On Writing by Charles Bukowski

‘I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter,’ wrote Charles Bukowski in late 1960. But he was only just getting going: the letters collected here show the dangerous intensity of the following four decades of writing. He’s a loner, holed up in tiny Los Angeles apartments, starting to write poetry at 35 having spent ten years of his life in the depths of unproductive and near-fatal alcoholism. Resolutely disconnected, he loathes almost all contemporary poetry and dislikes the Beats (‘they were too self-promotional and the drugs gave them all wooden dicks or turned them into cunts’).

Here we see him pouring forth all his wild energy: revelling in being a 'Dirty Old Man' of American letters. He’s quick, funny, and makes no effort to hide anything. The letters are every bit as spunky as his work elsewhere: a ballsy low-life set free and calling out the bullshit wherever he looks. His voice fills your head, sentences all loose with beer and life and a sense of getting to the heart of it all.

You can hear the battering of the typewriter as he goes – he has one setting, whether writing to close friends, enemies, editors, or big famous writers. The pace of the man is incredible: ‘I’ve gulped down damn near a full bottle in 15 minutes, chilled white. Have to, it gets warm so fast.’