should produce the beasts en masse. We could become rich.”
His embarrassed gesture after the last sentence leaves no doubt. The wish Charles Bukowski just expressed belongs to another lifetime. He does not need more money. For quite some time now he has had enough on hand; and for sure, he is lacking nothing for the couple of months that remain to him.
What is he working on right now? Bukowski, who has published over forty books up to this day - novels, short stories and more than a thousand poems - defensively lifts his right hand, in which he still holds the wolf in the sheep’s clothing.
“The crime rate, our alarm systems, the constant annoyance by smokers - that’s all we talk about here in San Pedro. We don’t discuss literature and Hemingway.”
He stops short and watches me fumbling in my coat pocket for a note book.
“Damn!” Bukowski says to everyone and nobody. “I bet this guy’s got a tape recorder, too!”
Many who’ve met him have described his desperate countenance when bothered with literary questions. “A couple of friends and I had cornered him,” David Baker remembers a party in the early Seventies, “and we wanted to talk literature. He looked like he wanted to crawl off into a dark, quiet space and die like a wounded animal.”
For Bukowski there’s only one thing worse than being questioned by aspiring poets: being interviewed by a pro. Like so many authors, he hates to submit to the uppermost rite of fact-crazy journalism. For a while he scared off potential interviewers demanding: “One thousand dollars an hour.” He always refused to go on the talk-show circuit. And he advised Sean Penn, of course, when the actor was pestering him with questions: “So if you want to know about me, never read an interview. Ignore this one.” Since: “It’s embarrassing. So, I don’t always tell the total truth. I like to play around and jest a bit, so I do give out some misinformation just for the sake of entertainment and bullshit.”
Those who can write usually find little reason to have their unpolished words recorded. Bukowski thus completed the last question-and-answer session he agreed to in writing. Why, then, did he concede today to ...
“Well, certainly not to sell books.” Bukowski smiles. “I mean, wouldn’t it be much nicer if we could simply sit here and talk and then go out and eat something?”
Bukowski turns up his mouth in an indignation that seems shamelessly contrived.
“But it’s my birthday. I must be nice.”
He smirks at Michael Montfort. A father-to-son grin.
“Besides, I’d like people to say nice things about me later on ... I mean, as far as anybody is able to say nice things about somebody else.”
VI
“Like a spider spins a web.”
- Bukowski on Writing -
“‘The sun is in agonyeee in Saint Louiiiie’, or something weird like that I used to put into my early poems. You know, I would write a poem, most of it would be me, but then I threw them a line they wanted: Suck on that! ‘Cause I knew that the editors liked their poetry a little bit poetic and not so hard like my lines. So I gave them ... I mean, most of the lines were mine. I would just throw them a little bait. Which I shouldn’t have done. But I did. And then I got rid of the poem. So ... That’s it?”
“I haven’t asked a single question yet ...”
“Okay, go on ...”
We are sitting in the little yard Charles Bukowski calls his “garden of Eden.” A few feet away the silhouettes of two wooden boxers driven by the wind are attacking each other. The toy is Michael Montfort’s birthday present for Bukowski. The old man watches the restless fight and grins.
“I bet the next thing you want to know is why I write?” he says. “Yeah? Of course, I thought so ... I do it for the same reason now I did it then. So that I don’t go totally mad. The reason is the same. But now I get paid for it. And then I didn’t.”
“For me to get paid for writing is like going to bed with a beautiful woman,” he once noted, “and afterwards she gets up, goes to her purse and gives me a handful of money. I’ll take it.”
“All that money,” I ask, “is it really good for what you write?”
“Of course, it’s better. I’d rather have a little,” Bukowski says. “I starved many, many years. I starved, and starved, and starved. I mean, it’s alright. But it’s wearing. You get thin, and your teeth fall out. I could just pull my own teeth out of my mouth. Just pull one out and throw it on the floor. Starvation. Then all parts weaken.” He pauses. “Okay, I starved. I don’t mind not starving. I put in my time on that. I don’t feel guilty.”
“You said you wrote in order not to go mad ...”
“Not going crazy. Yeah ...”
“And?” I ask: “Did it help?”
“You think I am crazy? That it did not help?” He chuckles. “Think, if I hadn’t written all that! I mean, I’d probably be in some padded cell. I think so. It’s a relief ... That’s it? No?”
He takes a deep breath and points to Michael Montfort who whirls around us letting the motor of his camera whirr.
“If he says something interesting,” Bukowski says, “just pretend that it was me ...”
“Sure,” I nod. “On the other hand, it’s not that important. I will make up the quotes anyhow.”
“Oh well,” Bukowski says, “it’ll be fine with me. But listen, just in case you can’t come up with something, I’ll tell you a story about writing ...” With a tired gesture, he chases a fly off the age marked back of his hand: “Once I was starving, in a shack in Atlanta. I didn’t have a typewriter. But I found a little stub of a pencil, and with that stub of a pencil there were newspapers on the floor. I wrote on these edges of the newspapers; that was all the paper I had. So I knew, nobody would ever read what I wrote, but I had to write. It was like a spider spins a web, you know. So, I am a natural born writer. I wanna write. It’s a thing I can’t explain. It’s deep in me. There is nothing I can do about it; except do it; and then I’m relieved ...”
“Do you still remember what you have written then?”
“In that shack? Oh, no ...! Not a word ...”
“I once knew a writer who in 1940, on his flight before the Nazis, had been kept prisoner in a French camp,” I relate: “There he wrote his poems just like you - with the stub of a pencil on scraps of paper. And half a century later, when he was almost ninety and blinded of old age, the recovered texts were archived, and there was nobody who could read his hand writing ...”
“Well, there you go,” Bukowski says, “makes no sense to keep stuff like that ...”
“The story isn’t over yet: The old man - his name was Hans Sahl, I met him in New York - still knew each line by heart. ‘What one has written with the stub of a pencil on notepaper for which one had to trade in two cigarettes in the camps,’ he said, ‘something like that one will not forget.’”
“Good,” Bukowski
