When Bukowski met
Bukowski By N Quentin Woolf
It seems pertinent, then, to ask whether Bukowski deserves
this adulation. His most popular and accessible book, Post
Office, isn’t very well written – it’s funny and full of
pathos, as well as being depressing and insightful, but the
back half is weak, as though it’s forgotten what it’s
supposed to be doing. Women reads like bad porn (writing
dirty stories, some of them so disgusting as to be
unpublishable, for wank-mags, was one of Bukowski’s major
literary outlets) and it is barely fiction at all, rather a
collection of memories with the names changed. And then
there are the poems, which seem to have relied for their
success, at least in part, on the monkeys-and-typewriters
approach – Bukowski was very prolific, and shipped box-loads
of bad poetry to his publisher, who then skimmed for stuff
worth publishing (and, by Sounes’ reckoning, over-published
even then).
If not the quality of his writing, then what? One of the
claims Sounes makes is that Bukowski was an important
blue-collar voice in an otherwise privileged literary scene
– as though he’s the first to write about ordinary men doing
manual work. Lawrence got there first; Steinbeck and Orwell
too, but Buk scores more credibility points for having lived
the experience, rather than dropping in for a while and
writing it up afterwards. There’s clearly a place in the
American culturescape for the voice of the working man –
think Springsteen, Barrio, Fante, Carver. Particularly when
contrasted against his contemporaries in the LA scene,
mostly trippy beat poets from good families, is that here
was a real working man who had somehow found in himself the
ability to write; he’d managed to find poetry on the post
office mail sorting line, and read it out in front of
audiences of students while guzzling from a beer bottle,
like an ape performing a magic trick.
Given that he spent most of his time writing about himself,
it’s as well that Bukowski was the controversialist he was:
the basic pattern of his lifestyle seems to have been
otherwise tedious: gambling and drinking, mostly. In truth,
that’s a major challenge for the biographer of any writer:
your subject is likely to have spent most of his or her life
sitting at home, alone, minding their own business behind a
typewriter. But Bukowski more than compensates: every time
he stumbles towards another six-pack, you know he’s going to
do or say something outrageous, and he doesn’t disappoint.
Part of the fascination is watching him fall apart, like any
other showbiz boozer. His hold is also in part that great,
transcendent wisdom the raddled drinker is able to exude,
when they can keep it together long enough, and in part the
honest, explicit cataloguing of gradual collapse.
Ah yes: honesty. This is where Bukowski, and consequently
the writing of his life, gets complicated.
The problem with this is that we know Bukowski doesn’t tell
the truth. He’s a novelist, for a start, a profession
germane to which is the ability to sustain complex
fantasies, to ‘experience’ them as real, and to convincingly
portray them as such to others. To write fiction is to lie.
However, Buk’s brand of fiction is much more closely related
to lying than is, say, the average bit of sci-fi or crime
fiction: he takes real scenarios and changes a few details,
and asserts that that’s how things were. He’s also an
inveterate drunk – and rare is the inebriate whose
relationship with truth isn’t altered, one way or the other,
by alcohol, whether it’s out-and-out fabrication or an
inability to keep mum. But beyond both of these, time and
time again we see Charley-boy misleading us, whether it’s
claiming to have been a boxcar hobo (when photographing
Bukowski as the writer posed for a publicity photograph
climbing onto the ladder of a boxcar, a friend, who himself
had travelled that way, declared Bukowski a fraud – old Buk
didn’t know the first thing about how to board the vehicle)
or claiming to have drunk a $15,000 inheritance (Sounes
presents Buk as a spendthrift, not a splurger), or claiming
to have abandoned writing for ten years when in fact he was
both writing and submitting his writing throughout that
time. There’s a possibility Bukowski made up and circulated
false praise of his work from Jean-Paul Satre. Indeed,
people who knew Bukowski, whether well, like Linda King, or
less so, like Sean Penn’s mother, identified Buk as a
phoney, and he seemed to like being described that way.
“This isn’t a commercial,” Bukowski breathes, stopping for a
cigarette between poems on his early seventies recording
Happy Hour. The trouble, as with everything he says, is you
can’t believe it. As with everything else, it is a
commercial, with a commercial’s phoneyness and loudness and
hunger for attention.
Naturally, biography, as a form, is in no way obliged to
confine itself to subjects of great moral stature, but one
wonders how Sounes managed to become quite so enthused by
Bukowski, who seems to have been, all too often, a real
shit. Here’s where I have my biggest disagreement with
Sounes’ approach: some really appalling aspects of
Bukowski’s character receive a glossing-over for reasons
that are not explained and are hard to imagine. For
instance, in what is almost an aside, Sounes mentions that
Bukowski ‘decided [his first love] was little better than a
whore, and was not above slapping her around’. Whose ‘not
above’ is that? Did Buk say that, or did Sounes? The choice
of phrase entirely fails to address the viewpoint of the
victim of this violence. One worries Sounes’ hero-worship
has drifted too far; we can only hope that eating steak
dinners was the limit of his self-confessed adoption of
Bukowski’s habits. Elsewhere, we hear that during World War
Two, Charles Bukowski – born Heinrich Bukovski, in Andernach,
Germany – voiced support for the Hitler and the Nazis. This
wasn’t mere talk: he went to meetings of neo-Nazis. Of
course, he was just kidding, Sounes asserts. Really? The
source notes (which, let us remember, are tucked away at the
back of the book lest they puncture Sounes’ illusion that he
is Charles Bukowski writing a novel rather than Howard
Sounes writing a biography) cite only Bukowski’s novels as
the basis for this. Given that many people who knew Bukowski,
and Bukowski himself, recognise how much he fibbed, and that
Bukowski’s entire oeuvre is an adjustment of reality,
wouldn’t it have been wise at least to suspend judgement on
this? The idea that something is a fact because Buk said so
doesn’t seem convincing to me.
Top | 2/3 | Next Page> |
