Charles Bukowski, who died today at
age 73, was the only Los Angeles writer I was ever totally proud of.
Other famous writers -- Henry
Miller and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to name two -- lived here at the end of their
careers when their best work was behind them.
But Bukowski didn't come to L.A.
with a pocket full of royalty checks and a career made in Europe and New York.
For worse and later better, he grew up and made his career here.
And he made his stories and his
poems here.
He worked with what the City of
Angels gave him and in the early years, it didn't give him much. Then again, he
wasn't exactly the kind of guy the chamber of commerce was likely to pick for
L.A.'s poster boy.
Bukowski was, to begin with, ugly
as sin. Teenage skin diseases did a number on his face and a lifetime of heavy
drinking did nothing to improve it. He permanently looked the way most of us
have felt on the worst morning we ever had.
And he was not a nice guy.
Television, with its Mister Rogers idea of what a writer should be, has taught
an entire generation of jelly brains to believe that authors should be sweet,
kindly, polite and, most importantly, politically correct.
Bukowski was none of the above.
As his girlfriend said in terms
he would have endorsed, "He didn't like people.'' Most serious authors don't.
Socializing, with the kind of fawning literary hangers on who circle famous
poets like the sharks of boredom, is death to a writer. These people want to
ask inane questions about how the great author writes when all the great author
wants is to be left alone to write. Or perhaps to howl at the moon or stare at
the ceiling while waiting for the wild dogs of inspiration to arrive.
Anyway, an author doesn't want to
have tea with the gentle readers of The
Atlantic Monthly.
In Bukowski's case, he'd probably
rather be pounding on typewriter keys, doing the only thing a real writer is
really good at.
"If I die,'' he once told an
interviewer, "I hope I go with my head on that typewriter. It's my
battlefield.''
For a dirty old man who learned
his life lessons in skid row bars, Bukowski was as prolific as any literary
lion who ever grazed on the tenured lawns of academe. He published 32 books
containing selections of his 1,000 poems, five collections of short stories and
six novels. More than two million of his books are in print.
Pretty good for a guy who lived
the low life and who never had a job more prestigious than mail sorter at the
downtown L.A. post office.
And why did all of those readers
buy the books of this skid row bum?
I'm not sure. I only know why I
bought them and read them and loved them.
Charles Bukowski wrote about the
Los Angeles I was born in, grew up in and lived in most of my life. It was not
the picture postcard Disney version that tourists are fed. It was not the
superficial "let's do lunch"' world of Beverly Hills.
Bukowski didn't create yet
another one-dimensional movie poster of Los Angeles.
In his stories and poems, L.A.
was a dirty, ugly place where telephone wires blocked the view of the smog
shrouded downtown office buildings. His L.A. was filled with rowdy, drunk,
crazy people living in stucco apartments where the paint flaked off the walls
and ants patrolled the kitchen. It was an L.A. where not every pretty woman got
discovered by a Hollywood agent and where promising young men got ground down
by a system they never quite understood.
Charles Bukowski did not paint a
pretty picture. But then L.A. is not a pretty town. He captured it honestly in
ways that few writers would ever dare.
His clear-eyed view of Los
Angeles, warts and all, was a reality check for a generation of readers in the
'60s and '70s, who couldn't believe the bull pumped out by the public relations
factories in town.
He gave us a real gritty city
filled with lost souls and failures, drunks and survivors. It takes great
courage to resist the social, economic and political pressures that cause
weaker writers to tell people pretty lies that they ultimately cannot believe.
Charles Bukowski's legacy is a
kind of honesty about life that is so rare that when you encounter it in his
books, it sets you free.
Originally published in The
Outlook, Santa Monica, March 1994
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