BUKOWSKI, Charles (1920-1994)

BUKOWSKI, Charles (1920-1994)

Letter signed « Buk » to Raphaël Sorin
N.p, 17 Oct[ober] 1977, 1 p. in-4° in American format (27,9 x 21,2 cm)
Three autograph corrections in the text and four original drawings in Bukowski’s hand

Nice letter enriched with original drawings, on his literature and his current publications

“Hello Raphaël Sorin:
Thanks– your letter and the book, “Contes de la folie ordinaires” [sic] and the reviews. I would like it very much if you’d send me one or more copy– I need it for my archives at the University of Santa Barbara. O.k? Much thanks in advance. Your book looks fine!
“Women” is completed: 433 typewritten pages, 99 chapters, but John Martin and Black Sparrow will probably wait a year or a year and a half before publishing it because LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL has just been issued. WOMEN is by far my best writing up to date and I’d like to see it out but I can’t expect J. Martin to keep publishing book after book. He says that he can keep up with me but sometimes I wonder. I have sent him 20 or 35 new poems since the book was finished two weeks ago, plus one short story. I am punching it out, almost madly… drinking 2 to 3 bottles of wine a night, playing the horses during the day, fighting with my girlfriend off and on. It flares and jumps and I don’t know where it comes from but as long as it’s there, I’ll take it.
all right,
Buk
Charles Bukowski”

Women is the writer’s third novel. Published in 1978 by Black Sparrow Press, it was published in France three years later in 1981 by Grasset. The book tells the story of Hank Chinaski’s later life (Bukowski’s alter-ego) as a celebrated poet and writer, not as a dead-end lowlife. It does, however, feature the same constant carousel of women with whom Chinaski only finds temporary fulfillment. Bukowski makes an unequivocal analogy at the end of the letter between the character in his novel and his daily life.
Just published in France in the autumn of 1977, the collection Tales of Ordinary Madness was published in 1972 in the United States and then brought to the screen by Marco Ferreri in 1981 under the same title. Finally, Love is a Dog from Hell, a collection of poems written between 1974 and 1977, was published by Black Sparrow in 1977 and the following year in France by Le Sagittaire, in two volumes. Publisher Grasset had relaunched the brand [The Second Sagittaire] in 1975, placing it under the direction of Gérard Guéguan, assisted by Raphaël Sorin. It was also the latter who came to the writer’s rescue by holding his arm during an anthology television sequence. Bukowski, dead drunk on the set of the Apostrophes show on September 22, 1978, had been invited to promote Love is a Dog from Hell at Sorin’s initiative.