Writing letters fed the impulse to write poems and indeed sometimes (especially to Blazek) the letters themselves modulate into verse as they go. And while Bukowski was never too much interested in literary chitchat, criticism, theory, or analysis, the letter form allows him to throw off a number of passing evaluative remarks about other writers, from Hamsun and Kafka to Ginsburg and Creeley, and about his sense of what literature is for, what makes it good. He never quotes Pound’s phrase to name the function of literature: “nutriment of impulse” (indeed he rarely quotes at all), but he seems to agree with it. Clearly he hates any sense of literature as an accomplishment or of literary education as what gives polish to a man or woman. The literature that matters is what keeps you from dying. If he seems (to someone like me, of more conventional tastes) narrow in the range of his appreciation, he makes up for it in the passionate existential seriousness of his approach: “Poetry must be forgotten; we must get down to raw paint, splatter. I think a man should be forced to write in a roomful of skulls [* * *]” (14) Such an impatience with literature as “belles lettres” (“this fiddle,” in Marianne Moore’s phrase) has a long pedigree. Wordsworth, for one, the revolutionary who wanted to write like “a man speaking to men,” would have agreed.

A final word should be said on the consistency and integrity of the self so vividly and dramatically presented in this book. The man who cheerfully quotes Popeye’s “I am what I am” reminds me of Lawrence’s jaunty citing of “The Miller of Dee”:

There was a jolly miller once,

Lived on the River Dee.

He laughed and sang from morn till night,

No man more blithe than he.

And this the burden of his song

Forever used to be:

I care for nobody, no not I,

Since nobody cares for me.