Bukowski, Charles

Typed letter signed ("Buk") 3 pages (11 x 8 1/2 in; 280 x 215 mm) with holograph corrections, drawings and affixed artwork, Los Angeles, 31 October, 1964, to his publishers Jon and Louise Webb, with original typed envelope; light folding creases.

Bukowski to his early champions on the next book, america and sheri martinelli
Sitting in his breakfast nook while "pouring down the beer and listening to some opera in the kitchen" Bukowski writes a long letter to Jon and Louise Webb, owners of the influential small publisher the Loujon Press in New Orleans.

The Webbs issued one of Bukowski's earliest successes, 1963's It Catches My Heart in its Hands and herein the next year Buk relates just what effect it had on his life and his expectations for their next project (what was to become Crucifix in a Deathhand published in 1965).  "...If this book comes anywhere near what you did with It Catches I will know that the good angels are near you ... a book like this lifts up my life up into the light whether I deserve it or not."

As the beer flows Bukowski  drifts off into ruminations on his romantic luck, "I used to have a theory that if I could make just one person's life happy or real that would have been otherwise then my own life would not have failed. It was a good theory but a few whores ran me through the wringer for it..."  He also gives an account of a disturbing trip to the track in which the "face" of square America is revealed. "... almighty square faces of wood until the wood becomes flesh and the flesh becomes wood and it's no longer an act."

Elsewhere he admits "I don't learn much at the racetrack. I only learn that everything is impossible and it gets me ready to die" and relates the sometimes difficult nature of his correspondence with Sheri Martinelli (his first publisher, beat scene-maker and Ezra Pound muse).

Buk has added his usual self-portrait of a smoking figure with a bottle in the same green ink he uses to make a few holograph corrections, but also, he's profusely decorated each page of this unusually lengthy letter with his own colorful abstracts painted on card, cut up and mounted to the pages.