Charles Bukowski, the legend and the misunderstandings

Misunderstandings and opposing opinions about Charles Bukowski have never ceased.  In Germany, he is considered one of the great writers of our time and his collected works have sold more than the books of any other writer.  The American East Coast literary establishment, however, has yet to take him seriously.

One common misconception about him is that he was one of the Beat poets.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Los Angeles has produced very few great men ; Charles Bukowski is one of them.  A product and chronicler of the world of the working man, he was far too shy and proud to have joined a bohemian movement–which he could not have afforded anyway.  Instead, he submerged himself in the working/drinking class, all the while reading authors who wrote truthfully and honestly about what he, himself, was also seeing.  Dostoyevsky, Celine, Hemingway, Knut Hamsun, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc.

His drinking and writing also created the legend around him of the ‘dirty old man ,‘ which was based on his own ‘improved’ reality.  This is quite common for an artist, especially for a writer who avoids using third-person narration and writes mostly about himself as a combatative, funny, provocative drunk.  But in Bukowski’s case it hides one of the most important elements of his personality : an extreme, almost feminine sensitivity, accompanied by a great sense of decency and respect for the Other.  He could often be cruel in his truthful comments about people, but otherwise, he would literally have not hurt a fly.

In my DVD, The Charles Bukowski Tapes (fifty of his improvised monologues filmed in 1983-84), there is a very revealing passage in the segment entitled ‘Nature.’

‘… People are indifferent.  They don’t get themselves in with the spider and the fly.  I got myself in.  I am the fly.’

This is the sensitive Bukowski you discover when you read his most beautiful poems, for instance the ones from the collection, Love is a Dog from Hell (one of his 27 books of poetry).  His admirers are divided equally between those who prefer his poetry and those who prefer his prose.  For many, he completely changed the nature of poetry in the United States.  As for his prose, he was condemned to follow Hemingway, but had a darker and funnier voice. One the best of his seven novels, Women, the prose complement to Love is a Dog from Hell,  starts like this : ‘I was 50 years old and had’n been to bed with a woman for four years.’ In the next 300 pages,using his new found celebrity he catches up at a rapid hilarious pace  to end up in a durable relationship with the only woman who at first refuses to sleep with him.

When I think of Bukowski, the title of a book by Sartre keeps popping into my head, Saint Genet, Poet & Martyr. Images of some kind of  Saint or of one of the hundreds of disciples of Diogenes (continuously popping up for the next 700 years after his death, before the triumph of Christ), keep coming  to mind . Using his madness, Bukowski was forever trying not to be seen as a Wise Man, although that impression often stayed with those  who met him . A consistently dark and devastating humor was his armor against anyone who chose to take him too seriously, and yet he was very serious and lucid about his talent.

Even in his drinking, there was a form of wisdom which kept his writing fresh and allowed him to side-step his own destruction. Slowing down the drinking for example ,was done in a  graceful way.  I saw him in East Hollywood as he was starting to come down, at age 58, from hard liquor to white wine–albeit wine in very large quantities.  During our early days working on Barfly, twelve empty bottles of cheap German white were often lying on the ground by 3 :00 am.  A year later, he never drank before sunset.  Later still, he switched to red wine, and then ,much later,drank only one bottle every other day.

He went back to hard liquor for a very few rare evenings–once at a fancy dinner party for a  music promotion at the Beverly Hills Hotel.  At a table behind us sat Arnold Schwartzenegger, who Hank tried to provoke into a fight.  ‘If you’re really so tough,’ he said to him, ‘come outside and show us.’  In a panic, Schwartzenegger’s press agents were discretely signalling Arnold not to respond.  Later, Hank stole a carving knife from the kitchen and ’went after the rich‘ with it, spitting on arriving Rolls Royces.

For his chemotherapy, of course, he had to stop altogether, even the reduced drinking.  First though, the doctors checked his liver to see if it could withstand the chemo. The test revealed he had the liver of a young man.  He actually was a force of nature.  He used a short remission to finish his last novel, Pulp, and in the midst of his pain, kept on laughing until the end of the human comedy he was sharply observing in the hospital around him.

– Barbet SCHROEDER

New York , 11/5/2009

Article written for PLAYBOY Magazine, March 2010 issue (PDF, 2MB, Download/View)