The Transgressive Thrills of
Charles Bukowski
The captain of a low-life
odyssey, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he produced a large, completely
distinctive, widely beloved body of work.
By Adam Kirsch
March 6, 2005
In the third edition of “The
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry,” in which poets appear in
order of birth, the class of 1920 fields a strong team, including Howard
Nemerov and Amy Clampitt. If you were to browse the poetry section of any large
bookstore, you would probably find a book or two by each of those critically
esteemed, prize-winning poets. Nowhere to be found in the canonizing Norton
anthology, however, is the man who occupies the most shelf space of any
American poet: Charles Bukowski. Bukowski’s books make up a burly phalanx, with
their stark covers and long, lurid titles: “Love Is a Dog from Hell”; “Play the
Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a
Bit.” They give the impression of an aloof, possibly belligerent empire in the
middle of the republic of letters.
Bukowski himself, and his many,
many readers, would not have it any other way. John Martin, the founder of
Black Sparrow Press, who was responsible for launching Bukowski’s career, has
explained that “he is not a mainstream author and he will never have a
mainstream public.” This is an odd thing to say about a poet who has sold
millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages—a
commercial success of a kind hardly known in American poetry since the
pre-modernist days of popular balladeers like Edgar A. Guest. Yet the sense of
not being part of the mainstream, at least as the Norton anthology and most
other authorities define it, is integral to Bukowski’s appeal. He is one of
those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.
Fittingly, for a poet whose
reputation was made in ephemeral underground journals, it is on the Internet
that the Bukowski cult finds its most florid expression. There are hundreds of
Web sites devoted to him, not just in America but in Germany, Spain, the Czech
Republic, and Sweden, where one fan writes that, after reading him for the
first time, “I felt there was a soul-mate in Mr. Bukowski.” Such claims to
intimacy are standard among Bukowski’s admirers. On Amazon.com, the reader
reviews of his books sound like a cross between love letters and
revival-meeting testimonials: “This is the one that speaks to me to the point
where each time I read certain pages, I cry”; “This book is one of the most
influential books of poetry in my life”; or, most revealing of all, “I hate
poetry, but I love Buk’s poems.”
Today’s fans can no longer call
up Bukowski on the phone or drop in on him at home in Los Angeles, where he
lived most of his life. But before his death, from leukemia, in 1994, they
could and did, with a regularity that the poet found flattering, if tiresome.
As he told an interviewer in 1981, “I get many letters in the mail about my
writing, and they say: ‘Bukowski, you are so fucked up and you still survive. I
decided not to kill myself.’ . . . So in a way I save people. . . . Not that I
want to save them: I have no desire to save anybody. . . . So these are my
readers, you see? They buy my books—the defeated, the demented and the
damned—and I am proud of it.”
This mixture of boast and
complaint exactly mirrors the coyness of Bukowski’s poetry, which is at once
misanthropic and comradely, aggressively vulgar and clandestinely sensitive.
The readers who love him, and believe that he would love them in return, know
how to look past the bluster of poems like “splashing”:
dumb,
Jesus Christ,
some people are so dumb
you can hear them
splashing around in their
dumbness. . . .
I want to
run and hide
I want to
escape their engulfing
nullity.
Bukowski’s fans realize that
“some people,” like E. E. Cummings’s “mostpeople,” or J. D. Salinger’s hated
“phonies,” are never us, always them—those not perceptive enough to understand
our merit, or our favorite author’s. This is a typically adolescent emotion,
and it is no coincidence that all three of these writers exert a special power
over teen-agers. With all three, too, there is the sense that if the
misanthrope could know us as we really are he would welcome our pilgrimage; as
Holden Caulfield says, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re
all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of
yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”
Similarly, Bukowski might declare his contempt for humanity, and his alarm at
its constant invasions of his privacy—“I have never welcomed the ring of a /
telephone,” he writes in “the telephone”—yet he titles another poem with his
telephone number, “462-0614,” and issues what sounds like an open invitation:
I don’t write out of knowledge.
when the phone rings
I too would like to hear words
that might ease
some of this.
that’s why my number’s
listed.
This sort of cri de coeur is not
what first comes to mind when the name Charles Bukowski is mentioned. In the
course of some fifty books, he transformed himself into a mythic roughneck, a
figure out of a tall tale—brawler, gambler, companion of bums and whores,
boozehound with an oceanic thirst. (This legend gained still wider exposure
with the 1987 movie “Barfly,” in which a version of Bukowski is portrayed by
Mickey Rourke.) In his heavily autobiographical novels and some of his poems,
he gave this alter ego the transparent pseudonym Hank Chinaski—Bukowski’s full
name was Henry Charles Bukowski, Jr., and he was known to friends as Hank—but
since he almost always wrote in the first person, the line between Chinaski the
character and Bukowski the man is blurred. This blurring is, in fact, the
secret of Bukowski’s appeal: he combines the confessional poet’s promise of
intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.
Bukowski’s poems are best
appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in
the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial. They are
strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically
involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation
thereof. Bukowski’s free verse is really a series of declarative sentences
broken up into a long, narrow column, the short lines giving an impression of
speed and terseness even when the language is sentimental or clichéd. The
effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe
and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start
telling his life story:
I was the mean and
crazy white
guy, full of humor, laughter
and gamble.
I was shacked with a
silken-legged
beauty.
I drank and fought all
night,
was the terror of the
local bars.
These lines are from “then and
now,” a poem in the latest collection of Bukowski’s work, “Slouching Toward
Nirvana: New Poems” (Ecco; $27.50). Death has not put a dent in Bukowski’s
productivity; this is his ninth posthumous book of poems, and there are more to
come. Nor has it changed his style: these “new poems” are just like the old
poems, perhaps a shade more repetitive, but not immediately recognizable as
second-rate work or leftovers.
An uncannily prolific afterlife
was something that Bukowski counted on. As early as 1970, he wrote to his
editor, “just think, someday after I’m dead and they start going for my poems
and stories, you will have a hundred stories and a thousand poems on hand. you
just don’t know how lucky you are, babe.” In the next quarter century, the
surplus grew, thanks to Bukowski’s nearly graphomaniacal fecundity. “I usually
write ten or fifteen [poems] at once,” he said, and he imagined the act of
writing as a kind of entranced combat with the typewriter, as in his poem “cool
black air”: “now I sit down to it and I bang it, I don’t use the light / touch,
I bang it.”
Alcohol was the fuel, as it was
often the subject, of these poetic explosions: “I don’t think I have written a
poem when I was completely sober,” he told one interviewer. And he rejected on
principle the notion of poetry as a craft, a matter of labor and revision.
Against the metaphors prevailing in the New Critical atmosphere of the
nineteen-fifties, when he started writing in earnest—the Well Wrought Urns and
the Verbal Icons—Bukowski posed his own, entirely characteristic image for
writing: “it has to come out like hot turds the morning after a good beer
drunk.”
That kind of grossness is a large
part of Bukowski’s appeal. His own life, as it appears in the poems, at least,
is a teen-age boy’s fantasy of adulthood, in which there’s no one to make you
clean up your room, or get out of bed in the morning, or stop drinking before
you pass out. Yet, crucial to the myth, slobbery and drunkenness only increase
Bukowski’s appeal to women:
you’re a beast, she said
your big white belly
and those hairy feet.
you never cut your nails. . . .
beast beast beast,
she kissed me,
what do you want for breakfast?
Such poems offer the same kind of
vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy
novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. (In one
poem, Bukowski acknowledges this affinity, boasting: “don’t believe the gossip:
/ Bogie’s not dead.”) And Bukowski is best read as a very skillful genre
writer. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or
Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the
real thing. He has two of the supreme merits of genre writing, consistency and
abundance: once you have been enticed into Bukowski’s world, you have the
comfort of knowing that you won’t have to leave it anytime soon, since there will
always be another book to read.
The pleasures offered by
Bukowski’s work are more quickly exhausted than the questions raised by his
life, and the way he transformed that life into something like art. The crucial
episodes in his biography are reworked again and again in his poems and novels,
so that any reader quickly learns the broad outlines of his story. In
“Slouching Toward Nirvana,” for instance, the poem “clothes cost money”
recounts Bukowski’s childhood memory of a classmate called Hofstetter, who would
get beaten up on the way home from school every day, only to be berated by his
mother: “you’ve ruined your clothes again! / don’t you know that clothes cost
money?” This is nearly identical to an episode from Bukowski’s novel about his
childhood, “Ham on Rye,” where the hapless boy is called David: “David! Look at
your knickers and shirt! . . . Why do you do this to your clothes?”
In both versions of the story,
what matters is the brutality of children and the cruel indifference of
parents; and these seem to have been the major themes of Bukowski’s own
childhood. Born in Germany to an American-serviceman father and a German
mother, Bukowski moved at the age of three to Los Angeles. The Depression,
which shadowed his whole adolescence, affected him primarily through his
father, who took out his frustrations on his wife and son. Bukowski describes
terrible beatings, sadistically inflicted for minor transgressions like missing
a blade of grass when he mowed the lawn. When Bukowski reached adolescence and broke
out in a world-class case of acne, he saw it as a symptom of his helpless
suffering: “The poisoned life had finally exploded out of me. There they
were—all the withheld screams—spouting out in another form.”
This disfigurement helped to make
Bukowski a surly, friendless teen-ager. But there was another element in his
isolation, one that he dwells on much less often—an innate sensitivity and
intelligence, which led to the first stirrings of literary ambition. This is a
standard element in the biography of most poets, but it fits awkwardly with the
myth of Bukowski the tough, who constantly proclaims his contempt for mere
bookishness. “Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me,” he told one interviewer.
“That upper-crust shit bored me. I couldn’t relate to it.” The promise of his
books is that they detour around emasculated, fussy artistry—“We’re all tired
of the turned subtle phrase and the riddle in the middle of the line,” he
declared to another interviewer—and plunge deep into life itself.
Yet Bukowski also admitted, on
other occasions, to having been a very bookish youth: “Between the ages of
fifteen and twenty-four I must have read a whole library.” In his letters (four
volumes of which have been published so far), he shows that he is conversant
with the entire range of modern fiction and poetry. He parodies Eliot
(“Bukowski’s old, Bukowski’s old / he wears the bottoms of his beercans /
rolled”), drops references to Mann (in “Slouching Toward Nirvana,” there is a
poem titled “disorder and early sorrow”), debates the relative merits of
Turgenev and Tolstoy (he prefers the former). Most surprisingly, he admires the
New Critics, whose aesthetics of complexity and impersonality he so gleefully
violated. “I know that the Kenyon Review is supposed to be our enemy,” he wrote
to a friend in 1961, “but the articles are, in most cases, sound, and I would
almost say, poetic and vibrant.”
In fact, Bukowski started out in
eager pursuit of conventional literary success. He attended Los Angeles City
College, where he took a creative-writing class, and wrote furiously, as he
wryly recalls in “the burning of the dream”:
and I wrote from 3 to
5 short stories a week
and they all came
back
from The New Yorker, Harper’s,
The Atlantic Monthly.
In his poverty and dedication, and,
especially, in his low-rent Los Angeles milieu, the young Bukowski strongly
resembles Arturo Bandini, the hero of John Fante’s minor classic “Ask the
Dust”; the book, which Bukowski accidentally discovered in the stacks of the
Los Angeles Central Library, made a huge impression on him. (Decades later,
when Bukowski was famous and Fante forgotten, his advocacy led Black Sparrow
Press to bring Fante’s work back into print.) During the war, when he was
classified 4-F for psychological reasons, Bukowski travelled around the country
on almost no money, working menial jobs and staying in flophouses—but always
writing. He even scored a considerable success in 1946, when he was published
in the literary magazine Portfolio, alongside Henry Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Yet after that, so the legend
goes, Bukowski gave up writing completely, and became a full-time drunk. For
the next decade, he bummed his way across America, eventually washing up in Los
Angeles once again; he boozed, whored, fought, spent time on factory floors and
in jails. He frequently recalled one Philadelphia bar, in particular, where he
would sit from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m., earning free drinks by allowing the bartender
to beat him up for the entertainment of the crowd. This low-life odyssey is to Bukowski’s
poetry what Melville’s South Sea journeys were to his fiction: an inexhaustible
store of adventure and anecdote, and a badge of authenticity.
After being hospitalized, in
1955, with a nearly fatal illness, Bukowski returned to writing, but in a new
spirit. His focus was now on poetry, instead of short stories, and he sent his
work to underground journals with names like Coffin, Grist, and Ole. These, and
not the glossy weeklies, were the right venues for his new work, which boasted
a proletarian grittiness: “After losing a week’s pay in four hours it is very
difficult to come to your room and face the typewriter and fabricate a lot of
lacy bullshit.”
Once Bukowski returned to his
vocation, success arrived slowly but surely. He became well known among readers
of little magazines, and published a series of chapbooks and limited editions.
Yet, as his reputation grew, he was still stuck working as a postal clerk, a
job whose indignities he detailed in his first novel, “Post Office.” The real
breakthrough in his career as a writer came in 1970, when John Martin agreed to
pay him a monthly stipend of a hundred dollars in return for the right to
publish his work through Black Sparrow Press. This arrangement was a gamble for
both publisher and author, but it proved tremendously successful: by the time
Bukowski died, his monthly payment had risen to seven thousand dollars and he
had nineteen titles in print.
The deal can also be seen,
however, as a sign of Bukowski’s lack of literary confidence. Instead of
offering his publisher each book as he finished it, Bukowski simply sent all
his work to Martin, who then selected the contents of the new volume. “He
didn’t even know what I was going to put in,” Martin is quoted as saying in the
1998 biography “Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life,” by
Howard Sounes. “He didn’t care.” It sounds less like modern publishing, with
authors and editors and agents all defending their own interests, than like the
quasi-feudal relationship that John Clare, the archetypal nineteenth-century
“peasant poet,” had with his publishers. Clare, too, sent off all his writing
to his editor—John Taylor, of Taylor & Hessey—and received a regular
allowance in return, a sign of the parties’ profound imbalance in social status
and worldly savvy. But, while Clare and Taylor eventually had the bitter
falling-out one might expect from such an arrangement, Bukowski and Martin
remained close, trusting partners to the end. Black Sparrow continued to
publish Bukowski until Martin retired, in 2002; the Bukowski catalogue was then
sold to Ecco, itself a formerly independent house that is now part of
HarperCollins. (The ironic result is that Bukowski, the ultimate underground
poet, is now published by Rupert Murdoch.)
It is not just in his business
dealings that Bukowski gives the impression of insecurity—of feeling, as he
once wrote to a friend, not “so much like a writer as . . . like somebody who
has slipped one past.” The same sense emerges, more damagingly, in his
defensive scorn for complexity and difficulty, as if these literary values were
a trick played by effete professors on honest, hardworking readers. “What’s
easy is good and what’s hard is a pain in the ass,” Bukowski declared to one
correspondent; or, again, “Somebody once asked me what my theory of life was
and I said, ‘Don’t try.’ That fits the writing too. I don’t try, I just type.”
Just typing allowed Bukowski to
accomplish a great deal. He became wealthy and famous, a friend of celebrities
like Sean Penn and Madonna, the subject of biographies and documentaries. In
his late poems, his delight in driving a BMW and hobnobbing with Norman Mailer
is so genuine that it becomes infectious. His escape from poverty and menial
labor, solely through the passion and popularity of his writing, is like a
fairy tale. “I laid down my guts,” as he put it, “and the gods finally
answered.” In a literary sense, too, Bukowski accomplished something rare: he
produced a large, completely distinctive, widely beloved body of work,
something that few poets today even dream of. It is a testament to Bukowski’s
genuine popularity that, at a time when most poetry books can’t be given away,
his are perennially ranked among the most frequently stolen titles in
bookstores.
Yet Bukowski and his work also
have the pathos of missed possibilities. He occasionally took pains to align
himself with a coherent literary tradition, writing about his admiration for
Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Céline, and Camus—the classics of modern alienation, the
biographers of the underground man. He was especially fond of Hamsun’s
“Hunger,” the story of a young writer demented by poverty and ambition. And
Bukowski came much closer to this experience than almost any other American
poet. There is every reason to believe that “a note upon starvation,” a poem in
the new collection, was written from experience:
about the fourth day
you begin to feel almost
intoxicated
panic subsides
one sleeps well:
12 to 14 hours,
and most unusual
one continues to defecate.
the vision grows more acute
everything is seen with a new
clarity.
Yet the contrast with Hamsun
reveals just how conventional a writer Bukowski remained. There is nothing in
his work even remotely like the episode in “Hunger” where the starving hero,
having encountered an old man on a park bench, starts to make up fantastic lies
about his landlord: that his name is J. A. Happolati, that he has invented an
electric prayer book, that he was once the Prime Minister of Persia. The old
man patiently accepts all of these outrageous stories, and even asks polite
questions about them, sending the narrator into a rage: “ ‘Goddamnit, man, I
suppose you think I’ve been sitting here stuffing you full of lies?’ I shouted,
completely out of my mind. ‘I’ll bet you never believed there was a man with
the name Happolati. . . . The way you have treated me is something I am not
used to, I will tell you flatly, and I won’t take it, so help me God!’ ”
The comic fury of this episode
does seem to take us to the edge of insanity: Hamsun, like Dostoyevsky, shows
that the most frightening symptom of madness is the immolation of self-esteem,
the urge to humiliate oneself at the same time as one humiliates everyone else.
And this is the risk that Bukowski never takes. Even at his most unheroic, he
is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert
approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with
little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more
demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire.
Published in the print edition of
the March 14, 2005, issue, with the headline “Smashed.”
Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic,
and the author of, most recently, “The Global Novel: Writing the World in the
21st Century.”