so, after Dec. one, I will be on my own, and this typewriter will be a machine gun…as it was meant to be. this does not mean that I will be writing for money but for luck. a hell of a decision to make at age 50…. I toss a job away that most men would oh love. but I am not most men. [* * *]

my little daughter is so beautiful, Karl, Carl, you never met her did you? she’s singing London Bridge Is Falling Down from the bedroom. the woman thinks London B. is corrupt. she’s a radical. o.k. when the sun hops we will be the first to record it.

[To Jim Roman]

January 11, 1970

[* * *] I am a member of the unemployed now with nothing but a typer and a couple of paint brushes to hold off the world. So keep your fingers crossed for me and hope the gods are on my side. There’s my 5 year old daughter involved and if I lost her, that would do me in. But things sometimes have a way of working. There’s no need to lay it down yet. There’s a novel in mind and The Days Run Away…moving very nicely. but but but…

This letter is so gloomy, Jim, that I can’t ever write it, finish it. I’ll write when things are looking better.

AFTERWORD

It’s easy, reading these letters, to see why Bukowski’s correspondents saved them. Apart from the sometimes striking idiosyncrasies of format which gave them an unusual impact (and which we mostly can’t see in book form), their often searing vividness—a stream of feeling and suffering more than stream of consciousness—gives them an impact which must have been easy to recognize. Besides, during these years all of those addressed in the letters printed here were aware of Bukowski’s poetry and already valued it for similar vividness of impact.

Bukowski’s letters have an unusual immediacy, compared to those of other noteworthy modern literary correspondents. (Think of Lawrence, Pound, Fante, or Creeley and Olson; all are variously fascinating as letter writers but give infinitely less by way of self-portrayal.) Bukowski seems, with trusted correspondents, to pour himself forth with little forethought or purpose other than to render his immediate experience. Only a small minority of surviving letters have a mainly conventional kind of purpose—answering or posing questions, conducting literary business. More often, even when the letter accompanies submissions of poems or other writing, there is a full outpouring of the self in its present situation, generally incorporating notations of the immediate mundane circumstances: people passing or working outside, activities in the apartment, toothache, hangover, radio sounds, etc.

It is a cliché to lament the decline of the personal letter in our telephone age, but Bukowski never doubted its value. “I think the letter is an important form,” he writes early on.