Beerspit Night And Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli, 1960­1967 Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli Black Sparrow Press 400 pp. Available from Powell's Books.

In The Tipping Point, that marvelous mediation on the unseen forces that spur social trends into motion, Malcolm Gladwell writes at length about a woman named Lois Weisberg. Lois has lived in Chicago since the 1950s, and what fascinated Gladwell about her is that she as the kind of person that knew everybody in Chicago. Not just "knew a lot of people", but, uniquely, had a toe in a bewildering number of very separate and otherwise unconnected circles. She demonstrates a key point of his book: "Lois is a connector."

Sheri Martinelli seems to have been a similar sort of person. Indeed, Martinelli seems to have been a walking compendium of modernist/Beat lore. She knew everybody, and everybody knew her. She was a protégée of Anaïs Nin; the basis for a major character in the William Gaddis novel The Recognitions; the muse and mistress of Ezra Pound; host to Charlie Parker and members of the Modern Jazz Quartet; object of Marlon Brando's desire; inspiration to the poet H.D.; and friend to all the Beats, especially Allen Ginsburg. Martinelli was also an unusual artist whose work was bought by Rod Steiger and E.E. Cummings. Much of her writing (both prose and poetry) appeared in her own magazine, the Anagogic & Paideumic Review, one of the many periodicals that Charles Bukowski wrote for in his long and eventful career. It was this connection that led Martinelli and Bukowski to develop a remarkable correspondence that lasted several years, from 1960 to 1967. Like many correspondences, there are lots of letters early and then it all tapers out.

Bukowski carefully cultivated the myth of the drunken mad genius (or buffoon, depending). The Bukowski revealed in Beerspit Night and Cursing resists Martinelli's tender rebukes, rails against the literary establishment and skewers inauthentic scenesters who rub him the wrong way, but the book also reveals a well-read man who had colorfully strong opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of many of his contemporaries and predecessors. As Martinelli was a bona-fide intellectual and aesthete, the correspondence allows Bukowski to show a side of himself that isn't usually present in his work: Bukowski himself as intellectual and aesthete. What's indisputable is that the letters wholly merit a book unto themselves, both in volume and interest. Not only is there a new side of Bukowski to absorb; Martinelli, a bit player in the lives of so many interesting people, is rescued for history as well.

Part of Bukowski's secret was that he combined the recklessness of a deadbeat drunk (which he was) with the hifalutin' vocabulary of a bookworm (which he also was). His prose in these letters is a drunken melange of gutter talk and the detritus of a thesaurus ("oocytes" and "gallimaufry" and "polysyndeton"). The letters, banged out on a typewriter, are jammed with amusing misspellings, many of them initially inadvertent and then transformed in a game of automatic word-association. He was twice besotted -- not just by drink, but also by language.

At times it feels like Bukowski considered himself the last of the great modernists, but in retrospect he comes off with another honorable title: modernism's heroic late defender. His praise of Pound is effusive ("Nobody invented E. Pound. I was going to say he invented us but that's too easy, and besides he would have done a better job." Elsewhere, he refers to him as "my god Pound -- the only man I feel inferior to on this earth"), although it's possible he's playing up to Martinelli's connection to the poet. He does have the wit to tweak Martinelli for her paramour's "circus and blather, maestro maestro throwing spagetwopchink and rolling with the punch, effect of doing, appears walking straight while lying down."

While Bukowski loved D.H. Lawrence and Pound, he disliked Faulkner and many of the Beats with whom he now shares shelf space in bookstores. Fittingly enough, he worshipped the dark, brooding Dostoevsky but disliked the more ecumenical, measured Tolstoy. His outspokenness with regard to his contemporaries is often startling and acts as a tonic -- for example: "The biggest fake in amer. lit. is Wm. Faulkner but it is going to take them some time to find out." And, a moment later, he writes that Kerouac "has set back letters and intelligence 100 years and that's all he'll be famous for." Later: "I have never been able to read (Ginsburg) without boredom. Boredom, hell yes. And I do not think Ginsburg has come through with a consistent body of work that points in any direction with force."

There are some wonderful scenes described here as well. One marvelous letter is written as he awaits an early-morning singing telegram sent by his former wife to celebrate his birthday. He is halfway disgusted by the whole concept, and waits -- and types -- until he is relieved to receive a mere delivery of flowers. There's another great moment in which he describes being in a bar with a bunch of barflys, and showing them his byline in a literary magazine, "only it skidrow bar and they never hearda nobody." Bukowski frequently displays the pride of craft (as well as the flip side, sheer disgust) towards his poetic efforts. In an epigram only he could have written, Bukowski notes that "the essence of poetry is malarkey crossed with bullwhip." This volume is essential reading for anyone as besotted with Bukowski as he was with poetry.

-- Martin Schneider

"Since the mid-60s, a single small press in California has made a profitable and growing business -- without advertising, without relying on grants, without leverage, and without press coverage -- by publishing precisely what it wants. And what it wants to publish is the original, the counter-cultural, the avant-garde, and the overlooked. Black Sparrow Press was launched in 1966 by a Southern California businessman, John Martin, to publish the work of the then little-known (though highly respected) poet Charles Bukowski. It has continued over the past 30 plus years -- growing steadily -- to publish American poetry and fiction that, whether one cares for it or not, can only be described as determinedly noncommercial. And from this mix has risen some of the finest avant-garde and experimental work of the 20th century." -- Neil Gordon, Boston Review