between Diogenes, that odd manticore, the lofty language of Santayana, and the making of jewels from fish scales? One recalls Vladimir Nabokov: “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” The range of these rather recherché allusions indicates the depth of Bukowski’s reading, and placing them one after another may suggest the absurdity of the quest for meaning as well as the indecipherability of an obscure unfinished life.
From the beginning of his career, Bukowski depicted the terrible human encounter with the Other: insects (here spiders and ants) in particular pullulate through many of his early poems and stories. His work also shows the influence of Robinson Jeffers’s hawks and herons as well as D.H. Lawrence, whose Birds, Beasts and Flowers can be heard echoing in the title of Bukowski’s first book of poems, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. Mockingbirds, wild horses, and dogs appear in three other poetry titles. In the stories in this volume, there is a frightening encounter with a hog, while another tale set in Bolivia depicts a man, a woman, and a monkey engaging in a bizarre psychological battle, a theme Bukowski would return in his late story “The Invader” (1986).4 And in “The Bell Tolls for No One,” the narrative draws to a close on an awesome note: “Then in front of me there was an animal. It looked like a large dog, a wild dog. The moon was to my back and it shone into the beast’s eyes. The eyes were red like burning coal.”
In the same issue of Matrix as “The Reason Behind Reason,” Bukowski’s poem “Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses” appeared, recounting a love triangle involving a waitress, her husband, and her Greek lover; this suggests Bukowski most likely had read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), in which the plot is very similar, though the restaurant owner is Greek and the other man steals his wife. Cain famously shaped the style of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger—the French existentialists owed a debt to the cool, tough American private eyes—and Bukowski also acknowledged Cain’s style as a significant influence on his own work.5 Like Cain, Bukowski often takes a detached, clinical view of crime, and Los Angeles noir would be the style of his many “hardboiled” crime stories, culminating in his homage to the genre, his final novel, Pulp (1994).6 When Irene in one of our tales tells the Bukowski-character that he is the “greatest thing since Hemingway,” he responds: “I’m closer to Thurber mixed with Mickey Spillane”: the hero of Pulp is tellingly named “Nick Belane,” obviously echoing “Mickey Spillane.” Of course, Bukowski’s gift for dialogue, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and skeletal, pared-down prose derives from Hemingway, supplemented with elements he often said he found lacking in Hemingway: humor, as well as liberal doses of slang, swearing, scatology, and obscenity. The title “The Bell Tolls for No One” is an obvious reference to Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, while in another story a pornographer husband and his wife carry on a humorous dialogue about Hemingway.
Bukowski often returned nostalgically to the legendary outlaws of the 1930s, and in the poem “the lady in red” recalled: “the best time of all / was when John Dillinger escaped from jail, and one of the / saddest times of all was when the Lady in Red fingered him and / he was gunned down coming out of that movie. / Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma / Barker, Alvin Karpis, we loved them all.”7 For Bukowski, as for a writer in every way his opposite, William S. Burroughs (one of whose favorite books was Jack Black’s 1926 autobiography chronicling his adventures in the underworld, You Can’t Win), the American power structure was criminal at its very core and found its mirror image in the violent figures who struggled against it.8 Cain, Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler depicted a hard, amoral universe that shows no mercy and provided Bukowski a tradition within which to dramatize his mythicized autobiography. His 1947 meeting with Jane Cooney Baker at the Glenwood Bar on Alvarado Street becomes a tale endlessly told and retold, shaped and refined. In a 1967 story for Open City he declares that Jane “had delicious legs and a tight little gash and a face of powdered pain. And she knew me. She taught me more than the philosophy books of the ages”—casting Jane in the film noir role of femme fatale. And the violence of this broken world is continual. Wallace Fowlie once wrote about Henry Miller: “I believe the quality which first attracted me in Mr. Miller’s writings was his violence. Not the violence of the things said, but the violence of the way in which they were said. The violence of feeling has become in his work the violence of style which has welded together all of his disparate passions and dispersed experiences into the one experience of language.”9 Similarly, Bukowski evolved his own original finely modulated “language” to portray a modern world in which the redemptive power of love was under continual threat.
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted” was a phrase of Hassan-i Sabbah (ca. 1050 CE–1124 CE), the Ismaili founder of the Hashshashin, repeated like a mantra by William Burroughs. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky proclaims: “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” and Karamazov is cited in “A Dirty Trick on God.” Another Bukowski favorite, Friedrich Nietzsche, declared in The Genealogy of Morals:
When the Christian crusaders in the Orient encountered the invincible order of the Assassins, that order of free spirits par excellence, whose lowest ranks followed a rule of obedience the like of which no order of monks ever attained, they obtained in some way or other a hint concerning that symbol and watchword reserved for the highest ranks alone as their secretum; “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Very well, that was freedom of spirit; in that way the faith in truth itself was abrogated. Has any European, any Christian free spirit ever strayed into this proposition and into its labyrinthine consequences? Has any of them ever known the Minotaur of this cave from experience?—I doubt it.10
“The labyrinthine consequences” of such a philosophy become the subject matter of Bukowski’s repeated portrayals of his characters’ encounters with the Minotaur of the cave of unrelenting chaos. Crime becomes a metaphor for an unjust universe in which reward and punishment often seem unrelated to virtue: The unyielding, brutal, and powerful “Break In” contains an explicit speech on the unfairness of society, and in Bukowski the narrator often observes the occurrences helplessly, without commentary. He is at once quasi-participant and observer.
Yet these stories also demonstrate Bukowski’s wide range; he can be witty, casual, intimate, and ingratiating, and he tries his hand at a variety of genres: science fiction, a send-up of Westerns, stories of jockeys and football players. While he is devoted to chronicling the Sturm und Drang of his private, emotional life, the political and social upheavals of the mid to late sixties are frequently portrayed, as in “Save the World,” which depicts his relationship with his partner Frances Smith. Although he pokes fun at Frances’s devotion to liberal causes, Bukowski had met—and liked—Dorothy Healey, giving her inscribed copies of Cold Dogs in the Courtyard and Crucifix in a Deathhand. He wrote Will Inman, editor of Kauri:
The political ferment of the period—from approximately 1967 to 1973—corresponds exactly with one of Bukowski’s most brilliant and prolific phases. One might argue that the eruption of Dionysian sexual energy was directly related to the anti-war stance of the time: Make love not war. The gradual loosening of censorship restrictions allowed writers and artists new freedom for self-expression. Centered in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the “comix underground” had taken off with the appearance of the famous Zap #1 in 1968.12 Bukowski himself continued to draw and paint prolifically and would ultimately get to know personally or have professional association with the three major figures of underground comics: Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay
