reading becomes the scene of raucous insults and the post-reading party provides opportunities for the lofty poetic impulse to be brought back down to one of its purposes: the song, like a bird’s, to attract a female.
Bukowski the journalist and book reviewer is also represented in these selections. In one of his earliest columns for the Los Angeles Free Press, on March 17, 1967—“Bukowski Meets a Merry Drunk”—the narrator reveals at the close that his “little talk” with the “merry drunk” might appear in the LAFP.8 In his essay concerning the Rolling Stones, we can see Bukowski the journalist at work. He also reviewed a Rolling Stones concert in “Jaggernaut,” an essay published in Creem: here he narrates the same event but takes a different approach, dramatizing the experience from a fresh angle.9 This is of course his method as an autobiographical writer: he constantly tells and retells his life history from a variety of viewpoints throughout his prose and poetry. Bukowski describes his adventures writing for erotic magazines, describing a trip to an adult bookstore where he is nonplussed by the sophomoric level of the content of these productions, while in “Politics and Love,” he depicts a hapless journalist sent to interview a violent South American dictator.
Ernest Hemingway returns like a leitmotif throughout Bukowski’s work. In his “Introduction” to Horsemeat, Bukowski points out that “Hemingway liked the bullfights, right? He saw the life-death factors out there. He saw men reacting to these factors with style—or the other way. Dostoevsky needed the roulette wheel even though it always took his meager royalties and he ended up subsisting on milk.” This theme returns in a seminal essay “Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way,” a central document of Bukowski’s poetics in which he speaks of the centrality of the struggle of the horserace as metaphor for the act of creation. In the preface to one of his early plays, William Saroyan—an influence on Bukowski and an author to whom he frequently alludes—noted that the writer “must put his inner force, and the inner force of all living and all energy into the contest with non-existence. He simply must do so.”10 For Bukowski, Saroyan’s “contest with non-existence” is the horserace, which confronts him with the contingency of chance and luck in their confrontation with free will, determinism, and the mystery of time. In his review of Hemingway’s posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970), Bukowski asserts: “This book does not make it. I wanted this book to make it. I have been pulling for Hemingway to hit one out of the lot for a long time now. I wanted another novel like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, or To Have and Have Not. I’ve been waiting a long time. . . .”11 Bukowski admired the later section Islands in the Stream, which he calls “the best part of the book”—the section chasing the German submarine—and presciently remarks that “there’s a movie in this part, and a good one”: the novel was indeed made into a film starring George C. Scott in 1977, seven years after his review appeared. Hemingway was a wounded man whose work charts a continual drama of revealing and concealing his own vulnerability, a clear pattern in Bukowski as well.12
Bukowski also produced a number of essays, reviews, and introductions to the work of other writers. As we have seen above, he often used his introductions as places to espouse his own poetics. For example, in his “Introduction” to Jory Sherman’s My Face in Wax, Bukowski writes: “When I run my hand across a page of poetry, I do not want oil or onionskin. I do not want slick bullshit; I want my hand to come away with blood on it. And goddamn you if you are otherwise.” One of Bukowski’s finest essays on poetry is his introduction to Steve Richmond’s Hitler Painted Roses. Richmond earned a law degree from UCLA , worked in his father’s lucrative real estate business in Santa Monica, became friends with Jim Morrison, and published Bukowski in his magazine Earth Rose. Here again, Bukowski declares: “There is just one man thrown upon the earth, belly-naked, and seeing with his eye. Yes, I said ‘eye.’ Most of us are born poets. It is only when our elders get to us and begin to teach us what they teach us that the poet dies.”13 Bukowski also composed two essays celebrating d.a. levy, a central poet of the mimeograph revolution who committed suicide. levy’s 7 Flowers Press in Cleveland had published Bukowski’s The Genius of the Crowd (1966), and when levy was indicted for “obscenity,” Bukowski responded with two essays registering strong support of his bravery.14 Bukowski also admired Canadian poets Irving Layton and Al Purdy as well as the work of actor Macdonald Carey, for whose book Beyond That Further Hill he contributed a “Foreword.” Bukowski’s preface to The Cockroach Hotel by “Willie” requires a brief explanation: “Willie” is William Hageman, with whom Bukowski corresponded and who appears in Bukowski’s short story “Beer and Poets and Talk.”
Bukowski was consistent through the years in his list of favorite writers: Hemingway, Hamsun, Céline, and the early work of William Saroyan. Saroyan appears in “Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb”—first published in Quixote in 1958—along with a fugitive allusion to the Czech writer Karel Čapek (1890–1938). As we see in his review of Islands in the Stream, and in scattered comments throughout the essays and stories presented here, he objected to Hemingway’s lack of humor. Bukowski was also heavily influenced by the Russians Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Gorky, as well as by Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, in which the protagonist wanders the streets of Kristiania on the verge of starvation. The novel opens: “It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him.” Bukowski’s many poems about his hellish encounters with landladies also find an analogue in Hamsun as we learn in Hunger that our starving writer “stole quietly down the stairs to avoid attracting the attention of my landlady; my rent had been due a few days ago and I had nothing to pay her with anymore.”15 Hunger became a central text for Bukowski, who himself recounts eating candy bars in a floorless tar-paper shack in Atlanta and writing his stories on the edges of newspapers. In his essay “About Aftermath,” we see how Bukowski recounted his early years of starving and writing. William Saroyan’s famous short story “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” and Arturo Bandini in John Fante’s Ask the Dust continue this line of sensitive, impoverished writers who provided models for the ways Bukowski would portray himself. Starving leaves no room for self-delusion: one encounters the bedrock self which engenders a bedrock literary style.
In the interviews we also learn about Bukowski’s writing rituals: symphony music on the radio, a bottle of wine and cigarettes nearby. In his interview with Chris Hodenfield, he reveals how much of the screenplay of Barfly was indebted to his times in that famous bar in Philadelphia where “We had a roaring time. And we’d be sitting there, eight guys. And suddenly somebody would make a statement, a sentence. And it would glue everything we were doing together. It would fit the outside world in—just a flick of a thing, then we’d smile and go back to our drinking. Say nothing. It was an honorable place, with a high sense of honor, and it was intelligent. Strangely intelligent. Those minds were quick. But given up on life. They weren’t in it, but they knew something. I got a screenplay out of it and never thought I would, sitting there.” Bukowski often affirmed that he did not want to be taken as a guru, and in his Lizard’s Eyelid interview, he declares: “I have no message to the world. I am not wise enough to lead, yet I am wise enough not to follow.” Bukowski also describes his life during the early seventies when he began work on his second novel:
It’s called Factotum, and it’s about my ten years on the bum. I read Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, and it’s a pretty good book, but I said “This guy hasn’t been through anything—I can play the piano better than that, as far as experience goes.” He had some rough trips but he didn’t have as many as I did. So, it’ll be an interesting book, I think. We’ll see. So I’ve been making it on my writing the last three years, since I quit the Post Office. It’s all right, I can’t complain. Little checks come in, royalties . . . I’m a professional writer, man, get up at noon, get up at six, get up at three, hell, my life’s my own. But that can get rough too, you know, you have to face yourself, it’s all sitting on you. But it’s lively.
Thus we can see how throughout his work,
