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Charles Bukowski

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Hot Water Music

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SOURCE: A review of Hot Water Music, in Punch, Vol. 286, February 15, 1984, p. 48.

[In the following negative review, Mansur underscores the superficiality of the stories in Hot Water Music.]

There is a bookshop in San Francisco where some 30 feet of shelf space are designated “For the Writer”. The space is fully occupied, and the floor area in front is usually well populated by Jack London's heirs. So let's push our way through and see what Californian writers are reading.

A potential bestseller could be Outdoor Writing (as it were, “First mount your roller-skates, gripping your pen in your teeth …”); or perhaps How You Can Make $20,000 a Year Writing, No Matter Where You Live (the first chapter entitled “To Hell with Manhattan”); or even, How to Write and Sell Your Personal Experiences. Evidently, lots of people think it beats living them, though they do not, I hope, commit them to paper with the aid of The Chicago Manual of Style; we've had enough of monetarist clichés.

Yes, the evidence of a growth industry is there: from the State which gave you Silicon Valley, discs of ready-processed words flop at an ever faster rate onto publishers' desks, thence to be turned into cloth or paper. And yes, every second person you meet is writing something (someone even wrote a book called How to Write “How-to” Books).

Is this then a golden age of literature, nourished in a climate of free enterprise under the patronage of self-expression? I think not. Although we can't plot a graph of the relationship between the theory and the practice, we can tell that there is some good writing but equally a lot of dross, and we can observe that there are a lot of self-indulgent bums drifting on the creative writing swell pounding the Pacific coastline.

One of these is Charles Bukowski, who seems to be suffering a perpetual hangover from the era of the Beats though now in his sixties. His writing mirrors the incestuous nature of the literary scene: he likes nothing so well as to write stories about writers trying to write. To summarise the none too healthy technique he expounds: get a drink, get a woman, and hang about for something to happen; either the arrival of inspiration, or a cheque, so that the endless round of debauchery can begin again.

He's hardly a good publicist for his profession. His photo on the back flyleaf (appositely) shows what must be everyone's—or at least my—idea of a dirty old man, and (didn't I say so?) turning to the front flyleaf, in the list of works of his fertile imagination, we find Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

Hot Water Music is a tributary of the same stream, a collection of stories describing the seamier side of life in the Golden State, where the film stars live whom you never see. There's nothing really shocking, unless it's the sheer banality of existence.

Unfortunately, the banal description of life's superficiality soon rebounds on Bukowski, whose work begins to read superficially too. The texture of life, all its pits and boils, is obsessively felt over, but this is aimless, distracted wandering, where all encounters are casual. You feel hungry, you look in the fridge for instant gratification; you want to talk, you lift the receiver and dial a random number; you want a woman, you knock at the next room in the motel. These often repeated rhythms become the nervous tics, the death rattle, of a decadent society. The result is a devaluation of feeling, a levelling of the peaks and troughs to a monotonous plain: a register for the Los Angeles landscape, the city notoriously described as 14 (or was it 40?) suburbs in search of a city.

These slice-of-life stories resemble a plateful of cake which is no sooner finished than an identical wheel of slices rolls into view. Life goes on, relentlessly, but it's increasingly sickening. You resettle in front of the TV; take another six-pack; brush your teeth: these are the closing movements.

So it is with “The Death of the Father”, one of few excerpts fit for broadcast in prime time. After his father's funeral, the narrator finds nothing better to do than water his roses. A flock of neighbours descend to peck remorselessly at the dead man's effects, stripping the house bare. The son stands aside, not bothering to protect the property of the father he didn't love, whilst the neighbours care just about his possessions. The material world, either way, is the only reality. The son is left to resume his idle hosing.

In other stories, this netherworld, this underside to success roamed by losers in the race, is depicted in all its raw brutality with correspondingly crude language. Because he's a worker with surfaces, Bukowski is apt to polarise opinion. Either you like his scenery, or you don't: I didn't.

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