LOS ANGELES, June 3 - No more left.
Done. Finished. All gone.
Sad and happy day.
No more Bukowski left for me to read.
I came to Charles Bukowski’s novels a little late. I was aware of his poetry for many years, and had a limited appetite for it. The word smithery was more than able, but the content became tiresome after a short while. This is, mind, my personal response, not a general critique about the value/quality of the stuff. God knows, whether I wanted to read it or not, Bukowski’s poetry was and is far supperior to any lame stab I’ve taken at writing verse. But the fact that his poems were little more than grist for a cheap lampoon in my mind led me to disregard his prose as well.
A note for clarity. While Bukowski’s prose works are generally shelved as fiction, they almost all deal with an oh-so-thinly veiled doppelganger named Chinaski, and are, by the author’s own admission, essentially memoir. The same holds true for most of his short prose work as well. Thus, I tend to refer to his prose rather than his novels and short stories. I’m not fetishistic about categories, but it helps make the larger differentiation I’m interested in, which is Bukowski’s prose, opposed to his poetry.
I didn’t take the plunge until roughly 1996. “Post Office” was my gateway drug. And I was instantly hooked. And influenced.
More than the rampant drug and alcohol abuse, foul language, and low life environs, all of which I already had a taste for, the echos of Bukowski’s prose can be found in my own in moments of extreme leanness. His writing is spare to the point of anorexia. Flourishes, such as there are, come delivered with a dryness that withers the lips. Tossed off with no more care or polish than an empty beer bottle would garner. This paragraph? Hopelessly overwritten by the standards of Bukowski’s prose. Positively fucking florid.
Hook by “Post Office” I was quite fortunately forced to dole his books to myself in drips and drabs. You don’t find his stuff in the one-buck bin at the second hand shop. You don’t find them used at all. People buy them and keep them. You want a Bukowski book? You have to buy it new. At least you did in prosaic pre-Amazon.com 1996. Those were the days when fifteen bucks for a trade paperback was a serious hole in my finances. And I wanted to own the books. I didn’t want to read them and return them to the library, I wanted them for myself.
So I had to wait.
But, as much as I loved that first hit, there’s always something on the shelf calling to you when you have twenty bucks to spend on books. Be careful about your shopping and you could come away with two books. And maybe have change for a beer and a game of pool at Mona’s. Bukowski’s books were never on the buy-one-get-one tables. Hell, even whan they showed up on the book tables out on Astor Square, where everything was half-price because it was all hot, even then Bukowski cost full.
So I read the books slowly. No more than one a year for a couple years.
Then came awareness.
This fucker is fucking dead, man. He ain’t writing no more.
We’ve all had this moment, looking at the shelf, seeing just exactly how much is left, how many books left in the library of a beloved writer, how many times left to read one for the first time and get that feeling of being there in beloved but undiscovered country. And we start the rationing. Facing twin pressures:
Don’t read them too soon.
Make sure you read them all before you walk in front of a car one day.
I slowed consumption to a trickle. No more than one every two to three years. A special treat. A reward. An old reliable to go to when nothing else would do.
But all things end.
I saved the last for last.
“Pulp”. The last of Bukowski’s prose. A work outside his usual memoirist mode. Total fiction. “Dedicated to bad writing.” What’s it about?
Pulp.
Just like the title says.
Homage and satire both, it is a wonderful pulp. Wonderful Bukowski. No less derived from real life than his other books, it consistently breaks the heart while making you choke on the pieces in laughter. Fucker could write.
Evidence:
“Getting out of bed in the morning was the same as facing the blank wall of the universe. Maybe I should go to a nude bar and stick a 5 buck bill into a g-string? Try to forget everything. Maybe I should go to a boxing match and watch two guys beat the shit out of each other?
But trouble and pain were what kept a man alive. Or trying to avoid trouble and pain. It was a full time job. And sometimes even in sleep you couldn’t rest. Last dream I had I was laying under this elephant, I couldn’t move and he was releasing one of the biggest turds you ever saw, it was about to drop and then my cat, Hamburger, walked across the top of my head and I awakened. You tell that dream to a shrink and he’ll make something awful out of it.”
from “Pulp” by Charles Bukowski
So that’s that.
Bukowski, Chandler, Hammett.
Those guys don’t write anymore. What a fucking shame that is.
Good news for me is that I shrugged of Chuck’s poetry all those years ago. Now I get a second shot at it. See if I’ve changed enough to get the hit off it that I got off the prose.
Just like a good junkie, never looking to really get clean.
-charlie
