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Charles Bukowski

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Charles Bukowski American Literature Analysis

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Bukowski seldom commented on his own work, as most of his readers know that virtually all the novels, short stories, and poems are thinly veiled approximations of his actual life. Indeed, his highly acclaimed novel Ham on Rye (1982) is not only his autobiography but also an American portrait of the artist as a young man. Literary critics find his work difficult to interpret because it so closely resembles the actual day-to-day routine of an unapologetic, hard-drinking, womanizing gambler who loves playing the horses and brawling in barrooms. His work records the despairing lifestyles of the poor and infamous in Los Angeles in unrelenting detail. In Hollywood, his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, announces himself as “a historian of drink” who has no peer and wryly adds that he has outlived his drinking companions principally because he “never gets out of bed before noon.”

The great French playwright and novelist Jean Genet called Bukowski “the best poet in America,” words of high praise from an artist who rarely commented on another poet’s work and is considered the archetypal “underground” writer of the twentieth century. Bukowski’s themes are the same in most all of his poetry, novels, and short stories: violence, despair, poverty, hopelessness, alcoholism, suicide, madness, and how alcohol, sex, gambling, and, most important, writing can intermittently relieve the agony of these lives of dramatic desperation. He is among the United States’ best-known existential writers and, many would claim, the most influential and imitated American poet. Bukowski owed allegiance to no one for the success of his work except the persistent integrity of the small presses that first published his work and especially Black Sparrow Press. The only literary assistance he ever received was from the books he read in his local public library.

Bukowski continued his work in spite of the psychological or physical traumas he was experiencing at any given moment; his fictive alter ego, Henry Chinaski, always finds time to jot down a few lines of a poem on the back of an envelope or a paper bag. What motivated Bukowski’s commitment to the life of the imagination was his unflinching realization that without it, his life would be as meaningless and absurd as the rest of the trapped creatures he writes about. Wallace Stevens, one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, defined the imagination as the “violence within that protects us from the violence without.” There is little doubt that Bukowski viewed its function in exactly the same terms, yet in an even more profoundly personal way. He survived on the mean streets of Los Angeles, after all, not (as did Stevens) in the comfortable safety of the office of vice president of one of the United States’ largest insurance companies.

One of the more compelling poems from what is perhaps Bukowski’s best-known collection of poetry, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hills, concerns the plight of a poor man who discovers his beloved wife’s infidelities and proceeds to castrate himself in her horrified presence, flushing his testicles down the toilet yet continuing to drink his wine while holding a bloody towel between his legs with a look of utter indifference on his face. The poem is called “Freedom.” The ruling passions of the poor, the ugly, and the hopeless are, in Bukowski’s view, much more significant to them than those of the wealthy are to them, simply because they are all that the poor have. In one of Bukowski’s finest collections of poems, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands , he presents a world in which the...

(This entire section contains 3690 words.)

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young are “fenced in/ stabbed and shaven/ taught words/ propped up/ to die”—an existence in which “you and I ain’t living well! or enough.”

Critics often compare Bukowski to several of the so-called Beat writers (such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg) but fail to mention that Bukowski’s is a working-class background. He never had the opportunity to attend such prestigious universities as Columbia or Harvard, as did the other three writers. A number of his public school friends’ fathers committed suicide during the Depression, while many others drank themselves into early graves. Though Kerouac emerged from a working-class New England background, he attended Columbia University on a football scholarship, while Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs came out of college-educated families with traditions of reading and culture.

Though Bukowski is frequently compared to Henry Miller in his graphic depiction of drinking and sexual freedom, one never feels that Bukowski is in any way romanticizing that lifestyle. Miller’s characters could, if they chose, move on to an economically more rewarding life and, because of their intelligence, charm, or sexual prowess, find any number of amorous partners in countless cafés of the Latin Quarter of Paris during the 1930’s.

What brings people together to form couples in most of Bukowski’s works is that nobody else wants them; they are social outcasts who are desperate for sexual contact or for any kind of momentary intimacy that will temporarily assuage their empty despair. In the novel Post Office, the transient sexual liaisons with Betty, Mary-Lou, Joyce, and Fay do not last long, but they are vital in creating a meaningful life for Henry Chinaski (though he never thinks of his life in anything but temporary terms, because people are going mad or dying around him constantly). There is no aunt back East like the one to whom Sal Paradise, the fictive alter ego of Jack Kerouac in On the Road (1957), continually returns for solace, comfort, and forgiveness, Bukowski’s heroes are denied the luxury of despair because there is literally no physical place to indulge in that kind of self-pity.

The desperate and unvarying patterns of lives that Bukowski presents in most of his novels, short stories, and poems can be summarized quite bluntly in an excerpt from his volume of poems titled Dangling in the Tournefortia (1981): “it was 11 a.m. and I was puking/ trying to get a can of ale down/ the whore in the bed next to me/ in her torn slip/ mumbling about her children in/ Atlanta.” It is these stark imagistic scenes, repeated in book after book, that call to mind the literary advice from another stark poet, William Carlos Williams, and his rule for writers: “No ideas but in things.” Bukowski’s action immediately moves into image with no intervening philosophical speculations; his language records with unflinching accuracy scenes that tell all.

The critic John William Corrington captures the effect of Bukowski’s direct language when he calls it “the spoken voice nailed to the paper.” Not all of Bukowski’s language, though, is so brutally naturalistic. He regularly offers a bittersweet comic side to the dreary life of cheap boardinghouses and the eternal quest for the rent check. In a poem titled “The Tragedy of the Leaves,” he talks about the necessity for laughter in spite of depressing circumstances:

what was needed nowwas a good comedian, ancient style, a jesterwith jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurdbecause it exists, nothing more;. . . . . . . . . . . .and I walk into the dark hallwhere the landlady stoodexecrating and final,sending me to hellwaving her fat sweaty armsand screamingscreaming for rentbecause the world has failed usboth.

There is also in these lines an empathetic quality of the poet as spokesman for all members of his tribe of down-and-outers, the losers in this world. The cadences are reminiscent of a bardic voice. One could certainly view Bukowski as the bard for his people in the poorer sections of Los Angeles where he originated. Bards have traditionally been viewed as the voices of their people but always of people in a very specific physical locale. Allen Ginsberg and William Blake project bardic voices and attempt to reconnect their readers to the truth of their own experiences. Bukowski’s bardic voice, like that of William Carlos Williams, functions in a much more specific geographical place using the energies of the local, depleted though they may be, to generate utterance.

Though his message is consistently pessimistic, it is not the hopelessly bitter pessimism of his poetic idol, American poet Robinson Jeffers. Even in the midst of violence and death, Bukowski continues to offer hope. In lines reverberating with E. E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, he declaims: “I want trumpets and crowing, . . . I want the whirl and tang of a simple living orange/ in a simple living tree.” The great poet Robert Duncan once defined the word “responsibility” by breaking it down into its etymological units as “response-ability: that is, keeping the ability to respond.” If one defines the word in those terms, Bukowski is arguably the most “responsible” poet that America has produced since Walt Whitman. He unquestionably kept and even celebrated his ability to respond vividly to his own life and the lives lived in his bardic realm with an affection, dedication, and faithfulness rarely encountered in contemporary American literature.

Post Office

First published: 1971

Type of work: Novel

The normally jobless, transient Henry Chinaski attempts to live a normal life with a permanent job in the postal service.

Post Office is Bukowski’s first novel; it became one of his best-selling works. He had published approximately twenty books of poems and short stories during the 1960’s, with his hero, Henry Chinaski, as the major character in most of the stories. Post Office breaks no new literary ground but offers amplified versions of his typical narratives, now covering a fourteen-year period of employment in the postal service. The plot moves through various episodes of crises with his supervisors, coworkers, and lovers. Post Office presents a domesticated version of the picaresque hero. Chinaski certainly fits the major requirements of the typical picaresque hero, as he is a rogue who satirizes his authoritative supervisors in a series of loosely connected episodes. While his tone is consistently cynical, he usually projects a morally superior attitude.

The plot moves along on the intensity and energy of the particular crisis that involves Chinaski at any given moment. He initially seeks employment with the postal service because the monotonous work appears easy, and he seems exhausted with his transient living conditions; his betting at the race track has also drained his financial resources. The opening line, “It began as a mistake,” sets the tone for the entire novel, which is divided into six major sections.

The first two sections present his beleaguered contacts with overly demanding customers and inflexible supervisors such as the thirty-year postal veteran Mr. Jonstone, known throughout the remainder of the novel as “The Stone.” A bureaucratic bully of monstrous proportions, Jonstone spends most of his days doggedly carping at Chinaski and “writing him up” for the smallest infractions of postal rules. Chinaski, while suffering from The Stone’s consistent pettiness, is clever enough to know exactly how far to go and when to utilize similar bureaucratic tactics to intimidate his supervisor into temporarily modifying his mean-spirited behavior. Chinaski’s only solace during his apprenticeship is the warmth and sexual security that Betty offers him as they drink their way through most evenings.

As Chinaski’s financial condition improves, he concentrates on playing the horses and begins to miss work. Betty, who has become jealous of his attentions to an attractive neighbor, gets a job and leaves Henry. His next amorous partner is a sexually indefatigable Texan, Joyce, who insists on marriage in Las Vegas and moving them to her small Texas hometown directly next door to her millionaire father. There, Chinaski works as a shipping clerk and eventually at the local post office. Joyce becomes bored with Chinaski’s inability to keep her sexually satisfied and divorces him. He then returns to Los Angeles, moves back in with Betty, and goes back to the postal service. Betty soon succumbs to the effects of her alcoholic binges and dies in the city hospital.

Chinaski meets a number of interesting but irksome fellow workers in the sorting room, including David Janko, a novice writer who bludgeons him night after night with the infinite details of both his sexual life and his novel in progress. He relates all these details in a strident vocal narrative that nearly pushes the regularly hungover Chinaski over the edge. The remaining three sections detail Chinaski’s relationship with Fay, an aging hippie who bears his child and eventually moves into a commune in New Mexico. His highly successful performance at the track, letters of warning from his supervisors written in impeccable bureaucratic jargon, and his eventual resignation from the post office conclude the novel.

Adding a level of self-consciousness to this work, the concluding paragraph proposes that the seemingly pointless episodic nature of the narrative will be organized into a literary structure: “Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.” The concluding paragraph of Post Office, though only three short sentences, qualifies this first novel as an embryonic version of a Künstlerroman, or a novel about the education and growth of the artist. A number of Bukowski short stories from the 1970’s and 1980’s such as “Scum Grief,” “How to Get Published,” and “Scream When You Burn,” concern the specific day-to-day problems of the writer. He compares himself to his literary heroes and colleagues of the past and present, such as Dylan Thomas, Ginsberg, and Hemingway. In many stories and novels after Post Office, he frequently includes references to his creative work along with the typical drinking, gambling, and sexual scenarios that remain standard subject matter for virtually all his work.

Ham on Rye

First published: 1982

Type of work: Novel

Bukowski’s literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski, chronologically records his brutally poor childhood and adolescence in Los Angeles during the Depression.

Ham on Rye (1982) is not only a loosely constructed autobiographical novel of Bukowski’s distressingly poor childhood during the Depression, but it also qualifies as the novelist’s version of both a Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman. A Bildungsroman is a literary genre that usually deals with a young protagonist’s growth, development, and education into the sometimes harsh realities of life—a fall from innocence into experience, from a condition of blissful ignorance into the potential agony of self-consciousness. D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913) is a classic example of this type of novel.

Ham on Rye can also be viewed as a Künstlerroman, or a novel that presents the growth and development of the young hero as an artist. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger (1903) are two of the better-known examples of this kind of apprenticeship novel. Even though Bukowski’s second novel, Factotum, recorded Henry Chinaski’s failure to keep even the most menial of jobs, and Women documented a similar inability to maintain consistent relationships with his numerous lovers, Ham on Rye goes back to his earliest childhood memories, predating the chronic personal failures of Chinaski’s middle years.

The structure of Ham on Rye resembles the episodic, loosely organized plot of his three earlier novels. It is divided into fifty-eight chapters, some as short as a page and a half. The title is a fairly obvious pun on Bukowski’s legendary reputation as a “ham”—that is, a dramatic self-promoter—and his equally infamous reputation as a drinker of heroic proportions. His drink of choice is whiskey or rye. It is also quite obvious that the “wry” or comic attitude that Bukowski/Chinaski projects toward a life steeped in unrelenting pain and misunderstanding saves him from the madness and suicide that have swallowed up less resilient characters. His sense of humor and his ability to view himself ironically help him objectify his sufferings and enable him to accept his condition and work within it rather than hopelessly resigning himself to its despair. His comic imagination, then, transforms the merely grotesque into a vividly compelling work of literature.

While the time frame of the novel covers the young Chinaski from his birth in 1920 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the major focus is on his relationship with his father and other authority figures during his elementary and secondary school years. It is unquestionably his father’s sadistic cruelty toward him that becomes the novel’s emotional and psychological core. Henry Chinaski somehow creates an interior life that generates an alternate kind of benign violence that enables him to regulate and utilize the destructive energies of his father for his own artistic growth rather than his self-destruction. Though he finds temporary solace in heavy bouts of drinking and mindless barroom brawling, he also discovers, in his local public library, fellow sufferers such as D. H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and, for humor, James Thurber. A sympathetic teacher encourages his precocious ability to create “beautiful lies”—that is, fictions that fulfill his imagination’s yearning for some kind of satisfaction even though he seems buried in a life of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.

Again and again, Chinaski’s wry or sardonic sense of humor saves him from the uncertainty and chaos of the Depression years:The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil and another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.

It is precisely Henry’s resolution not to be “finished” by the time he is twenty-five that drives him to read and write himself out of the despair. It is in a scene in which he attends his high school prom as an onlooker because he has neither money for formal attire nor a date with whom to go, that Henry comes into his deepest realization of his isolation and alienation. He sees himself infinitely separated from the rich “laughing boys” and confesses his hatred of their beauty, their untroubled lives, and their unconscious participation in the joys of youth. He resolves at that moment that “someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.”

Ironically, Ham on Rye dramatically documents that Bukowski not only survived but prevailed by transforming his brutally isolated childhood and adolescence into a critically acclaimed novel for the more privileged members of the class of 1939 to read and envy.

Hollywood

First published: 1989

Type of work: Novel

A novel about writing a screenplay and the chaos of trying to deal with Hollywood producers who are interested only in huge financial profits.

Hollywood is Bukowski’s version of a subgenre of the novel called a roman à clef or a “novel with a key or secret meaning.” The key will be immediately apparent to anyone who has seen the film Barfly, as the content of the novel Hollywood concerns the difficulties in writing and producing that film, for which Bukowski wrote the screenplay.

Though Bukowski has altered the proper names in the novel, many of them are easily recognizable if the reader uses some imagination. The film Barfly is called The Dance of Jim Beam, and certain well-known foreign directors appear from time to time with names such as Jon-Luc Modard and Wenner Zergog. The major difference between Bukowski’s four previous novels and Hollywood is that most of the action takes place in Beverly Hills and Hollywood rather than the usual sordid neighborhoods of urban Los Angeles. Some of the sleazier film scenes, however, are actually shot in several of Bukowski’s favorite gin mills, which have now become “sets” for the film. The French director Jon Pinchot, in his quest for authenticity, also decided to use the real inhabitants of these places, the barflies themselves, instead of Hollywood actors. Chinaski himself is regularly called in to demonstrate to the actor portraying him exactly how he conducted himself during his habitual barroom brawls.

The plot consists of the endless ups and downs of acquiring funds for producing the film. Bukowski also reveals that greed, and greed alone, constitutes the primary motivation for filmmaking and that producers and backers will do anything to increase profits. He finds that Hollywood has nothing to do with art, truth, or beauty in any form.

The comic aspects of Hollywood work on a number of complex levels because the content of the novel is also its form: It is a novel about writing a screenplay, but it is also a novel written by a barfly trying to write a screenplay about the life of a barfly. Not only is the barfly, Henry Chinaski, drinking to excess and trying to recover long enough to produce some acceptable scenes, but also one of Chinaski’s major complaints is that everyone else involved in the direction, production, and promotion of the film is also debilitated by their alcoholic drinking. Indeed, when Chinaski is first asked what the screenplay is about, he states unequivocally: “A drunk. Lots of drunks.” Later, he adds: “But the whole movie is about drinking.” During an interview just before the preview of the finished film, he summarizes quite clearly his attitude toward drinking:“Isn’t drinking a disease?” “Breathing is a disease.” “Don’t you find drunks obnoxious?” “Yes, most of them are. So are most teetotalers.”

Finally, Henry honestly admits to himself as he watches his film, The Dance of Jim Beam, in his local theater: “I only wanted to show what strange and desperate lives some drunks live and I was the one drunk I knew best.”

Although Henry Chinaski’s financial situation has improved by the conclusion of the novel, he and his companion, Sarah, still enjoy going to films together, coming home to the five cats, and watching Johnny Carson on television. Sarah asks Henry what he intends to do now that the film is completed, and he responds that he will now write a novel about “writing the screenplay and making the movie.” When asked what he might call the novel, he answers that it will be titled Hollywood.

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Charles Bukowski Poetry: American Poets Analysis

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