"Almost everyone is born a genius and buried an idiot."
- Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old ManAfter all my talking, this post will surely be a letdown, one that I'll want to write and rewrite again. But, gotta let go sometime. Not going to go into individual books here, might prefer to touch on those somewhere down the road. I consider this a preface.
Why I love Bukowski. Because he was reflective; because he was funny; because he was socially awkward; because he was able to say a profound thing in a simple way. Buk died March 9, 1994. I was working at a
comic book company at the time. And in fact, he was the reason I got my first full-time job in publishing. I had to fill out a questionnaire before the interview, and one of the questions was, "Name some of your favorite writers." I almost didn't write him down. But, it turned out the woman who would become my boss, was a huge fan as well. So she hired me. When I got to the office that morning, I found on my desk that a friend (and future boss) had left the
NY Times obit there with a note that read, "go home early, mourn Hank." I wish I still had that.
Looking at bookstore shelves with their "newly published" or "newly found" Bukowski titles, it's hard to believe that he only wrote six novels while he was alive. Of those, only one of them wasn't autobiographical (
Pulp). His alter ego, Hank Chinaski appears throughout the other five. And like Buk (whose first name was Henry), Hank despised society and loathed and feared the middle class and their values. Hank was brilliant at unearthing the motivations of those he came in contact with and as much as he fails, whether in love or lust, or employment (or housing), his tormentors never escape without having been laid bare by one of his devastatingly funny and brutally honest observations. But, as is often the case, what lay behind that wit and cynicism and bluster was exactly the opposite--Buk was a lonely and vulnerable man full of self-doubt and loathing. Someone longing for love and to be loved--and it is this, this essential part of his soul, that is never gone from the page, no matter how vulgar or crude the scene.
Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920, and though his first works were published in the 1940s, he gave up writing to generally live the life he would eventually describe when he returned to the typewriter, about 20 years later. He spent his childhood as a social failure, in a lower class family, with an abusive father and horrific acne (the extent of which can be clearly seen on his ravaged face), just as Hank did. For years his work was either compared to the Beats or dismissed outright as too simplistic, but more recently it has been accepted in "literary" circles and has even found its way into coursework and literary theory. Perhaps most famously, was an essay that appeared in
Granta by Bill Buford, which dissected Bukowski's novel
Factotum (even if by doing so, it missed the point, entirely). Buford called the form "Dirty Realism," and his theory takes Roland Barthes idea of writing in the style of "literary consciousness"--essentially, the reader experiences immediate pleasure at the moment of reading--and turns it on its head. For Buford, dirty realism transfers the consciousness to the writer at their required moment:
Imagine someone ... who abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple discard of that old spectre: logical contradiction ... [Bukowski not only] discards ... logical contradiction, but flaunts his disdain for consistency, logic, and accountability. He is not only conscious of contradiction within his text, but celebrates a willful hypocrisy, indiscriminately exhibiting (and conscripting to his own ends) the incongruities of postindustrial capital. Bukowski turns passivity into a subversive practice by self-consciously displaying his subjection to capital's indeterminacy, in effect replicating and co-opting that indeterminacy to empower himself.
In other words, Bukowski was an insecure, confused, uh ... human being. Whatever the thought, this piece did bring much attention and to that book, as well as his other work, and provided much of the long-overdue legitimacy it deserved. More recent theories include British author
Jules Smith's critical analysis of Buk,
Art Survival and Poetry, that, as the book's blurb states:
Smith investigates in detail the formal influences of Whitman's broadening of subject matter, iterative parallelisms, and revival of narrative, Robinson Jeffers' Inhumanism, and the long, strophic lines of both predecessors. As a poet based for thirty-six years in Southerm California, I am especially grateful for the insightful attention paid to the complex relationship of subsequent generations of L.A./Long Beach writers to the Bukowkian model. I share, furthermore, his conviction that Bukowski's work is of at least the stature of Ginsberg's, Kerouac's, and Henry Miller's - I would, in fact, place him a notch above all three. I also find of great significance the "anxiety of influence," to invoke Harold Bloom's terminology, of Bukowski's Oedipal relationship to his towering, glowering forefather, Ernest Hemingway.
This theory sounds a little closer to the spirit of Bukowski, insofar as considering the thought of his work being deconstructed on the basis of a prurient interest in Papa by a room full of twenty-year-old coeds. The idea of which, I imagine, would tickle Hank no end.
I mentioned I was re-reading
Run with the Hunted, to refresh my thoughts on who he was, and even in part to see if what I thought it was that I found so appealing in him was even true anymore. And, it was. It only gets funnier as you get older; more recognizable; just how spot-on his rants about life and love were; and the petty frustrations and petty people you run into throughout both; and how often you revisit it all, no matter what alleyway you find yourself walking down. As far as the book itself, as a concept,
Run with the Hunted is an inspired idea for a "biography," and I'd recommend it for that reason alone. Since so much of Buk's work was semi-autobiographical (his short stories and his poems, in addition to his novels) what editor
John Martin (the genius behind
Black Sparrow Press) did was take excerpts from novels, short stories, and poems and put them in the
chronological order of Buk's life. And what this does is provide an entirely different view of him. It reveals just how sensitive to the world Buk was, how utterly dumbfounded. And it also reveals why more clearly. This is important I think, in understanding him. Because, if you read just one book, or if you read many in varying order, it may not occur to you that most of the stories are true. And it's easy to see in that case, how his writing might just come across as simple and profane. But to read these poems, excerpts, and stories in the order of his life puts all of that into perspective. You may still find him repulsive, but you can't help but recognize the pain and humor behind it. And with that recognition, you also come to see how deceptively simple his writing is. There doesn't exist a Bukowski sentence that runs off for a full paragraph. Not only was he incapable of that kind of preening, he was incapable of bullsh*t. Period.
I wish I could include more of his poetry here, because as with his novels, their simple form makes reading poems much less of a chore. It becomes instead, what the form was intended to be, emotion boiled down, in a simple way. Please click to read these, if you have the time.
eulogy to a hell of a dame
for jane: with all the love i had, which was not enough
a radio with guts
as the sparrow
an almost made up poem
confession
I think I can live with this as is for now. Maybe.
["Conversation" line drawing by Charles Bukowski]
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
