Why is bukowski important

This is a typically adolescent emotion, and it is no coincidence that all three of these writers exert a special power over teen-agers. This sort of cri de coeur is not what first comes to mind when the name Charles Bukowski is mentioned. In the course of some fifty books, he transformed himself into a mythic roughneck, a figure out of a tall tale—brawler, gambler, companion of bums and whores, boozehound with an oceanic thirst.

They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof.

The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story:. I was shacked with a silken-legged beauty. I drank and fought all night, was the terror of the local bars. An uncannily prolific afterlife was something that Bukowski counted on. And he rejected on principle the notion of poetry as a craft, a matter of labor and revision.

Such poems offer the same kind of vicarious wish fulfillment that differently inclined readers might find in spy novels or gangster movies, with their parodies of unbound masculinity. He bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction, or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing.

The crucial episodes in his biography are reworked again and again in his poems and novels, so that any reader quickly learns the broad outlines of his story. Look at your knickers and shirt! Why do you do this to your clothes? Born in Germany to an American-serviceman father and a German mother, Bukowski moved at the age of three to Los Angeles.

The Depression, which shadowed his whole adolescence, affected him primarily through his father, who took out his frustrations on his wife and son. Bukowski describes terrible beatings, sadistically inflicted for minor transgressions like missing a blade of grass when he mowed the lawn. There they were—all the withheld screams—spouting out in another form. This disfigurement helped to make Bukowski a surly, friendless teen-ager. But there was another element in his isolation, one that he dwells on much less often—an innate sensitivity and intelligence, which led to the first stirrings of literary ambition.

This is a standard element in the biography of most poets, but it fits awkwardly with the myth of Bukowski the tough, who constantly proclaims his contempt for mere bookishness. And this persistence was while he was going through three marriages, dozens of jobs, and non-stop alcoholism.

Some of this is documented poorly in the move Barfly but I think a better movie about Bukowski is the indie that Matt Dillon did about his novel, Factotum which details the 10 years he was going from job to job, woman to woman, just trying to survive as an alcoholic in a world that kept beating him down.

He wrote his first novel in 19 days. Michael Hemmingson, whom I write about below, wrote me and said Bukowski had to finish that novel so fast because he was desperately afraid he was going to be a failure at being a successful writer and didn't want to disappoint John Martin, who had essentially given him an advance for the novel.

When I think "constant alcoholic," I usually equate that with being a homeless bum. Bukowski, at some deep level, realized that he needed to survive. He couldn't just be a homeless bum and kill himself, no matter how many disappointments he had.

He worked countless factory jobs the basis of the non-fiction novel, Factotun but even that wasn't stable enough for him. Finally, he took a job working for the US government you can't get more stable working in the post office for 11 years.

He didn't miss child support payments although he constantly wrote about how ugly the mother of his child was , and as far as I know he was never homeless or totally down and out from his early 30s 'til the time he started having success as a writer. And despite writing about the overwhelming poverty he had, he did have a small inheritance from his father, a savings account he built up, and a steady paycheck.

The post office job is documented, in full, in his first "novel" called, appropriately, Post Office. Many people think that's his best novel but I put it third or fourth behind Ham on Rye and Factotum and possibly Women.

He also wrote a novel, Hollywood , about the blow-by-blow experience of doing the movie Barfly. All the names are changed hence its claim to be fiction but once you figure out who everyone is, its totally non-fiction. Like all of his other novels not counting Pulp , which was the worst American novel ever written and published. Imagine working a brutal hour shift at the Post Office, coming home and arguing with your wife or girlfriend, or half-girlfriend, half-prostitute that was living with you, finishing off three or four six-packs of beer and then He did it every day.

Most people want to write that novel, or finish that painting, or start that business, but have zero discipline to actually sit down and do it. If there was any talent that Bukowski had that I can't actually figure out how he got it, its that discipline. When he was younger early 20s, late teens he spent almost every day in the library, falling in love with all the great writers.

The love must have been so great it superseded almost everything else in his life. He had to write like them or he really felt like he would die.

He had to "put down a good line" as he would say. And every day he would try. And good, bad, or ugly, he probably ultimately ended up publishing many posthumously everything he ever wrote.

I try to match that discipline. Even when I don't post a blog post I write seven days a week, every morning. At least words and a completed post.

I used to do this in my 20s when I was trying to write fiction. My minimum then was words. I did that for five years. It adds up. The average book is 60, words. If you can write words a day then you'll have 6 books by the end of the year. Because poetry books are much smaller, Bukowski probably had around 80 or so books published by the time he was dead and I bet there are more coming. He was inspired by several writers and he inspired many more. Some of my favorite writers come from both categories.

I highly recommend Celine's Journey to the End of the Night. Celine is almost a more raw version of Bukowski.

He was constantly angry and trying to survive and do whatever it took to survive. The thing about Bukowski, as opposed to many other writers, is he didn't concern himself with flowery images or beautiful sunsets. The flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul and the women break vases against the walls and the men drink too much and nobody finds the one but keep looking crawling in and out of beds.

The city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill. This view of loneliness helpes us better understand Bukowski. H is drinking and loafing and sleeping around is tied more to a fear of isolation than a haughty dissent from convention. But it is hard not to laugh at that penultimate stanza, which is a pessimistic list of refuse and death that could double for a lyric from a high school metal band. Successful metaphor is scant in his work, as is enriching irony.

What you see is what you get, and what is seen is Bukowski is rarely impressive. Then there is the issue of his misogyny. His book Women is predictably troublesome. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

We see that not only were women to be collected in a life, they were to be kept in check. His personal life practiced what he preached. There is nothing wrong with enjoying something, but we should ask ourselves: What are we enjoying it for? Just because a writer is not Shakespeare does not mean we should not read her, but that is to say that we read her to get something different from what Shakespeare provides.

I believe Bukowski readers to have a genuine interest in reading serious and literary works, that yes, present a dramatic vision of what it is to be a contemporary straight male. And in this respect, there are many stronger writers, of superior artistry, perspective, depth, and temperament that beat Bukowski at his own game. Here, I propose a list of alternatives that our reading time could be better dedicated to. Henry Miller: Miller is at times a misogynist, but like a proper canonical male writer, his talent and intelligence makes it hard to dismiss him.

There is a complexity and strangeness to Miller that Bukowksi who was openly influenced by him fails to reach. In Tropic of Cancer , a novel banned for thirty years for its explicitness, Miller makes an artistic case for openness to sensual experience as a way of life.