On Charles Bukowski

Thoughts on the Mad Bard

Buk had a hell of a lot of self-awareness, which is also ironic. He didn’t try to hide the fact that he was what he was, which often was fairly despicable. He understood something lost, forgotten, but crucial about Art: it’s not about being “good,” it’s not about “community,” it’s not about any specific ideology (fuck off with your “literary citizenship”), it’s not about being safe or polite or kind. Art—true art—is an expression of the inner complex turmoil which is the Human Condition. Rarely can a writer truly “open up and bleed.” Were Buk a musician he’d surely have been Iggy Pop. (Perhaps a little closer even, at times, to G.G. Allen.)

Who hasn’t heard of Charles Bukowski? Madman poet. Drunkard. Short story writer. Autobiographical novelist. Lowlife. Barroom brawler. Even tortured, obscure genius.

Like many of my [Millennial] generation, I loved Buk. For a long time, frankly, I didn’t exactly know why. I’d always found it ironic that he was embraced—maybe no longer, given the age of Wokeism and #MeToo?—by the young Left hipster-intelligentsia circles who grew up, like me, in the 1990s and early 00s. These hipster types claimed to be about love and acceptance and feminism and community and inclusiveness, yet they read and cherished Bukowski, a man born in 1920 who often wrote nastily and brutally about “whores,” “cunts” and straight-up rape. (Seeing it, imagining it, doing it.)

Yet there does seem to be a deeper reason. Several, actually. First, at least the original “Beat” hipsters (read Norman Mailer’s The White Negro) were often white middle- and upper middleclass kids who faked being working class delinquents: Going to see jazz in the Village in rooms filled with Black folks, yapping about “the man” and “the system,” etc. In other words, the original hipsters came out of a sort of cultural stew made up of criminals, wannabes, intellectuals, jazz musicians, the middleclass, and people who wanted to be or organically felt “anti-authority.” It was about rebellion, communism or socialism (or at least being anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism), looking tough, appearing nonchalant, being cool.

Therefore, my point is, Buk was organically anti-authority, which is what attracts, perhaps unconsciously, largely white, largely middle and upper middleclass kids to his prose.
Also, Buk was against The Man. He was a socialist without being overtly pro-socialism or political at all. (Orwell would disagree.) Buk was a working-class author, perhaps truly the first one who fully embodied the down-at-heel blue collar man, the man who had only his body, his physical labor, to sell.

If you read his collected letters, or Notes of a Dirty Old Man, you’ll hear about working-class men (firefighters, plumbers, cops) actually reading his books. That’s rare. For one, this probably, speaking in generalities, isn’t the highest reading population. But more, for them to not only be reading but reading serious literature. (Some would quibble with calling Buk’s work “serious literature.”) That is a truly unique thing. (Even more so now, as traditionally published writing seems to be almost exclusively by elites, regardless of race.)

My point is that he appealed to a broad audience, especially those who weren’t in academia or the literary world writ large.

In addition: He’s an irony-machine, composed of sharp inner opposites. (And what is hipsterism if not the salty, cloying whiff of irony?) With Buk you had a man at once legitimately tough, down and out (one of Buk’s biggest literary influences, besides John Fante’s novel, Ask the Dust, was Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London), working-class, bohemian, alcoholic, mad, wild, angry, violent, misogynistic…and yet also a deeply sensitive poet, a man who fell hard in love with women and had his heart broken badly many times, a man who lamented for years the death of his girlfriend, a man who could lay down poetry lines so accurately capturing the human condition that Shakespeare might be awestruck were he alive today, an insecure, emotionally needy, self-conscious man (surprise surprise: He was a writer!) who all his life searched for self-love, self-fulfillment, acceptance, love and praise.

I think it’s this above all else which captures hearts and minds, both in academia, in the literary world at large, in hipsterism, and in the world in general. He simply (and authentically) nails something so concretely, so absolutely, comically human, that to ignore it would just make you feel foolish. A deeply wounded, psychologically cracked, flawed human being, Buk possessed the ability to magically transform that inner struggle (and outer suffering) into Art.

One of course must separate the artist from the art, especially in this case. In reading Howard Sounes’s Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, a Buk biography, I came away feeling a strange mixture of disgust, revulsion, deep respect and total awe for the man who had supposedly ripped literature back from the greedy hands of the academics and placed it back squarely into the hands of The People, where it had rightly always belonged well into the 19^th century. (Sadly, literature has since become the effete domain, at least in traditional circles, of the MFA-glazed boring elite milieu.)

Buk got away—at least with many millions of readers—with his sardonic messiness on the page and in life because he truly was a “real” artist. He wanted to make money, and he desperately wanted notoriety and fame, but deeper than all that was the prose, the art. Also, he was a rebel and an outsider, and people either fear that or admire that. Me? I admire it. I feel in many ways simpatico. I grew up loving Kerouac and the Beats, and they’re great, but they had a sort of trendy cool-kid crew, and they became famous as a group: Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, McClure, etc. (And they unintentionally started off the hippie movement of the 1960s, which Kerouac rejected.)

But Buk had no crew, no tribe, no group, no in-crowd. He was his own man. A loner. A drunk. He was vehemently anti-MFA and anti-academic; he thought most of that noise was fraudulent, and in many ways I think he’s right. What mattered for Bukowski was balls; guts. Guts, honesty, and realism. Hemingway told us to bleed on the page, but he himself never really did. He held back too much; he played it safe; he got too caught up in his own image. (Ditto Kerouac.) Buk was different. He believed a writer must write alone, in solitude. It was the writer against (or with) his typewriter, his mind, and four walls. Food wasn’t even necessary, just cigarettes and beer. Kerouac was like me: of the middleclass, slumming around with the wonder jail-kid Neal Cassady, fighting against a world that wasn’t really [fully] against him.

Buk was a contemporary of the Beats; all those guys were born in the 1920s. Children of The Depression. Buk got his ass kicked by his father as a kid, growing up in Los Angeles, where he lived most of his life after years spent bumming around the country in rooms across America. In his 20s he wrote short stories. In his thirties he wrote poetry and submitted to magazines just about everywhere in the country. At 50 he published his first novel, Post Office. He [largely] lived the life he wrote about. Put Buk in a similar slot as Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, etc. (More Miller than Roth; Roth was a middleclass Jewish kid who was pampered.)

The thing is: Buk saw writing, saw literature as a necessity. It was his form of inner creation being spilled out into the external. Writing was his holy grail, the one thing that was always there for him, that never ruined him. Unlike booze, women, jobs, men, society, cops. Nabokov and Hemingway were actual boxers, but they were also rich kids. Buk wrote about the underground most people didn’t know existed because he actually came from it. Sure, he changed, altered, exaggerated some of his prose; of course he did. He was a writer, just like any writer; a man telling 75% truths mixed in with convenient lies to serve the story. Isn’t that what we all do?

Even though I was a rich kid from Ojai, California (north of Los Angeles), in many ways I lived a somewhat parallel life as Buk during my drinking years (2000 to 2010, age 17-27). Alcohol took me to some dark places, from blacking out, waking up with strange women in strange places, to violence to hopping trains to sleeping around to diabolical rage, anger, estrangement from friends, family and society as a whole. Sometimes I blacked out for days at a time, ended up in cities I didn’t know, got into fights with men I didn’t remember even seeing. Broke into vehicles for the fun of it. Found myself in a stolen car. I crashed probably a dozen cars during that decade, totaling half of them. I got fired from jobs left and right, or walked out on them.

Like Buk, I moved around constantly. In 2008 alone I moved five times all within San Francisco. There were a wild, booze-soaked few months in Santa Cruz, and ditto Philly, not to mention NYC, Portland and Oakland. I was a drifter, a drunk, a madman when I drank. Yet, unlike Buk, I always worked, always had mom and dad, always had some hazy form of stability. But I can relate to his lifestyle. I even remember hanging out with bums, buying them beer, or even having them buy us beer when we were in high school. I never liked school. I preferred solitude, casual sex, alcohol, reading and writing. When I finally did go back to college for Creative Writing, in 2012, two years sober, I was later accepted into the MFA writing program but last second declined it. I was a writer “of the streets,” I ironically told myself; not of the classroom.