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Authors: Charles Bukowski,Edited with an introduction by David Calonne

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Thus Bukowski's writings derive their power not only from his boisterous, energetic, autobiographical voice, but from the fact that they are vivid chronicles of the Sixties counterculture. For example, Gregory Corso is affectionately portrayed in “I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls.” Jack Micheline becomes a lively “Duke” in a “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column from 1973, while d.a. levy, who committed suicide in 1967, was the subject of two essays: “The Deliberate Mashing of the Sun” and an article in
The Serif
, the literary magazine of Kent State University. Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) is the subject of one of his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columns, while Robert Creeley is pilloried in the
Literary Times
essay “Examining My Peers.” It is clear then—his own many disavowals to the contrary—that Bukowski's career was in many ways inextricably bound to the Beats.

One area of common ground with the Beats was Bukowski's development of his own style of “spontaneous prose composition,” which sought to depict everything about the human body and imagination normally ignored, shunned, and rejected as “vulgar.” In “The Absence of the Hero,” Bukowski struggled to record violent, scatological, fascinating, grotesque images as they emerged unbidden in convulsive patterns from the depths of the unconscious. Here the words seem to be energetically thrown upon the page randomly but nevertheless they fall into a vital pattern. He records discrete perceptions, even notating the passage of time—“3:24
A.M.
”—in diary-like fashion as if to catch the very movement of fragmented consciousness through time. The story also illustrates Bukowski's alternating use of lines of capital and lowercase letters, the use of jagged line spacing, lists of capitalized sentences—all as if he is attempting to paint or draw with words. He experimented frequently in his prose with punctuation, type size, ellipses, idiosyncratic spellings, and repetitions—some of his narratives were entirely composed in lower case, thus transporting into prose some of e.e. cummings' poetic typographical playfulness.

This emphasis on the appearance of the text—he often illustrated his stories, poems, and letters with cartoons and drawings, while his early stories were actually combinations of words and illustrations—shows that Bukowski frequently strove to make the text itself into an image. He was actually ahead of his time, anticipating the current craze for “graphic fiction” since he obsessively joined text to image in his hand-printed stories from the mid- to late '40s.
18
As we see in “East Hollywood: The New Paris,” Bukowski devoted a serious amount of time to his drawing and painting, and many of the deluxe editions of his work are accompanied by original art. So too the text of “The Absence of the Hero” reveals that Bukowski was a kind of Action Writer: he tried to make words perform, act out their meaning in a quasi-visual way in the same fashion that Jackson
Pollock
performed the spontaneous act of creation by “randomly” yet accurately flinging paint on canvas.

Bukowski would develop a hard, comic, lyric realism, a toughness, but underneath an abiding sensitivity and a photographic, documentary fidelity to everyday horrors. In his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” columns, he records the humdrum facts of city life: drivers in Los Angeles, a confrontation between Nazis and Marxists, joyous nighttime sessions with his drunken landlady and landlord. He often writes the prose equivalent of William Carlos Williams' “This is just to say,” telling you precisely what is in front him without commentary. He addresses the reader directly, removing any barrier between writer and audience. And he strengthened his vulnerable, hurt self by muscling it with irony, by a subversive, mocking, irreverent sharpness of observation. Bukowski's prose became more accomplished with time and his narratives more skillful: he would begin
in medias res
with an outrageous opening scene to hook readers and draw them into the story, as in “The Cat in the Closet.” This story is also a marvelous example of the ways he casts his alter ego as a comical, self-deprecating, helpless character lost in a universe where things just happen.

The unexpected references to Stravinsky, Mahler, Hemingway, Camus'
The Stranger
, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Berlioz against the backdrop of graphic sexuality and comic drunken self-abasement are typical examples of a literary device Bukowski frequently employs. These surprising, sudden allusions to cultural figures serve to “equalize” “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture to comic effect and are a kind of “winking” by the narrator to the reader, signaling that our hapless anti-hero may be a clown, but he is smarter than he lets on. So too Bukowski seeks to entertain us by playing the fool; he gives us our existential lesson, but with a knowing smile. His characters do not grow, achieve epiphanies, or reach enlightenment. Rather, as the Buddha said in the Diamond Sutra: “I obtained not the least thing from complete, unexcelled awakening, and it is for that very reason it is called complete, unexcelled awakening.”

With increasing fame, Bukowski began to give poetry readings throughout the U.S.: in California (Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, San Francisco), New Mexico, Washington, Utah, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin as well as in Vancouver, Canada, and Hamburg, Germany. He also made a rambunctious appearance on the famous television talk show hosted by Bernard Pivot in Paris,
Apostrophes
. And as always, life fed his art as he began to chronicle his life on the road in his poems, stories, essays, and novels. He became a “literary hustler,” and he satirizes himself, and depoeticizes and deromanticizes poetry; he turns the lofty poetry reading into a ritual in honor of the god Dionysus, complete with rivers of wine and ecstatic maenads.
19

The sexual revolution of the Sixties coincided with Bukowski's own raw and direct confrontation with his own sexuality. Due to his
acne vulgaris
and tortured childhood, Bukowski had never
experienced
a “normal” adolescence and he spent 1970–1977 playing catch-up for all the delights he had missed as a Southern Californian teenager. In “The Big Dope Reading,” for example, we see Bukowski at the height of his powers, engaging in multiple levels of irony and self-parody. The title itself may carry a double entendre: “dope” as in marijuana, but also the Big Dope equals the Poet as Clown. Bukowski gives his readers a hilarious moment of deadpan self-parody when Chinaski quotes two of the most famous Bukowski apothegms—“Genius . . . could mean the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way” and “Endurance is more important than truth”—which are in-jokes for devoted Bukowskians. Here too there are complex moments when he is at once parodying erotic writing, himself, and the convolutions of sexual/romantic “relationships” (he would have been allergic to such a psychobabble word). Bukowski often plays at the “meaning” of “relationships” in a teasing, Zen way which recalls Jacques Lacan's gnomic apothegm: “There is no sexual relationship.” He stripped himself down to show his vulnerability, his wounds, trying to recover through love what was lost in his childhood yet, at the same time, poking fun at the effort to find salvation through love and sex.
20
Yet Bukowski is also of course really a romantic who could write of falling in love in his June 24, 1974 “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column: “I walked about and it felt as if the sun were inside of me.” And as one of his favorite poets, e.e. cummings, wrote: “unlove is the heavenless hell and homeless home . . . lovers alone wear sunlight.”
21

Bukowski's “defense mechanism” to ward off psychic anguish is of course laughter. Wit, an unerring sense of comic timing, and a driving inexorable energy power his writings; his beloved Renaissance brothers in manic extravagance were Fran
ç
ois Rabelais and Giovanni Boccaccio.
22
He could also be sardonic, which was in perfect accord with the
Zeitgeist
: black humor would mark the counterculture of the '60s and '70s.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(1966),
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(1975), and
Eraserhead
(1978) were among his favorite films—humor and madness in close and delicate counterpoint.
23
So too, Bukowski's writing is poised between despair and lyricism, moving forward with a vigorous power that virtually always redeems his writings from nihilism. His admiration for the genius of Robert Crumb (who illustrated several Bukowski works) shows that for Bukowski there is a nexus between pain, laughter, and quasi-German-Expressionist extreme states of emotion.

After he tendered his resignation at the post office at age 50,
Bukowski
demonstrated that he could be a practical working writer and he maximized his productivity by reassembling his plots in differing contexts. He not only recycled favorite narratives in stories and novels, but he even recast them in both story and poem: “Fooling Marie” exists in both forms. Furthermore, sections from
Post Office
,
Factotum
, and
Women
all appeared initially in his “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column in the
LA Free Press
as separate stories. Chapter 30 from
Women
appeared in two installments and in comparing the story and novel versions, one can see how much he altered and revised; in this case, many splendid passages were left on the cutting-room floor as he shaped his prose into novel form. This method of composition made perfect sense, since Bukowski's fiction had always been episodic, constructed out of brief sections strung together. His novels are in a way a series of connected brief tales, which enabled him to detach sections for submission to magazines as separate short stories as he composed them. And there was yet another mode of literary proliferation: Bukowski's work was circulated among many underground publications under an agreement with the United Press Syndicate (UPS) which allowed articles to be reprinted by all members of the organization.
24

As suggested above, perhaps due to both the loosening of censorship restrictions during the '60s and '70s as well as his own desire to explore more fully the darker reaches of his imagination, Bukowski would begin to experiment more dramatically with direct portrayals of violence.
25
Films such as
The Wild Bunch
(1969),
Easy Rider
(1969), and
A Clockwork Orange
(1971) laid the groundwork for a story such as “Christ with Barbeque Sauce,” in which Bukowski used an actual newspaper account as the source for his narrative.
26
In later stories such as “The Invader” (1986), Bukowski traces the sudden incursion of terror into the banalities of everyday life: tales of ordinary madness. This story also recalls his earlier apocalyptic portrayals of the human inability to fathom primal wildness in stories such as “Animal Crackers in My Soup.”

Bukowski's late, lovely cycle of poems about his cats reveals them to be creatures who preserve the style, poise, and lack of pretense that are so sorely lacking in human beings. And in one of his very last essays, Bukowski asserts that most people lose their magic at a very young age. In “Playing and Being the Poet,” he returns to his musings about the life of the poet: “Poetry comes from where you've lived and from what makes you create it. Most people have already entered the death process by the age of 5, and with each passing year there is less of them in the sense of being original beings with a chance to break through and out and away from the obvious and the mutilating.” For Bukowski, living life poetically is in fact the only way to really live.

ABSENCE
OF THE
HERO
The Reason Behind Reason

CHELASKI
,
CF
, .285 (AB-246 H-70)
felt a little . . . felt a little . . . different out there. There
are days when you feel a little different. Things don't
set right. Like now, even the sun looked a little
sick, the green of the fences too green, the sky
much too high, and the leather of his glove too much like . . . leather.

He took a few steps forward and beat his fist into his glove, trying to shake everything. Did he have a headache or what? He felt
potential
, as if he were about to scream or to leap up or to do something that shouldn't be done.

Chelaski was
a bit frightened and looked over at Donovan, LF, .296
(AB-230 H-68) but Donovan looked very comfortable. He studied Donovan
carefully, trying to draw strength from him. His face was
very brown, and Chelaski had never noticed the pot belly
before. Such an ugly bulge, so unselfconscious. Even Donovan's legs
seemed thick, tree-like, and Chelaski stared straight ahead again, feeling worse.

What was wrong?

The batter connected and it was an outfield fly . . . to Donovan. Donovan moved forward a few steps, moved his arms leisurely, and caught the ball. Chelaski had watched the ball in its long, slow arc through sun and sky. It had seemed pleasant enough, but somehow unrelated, unattached to anything. The next man hit an infield single that he didn't have to handle. One out. One on. What was the inning? He turned to look at the scoreboard and saw the crowd. His eyes didn't focus on them. They were just bits of movement, cloth, and sound.

What did they want done?

It ran through his mind again: what did they want done?

Suddenly he
was terrified and didn't know the reason. His breath came
hard and the saliva ran in his mouth; he felt dizzy, airy.

There was Donovan . . . standing. He looked again
at the crowd and saw everyone, everything, all together and
separately. Glasses, neckties; women wearing skirts, men wearing pants; there
was lipstick . . . and fire on things sticking in mouths . . . cigarettes.
And they all hung together in a strange understanding.

And then it came . . . an outfield fly . . . to him. An easy one. He was worried. He studied the ball fiercely and it almost seemed to stop its movement in air. It just hung there and the crowd shouted and the sun shone and the sky was blue. And Donovan's eyes were watching him, and Donovan's eyes were watching. Was Donovan against him? What did Donovan
really
want?

The ball came into his glove. It entered his glove and he felt the strong pressure and pleasant push of the catch. He threw the ball to second, holding the runner on first. It was a good throw and Chelaski was amazed; it had seemed is if the ball had gone there because it was supposed to. His terror left a little;
he was getting away with it
.

The next man was out, short to first, and
Chelaski began the long trot to the dugout. It was
good to be running. He passed several opposing players but
they didn't look at him. It bothered him a little,
and the bother hung there in a little knob as
he followed Donovan's set neck into the dugout. When Chelaski
got down there, he felt somehow naked, or spotted, or
something, and in an effort to act as if he
were all right, he walked up to Hull and grinned
down on him.

“Do you want me to kiss you? I could make you forget,” he said to Hull.

Hull was hitting .189 and had been benched for Jamison, the college kid. Hull looked up at Chelaski. It was a look of absolute unrecognition. Hull didn't even answer; he got up and walked to the water cooler. Chelaski quickly moved up to the railing, with his back to the bench.

Corpenson singled. Donovan hit into a double play and trotted back down the first base line, lifting his legs high, his stockings showing, somehow all full of color.

Chelaski walked to the plate. There was
the umpire, the catcher, the pitcher, the fielders, the audience.
Everything waiting, everything waiting. Outside, perhaps, a man was holding
up a bank; or, a streetcar full of people sitting,
was turning a corner; but here it was different: it
was settled, expected . . . not like
that
, outside: the streetcar, the
holdup. Here it was . . . different, caught up, demanded.

He swung and missed the first pitch and people shouted. The catcher yelled something and tossed the ball back. A bird skipped through the air, up and down, going somewhere, very fast. Chelaski spit and stared at the birthmark on the ground. The ground was very dry. Ball one.

The next one came on the outside, where he liked them. He swung the bat swiftly, automatically, and the crowed screamed. It was a long drive, deep over the centerfielder's head. Chelaski watched it bounce against the wall by the flagpole. The crowd screamed louder than ever; it screamed louder than Chelaski had heard it all season. Then Jamison, who was on deck, began yelling at him.

“Run! Run!
Run
!” he shouted.

Chelaski turned and looked at Jamison. His eyes were extremely wide and burned like two flashes, cups of hot, driven things. His face was contorted, the lips turned out, and Chelaski noticed especially the thick veins in the red neck.

“Run! Run!
Run
!” Jamison shouted.

A cushion came out of the stands. Then another one. The crowd was so loud he could no longer hear Jamison. What was probably the same bird came flying back, hopping up and down, only a little faster. The centerfielder had fielded the ball. The noise was almost unbearable. Chelaski was hit by a cushion and he turned to look at the crowd. When he did, many of them leaped up and down, waving their arms. Cushions, hats, bottles, everything came down. For a moment Chelaski's eye caught sight of a girl in a green skirt. He couldn't make out her face, or her blouse or her coat. He saw a green skirt, and a pleat in a green skirt, shadow-like and leaping. Then he was hit by another cushion. It stung, cut, felt warm. For a moment he was angry.

The throw came into the second baseman, who relayed it to first for the out. The noise was volcanic, stifling, maddening. Jamison had Chelaski by the arm, pulling him from the batter's box. He noticed Jamison's face, streaked with shots of red and white, looking thick, as if several layers of skin had been added.

Chelaski walked to the dugout as the noise continued. The team was taking to the field, Hull replacing him in the outfield.

It was cold in the dugout, dark in the dugout. He saw the water bucket with the towel over its side. He walked down in there, saw somebody's hands slide nervously on the bench, somebody's legs cross.

Then Chelaski was standing in front of the manager, Hastings. He didn't look at Hastings; just looked at his shirt below the V of the neck.

Then he looked up. He saw that Hastings was trying to speak but couldn't get it out.

Chelaski turned quickly and ran down the runway that led to the locker room. When he got there, he stood a moment looking at all the green lockers.

Outside, the crowd was still shouting and some of the reporters were making their way down to Chelaski to ask him what was wrong.

BOOK: Absence of the Hero
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