By Peter Richardson
FROM: LARB

Half a century after the publication of Post Office (1971), how should we understand Charles Bukowski’s literary achievement? His publisher predicted that Bukowski would never reach a mainstream audience. And yet his books, including his poetry, have sold millions of copies in more than a dozen languages. Writing for The New Yorker in 2005, Adam Kirsch claims that Bukowski’s liminal status and seedy persona were part of his appeal: “He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.” Describing his verse as “pulp poetry,” Kirsch also notes the author’s penchant for autobiography. “Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial,” he observes. “They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof.” That combination made a strong impression on readers. “The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story.”

The pulp comparison is on point — in fact, Bukowski’s final novel, Pulp (1994), draws on the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction — but Kirsch also mentions Bukowski’s efforts to place himself in more reputable literary company. “He occasionally took pains to align himself with a coherent literary tradition, writing about his admiration for Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Céline, and Camus — the classics of modern alienation, the biographers of the underground man,” Kirsch writes. “He was especially fond of Hamsun’s ‘Hunger,’ the story of a young writer demented by poverty and ambition.” While Bukowski’s literary ambitions were grandiose, he is, for Kirsch, essentially a genre writer: prolific, predictable, and popular.

Kirsch does not mention an equally coherent tradition to which Bukowski belongs, one that includes some of the most notable fiction and film produced in Los Angeles during his lifetime. This tradition is by no means at odds with the classics of modern alienation. In fact, Bukowski’s favorite author was L.A. novelist and screenwriter John Fante, who also admired Hamsun. After achieving his own success, Bukowski persuaded his publisher to reissue Fante’s novels, including Ask the Dust (1939). Demented by poverty and literary ambition during the Great Depression, Fante’s protagonist passes his days at a saloon in Downtown Los Angeles, where he drinks bad coffee and obsesses over a Latina waitress. Bukowski’s preface to the reprint recalls his own days as an impoverished writer in the city: “I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer.” Scouring the L.A. Public Library for suitable reading, he was unmoved by modern fiction until he discovered Fante’s novel. “The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me,” he writes: “Fante was my god and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didn’t bang at their door.”

That homage suggests that Kirsch overlooked the most proximate influence on Bukowski, or at least on his fiction. In fact, Bukowski cannot be understood apart from his midcentury Los Angeles milieu. His vision of the city was an integral part of his output, and few writers have documented its squalor more meticulously. Nowhere is the city’s significance clearer than in Post Office, Bukowski’s first and most famous novel, and nowhere else does he tap the region’s deepest literary tradition more directly. Read Rest of Article Here