(The article I wrote in another thread was "published"-- sorta-- in Portland and provoked a response from a friend of mine, which I thought was well-written and amusing. It seemed only fair to re-publish it here.
I think of literary criticism as something like our advesarial system of justice: the "jury" should hear the case FOR and AGAINST presented by two arch advocates.
I would guess the case against Bukowski would just about have to sound something like what I said...how can you be generous with someone who would HAVE to be a fraud if he wasn't worthy in the way he presumed to be?
And I suspect a defence of Bukowski would be along the lines of the one Matthews presents below.)
Bukowski: A Modest Defense
Charles Bukowski, notorious boozer, womanizer, blowhard, icon of disaffected youth, object of a rather astonishing cult of personality, is a barbarian in the temple of poetry, as were Rimbaud, the Surrealists, the Beats, to name but a few, before him. The impact of barbarians may be malign and destructive, but it may also be a source of invigoration, restoring life to stale forms and desiccated practices empty of existential content, dismal in their failure to address the lives and concerns of women and men. A case critical of Bukowski can certainly be made, but Andrew MacArthur did not make it in the essay that appeared on the Meander web site June 12, 2004. Instead he chose to deliver a vitriolic, largely ad hominem rant. It is unfortunate that he elected to forgo the effort, care, and thoughtfulness so evident in his own poetry when writing about Bukowski.
The documentary film Bukowski: Born into This provides the occasion for MacArthur's essay. He is correct that this rambling pastiche of extant film footage, interviews for European television, commentary of friends and lovers, and the remarks of celebrity fans Tom Waits, Sean Penn, and Bono is not a well-done documentary. The movie fails to investigate the accuracy of Bukowski's claims of childhood abuse or offer a more insightful critical appraisal of the writing than is to be had from the likes of Waits and Penn, whose talents lie elsewhere. In the movie's defense, it does contain segments that humanize Bukowski, as in the oddly touching scene where he is waiting expectantly for his girlfriend, Cupcakes, to return, repeatedly going to the window like a lovesick schoolboy, and in the testimony of his daughter, Miranda. It is impossible to conceive of Bukowski as a good father. Yet Miranda is kindly disposed to him and offers up several anecdotes relating warm memories from her childhood.
MacArthur's depiction of Bukowski's women as dumbbells and bimbos is not entirely accurate. While Cupcakes has bimbo written all over her, Linda Lee comes across as reasonably intelligent and well-spoken. The movie offers nothing to rebut MacArthur's assertion that Bukwoski did not read much, but evidence to the contrary can be readily found elsewhere. Neeli Cherkovski states that Bukowski rhapsodized endlessly on Saroyan, Hemingway, and Faulkner and notes Bukowski's excitement when Pablo Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, quoting Bukowski, "Outside of myself, I don't know anyone with such a clean line. When he says 'blue' he means blue. The problem is when he becomes political. That is his weakness." [Whitman's Wild Children, (South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press, 1999) p. 13]. The point here is not whether Bukowski is justified in putting himself up there with Neruda but that he knew and admired the work of the Chilean poet A cursory perusal of Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame and Septuagenarian Stew, the two volumes of Bukowski I happen to have on my book shelf, reveals references to Dreiser, Wolfe, and Capote (whom he refers to as the only three bad writers in acceptable American literature), Montaigne, Proust, Herrick, Spenser, Marvell, Hopkins, and Emily Brontė, the composers Shostakovich, Beethoven, Mozart, and Dvorak, and a Van Gogh exhibition he saw. Even if he is just dropping names for the most part, their inclusion attests to the significance art holds for him. Bukowski was no intellectual, nor a deep or subtle thinker, but there was considerably more to him than his detractors are able to see, perhaps because they fall prey to the fallacy of conflating the author and his fictional alter ego, Hank Chinaski.
Bukowski speaks to themes serious poetry has always addressed, with rawness, yes, but with vigor and clarity and a determined integrity. It was in the art that this shallow, boozy, poseur, as MacArthur deems him, sought redemption, going to the typewriter day after day after day, for decades, with no reasonable hope of success, much less expectation that he would become the cult of personality Bukowski. That he cashed in on it was part accident and luck and part because the writing faces up to the despair of everyday life, the tyranny of mind-deadening, meaningless, dead-end jobs we are nonetheless terrified of losing, the pursuit of authenticity in a world populated by the spiritually empty who are consumed by crass materialism and secure in their unthinking complacency and vapid self- satisfaction. Bukowski refuses to accept that the meaning of our lives is to be found in the idiotic Protestant, capitalist work ethic or in the things it permits us to own. Work may be a necessity, but it is not an end. This is where he takes his stand, and the stand taken is for art. In the poem "dreamlessly" he sees the ones who care for nothing and have nothing that cares for them, who feel for nothing and get no feeling back, "those who / crave nothing but / food, shelter, and / clothing; they concentrate on that, / dreamlessly." He does not comprehend how they can "feel no terror / at not loving / or at not / being loved," a terror that, by implication, the poet knows all too well. It is through the art, the poems hammered out on the typewriter, the Shostakovich, the Van Gogh exhibit, that he finds strength and reason to go on.
Bukowski was not an accomplished stylist. A defender, and Bukowski himself, might argue that his strength lies in the clarity and straightforwardness of the prose and poetry alike, a commitment to mince no words, to call a spade a spade. This lends the writing an easy accessibility that at once helps account for Bukowski's wide audience and renders him suspect in certain circles among the intelligentsia, open to MacArthur's charge, for example, that his poetry "is uncrafted and pedestrian prose," a charge routinely leveled against practitioners of free verse. So where does the poetry lie? Form and style are aspects of it without question, but so too is the content of the poet's vision, which in Bukowski is not a product of "the grandiose delusions and pathetic denial and despair of a chronic low-end alcoholic" but an uncompromising facing up to the despair of everyday life and faith in the redemptive and restorative qualities of art. There is a considerable difference.
That Charles Bukowski presently occupies a place on the cultural and literary landscape is indisputable. His themes touch an audience, and it not just an audience of the unwashed, the untalented, the unread. Whether for good or ill and with what degree of merit or want of it remains open for debate, a debate it may be hoped will stimulate our thinking as to what poetry is to us as individuals, as writers, as readers, and its role, if any, within the larger society. We might also consider where the greater threat to the temple of poetry lies: with the barbarians or from the pissant drivel that regularly oozes out from the MFA programs and the writing workshop racket, an issue I raise as fodder for another day's contemplation. For now I conclude with the conviction that, the wishes of those who detest him to the contrary, Bukowski will be with us for a while.
David Matthews
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