It was D. H. Lawrence who said, “Art speech is the only speech,” and these declarations by Bukowski put the emphasis finally in the same place—on the achieved writing. The ability to be buoyantly stoic, to declare, “I have nothing to hide and anything I say in a letter goes anywhere anytime, and if they don’t like the taste of it, let them suck empty beer bottles” (86), is a liberating and enabling self-sufficiency. The letter writer and the poet are a single, coherent entity. One result is that, while we may find a difference of emphasis and tone in references to the same person over time, we don’t find here the kind of bad faith recently noticed in the letters of Philip Larkin:

a warm and appreciative letter to X is followed, often on the same day, by a warm and appreciative letter to Y in jeering dispraise of X, and so on. Bad faith was a form of good faith; it meant that Larkin was still keeping his options open.7

Bukowski’s letters give us a whole self in many moods. His courage and endurance and sheer hard work at his writing are exemplary. He told a correspondent that “it is good to have your own courage but it is also good to take hope and courage from the ways of others. this I haven’t been able to do until lately.” (185) The encouragement he found in his correspondence can be shared by us. “I wrote letters to many in those days,” he has said, “it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.” It is gratifying for the reader of these sometimes agonized “screams” to know that the decade ends with his escape from the Post Office into a successful career of living by his writing alone.

—Seamus Cooney Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan

NOTES TO AFTERWORD

1 He had to suffer the complaints of his neighbors, though, and was forced to agreenot to type after 10 p.m. in his first apartment (see Jan. 28, 1964, p. 102).

2 Neeli Cherkovski made a similar point about Bukowski’s diction: “In the heart of the sixties he remained untouched by hippie terminology, employing it only sarcastically to prove a point” (Hank, p. 189). Curiously, one of the few literary allusions to familiar quotations that I have spotted in these letters is to Spenser’s remark that Chaucer is “a well of English undefiled” (Bukowski calls the Cantos “a well of Pounding unrecognized” [5]). (Another allusion is to the last lines of Eliot’s Prufrock.)

3 See Jack Kerouac, “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose” and “Essentialsof Spontaneous Prose” (1957), reprinted in New American Story, ed. Donald M. Allen and Robert Creeley (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 269-271.

4 Unpublished paper by Russell Harrison, whose The Outsider As Insider: Essays on Charles Bukowski is forthcoming from Black Sparrow Press.

5 Letter of June 23, 1965, not otherwise excerpted in the present volume.

6 To Louis Delpino, August 2, 1967.

7 Jonathan Raban, The New Republic (7/19-26/93), p. 35.

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