PART 2
On alcohol and his vices
There’s no way around it, he was a serial alcoholic.
And alcohol had a huge influx on him as a person, on him as a writer, on what he wrote.
Which is funny to think of, because he seems to possess this unparalleled control and clearness of his mind and thought, eloping any suspect of intoxication, except maybe when his writing gets surrealist, and writes about a guy he lives next door to who trains monkeys to fly or when it rained in the LA Country Museum.
Never misses a trick, knows where and who and why he is at any given moment, never gets disconnected or wanders … “drunk.” He’s always there, watching with his old lion eyes. Relax …. but not too much.”
[H. Fox, “The Living Underground: Charles Bukowski”, 1962]
In his early years, he was a shy and asocial guy, often ridiculed by his peers for the ridiculous clothes his parents made him wear, with a thick German accent and raging acne scattered across his face.
He began drinking just before he hit 20, as he was introduced to alcohol by a peer he would cite in Ham on Rye (1982) as a deranged son of some alcoholic surgeon.
To him and his friend, drinking was a route of escape from the torments of their miserable life. It was a coping mechanism, something to help him bear his unkind life.
To his own admission on several interviews, he never wrote without having chugged something first and during the process.
It stimulated his thoughts, and enabled him to be “truly himself” when he sat at his typewriter.
He definitely was not the first ever to do this.
Think of the importance of absinthe to poets like Verlaine -rumored to have drank himself to death with it- or Artaud. Many others surely loved the Green Fairy. Some couldn’t produce their art without drinking it.
He wasn’t any different.
In an interview he said this, I’ll quote him:
"I never write without it. [...] I drink beer and wine when writing. Whiskey doesn’t work. You get drunk too fast. Writing gets bad, or overdramatic, gets shitty. On beer or wine you can go on for hours, y’know. Wine is best.”
Bukowski (VERY) often wrote about alcohol, because it was inextricably part of his life.
- Alcoholic game idea: take a shot every time “get me a beer” is read -
Another less mentioned vice was betting on horse races, which, coupled with difficulties in managing money, made him flat broke most of the time.
To sustain his vices, he would reluctantly seek (seldom minimum wage) employment everywhere he could, living on paycheck after paycheck. He hated it most of the time.
Of course, the n-th backlash was taken by his health.
There wasn’t a morning in which Charles wouldn’t wake up, go straight to the bathroom, and vomit as a result of intoxication from cheap booze from the previous night.
One like me, knowing he died in 1994 at 74, is first and foremost surprised by the age he was able to hit despite everything, and secondly would’ve guessed he died as a result of a liver failure, or cirrhosis… something gruesomely related to his drinking addiction.
Apparently what took him away from this world was leukemia. Surely alcohol helped the insurgence of the illness.
I feel like he personally, not only physically, was dependent on alcohol.
I know some people like him myself.
These people cannot envision themselves without their vices.
Had they not been blazing js, smoking cigarettes, drinking countless pints, they simply wouldn’t feel like themselves anymore.
It’s a dangerous association.
It keeps you in a loop of self-indulgence, and you always mount up the funkiest, most hilarious existential justifications to your vice defining you.
You make it define you.
“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
I was like this, more or less, with cigarettes. I still smoke, won’t lie. But I grew out of it. Mostly out of boredom. I am no longer inextricably tied to my own image of smoking.
Buk never did.
He surely had his own personal demons, realistically gargantuan if compared with mine. I guess it must’ve been harder for him to relinquish this mental cage.
Part of the reason why becomes clearer and clearer studying his early life and family background, he learnt to cope with pain by constantly ignoring it.
Disconnecting himself from his family’s and society’s abuse made it apparently go away.So he initially isolated himself.
When he couldn’t isolate himself any more, he resorted to drinking.
And partly because his addiction sold well, especially in his novels.
On women. Not the book.
I’ve had this interesting discussion with friends.
I especially listened to women’s opinions, ever so attentively.
Their conclusions were rightfully skewed, to say the least.
Almost all male authors we’ve explored write on women in a distorted way.
Especially so when they are the main characters, who naturally are under a brighter spotlight.
The probability increases the older the author is, the farther we go back in time, and the worse his father was.
Now.
Bukowski’s female characters are… simply and entirely real.
Yes, sometimes the characters he writes about in his short stories are obviously allegorical and impossible. But they too contain bits of real people he met, and they each brilliantly sum up a side of human nature.
Thus, the characters’ perceived realism defies any charge of preposterous unreasonableness, despite their fictional origin.
But the problem still remains, and resides in how he views them.
I hereby state that Mr Bukowski just didn’t understand women, and wrote things so misogynistic it threw me off multiple times.
It is a strange sentiment I feel towards him, because I kept asking myself: how can a man so emotively acute and extraordinarily capable of putting beautiful profoundness to paper just fuck it up this bad?
My mother too, as she revealed me, shared this rhetorical question back when she voraciously consumed her library, inevitably stumbling upon the grumpy bastard.
We had a good chat about it in front of a coffee in our garden, and it prompted me to write this little chapter, with our conclusions.
And the last thing I will do with it is to mount up a series of excuses.
I don’t excuse him myself, and in his own spirit, I won’t even pretend like I do. There’s little to excuse or justify, and, as such, condoning it is unthinkable to me.
One like me can only pinpoint possible causes to his behaviour given the evidence. In other words, I’ll try to understand the grassroots of Bukowski’s misogyny by looking at the ugly treetop. It would be a disservice to you and to him to avoid the topic.
Some days, the sunny days, I question the tangible reality of guilt. I often conclude the causal web, so complex and interwoven, dissolves individual accountability into the vast machinery of societal and raw historical influence.
On sunny days, I feel Bhuddist. Guilt is intangible, and only responsibility exists.
On the other hand, on rainy days, I find guilt to be an undeniable anchor in reality.
The cold, sharp clarity of consequence pierces through any attempt to dilute responsibility. Each action, a stone dropped into the still pool of existence, sends ripples of undeniable accountability. The shadows cast by transgression lengthen, and the weight of individual choice becomes an inescapable moral debt. The system, if it exists, is merely a stage upon which individual dramas of right and wrong are enacted.
On rainy days I feel Kantian, so to speak. Guilt remains the player’s sole burden. Today’s a grey day: there’s no sun, and there’s no rain.
His relationship with women is ambiguous to say the least.
The unwise may try to trace the ambiguity back to the context at the time, and the social norms rigidly mandating luckily outdated gender roles.
The slightly wiser may endeavour in psychoanalysing his parental roles, to find out that his father’s role was that of a patriarchal, emotionally and physically violent man, who taught Charles a deep kind of pain: pointless, unprovoked, undeserved; his mother’s role, on the other hand, was that of a detached, and irresponsible woman, who may have shaped the ill view Bukowski had on women as passive, disdainful individuals who play around with the man’s emotions. What is often overlooked is that his mother probably was a victim to the abuses of her husband as well, and feared to rebel so much she complied.
This, frankly, gets us nowhere.
So.. how was he in real life?
Many of his friends would recall meeting two different Bukowskis: the macho man (in the presence of women) and the outgoing fellow (around men only).
When women are around, he has to play Man. In a way it’s the same kind of ‘pose’ he plays at in his poetry — Bogart, Eric Von Stroheim. Whenever my wife Lucia would come with me to visit him he’d play the Man role, but one night she couldn’t come. I got to Buk’s place and found a whole different guy—easy to get along with, relaxed, accessible.”
[H. Fox, “The Living Underground: Charles Bukowski”, 1962]
He was oftentimes reported boasting about his sexual experiences to everyone, and how other males wouldn’t let ‘their’ women near him in fear of them being charmed by his ‘feral’ allure.
Moreover, the zenith was reached during an interview in the 1980s.
The interview takes place in Bukowski’s San Pedro home, and he’s visibly intoxicated.
His then-girlfriend, Linda Lee Beighle, is also present and on camera.
The presence of Linda Lee, and Bukowski’s desire to “perform” maleness, (we will see what this means in a bit) makes him more and more agitated.
He accuses her of “pushing him around,” suggesting a power struggle in their relationship. He expresses anger at her staying out late, revealing his possessive and controlling tendencies.
The abuse is verbal and emotional at first, characterized by insults, threats, and attempts to intimidate.
Linda describes a pattern of enduring Bukowski’s abusive outbursts, and she recounts a turning point where she finally asserts herself, refusing to tolerate his behavior any longer.
After threatening to leave him for other guys at night, he lashes out, kicking her and calling her a “whore”.
This slice of his life should be enough to qualify him.
But we always ought not to be too quick to judge, and give the benefit of doubt.
We can now move on to what he wrote.
The representation of women in his novels and poems is strikingly crude.
More often than not, even from a grammatical perspective, women are depicted in a more passive shade, at times even just the object of actions, rather than the subject.
Bukowski’s female characters are consistently subjected to degrading and hostile treatment, objectified through explicit, vulgar language.
The usual paradox applies here too:
“Women occupy a central and preoccupying position within the male protagonist’s consciousness… how can he be a misogynist?”
To which I would wholeheartedly reply with:
“One thing is obsession, another one is genuine emotional engagement.”
Sometimes, I find that Mr. Bukowski’s interactions with, and pronouncements upon, the female sex constitute a compendium of hackneyed stereotypes of his time.
His perspective offers no discernible insight, predicated as it is upon a demonstrably limited understanding of women, as evidenced by his reductive pronouncements (‘the ladies… will always be the same’). Plus, he exhibits a resolute unwillingness to expand his comprehension. A lethal mix.
He expresses no hint toward the systemic oppression of women in society, especially when he discusses the controversies of sex work, by trivialising it.
Women, in his literary and personal sphere, are largely reduced to the level of coarse jest, a source of both amusement and self-inflicted humiliation.
If we were to look at Hustler (1972), for instance, women are portrayed as this inscrutable creature, capable of using her intelligence to emotionally scar the man, violently disregarding his cry for help.
In essence, men are better off without them, but they need them.
He couldn’t live without seeking them.
I think that he had an unspoken desire to feel loved and acknowledged by the opposite sex, but had no tools to understand them, so he hurt and got hurt as a result.
Although, at times, it is difficult to discern the alter ego (e.g. Henry Chinaski) from the author and detangle all the parodistic complications behind it, Bukowski seems not to distance himself too much from his alter egos, nor disprove any accusations, sadly.
To Chinaski, women want the man’s soul, or what’s left of it.
That may partially explain why he would avoid humanising them too much. Or why he would often look out for prostitutes, women who demanded nothing from him but his money.
Your solution to a draining woman and to the desire for further gratification is one Greyhound bus ride away. Beneath the veneer of his inebriated, pugilistic, and sexually charged escapades he was famous for, resides a deeply ingrained sexual chauvinist.
This figure manifests in a series of self-destructive and hostile outbursts, revealing a profound fear of the societal roles imposed, as he perceives it, by the mere possession of genitalia.
As a reader’s side-note, we can never know for certain if this was an orchestrated joke, a deliberate mocking of true misogynists, a poetic licence, OR Bukowski’s true feelings towards women.
Either way, the aftertaste is equally -if not more- bitter.
As for the final considerations:
Did he have a distorted view on women?
Almost surely. But it’s difficult to assess its actual magnitude.
Should we censor it?
No, of course.
As a matter of fact, his posthumous publications have edited out the bits we have deemed critical, including alcoholism. Personally, I find it a disservice to Buk and to all readers.
Should we read him?
Definitely. I believe it can be instructive even at its lowest, with some critical sense.
Is reading Bukowski for everybody?
No, absolutely not. Especially if you are uncomfortable with regards to specific topics.
Should we suggest his work to others?
Yes, with a couple of disclaimers, if we don’t really know who we are suggesting his work to.