Category: Bukowski

The Journals of John Cheever

Arrived yesterday. I open to any page and find good writing. How can such a decadent booze hound write so well? And why is the sauce ink to so many literary pens? One of the mysteries of life, like why so many Jews are leftists. Whole books have been written about this. Prager wrote one. Podhoretz wrote one.

Cheever lets it all hang out with brutal honesty. Auto-paralysis through self-analysis  on the rocks of self-loathing. I open at random to p. 96:

I am a solitary drunkard. I take a little painkiller before lunch but I really don't get to work until late afternoon. At four or half past four or sometimes five  I stir up a Martini, thinking that a great many men who can't write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at bar stools.  [. . .]

He's thinking about Kerouac, I'll guess. The entry is dated  1957, the year On the Road was published. Two pages later, Cheever lays into Jack in a long entry which begins, "My first feelings about Kerouac's book were: that it was not good . . . ."

Who is the better writer? Cheever. Who cuts closer to the bone of life and left more of a cultural mark (for good or ill)? Kerouac.  

Too much of the preciosity of the Eastern Establishment attaches to such  superb literary craftsmen as Cheever, Updike, and Yates, phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.  Social climbers like Cheever look down on regional writers such as Edward Abbey, whose journal is entitled Confessions of a Barbarian.

I read 'em all, even boozer Bukowski whose novels I consider trash. Some of his poetry, though, I think is good; Bluebird for example.

Intimacy, Reserve, and Bukowski’s Bluebird

We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve.

And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves.

The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but neither do they suppress Bukowski's bluebird.

Bukowski’s Juvenilia and Mine

Here are the first few lines of Charles Bukowski's one-page late poem "Zero" (You Get So Alone At Times it Just Makes Sense, Ecco 2002, p. 104, originally publ. 1986 by Black Sparrow Press):

sitting here watching the second hand on the TIMEX go
    around and
around . . .
this will hardly be a night to remember
sitting here searching for blackheads on the back of my neck
as other men enter the sheets with dolls of flame
I look into myself and find perfect emptiness.

Here is an adolescent effort of mine when I was literally an adolescent:

tiredly picking my nose
listening to the grinding sounds of
clocks, air conditioners and refrigerators
i can hear it all this night
snarfing a fart now and then, tiredly
checking beef pies cooking in the oven
picking at a jammed-up typewriter
in confusion
dancing around on featherweight fright flights
and tiredly picking
picking my nose & my acne
and eating it
is this any way to run an airline?

I'll grant that Bukowski's poem, published when he was around 66, especially if you read the whole of it, is better than mine, which is not saying much.  But there are plenty of common elements: self-indulgence, self-absorption, diasaffection, alienation and disconnectedness.  My excuse is that my adolescent rubbish was written when I was 16.  At 66 that particular excuse lapses.

On Bukowski

Some write because they like the idea of being a writer.  It's romantic or 'cool' or something.  Others write to say something that they need to express.  Most combine these motivations.  The better the writer, the stronger the need to express something that not just needs expression for the psychic health of the writer, but that is worthy of expression. 

Charles Bukowski wrote from genuine need.  (See so you want to be a writer?) It was his therapy. He could not have believed in the early days of his scribbling  that he would ever be able to make a living from it.  But from what I have read of him so far, what he wrote is not worth reading except in the way that his writing was worth doing for him.  What do I mean?

His writing was self-therapeutic; our reading is motivated by something like the pathologist's interest.  We read him to learn about diseases of the mind and spirit.

Am I being fair?  Fair enough for a blog post.

 

The Day Bukowski Discovered John Fante

Ask-the-dust Through Charles Bukowski I discovered John Fante who I am now reading (Ask the Dust, Black Sparrow, 2000, originally published in 1939) and reading about (Stephen Cooper, Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante, North Point Press, 2000).  Here is Bukowski's preface to the Black Sparrow edition of Ask the Dust in which Buk recounts the day he stumbled upon Fante in the L. A. Public Library.

Both lived in and wrote about Los Angeles, which explains part of my interest in both.  And then there is the Catholic connection, stronger in Fante than in Bukowski, and the Italian resonance in Fante.  Ten years before Kerouac broke into print, Fante's writing had that mad, onrushing, intoxicated Kerouac quality as witness the following passage three pages into Ask the Dust:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya, hya,; there's a place for me, too and it begins with B., in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett, but I'd be there to sort of bolster up the B's, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame. Gala day, gala dream!

 

An Argument Against Bukowski

He had no appreciation of nature.  That says something about a man. And what it says ain't good.  I'll have to dig up one of his anti-nature poems for documentation.  I recall one in which he has good things to say about smog, the atmosphere of LaLaLand, the oxygen of (fallen) Angelenos.  Those last cute phrases are mine not his.

There is a Bukowski category now, for more on this dude.

Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time

A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life  and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown.  Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:

Barfly and gambler, flâneur and floozy fritter away their time.  And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.  But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's  dissipation, are equally time-wasting.  Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence  – all will evoke a smile from the worldly  bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.   He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.

For further exfoliation, see Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.