In 1994, Charles Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery, beneath a simple gravestone. The stone memorializes the poet’s name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the symbol of a boxer between the two, suggesting his life was a struggle. And it adds the very succinct epitaph, “Don’t Try.”
There you have it, Bukowski’s philosophy on art and life boiled down to two words. But what do they mean? Let’s look back at the epistolary record and find out.
In October 1963, Bukowski recounted in a letter to John William Corrington how someone once asked him, “What do you do? How do you write, create?” To which, he replied: “You don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
So, the key to life and art, it’s all about persistence? Patience? Timing? Waiting for your moment? Yes, but not just that.
Jumping forward to 1990, Bukowski sent a letter to his friend William Packard and reminded him: “We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.”
The key to living a good life, to creating great art — it’s also about not over-thinking things, or muscling our way through. It’s about letting our talents appear, almost jedi-style. Or is it?
In 2005, Mike Watt (bass player for the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and the Stooges) interviewed Linda Bukowski, the poet’s wife, and asked her to set the record straight. Here’s their exchange.
Watt: What’s the story: “Don’t Try”? Is it from that piece he wrote?
Linda: See those big volumes of books? They’re called Who’s Who In America. It’s everybody, artists, scientists, whatever. So he was in there and they asked him to do a little thing about the books he’s written and duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. At the very end they say, is there anything you wanna say, you know, what is your philosophy of life, and some people would write a huge long thing. A dissertation, and some people would just go on and on. And Hank just put, “Don’t Try.” Now, for you, what do you think that means?
Watt: Well for me it always meant like be natural.
Linda: Yeah, yeah.
Watt: Not like…being lazy!
Linda: Yeah, I get so many different ideas from people that don’t understand what that means. Well, “Don’t Try? Just be a slacker? lay back?” And I’m no! Don’t try, do. Because if you’re spending your time trying something, you’re not doing it…“DON’T TRY.”
It’s Monday. Get out there. Just do it. But patiently. And don’t break a sweat.
Before he was a big game hunter, before he was a deep-sea fisherman, Ernest Hemingway was a craftsman who would rise very early in the morning and write. His best stories are masterpieces of the modern era, and his prose style is one of the most influential of the 20th century.
Hemingway never wrote a treatise on the art of writing fiction. He did, however, leave behind a great many passages in letters, articles and books with opinions and advice on writing. Some of the best of those were assembled in 1984 by Larry W. Phillips into a book, Ernest Hemingway on Writing. We’ve selected seven of our favorite quotations from the book and placed them, along with our own commentary, on this page. We hope you will all–writers and readers alike–find them fascinating.
1: To get started, write one true sentence.
Hemingway had a simple trick for overcoming writer’s block. In a memorable passage in A Moveable Feast, he writes:
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.
2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
There is a difference between stopping and foundering. To make steady progress, having a daily word-count quota was far less important to Hemingway than making sure he never emptied the well of his imagination. In an October 1935 article in Esquire ( “Monologue to the Maestro: A High Seas Letter”) Hemingway offers this advice to a young writer:
The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.
3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.
Building on his previous advice, Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.
T0 maintain continuity, Hemingway made a habit of reading over what he had already written before going further. In the 1935 Esquire article, he writes:
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That’s how you make it all of one piece.
5: Don’t describe an emotion–make it.
Close observation of life is critical to good writing, said Hemingway. The key is to not only watch and listen closely to external events, but to also notice any emotion stirred in you by the events and then trace back and identify precisely what it was that caused the emotion. If you can identify the concrete action or sensation that caused the emotion and present it accurately and fully rounded in your story, your readers should feel the same emotion. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway writes about his early struggle to master this:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.
6: Use a pencil.
Hemingway often used a typewriter when composing letters or magazine pieces, but for serious work he preferred a pencil. In the Esquire article (which shows signs of having been written on a typewriter) Hemingway says:
When you start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none. So you might as well use a typewriter because it is that much easier and you enjoy it that much more. After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof. Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it. That is .333 which is a damned good average for a hitter. It also keeps it fluid longer so you can better it easier.
7: Be Brief.
Hemingway was contemptuous of writers who, as he put it, “never learned how to say no to a typewriter.” In a 1945 letter to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway writes:
It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
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In some rare cases, adaptations and interpretations of a literary work can surpass the source. Despite hundreds of valiant efforts on the part of fans, filmmakers, game/toy designers, and radio producers, this has never been true of the fully-realized fantasy world in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. (not that it’s ever been anyone’s intent). As we noted in a post last week, Tolkien’s fictional world is so intricate, its sources so vast and varied, that Corey Olsen, “The Tolkien Professor,” has made it his entire life’s work to open that world up to students and curious readers, most recently with his eight-part lecture series on The Hobbit.
One might also add illustrators to the list of Tolkien interpreters above who have—in the almost eighty years since The Hobbit’s publication and sixty years since the first appearance of The Lord of the Rings trilogy—done their best to visualize Tolkien’s world. But perhaps no one did so better than the master himself. Long known as a visual artist as well as a literary one, Tolkien left behind over 100 illustrations for The Hobbit, one of which adorns 2011’s HarperCollins 75th anniversary edition of the book. He also created these original cover designs for each book in TheLord of the Rings trilogy.
“When [Jack] Kerouac died in 1968 at the age of 47, he was a broken alcoholic, his literary reputation so depleted he was unable even to find a paperback publisher for his last novel, Vanity of Duluoz,” writes The Telegraph. “Unsure of what value to put on his estate, the bank valued it at a nominal $1. Over the years, it would rise to an estimated $20m.” As The Telegraph goes on to describe, the Kerouac estate started generating its wealth when, during the 1990s, feuding relatives, exercising questionable authority over the writer’s literary remains, began auctioning things off. The original manuscript of On The Road was sold to James Isray, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.43 million. Johnny Depp paid $50,640 for Kerouac’s raincoat, tweed overcoat and other personal belongings. And photos were licensed off to corporations.
Enter the Gap’s 1993 “Kerouac Wore Khakis” advertising campaign. The campaign drew on images taken in 1958, when Jerry Yulsman followed Jack Kerouac around Greenwich Village, taking pictures for Pageant Magazine. (See originals here and here.) 35 years later, Madison Ave. marketers airbrushed the images, stripped them of color, and, somehow found a way to graft onto stodgy pants, worn by desk jockeys nationwide, the illusion of freedom. That sleight of hand would make Don Draper proud. As for what happened in Kerouac’s grave, we can only conjecture.
We’ll have more from the annals of commercializing the Beats tomorrow.
In the summer of 1942, Jack Kerouac followed in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and Eugene O’Neill and went to sea. After dropping out of Columbia University the previous Fall, the 20-year-old Kerouac signed up for the merchant marine and shipped out aboard the U.S. Army Transport ship Dorchester.
Although World War II had broken out at about the time of his departure from Columbia, Kerouac’s motives for going to sea were more personal than patriotic. “My mother is very worried over my having joined the Merchant Marine,” Kerouac wrote in his journal at the time, “but I need money for college, I need adventure, of a sort (the real adventure of rotting wharves and seagulls, winey waters and ships, ports, cities, and faces & voices); and I want to study more of the earth, not out of books, but from direct experience.”
In October of 1942, after completing a voyage to and from an Army command base in Greenland (which he would later write about in Vanity of Duluoz), Kerouac left the merchant marine and returned to Columbia. That was lucky, because most of the Dorchester’s crew–more than 600 men–died three months later when the ship was torpedoed by a German U‑boat. But the restless Kerouac lasted only a month at Columbia before dropping out again and making plans to return to sea. In December of 1942 he enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve. He wanted to join the Naval Air Force, but failed an aptitude test. So on February 26, 1943 he was sent to the Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. That’s apparently when the photograph above was taken of the young Kerouac with his military haircut. It would have been right around the time of his 21st birthday.
Kerouac lasted only 10 days in boot camp. As Miriam Klieman writes at the National Archives, “The qualities that made On the Road a huge success and Kerouac a powerful storyteller, guide, and literary icon are the same ones that rendered him remarkably unsuitable for the military: independence, creativity, impulsivity, sensuality, and recklessness.” According to files released by the government in 2005, Naval doctors at Newport found Kerouac to be “restless, apathetic, seclusive” and determined that he was mentally unfit for service, writing that “neuropsychiatric examination disclosed auditory hallucinations, ideas of reference and suicide, and a rambling, grandiose, philosophical manner.” He was sent to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda Maryland and eventually discharged.
If you’re an author of literary fiction, you’d do well to shoot fellow author Gary Shteyngart an advance copy of that soon-to-be-published masterpiece you’ve got in the pipeline. He won’t just love the book, he’ll blurb it, thus telegraphing your insider status to the establishment and readers in the know. It’s a far from an exclusive club. As author Levi Asher notes in the video above, Shteyngart’s the sort of mensch who willingly blurbs his friends. Also friends of friends. Ditto strangers. (Former stranger Karen Russell wonders if perhaps some agent-deployed fruit basket was responsible for garnering her some of Shteyngart’s “swami magic”.)
The insouciant quality of the typical Shteyngart endorsement is not intended to telegraph any insincerity on his part. His mission is securing readers for the sort of titles indie bookstores hold dear, and in order for that mission to succeed, he has to generate blurbs by the bushel. He may not get to the end of every volume he champions, but he makes it deep enough to get a general sense that such a thing might be pleasurable.
His highly public willingness to clamor aboard other authors’ bandwagons has been described as both promiscuity and performance art. It has inspired a tumblr, and now the tongue-in-cheek mini-documentary above. Narrated by Jonathan Ames, it features a cavalcade of grateful New York City-based lit stars, gamely striving to exude the sort of devil-may-care buoyancy at which their hero excels.
The American writer Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Rock Springs) chose to read “The Student’s Wife” by his late friend Raymond Carver. The story was first published in America in 1976, in Carver’s debut short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please. It exemplifies Carver’s direct, economical style. But don’t make the mistake of calling Carver a “minimalist” around Ford. He describes the story, and the richness of Carver’s writing, in TheGuardian:
Its verbal resources are spare, direct, rarely polysyllabic, restrained, intense, never melodramatic, and real-sounding while being obviously literary in intent. (You always know, pleasurably, that you’re reading a made short story.) These affecting qualities led some dunderheads to call his stories “minimalist”, which they are most assuredly not, inasmuch as they’re full-to-the-brim with the stuff of human intimacy, of longing, of barely unearthable humour, of exquisite nuance, of pathos, of unlooked-for dred, and often of love–expressed in words and gestures not frequently associated with love. More than they are minimal, they are replete with the renewings and the fresh awarenesses we go to great literature to find.
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In 1994, Charles Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery, beneath a simple gravestone. The stone memorializes the poet’s name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the symbol of a boxer between the two, suggesting his life was a struggle. And it adds the very succinct epitaph, “Don’t Try.”
