Turn The Page: Charles Bukowski

You find the beats, you find Fante, you\’re gonna find Bukowski. As a writer how can you not be drawn to him? It is arguable that he is one of the most influential out of any of that type of writer — the ones taking their real life and fictionalising, drawing a thin veil between them and their reading public. Bukowski lived what he wrote — and he wrote it warts and all, none of that prettifying that some people go in fo; Bukowski didn\’t give a fuck what you thought about him.

He drank, he screwed and he gambled, and he wrote. I recently read Factotum for the first time and had a kind of crisis of confidence in the guy. I had read Post Office and loved it; I think Ham On Rye is the best thing he wrote; I even enjoyed Pulp which seems to be something of an accomplishment considering how many people slate it; and I really got into the poetry. You see, I was recently in New York (well, about a year ago) and someone I know had managed to get hold of some of Bukowski\’s unpublished letters and I met someone that knew him — so it fired up a new enthusiasm in me for his work. I went out and bought loads of books of poetry by him and determined to read everything by the guy.

Now Factotum I was looking forward to and I wanted to read it before I saw the film, which is in my Blockbuster queue as we speak, and as far as I could tell this was one of the works that I could trust. But I hit a point about two thirds of the way through and, as if it was some kind of revelation, I turned to my wife and said \’All  this guy writes about is fucking, gambling and drinking, and he\’s an arsehole.\’ I think the thing is, the reason why that realisation hit my so hardis that the writing didn\’t keep me engaged like it always had — something flagged in the writing in that boo, and I was suddenly standing outside in the cold looking in at something I didn\’t really want to see; like an enraptured rubbernecker at a godawful accident. I think the dirge-like quality of the work lasted about fifty pages and then I got back into it and it seemed to find its footing again. What springs to mind is an audio-clip from the Manic Street Preacher\’s album Holy Bible (can\’t tell you where from) that says: \”I want to rub the human face in it\’s own vomit.\” That was how I suddenly felt — dirtied by what I was reading, and I have rarely felt like that — Jack Ketchum did it with The Girl Next Door by making me feel complicit in the acts being carried out, and maybe that is what happened here: that I felt like I was glorying in the awful shit Bukowski was writing about.

One book and it\’s travails have not killed my enthusiasm for the man, but it re-framed him for me — let me see it in a different light. Perhaps you need that once in a while — to have people you look up to knocked down. I want to strive to reach the heights of my heros but if they are more human then it is more attainable. Bukowski\’s humanity, his failure, is nothing if not  a source of inspiration.

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