Charles Bukowski's Views on Life in His Poetry

Acne-scarred, transient, alcoholic; These are a few words that describe Charles Bukowski. Born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Germany on August 16, 1920, his parents moved from Germany to California when Bukowski was young where they settled, and he grew up and went to school. Growing up, Bukowski was teased in school for his German accent and at home he would receive beatings about three times a week from his father with a leather strap for the slightest offense when he was between the ages of 6 and 11. As a teenager, he had no luck with women as he suffered terrible acne. This led to his characteristic face. Bukowski was noted to have said that experiencing this unjustified pain allowed for better material.

When he reached the tender age of thirteen, he was introduced to alcohol by a friend which sparked a lifelong relationship with the substance resulting in alcoholism which he was famously known for (Poetry Foundation). This would become a constant theme in his writing. While he was first published at 24 years old, Bukowski struggled to be a writer and gave it up while he drifted around the country in a drunken stupor. Ten years later, at the age of 35, he found himself in Los Angeles and close to death due to a bleeding ulcer. Bukowski began writing again. He was published in underground newspapers but became known largely through word-of-mouth though a great deal of his popularity came from writing for a weekly newspaper and other underground sources. He had a relatively successful writing career eventually and at the time of his death Bukowski was making about $1,000,000.00 dollars a year. By the time Bukowski succumbed to Leukemia in 1994, he had written 5,300 poems and stories. He died at the age of 74.

Bukowski often wrote in letters of his desire to read anything which matched the raw intensity of his life experiences and he sought to express the absurdity of his troubled life through his writing. Bukowski's poetry and prose communicated a simple, and sometimes crass and cynical literary aesthetic that replaced beauty with a hardened realism which not only provided a thematic and stylistic focus in his writing, but ultimately impacted the direction his own life took. Bukowski wrote about his own life in stories and poems so that both himself and his readers might better comprehend the nature of his alternative views about both mainstream American society and the creative profession. Such views explain his lifelong quest for freedom and awareness of absurdity in the world. Bukowski also sought to communicate that he himself had ‘felt the flame,’ having struggled for much of his life to come to terms with everyday life in post-war American society. He set about portraying his experiences with a hardened, uncompromising tone in order to rage against writing that was ‘soft and fake’.

Bukowski decided at an early age that his various experiences growing up in the depression years, working in factories, drinking in bars and sleeping in rooming houses, would be suitable subject matter for his poetry and prose. These experiences, once turned into fiction, would negate the soft fakery of the literary canon as Bukowski perceived it, and the collective submissiveness of mainstream American society in accepting cultural mediocrity. Bukowski hoped his writing would animate his readers to identify with his alternative view of the world. Bukowski’s autobiographical fiction opened literary possibilities for turning one’s ordinary life into a literary form that could be both compelling and entertaining.

A consistent theme running through much of Bukowski’s writing is the struggle of an ordinary individual to overcome his suffering in a world he finds absurd. The nature of this struggle is revealed through several recurring characteristics which provide an explanation for the unusual nature of his particular aesthetic. Bukowski’s uncommercial publishing history, his emphasis on writing autobiographical fiction, the development of a distinctive persona in the writing, the consistent expression of a view of the world as absurd, the deliberate avoidance of literary complexity in the writing, the appearance of the literary grotesque, the recurring emphasis on drinking and sex, Bukowski’s obsession with non-conformity, and the clarification of the creative act comprise Bukowski’s aesthetic as it is manifested in each of the five autobiographical novels and in quite a number of short stories. Such an aesthetic justifies Bukowski’s reputation as the author of an alternative literature that, in an often crude and confrontational manner, records a central character’s quest for freedom.

Bukowski wrote many hundreds of poems throughout his career. A considerable number of these express simple, yet forcefully stated sentiments concerning the narrator’s awareness of what it means to be free. We will discuss a couple of poems relevant to our discussion. Bukowski's poetry thematically mirrors his prose in terms of his alternative view of the world, but it is expressed even more directly than in the novels and short stories. We learn something of the nature of this view in the poem “Nirvana,” in which Bukowski writes about a small everyday pleasure. In this poem, Bukowski portrays an aimless young man travelling on a bus through North Carolina and introduces a small event that ultimately makes the journey more bearable. After stopping at a cafe Bukowski writes:

the waitress was

unlike the women

he had

known.

she was unaffected,

there was a natural

humor which came from her.

the fry cook said

crazy things.

the dishwasher,

in back,

laughed, a good

clean

pleasant

laugh.

the young man watched

the snow through the windows.

he wanted to stay

in that cafe

forever.

Here, the narrator derives some comfort from the sheer commonness of his surroundings. We are told at the beginning of the poem that the narrator was a “young man/riding a bus/through North Carolina.” After dropping out of College in 1941, Bukowski escaped the violence of his family home, and proceeded to travel around America, drinking in bars and sleeping in rooming houses - this part of his life is recounted in the novel Factotum. Although we are not told that the narrator is travelling to escape a past trauma, we do learn something of his present state of mind in such lines as 'he wanted to stay in that café forever'. The narrator wants to stay in the cafe because he feels safe there. This is a sentiment repeated further into the poem when Bukowski writes, “the young man thought/ I'll just sit here/ I'll just stay here.” The narrator nevertheless resumes his journey on the bus, yet the experience in the cafe has seemingly resonated with him and him alone, as he distinguishes himself from his fellow travelers by noting, “they had not/ noticed/ the/ magic.” This poem is not atypical of Bukowski's poetry in general which often makes very simple observations or introduces everyday motifs. Although the narrator has not necessarily undergone a transformative experience in the poem, he has felt a moment of calm in what is otherwise a restless life. Significantly, a moment of 'magic' has been generated from a set of ordinary routines. One can imagine that had the narrator’s reverie been disturbed, the typically cynical and jaded Bukowski voice would have intruded. Nevertheless, the narrator was able to derive a certain satisfaction from his solitude which tells us much about the nature of Bukowski’s art in general, particularly in terms of explaining the motivation behind such a statement in the poem, “The Genius of the Crowd” in which Bukowski warns his readers:

Beware the average man

The average woman...

Not wanting solitude

Not understanding solitude

They will attempt to destroy

Anything

That differs

From their own.

The reasons for Bukowski's social alienation are further explained in the opening stanza of the poem:

There is enough treachery, hatred,

violence,

Absurdity in the average human

being

To supply any given army on any given

day.

This poem expresses a view that the genius of the average man and woman lies in a suggested human capacity to destroy or isolate anything that expresses a staunch individualism, distinct from the conformity of the masses. While the narrator in “Nirvana” takes pleasure in observing ordinary life, in “Genius of the Crowd,” the narrator distinguishes between what could be construed as anti-social tendencies in an individual personality, and what he perceives as the absurdity of the 'average man and woman'. This perspective comes from one whose experiences have resulted in some unpleasant conclusions about society in general such as the following:

Not being able to love fully

They will believe your love

Incomplete

AND THEN THEY WILL HATE YOU.

These experiences, which are also revealed in many other poems, stories and in the novels, allow the reader to reflect upon the type of individual who would make such aggressive remarks. Bukowski does provide some clues in the opening lines of the poem “a wild, fresh wind blowing...,” in which Bukowski writes, “I should not have blamed only my father, but/ he was the first to introduce me to/ raw and stupid hatred.” The narrator then goes on to explain that he was distressed to discover that his father was just one of many people he encountered throughout his life who were, similarly, misanthropic:

for when I left that...home...I found his counterparts

everywhere: my father was only a small part of the

whole, though he was the best at hatred

I was ever to meet.

but others were very good at it too.

Bukowski, however, does not merely pour out his grievances without offering a possible course of action that will potentially alleviate his narrator’s suffering. Hence, he concludes the poem with the lines:

my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from

them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where -

some old fat waitress bringing me a cup of coffee

is in comparison

like a fresh wild wind blowing.

This is a sentiment also expressed in the poem “Nirvana.” Bukowski is acknowledging in both poems that there is something life-affirming about the ordinary behavior of both the cafe staff and the 'fat waitress bringing me a cup of coffee,' which he recognizes as a simple human act devoid of cruelty. Bukowski is also hinting that true freedom will only come to those who are willing to make the effort to look for it. In this respect, Jean-Francois Duval notes that, Buk [Bukowski] was a man forced to put up with reality and get his hands dirty. A nonconformist who throughout his life tried to choose freedom and come to terms with his contradictions and darkness. In short, a man who, to use Sartre's terminology, couldn't be classified among the ‘bastards’. 

According to this interpretation, Bukowski's poetry and prose thus constitutes an act of defiant self-assertiveness, acknowledged in the concluding lines of his poem “Cornered”:

now

lighting new cigarettes

pouring more

drinks

it has been a beautiful

fight

still is.

This defiance is also found in the poem “Trollius and Trellises” in which Bukowski pays homage to his publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. Bukowski writes:

together we 

laid down the gauntlet

and there are takers

even at this late date

still to be

found

as the fire sings

through the

trees.

Bukowski's defiance in the face of adversity arguably constitutes the greatest value of his work, and is a key aspect of his personality, revealed in the poetry as well as the prose. As one of the working poor in America for much of his life, Bukowski often struggled to survive daily life with his sanity and physical health intact. However, he always faced the challenges presented to him with a fiery determination. Writing almost daily for four decades, Bukowski amassed a body of work that is amusing, confronting, and often bleak, but always fascinating.