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Dangling in the Tournefortia

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SOURCE: A review of Dangling in the Tournefortia, in The American Book Review, Vol. 4, No. 5, July-August, 1982, p. 6.

[In the following essay, Locklin praises Bukowski's work and declares that he is "undeniably a chronicler of politically significant phenomena. "]

Let me at once admit my bias: I think Bukowski is a writer of at least the stature of a Henry Miller. I also think he has been mistreated—or treated to a conspiracy of silence—by the American literary establishment and by factions outside the establishment as well. But he hasn't gone away. To the contrary, he and his American and European publishers have prospered. Films of his work are beginning to appear in Europe, where he seems to have become one of the best known, if not the best known, of contemporary American writers. A best-selling underground (or dirty old) man—talk about your oxymorons! Those who despised him as a drunken bum, now despise him as a drunken rich bum.

I am not a Bukowski idolater. Even Bukowski (maybe Bukowski most of all) knows that his work is uneven. His defense is that it's his job to write and the job of others to edit and evaluate.

Those who enjoy Bukowski do not have to be persuaded to read everything of his that appears, but I would not have recommended to the uninitiated a couple of his most recent collections because a reader could hit a run of second-rate offerings before encountering vintage Bukowski. I would have recommended The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, for poetry, and his novel Post Office or one of the City Lights collection of stories. Or one might find a library with back issues of the Wormwood Review and follow his development in its pages over the past twenty years. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to neophyte or jade this present volume though. I was sixty or seventy pages into it before I realized I hadn't read a poem that was not outstanding. I put the book down happy for Bukowski and happy for all of us who love books that live and will continue to live.

Of course, I've never understood why anyone finds Bukowski depressing. I've always found him a survival story. If he's come through, why can't the rest of us? George Orwell called Henry Miller the proletarian given a voice, and I'd say the remark is even truer of Bukowski. I like him best when he is being funny and dirty and conveying life at the infrared base of the socioeconomic spectrum. He's one of our few naturalists to possess a sense of style and a sense of humor. I like him least when he's waxing pseudopoetic or pseudophilosophical or stacking the deck to favor himself. What seems to bother people most about him, his attitude or attitudes, doesn't bother me. As just about everyone knows, Bukowski drinks a bit, and he can be unfair, in person and in print, at certain levels of the bottle, but there is also a purity in his unsparing view of humanity.

It's difficult to illustrate Bukowski's craft with excerpts because his poems tend to reach a certain length and the best are often the longest. While others debated how best to restore narrative and dramatic structures to verse, Bukowski just sat down and did it. He has the sense of timing and construction (and the voice) of a W.C. Fields, which is one reason why his infrequent readings, no matter what his state of inebriation, continue to draw throngs. To quote a line here and there makes as much sense as to tell a punch line without the build-up. In what is perhaps my favorite poem in this collection, the seriocomic "yeah, man?" the white protagonist pulls a knife on a Latin whose car is blocking his. Later the white returns to find his apartment in a shambles. His walls are spray-painted. His radio, television and electric clock are gone, as are his pillows and sheets. His mattress has been slashed; his faucets are running. His kitchen floor has been pissed on; eggs have been broken on it; garbage is dumped there. Missing are his knives, forks and spoons, the salt and pepper, the bread and coffee, everything in the refrigerator. The toilet paper is gone, and the mirror is broken, and the cabinet has been emptied of razor, shaving cream, Band-Aids, aspirins:

and then he looked
in the toilet
and down in the bowl
was a freshly-cut
cat's tail
furry and still
bleeding
in the water
Larry hit the lever
to flush it away
and got an
empty click
lifted the lid
looked inside
and all the toilet parts
were gone.

After a couple hits of the beer he has brought back with him, Larry decides

that it was about time
he moved
further west.

This is not simply a nightmare tale of one man's misguided race relations; it is the demographic and demonological saga of white flight. Bukowski may or may not be characterized as a revolutionary, but he is undeniably a chronicler of politically significant phenomena.

His language is the product of a movement towards the spoken idiom that is at least asold as Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads and that weaves its way through, among others, Whitman, Robinson, Frost, Masters, Lindsay, Williams, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi and Edward Field to become one of the dominant modes among young poets today, probably the dominant mode in Southern California. A special and striking influence upon the young Bukowski was the recently rediscovered Southern California fiction writer, John Fante, to whom this volume is dedicated and whose works are being reissued by Black Sparrow.

So why is Bukowski only now beginning to receive his due in his own country? One can only speculate, but he seems to have been perceived for a time, incorrectly I think, as an enemy of women and gays. Actually he is simply an abhorrer of orthodoxies. He has not given people used to respect—professors, for instance—the respect that they are used to. He is sparing in his praise of other writers. He not only knows that the literary world is rife with charlatanism, self-promotion, and mutual backscratching, but he hasn't hesitated to say so. He proclaims his literary superiority. Frankly, a lot of people seem just plain jealous of him. And he has been his own worst enemy at times, especially when the elixir has elicited his Doppelganger. But it must be admitted that Bukowski seldom initiates a relationship.

Bukowski has just finished his fourth novel, based on his childhood, a book that should go a long way towards making it obvious why he is the way he is and maybe even why we should be glad he is.

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