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‘I remember when I used to write and send you fifteen or twenty more stories a month, and later, three or four or five – and mostly, at least one a week…’
Bukowski was an obsessive letter writer and this collection On Writing is more about his own wayward journey and little about process. If there is one or two things that you can take away from this it’s that perseverance, and persistence might just be the key to success. Bukowski submitted hundreds of pieces to tabloids, literary journals, editors and publishers of all kinds, famously selling his typewriter to prop up his addiction to alcohol and anything else that might have come his way.
Bukowski was notorious for drawing, doodling and sketching all over his works to get attention, a few of which are reproduced in this chronological collection. It almost seems a miracle that anyone who corresponded so honestly about their life wasn’t regularly spiked by the editors of the day – passed over as another nutbar to avoid. However there is something so engaging about his utterly frank writing that you want to keep going back for more. Be warned though, a stream of consciousness to one reader may be considered ramblings by another.
‘I’ve earned $47 in 20 years of writing and I think that $2 a year (omitting stamps, paper, envelopes, ribbons, divorces and typewriters) entitles one to the special privacy of a special insanity and if I need hold hands with paper gods to promote a little scurvy rhyme, I’ll take the encyst and paradise of rejection’, writes Bukowski.
There is an urgency and dynamism in his letters sufficient to keep the reader satisfied and interested enough in turning the next page but it need not be a book that is read cover to cover, rather something that can be dipped in and out of.
Some of the included letters read like a paranoid writer’s bio that he is submitting to a litmag recalling everything he has been published in, before finishing off with ‘…you can take the few lines you need from here…’
Others are a desperate plea to be noticed: ‘Generally a writer of force is anywhere from 20 to 200 years ahead of his generation, so therefore he starves, suicides, goes mad and is only recognized if portions of his work are somehow found later, much later…’
On Writing doesn’t reach the vertiginous heights of Bukowksi’s actual prose. It is stinging and contemptuous in parts, droll and loose in others. It seems bawdiness and opinions flowed as freely as his booze. It is one for the reference shelf for an aspiring writer, but if you are seeking out writerly advice from the sage, you’re going to have work hard for it, just like the great man himself.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
By Charles Bukowski, Edited by Abel De Britto
Published by Allen & Unwin Canongate
September 2015
