[* * *] Kafka, unlike your Henry James, was not ordinarily intelligent and discerning. Kafka was a god damned petty clerk who lived a good damned [sic] petty life and wrote about it, the dream of it, the madness of it. There is one novel where a man enters this house, this establishment, and it appears that from the viewpoint of others that he is guilty of something but he does not know what. He is shuffled from room to room, endlessly, to the rattle of papers and bureaucracy, a silent simmering horrible living dream of ordinary mad and pressing, senseless everyday life. Most of his books are on this order: the shadow, the dream, the stupidity. Then there are other things—where a man turns into a bridge and lets people walk across him. Then there is another where a man gradually turns into a giant cockroach (“The Metamorphosis”) and his sister feeds him as he hides under the bed. Others, others. Kafka is everything.

Forget Henry James. James is a light mist of silk. Kafka is what we all know. [* * *]

[To Jon and Louise Webb]

November 30, 1962

[* * *] Yes, disgusting the rent they charge of a dive in the business districts of anywhere, and the landlord doesn’t have to do anything but sit back and take it in while you hope to make it—somehow. Hang on, you’re getting an award too, somewhere, somehow; this is lit. history like Poetry when Ez was European editor and full of beans, or even like Mencken’s Mercury; or Dial; but you are essentially the new center and the part of this age, only people never realize the blood sweat weariness disgust breakdown & trial of soul that goes into it; and the puking little criticisms of milk-white jackasses. [* * *]

Federman was coeditor of Mica, the last issue of which appeared in November 1962. Bukowski’s story, “Murder,” was published not in Mica but in Notes from Underground, no. 1 (1964). Dorbin records no earlier story in Mica, although one was published in Canto (Los Angeles), winter 1961.

[To Raymond Federman]

December 6, 1962

Rec. your O.K. on “The Murder.” I write very few short stories—you’ve taken the only 2 I have written in years. Both of them were very close to a type of personal experience and feeling that just did not seem to fit into the shorter poem-form.

You might call “The Murder” a prose-poem as I have worked with the poem so long that when I do try the story-form I still feel as if I were laying down the poem-line.

It might interest you to know that over drinks and in conversational lulls with the few odd people that get in here I have told the story of “The Murder,” first telling them what made me write it, what was happening to me at the time, and how I took this and made it into a story—or whatever it is.