Bukowski's First Appearance In Print, 1944

by Stephen J. Gertz

A wonderful association copy of the scarce March-April 1944 issue of Story, featuring the first published work by Charles Bukowski - at the time only twenty-four years old - is being offered by PBA Galleries in its Beats, Counterculture & Avant Garde - Literature - Science Fiction. Collection of Richard Synchef sale, October 10, 2013. It is estimated to sell for $2,500-$3,500.

Bukowski's contribution, Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip, was composed just two years after he had begun to write, and was inspired by a note from Story publisher-editor Whit Burnett regarding a recent submission:

Dear Mr. Bukowski:

Again, this is a conglomeration of extremely good stuff and other stuff so full of idolized prostitutes, morning-after vomiting scenes, misanthropy, praise for suicide etc. that it is not quite for a magazine of any circulation at all. This is, however, pretty much the saga of a certain type of person and in it I think you've done an honest job. Possibly we will print you sometime but I don't know exactly when. That depends on you.

Sincerely yours,

Whit Burnett

In Factotum (1975), Bukowski described his experience with this first publication, calling Whit Burnett "Clay Gladmore":

"Gladmore returned many of my things with personal rejections. True, most of them weren't very long but they did seem kind and they were very encouraging...So I kept him busy with four or five stories a week." 

Bukowski later recalled the circumstances of the short story's publication in an interview just shortly before he died:

"I can remember my first major publication, a short story in Whit Burnett's and Martha Foley's Story magazine, 1944. I had been sending them a couple of short stories a week for maybe a year and a half. The story they finally accepted was mild in comparison to the others. I mean in terms of content and style and gamble and exploration and all that."

But Bukowski was not happy when Burnett finally published him. Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip had been buried in the End Pages section of the magazine as, Bukowski felt, a curiosity rather than a serious piece of writing. The cover's tag line - "Author to editor with everybody discomfited" - didn't help. Bukowski felt discounted and humiliated; he never submitted anything to Story again.

In that same interview, he noted that in the aftermath of Aftermath... "I didn't feel that the publishers were ready and that although I was ready, I could be readier and I was also disgusted with what I read as accepted front-line literature. So I drank and became one of the best drinkers anywhere, which takes some talent also."

"Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, 1920. His father was California-born of Polish parentage, and served with the American Army of Occupation in the Rhineland where he met the author's mother. He was brought to America at the age of two. He attended Los Angeles City College for a couple of years and in the two and one half years since then he has been a clerk in the postoffice, a stockroom boy for Sears Roebuck, a truck-loader nights in a bakery. He is now working as a package-wrapper and box-filler in the cellar of a ladies' sportswear shop" (Bio in Story).

Laid in to this copy of Story is a postcard from Christa Malone, daughter of Wormword Review publisher Marvin Malone, stating that this copy belonged to her father. Bukowski was the most frequent contributor to the Wormwood Review, with works appearing in more than ninety issues. It's a strong association.

Story was founded in 1931 by Whit Burnett and his first wife, Martha Foley, in Vienna, Austria. A showcase for short stories by new writers, two years later Story moved to New York City where Burnett and Foley created The Story Press in 1936.

By the late 1930s, the magazine's circulation had climbed to a relatively astounding 21,000 copies. In addition to Bukowski, Burnett and Foley published early stories by Erskine Caldwell, John Cheever, Junot Diaz, James T. Farrell, Joseph Heller, J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright. Other authors in the pages of Story included Ludwig Bemelmans, Carson McCullers and William Saroyan.

In 1942, Burnett's second wife, Hallie Southgate Burnett, began collaborating with him and Story published the early work of Truman Capote, John Knowles and Norman Mailer. Story folded in 1967 secondary to lint in its bank account but its roster of authors established and has maintained its reputation as one of the great American literary journals.

After finishing Bulowski's Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,  readers of Story could take advantage of a fabulous offer advertised by the Book-Of-The-Month-Club. New subscribers to the BOTMC were offered a free copy of My Friend Flicka (1941) and its sequel (1943). Those familiar with the novel will note its thematic similarities to the work of Bukowski. 

My Friend Flicka is the story of a horse and the boy that loved him, and "Flicka," as we all know, is Swedish for "little girl." Flicka was quite the filly, and Bukowski had a keen eye for fillies - at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park racetracks. And, yes, Roddy McDowall, who starred in the 1943 film adaptation (as the boy, not the horse), was a dead ringer for Charles Bukowski, though a bottle or three of whiskey may be  necessary to appreciate their resemblance to each other.

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All images courtesy of PBA Galleries, with our thanks.
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Of Related Interest:

Bukowski: Lost Original Drawings Of A Dirty Old Man.

Charles Bukowski, Artist.

Charles Bukowski's Last, Unpublished Poem.

Charles Bukowski Bonanza At Auction.
  
Dirty Old Man Exposed At The Huntington Library. 
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The Amazing John Martin Collection Of H.P. Lovecraft In Weird Tales

by Stephen J. Gertz

March 1938.
First Weird Tales appearance of Lovecraft's
Beyond the Wall of Sleep.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

John K, Martin is, perhaps, best known as the far-sighted founder and publisher of Black Sparrow Press who fostered Charles Bukowski's career as patron and publisher. For that alone he has entered literary history. Yet few are aware that Martin has also been one of the great book collectors of our time. Now 82 years old, John has put his superlative collection of H.P. Lovecraft in Weird Tales, the famed pulp magazine, up for sale.

A remarkable collection of eighty gorgeous issues amassed over decades, each - incredibly -  is in fine to very fine condition with yapp edges intact; these old pulps are usually  encountered in rubbed, sunned, toned, and torn shape.

We recently had an opportunity to talk to John Martin about the collection.

March 1937.
Contains Lovecraft's The Picture in the House.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

BT: When did you start collecting the pulps?

JKM: I began collecting books in general in 1950 when I was 20. At that time I was attracted to both Lovecraft and the pulps that published him. Over the years I collected and then disbursed many Lovecraft items, often in trades. About 15 years ago I decided to collect Lovecraft seriously once again, and to concentrate on the pulps, pamphlets, fanzines, leaflets, etc.

BT: Each copy in the collection is in Fine condition. Were you always aware of condition when you first began to collect them? (Not something young collectors generally pay attention to).

JKM: I learned very quickly that pulps and first editions in poor or average condition were not worth the time and money it took to collect them. That fine copies were essential. Also, I took more pleasure in holding and reading the individual items if they were in the same, or nearly the same, condition as when they were published. Somehow it turned back the clock for me to the time of first publication.

September 1937.
First Weird Tales appearance of Lovecraft's poem,
Psychopomos.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

BT: When you began was it your intent to seriously collect or did it sort of snowball from informal to committed?

JKM: I was a serious collector from day one but I didn't begin to put together this current Lovecraft collection until about 1995.

BT: Weird Tales exclusively or others as well?

JKM: As per above, I collected Weird Tales plus every Lovecraft periodical publication I could find published up until c. 1940 (of which there are hundreds). Some are so fragile (and rare) they almost disintegrate in your hands.

July 1942.
First Weird Tales appearance of Lovecraft's
Herbert West: Reanimator, Part 2. The Plague Demon.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

BT: Was H.P. Lovecraft your area of interest and  Weird Tales followed?

JKM: Then and now, my first interest was Lovecraft, followed by a desire to collect the first edition of everything he ever wrote.

BT: Where did you find the stuff?

JKM: In the early days, copies of Weird Tales could be found in used magazine stores and some bookstores for 25 cents apiece. Since I began this current collection in 1995, I was able to utilize the internet. Also I was able to go back to several dealers from whom I had purchased Lovecraft material in earlier times.

The prices for Lovecraft material (and most literary first editions) have ballooned beyond all reason. It's a prime example of hyper-inflation. A 1920s fine copy of Weird Tales with a Lovecraft contribution, can cost from $1500 to $5000, or more in a few cases.

May 1941.
First appearance of Part One of Lovecraft's
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.
Adapted to film by Roger Corman in 1963
as The Haunted Palace.
Cover art by Hannes Bok.

BT: Why Lovecraft?

JKM: As an impressionable, unsophisticated 20 year old, I read a story called "The Doom That Came to Sarnath." I was hooked. (It took me more than 50 years to find a copy of the June 1920 issue of "The Scot" where this story first appeared.)

BT: Favorite Lovecraft in Weird Tales?

JKM: "The Doom That Came to Sarnath" remains my favorite Lovecraft story. (It was reprinted in the June 1938 issue of Weird Tales.

BT:  Have you collected Lovecraft beyond Weird Tales, i.e. Arkham House, etc.?

JKM: I collected the two books what were printed before Lovecraft's death, "The Shunned House" (1928) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936).

October 1937.
First appearance in Weird Tales of Lovecraft's
The Shunned House.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

BT: You're known for your collection of D.H. Lawrence as well? What other collections have you put together? Is there an underlying theme that unites them in some way?

JKM: I have spent the past 62 years assembling author collection. I sold my D.H. Lawrence collection (that took me 40 years to build) a few years ago. I believe at the time it was by far the most extensive private holding of Lawrence's first editions, manuscripts, letters, artworks, photographs, and association items. Everything was in very fine condition.

Realizing that I am 82 years old and "can't take my books with me," I have also (along with Lovecraft) recently sold my author collections of Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Charles Bukowski. I still retain my collections of Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, A.E. Coppard, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, along with several hundred miscellaneous first editions.

May 1938.
First appearance of Lovecraft's poem,
In a Sequestered Churchyard Where Once Poe Walked.
Also first appearance of Robert E. Howard's story, Pigeons From Hell,
which Stephen King called one of the best short stories of the 20th century.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

 BT: Any particular reason why you're still holding on to those authors?

JKM: I am not exactly "holding on." I just haven't gotten around to offering them for sale. Also, I MUST be surrounded by books or I'll curl up and die. Also, I LOVE reading these authors over and over. (I think I have read every book I ever bought.).

BT:  After collecting for 62 years do you have any regrets about a book that got away, something sought but never found and acquired, a Holy Grail?

JKM: I never was able to buy a first edition of "Leaves of Grass." Ditto Pound's first book, "A Lume Spento." Ditto, "Sons and Lovers" in a first state dust jacket. My only three big regrets.

July 1933.
First appearances of Lovecraft's
The Dreams of the Witch House and
The Horror in the Museum.
Cover by Margaret Brundage.

BT:  You began collecting when legwork ruled, before the Internet brought the marketplace into collectors' homes, Any thoughts on the difference in experience?

JKM: The difference between collecting books the old fashioned way vs. collecting books over the internet, is the difference between swimming from New York to London or taking a jet.

BT:  Finally, your thoughts on Weird Tales cover art, so many by the great Margaret Brundage?

JKM: You'd have to be blind not to love the Weird Tales covers. Especially the ones from the 1920s and 1930s.

June 1938.
First Weird Tales appearance of Lovecraft's The Doom That Came To Sarnath.
Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

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All images courtesy of Between the Covers, currently offering this collection, with our thanks.
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Holden Caulfield's First Appearance in Print: He's Crazy

by Stephen J. Gertz

December 22, 1945.

"It was about eight o'clock at night, and dark, and raining, and freezing, and the wind was noisy the way it is in spooky movies on the night the old slob with the will gets murdered. I stood by the cannon on the top of Thomsen Hill, freezing to death, watching the big south windows of the gym - shining big and bright and dumb, like the windows of a gymnasium, and nothing else (but maybe you never went to a boarding school).

"I just had on my reversible and no gloves. Somebody had swiped my camel's hair the week before, and my gloves were in the pocket. Boy, I was cold. Only a crazy guy would have stood there. That's me. Crazy. No kidding, I have a screw loose. But I had to stand there to feel the goodby to the youngness of the place, as though I were an old man. The whole school was down below in the gym for the basketball game with the Saxon Charter slobs, and I was standing there to feel the goodbye.

"I stood there - boy, I was freezing to death - and I kept saying goodbye to myself, 'Good-bye, Caulfield. Good-bye, you slob.'"

So begins I'm Crazy, a short story by J.D. Salinger featuring Holden Caulfield, a teenager on the cusp of college and the standard life-trajectory but with an inchoate yearning for something different. It was published in the December 22, 1945 issue of Collier's magazine.

"I started running with my suitcases banging the devil out of my legs.
I ran all the way to the Gate, stopped, got my breath, and ran across Route 202."

Having flunked-out of his third school for not applying himself, Caulfield, unfocused, listless, and alienated, now faces a grim future, consigned by his father to work in an office. Life is over before it has begun.

But life for Holden Caulfield as a literary character was just beginning. The disaffected and disenchanted youth of the story, fully developed in The Catcher in the Rye (1951), became the figurehead for all adolescents in the post-WWII U.S., spawning the youth movement that emerged in the post-WWII years to question the status quo and the automatic assumption that after school one settles down and gets a job, no matter how soul-sucking it may be; to work in an office is to be prematurely buried. Holden Caulfield was the first adolescent anti-hero and became an icon of teenage angst and rebellion. 

I'm Crazy forms the basis for the first two chapters of The Catcher in the Rye, including the scene with Mr. Spencer, Holden's kind but unsympathetic teacher. Here, Holden is a more repentant figure, lamenting his failure. He has another sister, Viola, who didn't make it into Catcher... In the accompanying illustration, Holden wears a standard fedora rather than his typical red hunting cap.

I'm Crazy was not Salinger's first story to feature Holden Caulfield. The character was introduced in A Slight Rebellion Off Madison,  which, though appearing in The New Yorker a year after I'm Crazy appeared in Collier's, was actually written by Salinger and accepted for publication in 1941 - ten years before The Catcher in the Rye appeared -  under the title Am I Banging My Head Against the Wall? but held back from publication until after the war.

Salinger was highly protective of his work and never allowed many of his early stories, including I'm Crazy, to be reprinted, so uncollected magazine appearances are highly desirable to Salinger enthusiasts. And, too, as a result of illustrations like the one accompanying this story, Salinger later forbid their use; he didn't want the reader to be influenced by an interceding illustrator's interpretation of his work.

The Holden Caulfield that appears in The Catcher in the Rye is not the naif of I'm Crazy. Compare the voice and attitude of Holden in the opening to I'm Crazy above with the Caulfield who appears in the novel's first paragraph:

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

It's as if Salinger somehow heard Tuddy Cicero, in Scorsese's Goodfellas, complain about adolescent Henry Hill helping a stranger who's been shot and took heed: "We gotta toughen this kid up." Holden gets an edge - however mild by today's standards -  yet remains vulnerable.

We're also witnessing Salinger's development as a writer with perfect-pitch for real-world, non-literary dialogue.

This attractive issue of Collier's is being offered within First Books and Before, a new catalog from Between the Covers that considers the question Where does an author's career begin? by featuring first books and early appearances, many of which are quite affordable.

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Images courtesy of Between the Covers, with our thanks.
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An O. Henry Story Loaded With Morphine

“The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-turned overcoat collar.

"’I would rather not supply you,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I sold you a dozen morphine tablets less than an hour ago.’

“The customer smiles wanly. ‘The fault is in your crooked streets. I didn't intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up. Excuse me."

Thus begins Fog in Santone by American short story master O. Henry (1862-1910). Those who know O. Henry only as the author of the classic tale of loving sacrifice, The Gift of the Magi, with its typically O.Henry ironic and surprise end, may be shocked to learn that the same author wrote a story soaked in morphine.

Fog in Santone, posthumously published in the October 1912 issue of The Cosmopolitan (Yes, that Cosmopolitan, which began in 1886 as a family periodical, morphed into a literary magazine, then, in the 1960s, transmogrified into Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmo) but likely written c. 1904, is one of a handful of stories that O. Henry set in San Antonio, Texas, where the author lived at some point during the early 1880s – 1896.

At the time of his residence, San Antonio, with its warm (some – me, for instance – would say unbearably hot), dry, and sunny climate and clean air, was a destination for tuberculosis sufferers. Within the story we are informed that San Antonio had 3,000 “tubercules” living within the city limits. Many were in the final stages of the disease and liberally dosed themselves with whiskey and/or morphine, at the time freely available over-the-counter without prescription, as palliative or final exit strategy.

Readers of O. Henry will be further stunned to learn that in this story a prostitute plays a major role. She, in fact, is the plot twist providing the ironic surprise ending. This is a very morbid story and O. Henry is having a lot of fun telling it in stereoscopic vision with one eye on the melancholy, the other one on the jolly with a wink and raised eyebrow.

I will not blow the ending (or beginning and middle) for you. The link above provides the full text to the story, and it will only take five minutes or so to read.

It offers a colorful view of drug use and cultural attitudes about opiates in the American Southwest during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the period of America’s first drug epidemic. It is to be taken seriously for that reason alone. That it was written by O. Henry makes it important.

This story has heretofore been unknown to scholars and collectors of drug literature. It is now a major catalogue contribution to the literature of drugs, and adds to our understanding of the continuum of drugs and drug use in American culture.
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Previously on Book Patrol:
The Story of O. Henry House

An O. Henry Story Loaded With Morphine

“The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-turned overcoat collar.

"’I would rather not supply you,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I sold you a dozen morphine tablets less than an hour ago.’

“The customer smiles wanly. ‘The fault is in your crooked streets. I didn't intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up. Excuse me."

Thus begins Fog in Santone by American short story master O. Henry (1862-1910). Those who know O. Henry only as the author of the classic tale of loving sacrifice, The Gift of the Magi, with its typically O.Henry ironic and surprise end, may be shocked to learn that the same author wrote a story soaked in morphine.

Fog in Santone, posthumously published in the October 1912 issue of The Cosmopolitan (Yes, that Cosmopolitan, which began in 1886 as a family periodical, morphed into a literary magazine, then, in the 1960s, transmogrified into Helen Gurley Brown's Cosmo) but likely written c. 1904, is one of a handful of stories that O. Henry set in San Antonio, Texas, where the author lived at some point during the early 1880s – 1896.

At the time of his residence, San Antonio, with its warm (some – me, for instance – would say unbearably hot), dry, and sunny climate and clean air, was a destination for tuberculosis sufferers. Within the story we are informed that San Antonio had 3,000 “tubercules” living within the city limits. Many were in the final stages of the disease and liberally dosed themselves with whiskey and/or morphine, at the time freely available over-the-counter without prescription, as palliative or final exit strategy.

Readers of O. Henry will be further stunned to learn that in this story a prostitute plays a major role. She, in fact, is the plot twist providing the ironic surprise ending. This is a very morbid story and O. Henry is having a lot of fun telling it in stereoscopic vision with one eye on the melancholy, the other one on the jolly with a wink and raised eyebrow.

I will not blow the ending (or beginning and middle) for you. The link above provides the full text to the story, and it will only take five minutes or so to read.

It offers a colorful view of drug use and cultural attitudes about opiates in the American Southwest during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the period of America’s first drug epidemic. It is to be taken seriously for that reason alone. That it was written by O. Henry makes it important.

This story has heretofore been unknown to scholars and collectors of drug literature. It is now a major catalogue contribution to the literature of drugs, and adds to our understanding of the continuum of drugs and drug use in American culture.
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