[MacArthur]

Bukowski: Born Into This

The one good thing about this-- probably definitive-- documentary on Charles Bukowski is likely inadvertant: it will probably serve to end his reputation. At just over two hours, and put together by well-wishers, it supplies an ample dose of Bukowski's vile personality, along with a generous sample of his artless literary output.

Bukowski's reputation has been sliding anyway, and for the most unappealable of reasons-- his writing isn't worth anything. A curiously sheltered mediocrity-- most of his time was spent doing night-work sorting at the Post Office, sleeping, and typing up three or four pieces a day at home while slurping cheap beer and grocery-store wine (with occasional forays to East Hollywood taverns where he was a neighborhood regular)-- Bukowski had little experience, and less understanding, concerning anyone's life...always, he was cocooned in the grandiose delusions and pitiable denial/despair of a chronic low-end alcoholic.

Bukowski had no logical grasp of anecdote or incident, neither insight nor real sympathy with his stereotyped "characters", no ear for the language, nor any phrasing or vocabulary more than was needed to transcribe his own conversational maunderings. His discourse was punctuated with commonplace obscenities situated exactly where you would expect to hear them from any witless teenager...and with none of the energy or inventiveness of a truly connected street-male-- Bukowski, friendless throughout his youth, had no grip on slang or dialect. He had no eye for detail, nor an imagination capable of conjuring arresting imagery.

His topics were limited...and to some considerable degree, concocted. If Bukowski was abused as a child, he has nothing to say about it that rings true (there is NO independent confirmation). He was likely not much of a bar-fighter (he was decidedly nonathletic) and most of his notorious stunts occured in contexts where he knew he was unlikely to get hurt. Even the fawning documentarists concede his sexual exploits were largely imaginary. Past forty, and an habitual heavy drinker and smoker...he was probably-- like most over-the-hill alcoholics-- simply impotent.

Bukowski was an aging man out of step with his times. He didn't read much, seldom travelled and kept a limited acquaintance. His taste in women ran to dumbells. His politics consisted of a sappy populism picked up in the 30's and 40's, and a vague (mostly second-hand) Hipster defiance. He was out of place among young people, and was the sort of drunk who privately railed at niggers, Jews and fags. Even his Underworld was more that of the 40's pulp-writer he once aspired to be-- he could tell you more about the race-track (which he frequented) than the heroin-infested East Hollywood he lived in most of his life (because he didn't understand it...he didn't understand much).

But, it is better to be lucky than to be good-- and Bukowski was lucky. He caught on among European intellectuals in somewhat the same way as Jerry Lewis....a Frenchman's American. He acquired a patron in the literary entrepreneur John Martin. And he created a niche in the Underground press of the 60's.

His own approach to literary success was pure Spam: he switched from stories to "poems" merely to increase his output (Bukowski's "poetry" is uncrafted and pedestrian prose, with predictable line-breaks and stammering repetitions), typed three or four pieces a day, and sent them to any free contest, small press or marginal journal available-- persistence was his one genuine virtue. He may have inaugurated the practice of self-publishing pamphlets to hawk at readings and small bookstores. It says loads about his own assessment of his work that he sent it out without making copies, or enclosing return postage: if it wasn't accepted on a one-time basis, he never saw it again. He couldn't care less...and neither should we.

The documentary isn't particularly well made, and I am sorry I went to see it. The fan-boy director had some previously unreleased interview material, and wanted to cash-in on a waning public interest in this dead and forgettable celebrity. The boozy bragging and quarrels with his bimbo are painful to watch. The ancillary interviews will convince you that Bono really IS stupid, and that Sean Penn and Tom Waits SOUND stupid, when they talk about Bukowski.

Charles Bukowski remains an icon to some: to the insecure writer he provides a benchmark easy to reach and exceed; to the untalented participant in the world of coffee-shop poetry he supplies a ready-made formula to infuse rushed, sloppy and sub-average writing with cheap "significance" (and an excuse to shamelessy tittilate); to naive suburban kids he might seem a messenger from a world they are little-familiar with...although he had nothing more than a worm's-eye view of his world, and none of the skills or personal resources to humanise it.

The film, like Bukowski, is fundamentally BAD. One good thing...it may inadvertantly serve to further debunk this shallow and mean-spirited fraud.

Andrew MacArthur



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited June 13, 2004).]

[Richard Wakefield]

No mistaking your stand, Mac! I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped his verse (or his life) if his beer had been expensive, his wine from an upscale shop, and his alcoholism hign-end. But his low-rent sensibilities were part of his persona, so maybe your adjectives are relevant after all.
RPW

[Kate Benedict]

nice girls

nice girls like me
didn’t drink
didn’t smoke
didn’t wrap their legs around
fast motorcycles
or the fast boys revving them

nice girls

nice girls like me
took books into their beds instead
books by
Charles Bukowski

[Hugh Clary]

What a great review! Shows that not only the emperor can have no clothes, but the motley fool as well. Oh, sorry, a naked Bukowski - ghastly image. My bad.

[Kate Benedict]

I'm sure he was a pretty unsavory fellow, especially as he got older, more wasted and more "known." It doesn't mean much, though, to say "he was an aging man out of step with his times." All poets reach the stage of agedness and many poets feel out of step with their times. I loathe to hear stories of the deep prejudice of poets, but Buky wasn't alone there, was he? Eliot, Stevens--they were bigots too, worse ones, powerful ones, elitist ones.

Anyway, ultimately we judge poets on their work not their mindsets or their behavior. Here's a poem by Louise Bogan that explains it all for you:

SEVERAL VOICES OUT OF A CLOUD

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom
and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless.
And it isn't for you.
--------------

Of course the laurel isn't for CB either! He specialized in the slightest of subject matters, artless and dashed-off. If memory serves, his earlier stuff was edgier and at that point, seemed fresher.

Still, I think of him as the only poet deserving of the term "beat." The one who walked the talk. That's why the French like him; he was so non-bourgeois, so louche! With Mickey Rourke playing him in Barfly, they must have been on Cloud Neuf.

[MacArthur]

Oh Kate. Hank's grip on the public imagination has always resided in his presumed bona fides-- the assumption that he really was an habitue of slum life, and conveyed some accurate reflection of it. But it wasn't so...he was merely a misanthropic-- and rather middle-class-- drunk.

With the PO job, then the patronage of Martin, and finally the success of "Barfly", Bukowski hadn't been in any sort of financial distress since at least the mid-fifties...even managing to keep up a fairly generous child-support without missing a payment (the two eviction notices he proudly shopped around date from the 40's).

The world Bukowski markets in his stories and "poems" wasn't true to his own times, or particularly authentic. It is derivative-- derived from the noir pulp-fiction of the 40's he once aspired to, and failed at. Pulp-fiction James Ellroy re-creates with consderably more literary skill and discipline.

When I first saw the documentary I was puzzled that it ran two hours, and more puzzled that it took six years to make. But I see the problem. A long look at either Bukowski, or his "art", simply demolishes the myths. The fan-director spends two hours trying to evade this...the world-- or some part of it-- seems to NEED to believe in Bukowski.

A Will-to-the-Fake-"Genuine"? THAT would be very French.

[wendy v]

Heh. Most interesting. I'm always happy to see an unabashed review, (which seems so risque' these days unless one is reviewing the Passion, of course), but it's too true: whether he walked the walk or not wouldn't make his poems any less dreadful. The chasm, or contradiction between artist and artist's life is nothing new, but I can't help sort've groan when biography becomes the criticism/acceptance of the art. It goes both ways.

As an aside, I often think lumps like Bukowski do serve a peripheral purpose. I was a wide-eyed teenager when I encountered his poems, and they surely did show me what the epitome of shallow, talent-free poetry looks like. If you were to tell me he had a gentle and wide soul, filled his life with acts of compassion and kindness, wrote those ditties as cautionary tales, I might be surprised, but I'd still say they were bad art. That's really the meat of it.

Sean Penn is an inarticulate dope, but has a tremendous talent. Bit of a counterexample right there in the article, Mac.

Aside from these thoughts that occur, I very much enjoyed this scathing report. I realize it isn't so much a literary review as an assessment of the documentary and of those who worship Bukowski.

Of course, it seems you're so far you're preaching to the choir here.

Hope it sees print.

wendy

[Rose Kelleher]

I confess I enjoy mean reviews when they're about the poet's work, but not when they're about his perceived worthlessness as a human being. I shudder to think how mine would sound: "She lived in a bland suburb, was overweight and boring, and didn't know Bordeaux from Beaujolais - therefore, her poetry had no merit."

While I'm not a big CB fan myself, I just don't see what his lifestyle has to do with anything. What happened to "art is a lie that tells the truth?" Also, I've read a couple of poems of his that I thought were great fun (and I'm far from a teenager), and my enjoyment of them had nothing whatever to do with where I thought he lived; I liked their irreverence, humor and energy, and by gum, their sheer arrogance.

For me, he's one of those writers I'd hate to see used as a model by hordes of aspiring writers - you wouldn't want everybody doing his shtick - but I'm glad he himself existed.

[robert mezey]

As an aging man out of step with my times, I must say that
although almost all of Bukowski's work is godawful, he began
with a genuine talent. If you go back to his very earliest poems, you can't miss it, mannered and obscure as they are.
And he occasionally wrote something very funny. I included one in POEMS OF THE AMERICAN WEST that I think is hilarious. But
however bad the bulk of his stuff is, I agree that it is pointless to talk about his unappetizing personal life. There
are a good many poets whose lives were as debauched and sad
and who were real shits, much worse human beings than Mr. Bukowski. Rimbaud? Verlaine? Marlowe? Just three of many I wouldn't want to spend much time with, but they all wrote some wonderful stuff. And Bukowski's prejudices were not nearly so venomous or did so much real harm as the Jew-hatred of Pound and Eliot, not to mention Baraka, cummings, etc etc.

[David Mason]

I'm with Mr. Mezey on this. There's a very odd aspect of a reading life that doesn't seem to get much play on the Sphere. That is, we can love individual poems and individual poets without for a minute thinking they're the greatest thing since Dante. I guess I don't want to live my whole life reading nothing but deathless literature. I'd get bored. I like to find vitality in odd corners, and even Mr. Bukowski provided wonderful moments. I commend the poem chosen for Poems of the American West, which is partly about this business of literary hierarchies. Lest I finish by sounding too shall we say Unitarian, I should add that I don't think it's a great work by any means. It's just a shard of life broken in some rather fascinating ways.

[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited June 14, 2004).]