On Writing

by Charles Bukowski

[To John William Corrington] April 1962 [ . . . ] Fry once egged me on to make a bunch of cartoons with captions, the joke bit, and I stayed up all night, drinking and making these cartoons, laughing at my own madness. There were so many of them by morning that I couldn’t get them in an envelope, none large enough, so I made a big thing out of cardboard, and mailed it to either the New Yorker or Esquire, putting another cardboard thing inside with proper postage. Well, hell, they could prob. see I was either amateur or mad. It never came back. I wrote about my 45 cartoons and they never came back. “No such item rec. from you,” wrote back some editor. But sitting in a barbershop a couple of months later I came across one of my jokes in some mag, I believe Man, showing a guy, a jock whipping a horse with one of those round balls with spikes on the end of a chain, and one guy along the rail is telling another, “He’s a very rude boy but somehow effective.” The words were changed just a little and the drawing a little, but it sure seemed just like mine. Well, hell, you can imagine anything if you want to imagine anything. But I don’t know, I wasn’t even looking, I usually don’t even look into magazines or maybe I do but don’t realize it, but I kept popping across my same ideas and drawings just altered a touch; it was all too close, all too much the same to be anything but mine, only I felt that mine were better executed, and I do not mean killed, they killed that. And when I c...