Charles Bukowski and the Habit of Art

Charles Bukowski (1920–94) was an alcoholic, a womaniser and a foul-mouthed brawler. He was nihilistic, mocking and scornful; he sold sadistic, offensive stories to pornographic magazines. He was an unreliable employee, preferring to visit the racetrack where he could gamble and drink. He was also a prolific poet, an exact memoirist, an hilarious novelist and a strangely humble, discomfortingly honest man. No other writer challenges my hopes, my values, my faith and my fears in the same unnerving way. When I read Bukowski, particularly his poems, I feel that he lived life abundantly and that I’m robbing myself of life because I’m far too conservative and, worse, religious. It can be argued that such a conclusion concedes far too much ground to Bukowski’s secular worldview, but the disarming feeling remains that Bukowski was more right than wrong. The way he trained himself in the habits of art, together with his undisguised corporeality and his disdain for the consumer-culture measures of success have far too great an antiseptic effect—even if the antiseptic burns!—to ignore. It turns out that the pornographer, the gambler, the heavy drinker and the user of women one-third his age got a lot right.

The Swiss theologian Emil Brunner writes: 

For whatever we may think about man, we can never escape this fact, that he is a thinking being; that whatever else he thinks, he is in the last resort determined by what he thinks about himself. The life of man—whether it is his science, his technology, his economics, his intellectual culture—is always an exposition, an interpretation of himself which he offers.

This is especially true when a man writes a poem; it is his individual anthropology in verse. Bukowski’s poems are frequently autobiographical. The raw experience of life they convey is expressed in colloquial language unmediated by traditional poetry conventions such as rhyme schemes or identifiable rhythms. He wanted his poems to be direct and engagingly real because it’s the life that’s lived that was important to him. Bukowski sought the significance in seemingly trivial events and passing conversations; through these he shared his perspective of himself in relation to the world. His poems insist that nearly everything—waking to find only empty beer bottles on the floor after a night’s bender; noticing the flat is tragically free of cockroaches; remembering his bouts of constipation as a child—is worthy of notice because it reflects a personal reality.

Bukowski was aided in this ability to turn any experience, no matter how brief, fragmentary or unpromising, into poetry because he had developed, to a very high degree, what Jacques Maritain called “the habit of art”. Despite the romantic, work and alcohol-related chaos of Bukowski’s life, he was rigorously disciplined about writing: he wrote every day or, rather, every night. And he wrote for hours every night—it was the one routine that kept him sane. For many years he wrote short stories and poems with only the occasional piece finding its way into small, obscure journals, yet he maintained the discipline of constant writing and he looked no further for subject matter than the dire circumstances of his own life: sleeping in flophouses, working menial jobs for cruel or crazy bosses, spending days in dingy bars, fighting with fellow barflies or finding temporary solace in drunken sexual encounters. His mind, both the conscious and the unconscious domains, was exercised and trained to write as a result of his creative discipline.

Flannery O’Connor says this about the habit of art:

It is a fact that fiction writing is something in which the whole personality takes part—the unconscious as well as the conscious mind. Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a long period of time, by experience; and teaching any kind of writing is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art. I think this is more than just a discipline, although it is that; I think it is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things.

This self-imposed discipline of constant writing especially developed Bukowski’s senses in the habit of art. As a result, his poems are largely free of abstractions but full of particulars: a woman leaving her lover, for example, doesn’t just drive away in a car, she drives a gold Camaro. His experience of life was emphatically corporeal. This corporeality might be expressed sexually, medically or scatologically but Bukowski never forgets that he is a physical being in a world of particular things. He doesn’t let us forget it either because the fact that we exist in bodies affects everything. That’s obvious, of course, but sometimes the obvious needs to be emphasised, especially for those who are lost in ideologies or an emotion such as love. Here are the final three stanzas from his poem “girl on the escalator”: 

I watch him take her
up
the escalator, his arm
protectively about her
waist, thinking he’s
lucky,
thinking he’s a real special
guy, thinking that
nobody in the world has
what he has.

and he’s right, terribly
terribly right, his arm around
that warm bucket of
intestine,
bladder,
kidneys,
lungs,
salt,
sulphur,
carbon dioxide,
and
phlegm.

lotza
luck.

This physicality is, in part, a reflection of his nihilism—there was only this life to live, then nothing—but it was also a wise recognition that the senses are humanity’s common denominator. Bukowski honours this common experience by naming, describing and particularising the information provided by his senses. This helps make his writing addictively vibrant and refreshingly real: you feel the humidity of LA’s rainy afternoons; you hear the bored, disgruntled complaints of his boozy lover; you know the self-satisfaction of lounging in bed with only a six-pack of Miller’s beer and a cat for company as you listen to your neighbours heading off to their jobs. It is through the senses, as Jacques Maritain observed, that poetry seeks meaning and gropes towards an expression of all the complex relations of man to the world. In Art and Scholasticism, Maritain writes: 

This divination of the spiritual in the things of sense, and which expresses itself in the things of sense, is precisely what we call poetry. Metaphysics too pursues a spiritual prey, but in a very different manner, and with a very different formal object … Metaphysics snatches at the spiritual in an idea, by the most abstract speculation; poetry reaches it by the flesh, by the very point of the sense sharpened through intelligence. Metaphysics enjoys its possession only in the retreats of the eternal regions, while poetry finds its own at every crossroad in the wandering of the contingent and the singular.

Bukowski thought religion a lie, yet he asked the same questions as religion asks: What is man? What is man’s relation to the world? How should we live? What is love? And how do men and women, boss and worker, stranger and friend, best relate to one another? These were his metaphysical speculations and as is proper to a poet, he sought to express his questions and observations, through his art, in the sensual world of the contingent and the singular. 

Bukowski’s scorn for status symbols, for the accumulation of possessions, and for the American Dream, derived in part from his own experience of abuse and lovelessness as a child. His parents sought to maintain a veneer of success and normality in their Spanish-styled suburban LA house but his father was subject to frequent rages and often thrashed the young Bukowski with a thick leather strop. His mother was either unwilling or incapable of protecting Charles—their only child—from these daily beatings. By his late teenage years, Bukowski was already drinking heavily and deeply sceptical about the conventions that guided American culture: he knew an outward peace could hide horrors. In a poem titled “the crunch” he writes: 

our education system tells us
that we can all be
big-ass winners.
it hasn’t told us
about the gutters
or the suicides.
or the terror of one person
aching in one place
alone
untouched
unspoken to
watering a plant.

Afflicted with acne vulgaris—he didn’t have pimples on his teenage cheeks and chin, he had masses of painful boils—his face was disfigured and scarred for life. This increased his sense of social isolation. Deliberately unpatriotic during the Second World War (he was conscripted but rejected by the military because he failed the psychology tests) and abrasive as a young man, Bukowski repelled people. Increasingly, he identified with the whores, alcoholics, boarding house bums and the lonely poor who, like him, rented cheap rooms, drank cheap booze and avoided their landlords. But this identification was entirely beyond politics. John Steinbeck’s or Woody Guthrie’s identification with itinerant workers and landless farmers, for example, was allied to a left-leaning ideology. Bukowski was too much a nihilist to embrace any politically motivated identification with the downtrodden. The shiftless he identified with were too drunk or too cynical to ever get themselves to a march, a meeting or a rally. Almost invisible, they existed outside any class system. Bukowski was a member of this subterranean culture of gamblers and drunks from early adulthood until well into middle age.

It hurt his health, but it fed his art. Rudyard Kipling thought a fiction writer should never drive the poor from his door because the poor have less to protect themselves from life’s bruises and that makes their lives more dramatic: a situation that’s bad for those who suffer but good for the writer who observes. Until old age, Bukowski lived life in a raw, basic and tough way. He didn’t have sufficient money to insulate himself from physical suffering like hunger, sickness and exhaustion but he liked it that way: it was primal, it was real and at least you knew you were alive—your nerves registered the pain, your mind writhed with the turmoil, and your bilious guts threw up their contents. He thought the bubble-wrap of privilege was a worse fate: it could slowly suffocate people, all the while easing their slide towards the grave. In “hug the dark”, he writes:

turmoil is the god
madness is the god
permanent living peace is
permanent living death.
agony can kill
or
agony can sustain life
but peace is always horrifying
peace is the worst thing
walking
talking
smiling,
seeming to be.

Even when he owned a brick home in San Pedro with a jacuzzi and a lap pool, and he was enjoying a stable marriage with his second wife, he still drove his black BMW to the blue-collar racetracks two or three times a week to gamble. There he maintained his contact with the unemployed, the working men seeking some luck, the deluded and the crazy.

In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor records that Thomas Mann thought the grotesque to be the true anti-bourgeois style. Bukowski, who pukes all over middle-class values, crowds his poems and stories with bums, drunks, selfish slobs (that is, himself and his friends) together with whores, strippers and violently jealous lovers. Through these grotesque characters, Bukowski questions the common measures of success: a steady job, a nice house, a comfortable marriage. Too often, he thought, we settle for security, routine, peace at all costs, dull jobs and pre-packaged experiences; we avoid questioning what we are seeking to achieve and we turn our eyes away from death and the questions that death raises about the worth of our values and the merit of our choices. This is not an original thought. Three hundred years ago Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees: “We rush headlong towards the abyss, putting everything possible in front of us to keep from seeing it.” Bukowski’s contribution was to reframe that observation for a contemporary context and especially for the hyper-consumerist, success-driven hothouse of LA. Here are some lines from “the big one”:

he buys 5 cars a month, details them, waxes and buffs
them out, then
resells them at a profit of one or two grand …
I have no idea of what he is trying to accomplish and maybe he
doesn’t either
he’s a nicer fellow than most, always good to see him,
we laugh, say a few bright things,
but
each time
I see him
I get the blues for him, for me, for all of us:
for want of something to do
we keep slaying our small dragons
as the big one waits.

Bukowski’s poems rarely rhyme and barely scan, long lines being the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, his best poems have coherence, clarity and momentum, and they reward reading aloud. He was certainly capable of writing bad poems: his long-time publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, rejected many poems because they were sloppy, uninspired, unfinished or merely vituperative rants. Bukowski churned out poetry and wasn’t overly concerned about the quality of individual poems; for him, writing was the main game. He left the work of selection to John Martin. One hopes that the many weak poems never make it into print because they would merely dilute the quality of his published poems and his detractors would appear right when they say Bukowski was more pose than poet.

His strongest, fully-formed poems have an austere beauty and capture the dignity of a man trying to be honest about his experience of life in a world that is frequently frustrating, seemingly at odds with human aspirations, and where death levels everything and everyone. He scorned poets who wrote about loves, violence, loss or dramas that they’d been too fearful to explore personally. He disdained novelists who sought the applause of their peers rather than seeking to release themselves from the need for that applause. Bukowski wanted truth in the inner man, not acclaim for the husk of man. He thought that what was common in much modern American literature—writing with an eye to academic acceptance, playing with form as if that were sufficient content—was a pretence that masked a lack of blood, of soul and of heart. John Martin considered that Bukowski’s aesthetics were perfectly captured in one of his shortest poems, “Art”:

As the
spirit
wanes
the
form
appears.

The informality of his poetry, its limpidity and its brevity are partly what endears it to readers. No one needs a scholarly tome or a teacher to unpack its meaning. It isn’t epic. It’s poetry for the ordinary reader in ordinary language written by a man of extraordinary, but often shocking sensitivities. The fact that Bukowski offends moral and academic sensitivities hasn’t affected his popularity in the least, except among moralists and academics. On the contrary, it’s possible that Bukowski is the most widely read poet in English of the past quarter-century.

Bukowski’s anarchism is challenging, but it doesn’t take much thought to realise that if any more than a very small minority of people adopted his philosophy and lifestyle then society would rapidly become much worse rather than much better. But his anarchism was not active: he didn’t suggest it as a response to the painful puzzle of existence for anybody else; it was his individual act of resignation. He was sensitive to the tragedy, the injustices and the cruelty of life, but he was too cynical to believe it could ever be changed. Clearly, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: there’s no hope for change, so why bother trying to change anything? Circumstances consequently remain lamentable, and the initial protest of powerlessness seems justified.

In a way, Bukowski’s nihilism led to an Epicurean response to life—not the modern, expensive version of Epicureanism, but the ancient, cheap version: life is difficult, so seek the minimum of comforts, cultivate independence, accept fate and expect little. Bukowski was content with a day off work, a race meet, and a few beers while writing a poem in a boarding house room. But by his sixties he’d achieved much more than he ever expected: he enjoyed wealth, celebrity, the company of a good woman (as he said, after so many bad ones, he was due some luck) and legions of fans. Despite this, his favourite phrase of resignation was still engraved on his headstone: “Don’t try.”

If he took his own advice, we would never have heard of him. He probably would have died of alcohol poisoning in a rented flat, his body collected by young, sun-tanned paramedics, and his poems and novels would have been unwritten and unshared. But he did try; he worked at his writing for decades. And he waited. Despite his atheism and cynicism, Bukowski recognised that the writer, or any artist, is the recipient of gifts which can’t be grabbed but must be received, and the writer must be ready to receive the gifts when they’re offered. So he kept his daily appointment at his typewriter, and wrote. In “the burning of the dream”, he confessed:

I was to discover two
things:
a) most publishers thought that anything
boring had something to do with things
profound.
b) that it would take decades of
living and writing
before I would be able to
put down
a sentence that was
anywhere near
what I wanted it to
be.

For all his resignation and hopelessness, he sought expression through writing, and that is always an affirmation of hope, even if it’s only the hope that words really can convey experience. Bukowski maintained some blinding inconsistencies, and I’m glad he did because the inconsistencies reveal his soul struggling against his own bleak vision of himself and the world. That struggle and his eventual creative triumph demonstrated that neither he nor the world were as hopeless as he thought.