Madman Incarnate
[In the following review of Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, Evanier addresses Bukowski's popularity and maintains that “the gutsy, audacious quality of Bukowski's writing loses some of its freshness in this collection.”]
Upon returning to my favorite Berkeley bookstore haunts last fall, I was amazed to find stacks upon stacks of sexually perverse comic books replacing the old stock of literary and political journals my parents, I, and last year's student body had grown up with. Apparently, the latest campus generation has little interest in even those writers who try to discard the old forms in order to understand the irrationality of us all: Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, Céline, Pinter, Barthelme, etc. In fact, many young people seem to have opted for no literature at all. Such recent counterculture gurus as Hermann Hesse, J. R. R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut are already fading from the scene. When I asked the clerks if any poet or writer was selling, the name I heard most often was Charles Bukowski.
The Bukowski phenomenon is a peculiar one. For several years his column was carried by the now-defunct Los Angeles underground newspaper, Open City. He has had 20 books published by little presses. He has also been accorded the recognition of being included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. And at age 52, his newest work has been brought out by that epitome of avant-garde chic, City Lights, whose list ranges from Timothy Leary to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg.
Despite being thus elevated to the pantheon of literary drug-advocates, Bukowski himself is indifferent or even opposed to marijuana: “That pot creates art, si, it's doubtful, and how. … The pot comes AFTER the Art is already there, after the artist is already there. The pot does not produce the Art.” In general he is scornful of the counterculture, of hippies and radicals: he feels that he is the only readable writer to emerge from the comic-book mentality of the underground press, and that he has been exploited by it.
Bukowski may be right on both scores. Wherever he appears in print (usually in publications with names like Unmuzzled Ox or Camels Coming), he makes the other writers look bad indeed. Nonetheless, it is doubtful that he would have survived without the underpinning given him by the passive, uncritical, anti-intellectual counter-culture. Typically, his new book, largely a collection of his old Open City columns, is a very mixed bag of good, mediocre, and awful fiction. He draws no line between the reader and himself and, for all his flashes of brilliance, in the end one is sick of Bukowski—of his hemorrhoids, his cruelty, his endless rounds of bars and racetracks and prostitutes, his contempt for women.
At one point, Bukowski describes himself as “the guy who'd been drinking cheap wine in a small room for 15 years. Had to walk down to the hall bathroom to take a crap. And when he typed, old ladies beat on their ceilings and floors with broom handles, scaring hell out of him. … Suddenly, out of some trick, he's known.” During those years of obscurity, he developed considerable self-discipline, depth, and a unique, acerbic writing style. A long period of self-deprivation affords an artist two alternatives: to create a finely wrought vision of life from his suffering, or to abandon control and bellow at the moon, cursing his fate. Bukowski vacillates between the two. Perhaps he is leary of success.
But no matter how much fame Bukowski may win—and it is unlikely his following will grow very far beyond its present size—there is little danger of his severing the links between him and his student admirers: his bohemian lifestyle, his penury, his psychological hangups, his neurotic obsessions. Well into middle age, he is still at war with landladies, recalcitrant girl friends, and other states of helplessness. He is a man working out of the desperation of his own life. His popularity with the counterculture stems from his vulnerability, self-destructiveness, honesty and erraticism: He is the writer as madman incarnate, bottle in one hand, challenging the world, and doomed.
Unfortunately, as is frequently the case with reprinted journalism, the gutsy, audacious quality of Bukowski's writing loses some of its freshness in this collection. Moreover, in many of the pieces his prose is slack, rambling and uncontrolled, with the result that the precise, incisive passages become blurred in the memory and lose much of their impact. Half of the material would have been omitted by a discerning editor. There is no question that Bukowski is more consistently disciplined in his poetry.
Still, his is an original talent. When we reflect on the writers who have made the deepest impression on us, we realize they are the ones whose presence cannot be denied. They sweep aside our boredom, indifference and sophistication because their style is compelling. Whatever their shortcomings, they say things in a way that has never been said before. Such is Bukowski. His words rip across the page, angry, intense, sometimes hilarious and, at his best, as finely honed as the masters.
He will never be a peaceful or a happy man; and he will never understand women, or himself, very well. The lack of a middle course will, I am sure, characterize him always. His faults are irremediable, even if endearing. In a letter to the poet William Wantling, Bukowski made an observation about another artist that applies equally to himself: “Artaud said what he had to say, not what he should say. This, of course, is what distinguishes madmen from motorcycle policemen.”
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