Read an Excerpt

Living on Luck

Chapter One

* 1 9 6 1 *

[To John William Corrington] January 17, 1961

Hello Mr. Corrington:

Well, it helps sometimes to receive a letter such as yours. This makes two. A young man out of San Francisco wrote me that someday they would write books about me, if that would be any help. Well, I'm not looking for help, or praise either, and I'm not trying to play tough. But I had a game I used to play with myself, a game called Desert Island and while I was laying around in jail or art class or walking toward the ten dollar window at the track, I'd ask myself, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island by yourself, never to be found, except by the birds and the maggots, would you take a stick and scratch words in the sand? I had to say "no," and for a while this solved a lot of things and let me go ahead and do a lot of things I didn't want to do, and it got me away from the typewriter and it put me in the charity ward of the county hospital, the blood charging out of my ears and my mouth and my ass, and they waited for me to die but nothing happened. And when I got out I asked myself again, Bukowski, if you were on a desert island and etc.; and do you know, I guess it was because the blood had left my brain or something, I said, YES, yes, I would. I would take a stick and I would scratch words in the sand. Well, this solved a lot of things because it allowed me to go ahead and do the things, all the things I didn't want to do, and it let me have the typewriter too; and since they told me another drink would kill me, I now hold it down to 2 gallons of beer a day.

But writing, of course, like marriage orsnowfall or automobile tires, does not always last. You can go to bed on Wednesday night being a writer and wake up on Thursday morning being something else altogether. Or you can go to bed on Wednesday night being a plumber and wake up on Thursday morning being a writer. This is the best kind of writer.

... Most of them die, of course, because they try too hard; or, on the other hand, they get famous, and everything they write is published and they don't have to try at all. Death works a lot of avenues, and although you say you like my stuff, I want to let you know that if it turns to rot, it was not because I tried too hard or too little but because I either ran out of beer or blood. [* * *]

For what it's worth, I can afford to wait: I have my stick and I have my sand.

the mention of Frost below alludes to his reciting of his poem "The Gift Outright" ("The land was ours before we were the land's. / ... (The deed of gift was many deeds of war)... ") at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20,1961.

[To John William Corrington) [ca. February 1,] 1961

I am listening to "Belly up to the bar, boys!" and I took the ponies for $150 today, so what the hell, Cor, I will answer, tho this letter-writing is not my meat, except to maybe gently laugh at the cliffs coming down. And it has to end sometimes, even though it has just begun. I'd rather you were the one who finally didn't answer. And I'd never kick a man out because he was drunk, although I've kicked out a few women for it, and the "wives-to-pinch," they are gone, mental cruelty, they say; at least the last one, the editoress of Harlequin said that, and I said, ok. my mind was cruel to yours...

I think it is perfectly ok to write short short stories and think they're poems, mostly because short stories waste so many words. So we violate the so-called poem form with the non-false short story word and we violate the story form by saying a lot in the

little time of the poem form. We may be in between by borrowing from each BUT BECAUSE WE CANNOT ANSWER A PRECONCEIVED FORMULA OF EITHER STORY OR POEM. does this mean we are necessarily wrong? When Picasso stuck pinches of cardboard and extensions of space upon the flat surface of his paper did we accuse him of being a sculptor or an architect?

A man's either an artist or a flat tire and what he does need not answer to anything, I'd say, except the energy of his creation.

I'd say that a lot of abstract poetry lets a man off the hook with a can of polish. Now being subtle (which might be another word for "original") and being abstract is the difference between knowing and saying it in a different way and not knowing and saying it as if you sounded like you might possibly know. 'Mis is what most poetry classes are for: the teaching of the application of the polish, the rubbing out of dirty doubt between writer and reader as to any flaws between the understanding of what a poem ought to be.

Culture and knowledge are too often taken as things that please or do not disturb or say it in a way that sounds kindly. It's time to end this bullshit. I am thinking now of Frost slavering over his poems, blind, the old rabbit hair in his eyes, everybody smiling kindly, and Frost grateful, saying some lie, part of it: "... the deed of gift was the deed of many wars"... An abstract way of saying something kind about something that was not kind at all.

Christ, I don't call for cranks or misanthropes or people who knock knock knock because their spleen has a burr in it or because their grandmother once fucked the iceman, but let's try to use just a little bit of sense. And I don't expect too much; but when a blind blubbering poet in his white years is USED ... I don't know by WHAT OR WHO ... himself, they, something... it ills me even to drink a glass of water and I guess that makes me the greatest crank of all time. [* * *]

Living on Luck. Copyright © by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.