Notes on a Dirty Old Man
[In the essay below, Kessler defends Bukowski's writing from attacks by the literary establishment, arguing that his work displays "an increasingly persuasive truthfulness, a sense of honest simplicity which makes his books easy to read, offensive to some, sad and funny—in short, lifelike."]
My first direct encounter with Bukowski occurred in 1974, in a Santa Cruz restaurant in the basement of a building that used to be the county courthouse but was converted to a little shopping complex with lots of nice shops for the tourists. The famous writer was in town to read at a poetry festival that evening, had drunk his free meal with the literary hustlers and was looking vaguely bored and pre-obnoxious as zero hour approached. I arrived late as the party was preparing to leave the restaurant, and my first impression of the distinguished guest (to whom I was perfunctorily introduced) was of a man profoundly indifferent to the surrounding bullshit but not really a nasty fellow. He seemed to be someone doing his job, stoically meeting professional obligations, keeping a crusty demeanor on for the sake of self-defense from the admiring vampires, not friendly but coolly tolerant of the attention. In that smallish group, which included Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and a number of lesser literati, Bukowski struck me as being for real in a way that could be trusted.
Later that evening, after a marathon reading at the Civic Auditorium where Bukowski enraged the feminists and delighted the subliterary slobs by being himself on stage, reading in that unshakably murderous monotone for his allotted time punctuated by slurps off his quart of screwdriver, then heckling his colleagues from the audience ("Read ten more!" he yelled at Snyder as the hour approached midnight and the crowd hushed reverently to receive some of Gary's Zen/environmentalist wisdom)—later, after the reading, there was a party to which the bards and their followers were invited. As one of the younger local poets, I had read that night and was honored to be among such illustrious company. At the same time I had a skeptical or even cynical feeling about the whole affair, a sour reaction to the sycophantic frenzy that often surrounds celebrities. Standing off to the side of the room moodily observing the goingson, I found myself next to Bukowski, who muttered to me in a tone that seemed a mixture of distaste and weary understanding (and maybe even sympathy for my unease), "I guess we have to entertain these people, don't we?"
I think I just shrugged, not wanting to provoke one of the legendary brawls for which the man was famous, but in retrospect there was a gentle sincerity in his voice which was anything but hostile or aggressive. Listening to the undertone of his work before and since—seeing through the stylistic toughness of his poetry and prose—one can detect that kind of compassionate tenderness, an acceptance which softens and absorbs brutality and gives the rawness of Bukowski's voice a deep and humane resonance.
With age, this compassionate quality, which was always present but masked with irony or tough-guy posturing, has risen closer to the surface of his writing and become its informing substance. The key, I believe, to understanding Bukowski's power is in the 1982 novel Ham on Rye, where he reveals the origins of his attitude toward life and in an incredibly generous way forgives his cruel and pathetic father for all the abuse the writer withstood as a child. One can begin to comprehend how, in the relentless account of his more-sordid-than-average days and nights prolifically typed and published over the past two or three decades, the act of writing has literally saved his life. This is what makes Bukowski such an inspiration to the readers who have grown to trust him: if this guy can make it through so much misery, anybody can. His works are a reservoir of earned courage.
If he is a model for other writers, it has less to do with his style—which unfortunately has been imitated to death by a multitude of second-, third- and fourth-rate poets—than with his ability, day after day, to sit down at the machine facing a blank page and to patiently put one word after another. This patience and perseverance in composition has not only tightened and clarified his language over the years, it has cultivated an increasingly persuasive truthfulness, a sense of honest simplicity which makes his books easy to read, offensive to some, sad and funny—in short, lifelike. His writing is proletarian without ever attempting to be politically uplifting; if anything, its rejection of political solutions for human plight and its embrace of such simple consolations as classical music on the radio, playing the horses, drinking and whoring around is what give it its illusionless appeal. Socially, his world is a comic wasteland where stupid jerks redeem their lives only through small acts of unheroic attention.
I write this knowing that there are people who will always see Bukowski as a pig, and that the professors will want some evidence to back up my assertions of his importance. But these are notes, not a doctoral thesis (though I guarantee that the PhD's will descend one day, if they haven't already, to document meticulously the artistic achievement of this barbaric figure), and I want to be sure my subjective reading is not mistaken for scholarship. If the literary establishment has rejected Bukowski's work as beneath any decent New Yorker's dignity, it's partly because his writing resists any form of text-worship or cocktail-party appropriation, partly because he's published by a small press on the West Coast (and has found his audience all along through funky little independent magazines and papers), and partly because—the horror, the horror!—he's from Los Angeles. His presence in that city has, through no intent of his own, been instrumental in helping to generate a large and vital wave of excellent work in poetry and prose by younger writers who learned from his example that one doesn't need New York's approval to become an author under one's own power.
Despite the fact that he's been widely translated and is extremely popular in Europe, Bukowski remains a local writer in the best sense of the term, rooted in his native turf and endlessly unearthing its indigenous reality without ever pretending to speak for the region as a public voice. More subtly and consistently than any other writer I know, Bukowski has mapped the nervous energy of LA's streets, its car culture, its architectural pathos, the truly mundane and unglamorous side of its Hollywood facade. In the novel Women especially, which I believe to be his masterpiece, one gets the sense of frenetic desperation that permeates the City of the Angels. But because he was raised in Los Angeles and knows its people—its real people, not the mosquitoes buzzing into the beams of its klieg lights—his portrayal of the city and its inhabitants lacks the bitterness and contempt so often found in the writings of outsiders taking a jaundiced peek into the dream factory. LA was never a dream for Bukowski, nor even very much of a nightmare; it was and is simply a given, a landscape whose reality was never in doubt. I'm convinced that Bukowski's books will be read in the future as maps of Los Angeles in much the same way that Joyce's work is seen as a guide to Dublin.
Within the context of American literature, Bukowski is sometimes compared to Henry Miller. In their radical rejection of mainstream social values, their survival-oriented individualism, the buffoonery of their sexual obsessions, the unabashedly autobiographical/personal orientation of their texts and the sheer productivity of their typewriters, Miller and Bukowski clearly share some territory. But while both are enemies of hypocrisy, Miller is deeply moralistic, often preaching to the reader or arguing for some philosophical position as if it made an important spiritual difference, where Bukowski is below good and evil, literally grounded in his own experience. It's not that he has no imagination, he's just not the metaphysician that Miller is. Bukowski is a poet, however, or an antipoet, who achieves a surprising lyricism in the midst of the most talky, typewriterly utterances. And perhaps what the two have most in common is that they're totally unafraid to make fools of themselves.
Bukowski's willingness to write badly without embarrassment, to do the same thing over and over again in poems or in stories, is one of the exasperating and endearing things about him. Exasperating because we've heard it before, endearing because it's him, it is the pattern out of which he has always worked, for better and worse. He has mined deeply a relatively modest area of experience: he has not sought exotic adventures or inventions because he recognizes the mundane's amazing capacity for revelation. Besides, he's lazy. He likes to be not too far from a liquor store at any time. He'd rather, like most goodfor-nothings, go to the race track than to the wilderness (not to mention work!). He does not set himself up as a model for anything, nor does he presume to be a bad example. In Bukowski's world, there's nothing even to rebel against. Life is the way it is—painful, absurd and scary—and so what.
And what about alcohol? the temperate will ask. Doesn't he glorify and celebrate the dubious pleasures of alcoholism? Hardly. Alcohol for Bukowski is a vice to which he admits, a crutch, a shield, a wall, a last line of defense against a world that refuses to cooperate. He no more advocates its use than he advocates driving on the freeway, but he presents it as one more presence in his milieu, like any other character, however unsavory.
The sexism of which he is sometimes accused is also a bogus charge. The women in most of his poems and stories are real people, they come across as quirky, complete beings, eccentrically individual, not just anonymous genitals on which the writer exercises his fantasies—although there's surely plenty of close-to-the-crotch activity. But fucking, even fucking violently, and eating and drinking and shitting are things that people actually do, and Bukowski faces these facts because they constitute life as he knows it. In his recent work he seems to be sweetening into a kindly old recluse (some of the poems in War All the Time show the emergence of a wanner, softer Bukowski than some readers might have anticipated), but he has earned this more kindly outlook, he didn't decide to be nice.
Like all great writers, Bukowski is a warrior of the spirit, even in his rejection of any form of conventional heroism. He testifies to the fact that even under the worst of circumstances people can remain undefeated. My respect for his work is a personal matter, although it has nothing to do with his personality; that night we met in Santa Cruz was the only time we've spoken face to face. One thing about him that astonishes me is that his work continues to improve, or at least maintain a level of strength that shows he is still creating, not just going through the motions. With each new book I find myself recharged with an interest in the everyday, reminded that the life of every person counts.
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A review of War All the Time and Horses Don't Bet on People & Neither Do I
Bukowski Unbound