple of them shit and one of them winked at me and I just stood there and the guy said, yes, a nice chicken, no?…and I turned around and walked out and the gal said, where’s the chicken and I said, hell, they all looked scrawny, you can’t tell what you’re getting with all the feathers, and she said, that’s easy, you just pick em up and feel em with your fingers, and check the eye, get a clear-eyed chicken. Chickens are just like people, if the eye is not clear he is malfunctioning.

  How do you kill ’em? I asked.

  My father used to whirl em, WHIRR, ZIP!!

  Let’s have a banana sandwich, I said.

  I remember the slaughterhouse down where the streetcar turns, and the floors were greasy with blood, green floors, blood has a special smell that will not leave and there is nothing harder to remove than a blood stain, blood is life, and death came on minute after minute but unlike the docs and interns and nurses at the L. A. County General Hospital I could not get used to it, and I did not have a car then and I would get on the streetcar and people would smell the blood on me and look, look, and then go home and eat a porterhouse.

  I am not building a case for the vegetarians who might be too soft for the formula we were conceived in and have to work out of; I will eat meat, only I don’t want to see it hap
pen, not anymore, not once more, I don’t want to hear the sound. When life changes to death in that very small instant it is an explosion against the mind that can never be rebuilt.

  No deershoots, kid, I might really go wacky tying roping the thing across the hood. Guys like Hem would think me queer.

  Although, I don’t know how we got on this. There is a funny story. It was told to me by this person who used to go to group therapy sessions to try to help himself. Played some instrument in symphony orchestra but right now, like me, not doing much, just hanging on. Well, he went to this guy’s house. The guy said, come on, I’ll show you something. I’ve got 2 chickens. You save money. you get ’em when they’re young and grow ’em. I wonder how you kill em? he asked my friend. Well, this guy didn’t know how to kill ’em. He got a hammer and he let them out in the yard and he tried to kill both of them at once. It was a mess. The chickens would not die. He kept hitting them with the hammer. The noise, you know, the blood, one eye hanging out on a long string, a beak all twisted back into the head and the thing going on, running, and the other one just standing there, the hammer coming down on the head and slipping off and the thing just standing there waiting. Finally, my friend, out of mercy, he did not help but he got excited and started giving instructions and finally the job was done, and then the guy took the 2 chickens and threw them in the garbage. His girl friend left him and never spoke to him again and she never spoke to the one who gave the instruction either. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  November 26, 1961

  [***] Yes, killing a chicken with a hammer is imbecile, although I doubt this person was sadistic, simply not a clear thinker, the way the story was told to me. [***]

  And don’t think that when I walk into a butcher shop that I don’t know. A voice always says to me, “They have done it for you.” It costs me in several ways, but I don’t think becoming a week-end huntsman would spring me clear. Old lady Hemingway said she felt or liked to feel “chic” when she made the kill. I don’t think much of old lady Hemingway, she read too many of the old man’s books. No more than we have. But believed them. But as I said in one of my poems now floating around, it seems sport to knock Hemingway now, so I will lay off for a while. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  December [?3], 1961

  the hem can be over-evaluated like anything else, and while he understood the mathematics of life and cut it fine, bravado and hardfire, there was essentially some music missing, and what he cut out in his figuring as unnecessary is what turned the shotgun in on him. He wrote well early and then got burned in the Spanish war thing. Won’t these fuckers ever learn that politics is the biggest whore, the biggest hole any fine man can fall into? Hem built an image and had to write up to the image. It’s all right to be tough cob but it doesn’t wear well when you get into your fifties. It’s better then to have some soft culture, something like the organ works of Bach, some Vivaldi, something going for you that may have a knife-edge but still a screen for softness to enter. You are still young, though a very wise young, and Hem is good to you like your 71/2’ barrel with 20% more reach n’ yr 6 shots in 5 inch square at 50 to 60 feet firing rapid clip. There is beauty in this, I can see beauty in this, and I can also see that you are nobody to mess with if you get pissed. I hope I don’t sound like an old man preaching. I’ve gone the route. You should’ve seen my fight with Tommy McGillan in a Philadelphia alley in 1948. They’re still talking that one and they wouldn’t serve me for 3 days because I busted their hero. Faulkner? Faulkner is a cutie, he left jabs, jabs, jabs, and an occasional hook. But who am I, shit, to say? I have never written a novel, don’t feel like writing a novel, although if I live to be fifty I will try one. I made myself this promise once sitting in a bar. I figured then that I would never live to be fifty so it was a soft promise and I was not too worried about it. I still may not have much to worry about, ah so many parts burned out and missing, including good fat portions of the mind, but mainly there is some singing left, the gut is soft and the sun comes down.

  [***] Of course we all fail and it doesn’t take a Faulkner to say it, it would be short-peckered wisdom indeed if we thought we could pull the curtain on God and expose his kisser…or the small pile of bleached bones. All we can do is work against the tide as best we may. I think that’s why the horses interest me: the beauty of loss, the working against the irresistible mathematics of death. You can piss on death and forget it until it finds you. Most people do this. That is why they cry at funerals. [***]

  · 1962 ·

  [To John William Corrington]

  January 12, 1962

  yr damned intelligent well written letters are backing me off into some back closet fulla mops and old Esquires but I carry on because, as I once decided, coming out of a St. Louis basement where I was getting 55 cents an hour for packing ladies’ dresses into boxes for shipment and the fat little Jew smiled his yellow-face smile because I was in his cage and he had a 12 room house and a wife more beautiful than I cd even have in my dreams

  I decided that I was losing

  not the money part

  fuck that

  but if I may be corny—the soul part that I was packing away in boxes with the ladies’ dresses—and since I was losing this, wt could I do besides start a ladies’ dress shop myself—which even if I could wd be very obnoxious—I decided

  that since I was losing

  I COULD EITHER GIVE UP AND LOSE IT ALL

  OR LOSE ALMOST EVERYTHING

  BUT SAVE

  SAVE THE LITTLE BIT THAT WAS LEFT.

  this does not sound like much; it does not seem like much, but that night walking to my room between the frozen trees of a St. Louis night, it seemed very right, it was my savior grown and walking beside me, a tiny flame. It made sense then and it still does now. You say you never care much for losers, but it’s all I’ve known, from celling with proud swindlers to shooting crap under a swinging light in Albuquerque (or was it El Paso?) as a member of a railroad section gang. Well, I don’t like winners. Winners get fat and careless and write things like The Old Man and the Sea which is printed in Life magazine for a public which was long ago gaffed by the formula, and while it is typical of little men like myself to bitch and scratch at the great dead, I will still have my say. Hemingway wanted to save man by giving him a sense of honor through action. The trouble with his action is that it was A STAND AGAINST SOMETHING: an army, a bull, a dog with horns, a country, a fish, the sea, the moon, the rich, the poor, anything that countered movement toward some seeming need for victory. Shit on that. That is child’s play. We need knock nothing down. It’s time we begin picking up. saving what is left. what is worth saving. so when we clean our shotguns we only clean our shotguns. I do not have the master’s talent but I can see a lot of fool in him, which does not make me better, but sometimes in packing in the dresses the mind did say, will say, no one must fool me now because there is so very little left; but how did I get on this? does not sound too good. it is a kind of preaching. I forgot to laugh. dead in a bed I will laugh, or in a gutter I will laugh, or red on a mutual ticket in a cool Arcadia wind where my great dead uncle raped a lady he had picked up on his dandy motorcycle. ah, my family, all maniacs, and now all gone. just one. the end of a bad line. a tiny flame. [***]

  three niggers smiling could not reproduce

  the tumult of that kiss

  I don’t know why, but that’s a very good line. it’s a shame you have to lose it. it reminds me of a room full of electricity and heat when it’s very cold outside and you sit and listen to the clock tick. of course, Jon [Webb]’s got to protect himself. for all we know, the mag’s his only income. by doing the work himself, enough dollars to carry on. This is a bad time. People are frightened of doing any wrong. A formula has been set up and everything has been pushed inside of this formula. I don’t know if this is the right way of doing things at all. I must agree with some that fucking wd eventually clear up the whole mess. I have 3
black mamas chasing me now. One with long black hair she winds over her ears in shell shapes n wata big can tits wowwowwow, only my bloody ass says no, and I run out to the race track with my new system (60 bucks profit today) and come back here and read your good letter. The main trouble with the black race is that they wanna be white; outside of that and hot weather, they are ok with me. but back to the poem, opening lines: 3 niggers smiling…the trouble with the word “nigger” is that it is very poetic. negro is soft and round and says nothing. It is as it looks. I had the same trouble with the poem “On a Night You Don’t Sleep” (see Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail if you have the beast around) and I had to go with nigger because that is what he was when I saw him through the doorway with the salt water in my eyes and this Barbara Fry walking along mumbling nonsense by my side. I thought, if I put “negro” then I am a coward, I am doing something because I am told to do something and not because I want to, and that’s about where we stand on the racial question now. The racial question is too large for me. [***]

  [To John William Corrington]

  January 22, 1962

  I am unable to write. The woman I have known for so long has been critically ill since Saturday and died 2 hours ago.

  This is going to be the longest night of them all.

  [To John William Corrington]

  January 28, 1962