Just some reviews of some of Bukowski...
March 11, 1994
Charles Bukowski Is Dead at 73; Poet Whose Subject Was Excess
By WILLIAM GRIMES
harles Bukowski, a poet, novelist and screenwriter whose heavy drinking and hard living were brought to the screen in the 1987 film "Barfly," died on Wednesday in San Pedro Peninsula Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 73 and lived in San Pedro, the Los Angeles port neighborhood.
The cause was leukemia, said Harvey Klinger, the agent for Black Sparrow Press, Mr. Bukowski's publisher.
Mr. Bukowski was a bard of the barroom and the brothel, a direct descendant of the Romantic visionaries who worshiped at the altar of personal excess, violence and madness. In works like "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail," "Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an Eight-Story Window," "Legs, Hips and Behind" and "Ham on Rye," he acted as a tour guide to the nightmare of his own personality, writing in tough, direct language. Indeed, the title of one of his best-known works, "Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness," can be taken as the author's guide to living.
Born in Germany
Mr. Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, and was brought to the United States at the age of 2. He once said in a magazine interview that he began drinking at 13 to dull the pain of being beaten continually by his father. After attending Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, he moved to New York City to become a writer. Over the years, he supported himself by working as a dishwasher, truck driver, mailman, parking-lot attendant, elevator operator and Red Cross orderly. He once hung posters in the New York City subways.
In 1946, as the rejection slips piled up, Mr. Bukowski set out on a decadelong period devoted to drink and travel. In 1956, near death, he returned to writing. His poems were first published in Los Angeles newspapers like Open City and The Los Angeles Free Press and in little magazines. "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail," his first poetry collection, was published in 1959, and over the years at least 40 more books followed, all of them rooted in the experiences of a loner and outcast with a keen eye for the absurd.
In novels and short-story collections like "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" (1969), "Post Office" (1971), "Factotum" (1975) and "Ham on Rye" (1982), Mr. Bukowski relied on an alter ego named Henry Chinaski, a down-and-out writer with a fierce dedication to women, drink, gambling and failure.
Mr. Bukowski wrote the screenplay for Barbet Schroeder's "Barfly," in which Mickey Rourke portrayed the poet in his younger days. His experiences as a screenwriter led to the novel "Hollywood" (1989).
Just before his death, Mr. Bukowski completed "Pulp," a mystery novel that will be published in the summer. An anthology of his work, "Run With the Hunted," was published in 1993.
He is survived by his second wife, Linda Lee, and a daughter, Marina, of Bellevue, Wash.
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There's Poetry in a Ragged Hitch-Hiker
By KENNETH REXROTH
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IT CATCHES MY HEART IN ITS HANDS
By Charles Bukowski.
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harles Bukowski suffers from too good a press- a small but loudly enthusiastic claque. Down in New Orleans, where they publish a magazine called The Outsider, the local advance guard seems to consider him the greatest thing since Homer. He is not. However, if you put aside his volunteer public-relations experts, he turns out to be a substantial writer.
I suppose the academicians would call him the most recent representative of naturalism and anti-literary revolt. His friends are always comparing him to Hemingway. This is not a fitting comparison. Hemingway, with all his virtues, was a literary figure and socially part of the elite of celebrities. Bukowski might well be the outsider for whom the magazine is named. He is certainly far less with it- it being the established rat race- than Colin Wilson who invented the current use of the term "outsider" and who was immediately co-opted into the Establishment.
No Establishment is likely ever to recruit Bukowski. He belongs in the small company of poets of real, not literary, alienation, that includes Herman Spector, Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Patchen and a large number of Bohemian fugitives unknown to fame. His special virtue is that he is so much less sentimental than most of his colleagues.
Yet there is nothing outrageous about his poetry. It is simple, casual, honest, uncooked. He writes about what he knows- rerolling cigarette butts, cashing in the neighbor's milk bottles to get two-bits for the morning visit to the bookmaker, the horse that came in and the hundred-dollar call girl that came in with it, the ragged hitch-hiker on the road to nowhere, the poignant, natural real scene around him where the last ride set him down.
Bukowski is what he is, and he is not likely to be found applying for a job with the picture magazines as an Image of Revolt. Unlike the beats, he will never become an allowed clown; he is too old now, and too wise, and too quiet. More power to him.
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New in Fiction
By RICHARD ELMAN
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FACTOTUM
By Charles Bukowski.
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ost first person voices in fiction are artful; Charles Bukowski's is no exception. For "Factotum" he speaks in the name of Henry Chinaski, having pared away all the excrescences of the hype all literary mannerism, to present himself flat out from his opening sentences plucky but woebegone, a careerist of lousy odd jobs and one night stands in the backwaters of our great American cities. "I arrived in New Orleans in the rain at five o'clock in the morning," Bukowski writes. "I sat around in the bus station for a while but the people depressed me so I took my suitcase and went out in the rain and began walking..."
Compare this style to the goosed up prose of Bukowski's "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" (City Lights) and you have the difference between put on and voice, between callow journalism written as self-advertisement and sensitive, moving, amusing narrative.
The rain that falls in these opening pages dampens all of Chinaski's adventures in this hard luck narrative even when, in the capital of the Sunbelt, L.A., he is working in an auto parts warehouse, running bets for his co-workers to Hollywood Park and living with a woman who demands personal service four times a day until, exhausted, Chinaski points out, "There wasn't much love left in me."
Bukowski records the edge on his teeth after tasting sour grapes, Chinaski's delight in making friends with women, his aversion to the work ethics of a crooked world, and his stubborn determination to write and be his own man while he burns his fingertips as a dog biscuit baker, or goudges them affixing advertising placards in the New York subway. In stockrooms and ladies' dress shops Chinaski exists for a few days as a fevered poorly fed cockroach, and then there's a scene that reoccurs in these various milieus: either he's given his final check after being "terminated," or else he walks out because no human being should have to debase and humiliate himself and waste his precious time on earth to eat.
A few years back in more prosperous times Bukowski may have passed for a crank. With a sizable percentage of the population more or less permanently unemployed he seems more like a prophet.
Bukowski owes something to Henry Miller, but just as much (like early Miller) to Dreiser, and the factualness of Defoe, and Twain. He can be accused of a lot of things, reductionism, I suppose, because he shows us what losers we all are, but in "Factotum" he also records quotidian tolls of courage, disenfranchisement and disgruntlement in simple language.
Not since Orwell has the condition of being down and out been so well recorded in the first person.
Richard Elman is the author of "The Poorhouse State" and other books.
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So Much Genius! So Little Money!
By MOLLY HASKELL
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HOLLYWOOD
By Charles Bukowski.
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harles Bukowski, West Coast poet and patron saint of drinking writers, or writing drinkers, author of the screenplay for the movie ''Barfly,'' has written a classic in the take-the-money-and-don't-run category of Hollywood fiction. This is the genre wherein Real Writers who have been seduced into screenwriting (than which nothing is more lowercase) live to tell all shamelessly.
The difference between Mr. Bukowski and other literary avengers is that he is neither a martyr nor a fallen angel. In ''Hollywood,'' he surveys the absurdities of the passing scene with the complicitous eye of a cast member in the theater of the grotesque, and has no delusions that he can fall any lower in life than a short drop off a barstool. Of course, the image of himself as a drunk who sleeps till noon and practices craft, not art, is itself a theatrical feint, the hipster's mask for his softness, the ballet dancer pretending to be a boxer, the writer cunningly demoting himself as someone who hits ''the typer.''
The basic motif of the novel consists of the endless wrangles and cons that characterize the making of a movie with a tiny budget, a movie that almost nobody wants to make and that almost nobody will pay to see. They couldn't have been any more operatic if the film had been a megastar superproduction like ''Cleopatra.''
The lower the stakes, the more frenzied the power struggles . . . and the more often the word ''genius'' is thrown around. Chinaski, the drinking-gambling-typing persona that runs through Mr. Bukowski's writing, refuses to be impressed by hyped-up art house deities such as Wenner Zergog and Jon-Luc Modard. Need I say, this is fiction disguised thinly enough for even non-cinephiles to see through the pseudonyms.
The clipped phrases and deadpan style recall the hard-boiled affectations of literary drunkards such as Hemingway and Hammett. In Chinaski's presence, Jon-Luc, who has never said more than a sentence at a time, opens up. About him: ''Jon-Luc was on a roll. I no longer understood what he was saying. I saw lips moving. He was not unpleasant, he was just there. He needed a shave. And. . . .'' A haze of alcohol always descends in time to rescue Chinaski from having to listen too closely to what goes on below the surface of his own or other people's lives. It is also, one comes to realize, a protection from his own acute vision. Anyone who sees life this clearly needs something to cloud his lens.
Among the cast of characters are a couple of producers, Friedman and Fischman, who pay $2,000 for a full-page ad, with photo, to advertise themselves in Variety, while signing rubber checks. A canny and sympathetic director named Jon Pinchot (based on Barbet Schroeder, who directed ''Barfly'') writes a letter to the producers, threatening to cut off parts of his body if they renege on their agreement, signs it ''love, Jon,'' then arrives at a contract-signing session with an electric chain saw. He plugs it in and, when the lawyer hesitates over a requested change, he holds the whirring blade over his pinkie finger. (The lawyer accedes.) Stars will surrender a good portion of their customary salary to work on a ''serious'' picture, but not their temperaments. Francine Bowers (a k a Faye Dunaway, one of the stars of ''Barfly'') demands a shot that will show her fabulous legs; Chinaski writes it in. Jack Bledsoe (a k a Mickey Rourke), playing the young Chinaski, refuses to read his lines until just before going on camera; Chinaski shrugs his shoulders.
Money evaporates and the members of the Eurotrash ''artiste'' contingent sell off their vehicular assets (the motorcycles go first), then decamp from Marina del Rey and return to France. Later, when pennies miraculously rain down from the Hollywood heaven, they reappear and move into a ghetto in Venice, Calif.
''THIS IS A WAR ZONE!'' says Jon Pinchot on the phone. ''The police do not come in here, it's like a separate state with its own rules. I love it! You must visit us!'' Bukowski-Chinaski, no stranger to mean streets and marginal neighborhoods himself, is nevertheless shocked by the pure hate emanating from the eyes of two black kids. In one brief, pungent paragraph, he conveys more of the bitter truth of race relations than all the verbiage spouted by sociologists and pundits on both sides of the divide:
''Poor blacks hated. Poor whites hated. It was only when blacks got money and whites got money that they mixed. Some whites loved blacks. Very few, if any, blacks loved whites. They were still getting even. Maybe they never would. In a capitalistic society the losers slaved for the winners and you have to have more losers than winners. What did I think? I knew politics would never solve it and there wasn't enough time left to get lucky.''
Bukowski-Chinaski watches the filming of Jack Bledsoe-Mickey Rourke-Chinaski and feels pangs of envy and yearning for his younger self, yet the real hero is this 67-year-old man on the sidelines, whose brain and liver have survived 40 years of strenuous - if intermittent -alcoholism. He talks a tough game, but there's a wide streak of fellow feeling - for sagging, used-up women, for gamblers, for professionals. For the flotsam and jetsam. His wife, Sarah, is more than a supporting player: she gets her share of good lines and, as the one responsible for getting him off meat and hard liquor (thus adding 10 years to his life), comes off as an unlikely combination of drinking companion, drinking conscience, straight talker, muse and nursemaid.
Where women are concerned - and women, for him, are always a concern - ''Hollywood'' shows Mr. Bukowski as a more sympathetic figure than in his earlier, no less fiendishly observant ''Post Office,'' a comic horror story about his 12-year stint as a mailman. Beneath the bravura appetite for female flesh that runs through the stories and poems is a fierce struggle: theirs to seize and capture his pure male essence, his to keep it and move on.
There are points of comparison with Norman Mailer, who enters ''Hollywood'' in a cameo role as Victor Norman, another ''genius'' on the dubious payroll of the confreres Friedman and Fischman, a tough-guy peer whom Chinaski admires as ''one of the last defenders of maleness . . . in the U.S.'' Both Mr. Bukowski and Mr. Mailer are writers whose greatest achievement lies in the intelligence of their reporting, where, ironically, they give of themselves more freely than in their ostensibly more imaginative work. Both are writers who've made a fetish out of their masculinity, but the contrasts may be more striking than the similarities.
At one point, Chinaski is worried about the casting of Bledsoe, wants him to ''stop that New York strut.'' ''Jon,'' he says, ''he can't be New York. This main character is a California boy. California boys are laid back, in the woodwork. They don't come rushing out, they cool it and figure their next move. Less panic. And under all this, they have the ability to kill. But they don't blow a lot of smoke first.'' Charles Bukowski might be describing the difference between Norman Mailer and himself.
Molly Haskell is a movie critic.
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Film Festival; 'Barfly,' Doing the Best With the Worst of Life
By VINCENT CANBY
arbet Schroeder, the French producer best known for his association with Eric Rohmer, infrequently directs films, but when he does, they're worth the long intervals between. It could be that being a producer is Mr. Schroeder's protective cover.
Nobody expects him to direct a new movie every 18 months. He's too busy producing the work of others. In the meantime he can take all the time he wants preparing his own films, including ''More'' (1969), a sunlit romance of doomed drug addicts, and ''General Idi Amin Dada'' (1976), his spellbinding documentary about the former dictator of Uganda, a man as madly obsessed as any of the creatures in the director's fiction films.
Mr. Schroeder's latest is ''Barfly,'' his first American film and another not easily categorized movie that may be, I think, some kind of small, classic one-of-a-kind comedy. One thing is sure: ''Barfly,'' in spite of its occasionally stomach-turning details, is not a tragedy - and it will invite anyone who says so to step into the alley.
''Barfly'' will be shown at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center today at 9:30 P.M. and on Sunday at 4:30 P.M. It will open its commercial engagement here later this year.
Though it's set within the world of the seriously down-and-out in Los Angeles and is about people who are at the end of their ropes, ''Barfly'' somehow manages to be gallant and even cheerful. It has an admirably lean, unsentimental screenplay by Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of America's misbegotten, a big, broad, mesmerizing performance by Mickey Rourke and one by Faye Dunaway that rediscovers the reserves of talent that, in recent years, have been hidden inside characters who wear designer wardrobes and sleep masks.
As Henry Chinaski, Mr. Rourke has a lot of the seedy, insinuating charm of Dustin Hoffman's Ratzo Rizzo in ''Midnight Cowboy.'' Henry, the Bukowski surrogate figure, is a part-time writer and full-time drink-cadger who frequently gets beaten senseless in boozy brawls. Some area of his face seems always to be swollen. His knuckles remain perpetually skinned. The way he hustles down a street, Quasimodo-like (though he has perfectly normal legs), one can feel the pain in his ribs.
Henry is not a conventional movie's idea of a drunk. His alcoholism isn't ''Lost Weekend''-instructive. It's far more insidious. He has no remorse for a life left behind, and he doesn't fall down or suffer blackouts. Throughout the long days and nights at the Golden Horn, a neighborhood bar just this side of Skid Row, he drinks only enough to maintain his easily wounded dignity. He's like a frigate bird hanging in the wind over the same patch of earth.
Though ''Barfly'' makes some half-hearted passes at explaining alcoholism as a way of dealing with life's pervasive second-rateness, it remains, for the most part, serenely above such paperback psychiatry. Mr. Bukowski and Mr. Schroeder are content simply to observe the minute, grotesque, hilarious details of the behavior of Henry and the other patrons of the Golden Horn - with respectful interest and amusement that never slop over into condescending compassion.
''Barfly'' has the form of a vividly remembered vignette about several tumultuous days that almost (but not quite) change Henry's life. First there is his encounter with Wanda Wilcox (Miss Dunaway) who, though rather classily pulled together, is no less of a barfly than Henry and who, like him, has no particular past. Henry can't quite believe his good fortune when Wanda responds to him, scabby knuckles, dirty fingernails, filthy T-shirt and all.
Wanda tells him she likes the cockiness of his walk. He also talks in an unusual way, affecting a kind of W. C. Fields drawl to say things Wanda's never heard before. When she asks him solemnly if he doesn't hate people, he thinks before he answers, ''No, but I feel better when they're not around.'' In the society Wanda keeps, this is rare wit.
In fact, Henry is light years ahead of Wanda in the brain department. Her recognition of this is to her credit, even as she admits that, if another man comes along with a fifth of whisky, she'll go off with him. Though the movie never makes a big deal of it, Wanda is far more lost than the resilient Henry will ever be.
Their new, very edgy relationship is complicated by the arrival of Tully (Alice Krige), a pretty, rich, uppercrust patron of arts who wants to publish one of Henry's short stories in her literary magazine.
This is pretty much the so-called plot of ''Barfly.'' The film deals not in event but in the continuing revelation of character in a succession of horrifying, buoyant, crazy confrontations of barflies, bartenders, police and other representatives of the world of the sober. Mr. Bukowski's dialogue is not only richly funny but, when Henry quotes his own writings, it's also compelling. There's a kind of courtly nobility about Henry that Mr. Schroeder appreciates.
The story of Henry and Wanda doesn't come to a conclusion. The movie seems to withdraw from it. At the end of another raucous night at the Golden Horn, Robby Muller's discreet camera pulls back from the bar and out the front door without interrupting the lives that have been recorded.
Note also the performances of J. C. Quinn as Henry's bartender friend, Frank Stallone as the mean-tempered bartender who can never resist yet another fight with Henry in the alley and, as some of the Golden Horn regulars, Sandy Martin, Roberta Bassin, Gloria LeRoy, Joe Rice and Julie (Sunny) Pearson. Each one is memorable.
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