Some Comments on Jack Saunders' Work (cont'd)

As you can see I've enclosed a $10 check. I feel kind of dumb because it reminds me of some guy giving a kid a quarter and patting him on the head. What you could use is $18,000, but I don't have that to give. So consider this either payment for Evil Genius and all that went before, or a step towards publishing your next book. State of Being.

I'm far along in Evil Genius and have to say it's the best so far. Actually, that's not quite correct--it does a great job of tying together that which came before it. Reid Wood (State of Being)

I am very pleased at the way you handled the tale of your life in EVIL GENIUS. It owes something to Henry Miller, but every writer owes a debt to those before them and those in turn were helped by their predecessors. No one is an absolute original, but you come close. William Eastlake

I finished EVIL GENIUS a few days ago. Whew. I need stuff like that to keep me going. Know there's others out there. Crowbar

Read your book last night - found much of you, the Florida we grew up with, and some of me in your writing - I'll read it again this weekend. William Cole

Enclosed is my check for Evil Genius, which I read pretty much in one sitting the day it came in the mail. I didn't really mean to do that but got absorbed while thumbing through it to see if it wasn't pretty much the same old shit about the plight of the creative artist. I think I can now understand why you bitch so much, and I don't mean because you had such a hard life. I mean because it is a genuinely good book and deserves to be read by more people and you deserve to be paid what it is worth, which is more than considerable. Maybe part of my liking and admiration for EG is because I know so many of the people and places. But you can discount that. It is the way you told a good story, not the who and the where that did it for me. Anyway, I thought it was a fine piece of work. Keep them coming. Jack Marwitt

Thanks for the copy of Screed. I liked it very much. In fact, I've been reading it aloud to my wife in bed at night. You write in a kind of natural, organic, free-flowing and perfectly lucid style that I much admire. Edward Abbey

Dear Jack: Thanks for Screed. It's good diatribe. The reason I know is that diatribe makes me feel better. And I felt better reading it. Walker Percy

Jack: Got your book, Screed, this morning in the mail and just finished it tonight at 11:45. Just before I read Screed, I'd been re-reading Somerset Maugham's Summing Up --you and Screed and "our times" hold your own with The Master and his in the 1930s. Jim Drought.

The greatest living American writer, perhaps the greatest American writer ever. Harvey Griffin

In Jack Saunders our generation is extremely lucky to have a powerful and determined writer, an honest writer. A Diogenes not merely of words, but of provocative thoughts. From his hideaway in Florida, like a super-energized lobster, Saunders lashes out at the sickening hypocrisy which is deadening our senses and rotting our souls. It is Saunders' adamant, boneheaded, determined persistence that is his great strength, his great gift to a society staggering in its own materialistic greed. Saunders is America at its best. He wants to clean up the world. He is clean. He spells out what spirit is all about. And humanity. How do we live? When do we really come ALIVE? As we should? And deserve? America needs writers with such strength and ferocity and independence and integrity, not all those greedy little wordmongers contemplating their private parts on every supermarket shelf. Saunders is more than a literary volcano. He is a live, writhing, crackling wire. Spewing sparks in all directions. Creating and developing a brighter, newer world. Raymond Barrio

Thanks for Screed. Nicely done. He rolls on. Charles Bukowski

The most neurotic, self-absorbed, anal-compulsive whiner on the small press scene. Merritt Clifton

Your writing is very, very good and deserves wide readership and critical acceptance to boot. You write too well, as you know too well; your stuff's too immediate and embarrassing for most people in publishing to handle. Fashion now is supposed to be slick, easy to snort, quick literary high. Who the hell wants to wade through 10,000 more pages of words? I do, if you'll send them. Judith Conaway

Jack Saunders writes about his life. That's all. It's not any more or less interesting a life than yours, or mine, really. But it's his. In everything he writes he tells the same old story, in infinite variety, like an earfull of blues based on the same three chords. He rings his changes, brushes off the dust, and reveals in his writing the mirror underneath; you see your own face staring back at you. The glimmer of universal recognition and revelation in the journey of the individual. We're all the same, after all. Just shuffle the cards and deal again. Dana Buck

You know David, when I was in NY and walked into some book-shops one afternoon I really thought they were branches of Delicatessen, incredible what a poverty, not one single book of serious literature, colorful covers covering nothing or fake literature (if you're lucky). If I would search for this rare unknown American author, where would I find him first? In NY, in LA, in SF or maybe in London, in Amsterdam in...well of course NY is big enough and maybe as a naive European I probably missed the right book-shop, somebody will sell it in NY I know just get a good directory. The point is Jack Saunders is probably too European for an American and too American for a European. That means his books could sell very well in Iceland, not America not Europe, but just in between. Arthur Berkhoff

Sanders--don't send me any more books. They're all the same. Spend the money on your wife and kids. Ann Charters

Thanks for sending OPEN BOOK, which has a great deal of power. Your writing continues to be energetic, important, and as always, honest. I could have done without some of the racism, but I can't deny that you're always being you. Richard Grayson

Thanks for Evil Genius and Open Book; I enjoyed both of them, and asked my publisher to send you my new book, Sideswipe, when it comes out in Feb. In 1957, Theodore Pratt told me that Delray Beach was a better town than N. Y. for a writer. "If you stay in Florida," he told me, "you'll never run out of things to write about." He was right, of course; I never have, and you won't either. My most productive years were from age 50 to 55, and I'm sure that yours will be too. Charles Willeford

Being a painter myself, your stuff is helpful and healthy to read. In the center of the whine is the ring of truth. These books should be available to young people who study art in schools. In fact I have sent two out urging that they be made available to students. John Dempsey

There is something very unusual in your work--what's most unusual, however, is not what it is but where it is--in a book. The works seem extremely hermetic in self-consciousness. Totally self-involved. And that is how, in my estimation, all of life is lived, at every turn. The trick is to recognize the activities in which the admission of such solipsism is not welcome--art, certainly, politics another, even "love," where heaven help those after their own solitary and exclusive ends. I think your work is being lived every day by countless people, and I think these people are of two camps --1) either despairing of not finding corroboration of their own self-involvement in works of art, or 2) convinced that such self-involvement is a sin of huge proportions, and that objectivity is the path of liberation, or at least, truth. Your work could open a lot of eyes, and could please a lot of hearts. Not for attribution

Just finished reading EVIL GENIUS last night. So I want to write while I have it fresh in mind. Think it is by far the best work of yours that I have read. There is a real universality with regard to the plight of the artist, which you capture just by writing the way you do. Have been to a few parties of late, I find that when I listen to so many artists that I am hearing you. These are for the most part visual artists, and also some other writers. John Evans

As I was reading OPEN BOOK, and getting toward the end of it, I thought to myself - well, he's really done it now, he's totally over the edge, he's cracking up. It was a very uncomfortable feeling - like being at a party or in public with someone who's coming on so strong and you can't get away. At any rate I read OFF-SHORE with a sense of relief; you seem to have regained some equilibrium. Often great art comes from the pain and suffering of the artist, but still as human beings we have to wish that the artist achieve some sense of relief from that pain and suffering. I do want to comment on your IBM observations. They seem to be right on. The ad campaigns are ludicrous, especially the one currently which shows Leonardo da Vinci using an IBM PC. I never imagined Leonardo as the cuddly and slightly befuddled figure who's shown on TV, and the kind of crap being produced as visual images on the machine would make Leonardo turn over in his grave. State of Being