As the years pile up, I am happy that my curiosity remains intact, somewhat. I don’t feel the same compulsion to know about everything the way I once did—my old practice of scanning the Chicago Reader to see exactly which movies (plural!) I would see that coming weekend, the hours spent reading articles about important musicians, those afternoons in used bookshops happening upon my next obsession, those days are sorta over. I’ve found my canon, and while there’s space for new music and a new favorite film, I have collected my go-tos and will happily revisit them as my fifties fall well behind me and I’m off toward the grave.
A personal canon is a good thing. I have my favorite this and that, fifty-plus years of amassing the art that speaks to me, for me, against me. And though I’ve eased away from cultural omnivorism, there’s still hunger for more, even as I have far less interest in whatever the hell is going on now. I’m sure the new Wet Leg is great, but I’m just recently discovering Swell Maps.
As with the posts to this blog thing about the Red Hot Chili Peppers (which nets me messages from randos, most in agreement, some making facile remarks) and A Clockwork Orange, I had it in mind today to revisit some of Charles Bukowski’s writing because there was a time when I read the guy. A long time ago. When I was young and that sort of thing appealed to me.
I don’t think of Hank much these days, but last week a student mentioned him in class, and I had a weird nostalgia for the time when I was reading Last Night of the Earth Poems and finishing the last cigarette (“one before I go to bed”) of the day and falling asleep thinking that a writer had to be, above all else, honest even if being honest meant being vulnerable and ugly. Risk, goddamnit!
I don’t know that I was wrong, but there a lot of ways to be honest and vulnerable that don’t require so much performative edginess. Which is not to say that Bukowski was faking his drunken asshole persona, but scores of lesser writers and bigger assholes have emulated Hank to significantly lesser effect.
The last thing I intend is an apology for reading the patron saint of drunken writers. Lit bros aplenty will pen their peans for Hank. This is more me thinking about why I have kept every one of his books (well, up to a point—the dude has more posthumous releases than Tupac) as opposed to many by Kerouac and Hunter Thompson I let go once their madcap scribblings struck me as juvenile. Thompson was the better craftsman, and Kerouac, for all his rambling, could land on something close to beautiful when his head cleared. Still, despite Bukowski’s prose sometimes clunking, and more than a few of his poems feeling unnecessary, his work remains compelling.
I might chalk it up to the man behind the poems/stories/novels. Not just the larger-than-life stuff, but the part of his biography that always inspired me. This was a man who rejected so much, who had zero time for the academic classroom, whose writing bore few marks of the editor’s scissors, and yet while he lacked Faulkner’s flourishes or Joyce’s maximalist glories, his simple, direct prose achieved something singular. Unlike his one-time hero Hemingway, Buk’s largely unadorned sentences feel natural, flowing, energetic. When he’s on, he’s really something—funny and heartbreaking despite the cheap bravado. But maybe because he earned the right to swagger, I don’t mind all the tough guy shit. Hemingway always read like a man in search of experience that would make him the legend he was in his head, whereas Bukowski didn’t chase wars or bullfights or deep-sea fishing. He chased solitude, self-destruction, the beauty that appears “as the / spirit / wanes.” Misanthropic, misogynist, malcontent, he definitely has his warts, many of which fueled his most interesting efforts.
Of course, the same bestial wails that continue drawing readers repel those looking for something like refinement. But he has that. Not in the sense of regality; Bukowski’s elegance comes from the simplicity of his ideas. He was at his best when he detailed the experience of the lowlife like an American Jeffrey Bernard without the British writer’s dry wit. The hardscrabble existence and skid row poetry that, when it was honest, offered complexities. But when Hank’s aim was profundity, when he really tried for something more than a slice of gritty life, he came off as another crank at the end of the bar who you were despite to pawn off on the next unlucky bastard bellying up.
A friend told me that she’d seen plenty of men whose dating profiles named Bukowski as their favorite writer. Automatic swipes left. I get it. Bukowski was a prick, albeit an interesting one, but the dudes who love him can be insufferable. Then again, I’ve heard women say that about Joyce fans, too. And one woman said she’ll never read Kurt Vonnegut because of the number of boys who have insisted she give Slaughterhouse Five a shot. Were I still a single man (perish the fucking thought!), I wonder which writer would send me away from a potential date. Nicholas Sparks? Colleen Hoover? No. Wait—Candace Bushnell. Maybe. I dunno… no woman has ever beset me with unending praise for their favorite writer, not because women don’t have favorite writers but because women don’t go on and fucking on about all the writers I NEED to read. I’ve learned more from women than men, yet no woman—aside from those employed as teachers—has ever tried to teach me anything.
Suffice it to state that Bukowski’s attitude toward women was rarely palatable. Part of his package. I don’t know anyone who goes to Hank for nuanced takes, but I will offer mild defense in the form of a few remembered poems and stories. At times, when he dropped the word “whore” from his lexicon, Buk could be a softy. His poems to his wife that speak of her adding years to his life, him pleading that when she takes herself away please do it slowly, his crying jags, tears running from his face like “heavy senseless things,” the stories where he communicates his madness and lets the reader see that all the posturing is actually covering up something so much worse than what’s on the page… I can’t help but find something in those highs that make me okay with the lows.
And there are lots of lows.
A few good texts stand out, mostly the novel Factotum and the poetry collections Mockingbird Wish Me Luck and War All the Time. A handful of stories have stuck with me— “The Blanket,” “Great Poets Die in Stinking Pots of Shit,” “The Birth, Life, and Death of an Underground Newspaper”— and the travel book Shakespeare Never Did This is an overlooked gem. But this list represents a drop in the Bukowski ocean. Among those waves are stories like “The Fuck Machine” and “All the Pussy We Want” that don’t do much more than send my eyes rolling. His story of nearly drinking himself to death and ending up in a charity ward remains high in my estimation, but for all those hits there are heaps of misses that a good editor would have caught. John Martin may have been a more hands-off editor or maybe he knew that unfiltered Bukowski was what kept the Black Sparrow flying. Or maybe what we have is the result of editing? In which case, what the fuck was left on the cutting room floor?
Bukowski’s many tales where women are little more than pieces of ass who lie and break his heart send me to a different shelf. I like to think I was never as big a prick. I have not always been a good guy or a great boyfriend, but I never absorbed Hank’s sexism so much I casually regurgitated it to some unfortunate female. Or maybe I did? Who remembers—but damn, I can certainly see the man I don’t want to be when I read his pages. Which is where this reevaluation gets sticky. Perhaps by reading these tales of ordinary madness and notes of a dirty old man I am afforded vicarious thrills, the voyeur’s permission to celebrate the worst on offer in Women or Love is a Dog From Hell. I can perform as an ally while letting this overt misogynist scratch some terrible itch I don’t want to touch.
Even when I had my head somewhat up Bukowski’s ass, all those years back when I thought Tarantino made good movies, I never thought he was the equal of Faulkner or Eliot. I knew better then, and I know a lot better now. The marvels I’ve witnessed in Joyce’s novels, the hysterical tragicomedy in Beckett, Calvino’s fabulist wonders, not to mention the slew of women who are, on their worst days, better writers (Jeanette Winterson, Ali Smith, Virginia Woolf, Jessie Fauset, Ann Quinn), Buk can’t touch any of that. Had I one writer to bring with me to a deserted island… I don’t know who I would choose. But it would not be Bukowski. Yet… there they are, those books. They take up so much real estate, an entire shelf on one of my bookcases. Most of those books currently staring me in the face are not worth keeping. They are there really to remind me of the kid I was who insisted that reading every Bukowski book wouldn’t yield diminishing returns. What a dumb dumb.
I lent a copy of Women to my friend Kevin. His review: “I could’ve drank. I could’ve fucked. I drank.” Nailed it.
I have not given Bukowski much thought in these last, oh, thirty years. But I see him popping up often in my Instagram feed, pictures of the man somehow looking both bloated and desiccated, shirt buttoned well below the top, beer bottle in hand, some plucked quote over the photo and scores of dudes in the comments celebrating the guy. Fine. Most of their praise is defensible, though from a few lauds come whiffs of manosphere sulfur. Ironic since Buk would have had no time for their dumb causes and idiotic worldview.
The last defense, and the only one I really care about, comes from the novel Women wherein the Bukowski stand-in Henry Chinaski responds to a girlfriend who, while readying her departure from his wretched existence, insists that she’ll one day be a bigger name, that she has more talent than him. Chinaski replies something along the lines of every baby in every crib has more talent than him. The difference is, he does the work. Which is pretty much the best thing we can get from the Bukowski example. The drinking, screwing, gambling, fucking off, quitting jobs, living like a cockroach—all of that overly romanticized stuff is for young males. (Until they get older and realize how much they like money and comfort. Until they reach middle-age and read Walden and daydream about escaping to a cabin in the woods.) But the work ethic is most admirable. Bukoski hated talking about writing and writing workshops and all of that. He just opened a bottle of wine, turned on some classical music, and wrote. Every night. A routine. Imagine that coming from the man mythologized as a loafing reprobate souse.
Bukowski was right. He did not possess admirable talent, at least not as we so often think of it: the fevered genius with greatness beyond understanding who produces visionary works, whose every utterance is a psalm. No, Buk’s example is one that has always inspired me more than the Great Man bullshit. One need not be a genius, just dedicated. Willing to do the work. Sit down, write. As much as possible. As often as possible. Regularly. The words will come. The pages will grow. But if you wait around for divine inspiration, you’re fucked. I’ve written a few books following this example.
