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Charles Bukowski

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Short Changed

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SOURCE: “Short Changed,” in The Spectator, Vol. 233, November 30, 1974, p. 711.

[In the following review, Ackroyd provides a disparaging review of Life and Death in the Charity Ward.]

I wish that critics would nail the ‘down and out’ routine for the lie it is; it is all very well for socialist journalists to revel in the dead prose of George Orwell, but that game came to an abrupt halt in the 'thirties. Now we have an American writer, Charles Bukowski, who writes about alcoholism and poverty as if they somehow increased his stature. Degradation, it seems, can make philosophers of us all, but it does not necessarily make writers.

Life and Death in the Charity Ward is a collection of short stories which are not improved in the retelling. The ‘poet’ (this is his term, not mine) is taken to the charity ward and is sick; he goes to a poetry reading and is sick; he is raped by two women at once and is sick; he finds a drinking companion and they are both sick. When he is not vomiting, he is talking in glowing and sometimes frantic terms of the pleasures of oral intercourse. This used to be the thing to do among certain American writers, although Mr Bukowski is much more cool and self-effacing than the average genius:

                    “I think that you are the modern living master of
the short story. Nobody touches you.”
                    “Sure, Harvey. Where's the scotch.”

This is known as the common touch. And it takes a strong man to resist praise:

“Charles Bukowski …”
I stood up.
“Oh, Charles Bukowski!”
“Uh, huh.”

There is a world-weary poetry in that grunt; only ‘poets’ can afford to be as boorish and as self-indulgent as Bukowski appears in his own pages.

Mr Bukowski is obviously following that age-long principle of writing down anything and everything which comes into his head, and he no doubt thinks of himself as the true heir of Shakespeare in never having to blot a line. It becomes increasingly clear in a reading of these stories that he has no critical sense whatsoever, since his talent is a matter of hit-and-mainly-miss. This leads to some vulgar and prosaic passages, since a writer who is not self-aware is condemned to be continually looking over his own shoulder. Bukowski's themes were fads some time ago, and it is now practically impossible to make sex and violence interesting. Of course a man who lives in the past is always the one who has the most to hide from the present, and Bukowski suffers from an inability to perform as much as he promises. Only a bad poet labels himself poet, and only a frustrated man writes about sex with such prurient abandon. A dull character finally emerges, and it is a dullness which spreads through these stories like a stain.

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