Freyermuth That's It. A Final Visit With Charles Bukowski

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-3-86287-024-0
Verlag: Fuego
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

'That's It' is an intimate and informative portrait of Charles Bukowski. Based on the very last interview he gave, the book combines reporting with literary criticism. It renders a final and lasting picture of Charles Bukowski and assesses his importance as a writer. A 'must read' for Bukowski fans.

Gundolf S. Freyermuth, Ph. D., is a writer, director and since 2004, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the ifs international film school, Cologne. He studied Comparative Literature at the Free University Berlin and wrote his Ph. D. thesis on digital aesthetics. Prior to his academic career, Freyermuth worked in the media; inter alia as editor for the monthly TransAtlantik, reporter for the weekly stern, head reporter for Tempo Magazine and for more than a decade as a freelance writer from the US West Coast. He has published three novels, eleven books of non-fiction and appr. 500 papers, essays and feature articles. He also writes movie scripts and directs documentaries. Freyermuth holds dual German-American citizenship and currently lives in Berlin and Cologne, Germany.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Freyermuth, Gundolf S.

Leseproben

VII

Hybrid of Man and Book.

- On “Bukowski, the Myth” -

“So when I write about Hemingway it’s sometimes a joke thing,” Charles Bukowski stated in 1993, “but I’m probably more in debt to him than I’d care to admit.”

Hemingway researched, typically as a journalist, the places and characters of his books until they had become part of his biography. He and Henry Miller, who all his life roved about exploring the case of spiritualism and sex, are the two American writers most frequently named in the search for Bukowski’s more honorable forerunners.

“Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller are alive and ill and living in a rented room in East Hollywood - or so one might think after reading this collection of thirty-six short stories,” Michael F. Harper wrote in his 1983 review of “Hot Water Music”: “Sordid, obscene and violent, Bukowski’s Los Angeles is more like Miller’s Paris than Hemingway’s, but our guide through this underworld responds to Hemingway’s laconic stoicism, not Miller’s apocalyptic rhapsody.”

Wolf Wondratschek called Bukowski the “new world writing champion, weight class Hemingway.” A reporter of “stern” magazine, on whose bald head “papa Buk” put his blessing hand fifteen years ago, described him as a “Hinterhof-Hemingway” (“backyard-Hemingway”); meaning that Bukowski did for poor neighborhoods what Hemingway did for more prestigious places and causes. The reporter as well observed that Bukowski’s stance was less grave and earnest: “What Buk produces is not machismo, but its parody ... In his grotesque exaggerations, Buk, like the caballero of the Rosinante, exposes what his predecessors, Miller and Mailer, Hemingway and Bogart, were concealing more expertly.” And Jörg Fauser - about whom Charles Bukowski maintains: “The guy was more Bukowski than I ever was!” - asked him:

“You are often mentioned in one breath with Henry Miller?”

“Is that so?” Bukowski answered. “Good for him.”

Charles Bukowski’s unusual and unusually popular prose has continually aroused his critics’ desire to compare him to other authors; more than once in an attempt of justification. The collection of scribes that was called up in addition to Hemingway and Miller is remarkable. Norman Mailer: Bukowski was a “Mailer on steroids.” Saroyan and Kerouac: “literary predecessors in the genres of working-class and outlaw literature [were] writers such as Henry Miller, William Saroyan and Jack Kerouac.” Céline: Bukowski was “in the line of Henry Miller and the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, unsentimental observers of the rancid underside of polite society. But Céline went crazy and Miller turned into a macho boaster. Bukowski is as matter-of-fact as poverty; he is too tough and self-sufficient to have to boast.” Hammett: “Bukowski nails his dialogues as dry and hard to the paper as a boxer thrusts his fists at the punching bag. His no frills prose is a blend of Dashiell Hammett and Henry Miller ...” Dostoevsky: Bukowski was “like an exhumed Dostoevsky going batso on his unsuspecting American brethren.” And last not least Jack London: Bukowski’s texts offered “a cross between the aggressiveness of Jack London and the eroticism of Henry Miller.”

In the effort to illuminate Bukowski’s prose, German literary critics cite Hemingway more often than any other writer, whereas in the English speaking world the recourse to Henry Miller dominates. Both authors spent a large part of their lives in California and had correspondence with each other. Bukowski holds Miller in high esteem, though he criticizes some of his novels to be partly tedious. For that, he likes to blame Miller’s intellectual aspirations. Bukowski himself hardly shows any predilection for the Western cultural heritage.

“The two single worst places you can put someone,” he remarks, “are the college and the church. Both eat up your brains. Put a man into a college or put him into a church, and you can forget him.”

As a declared anti-academic, he enjoys being an outspoken critic of the intellectual crowd, and he has evermore enjoyed irritating the well-educated among his readers.

“I haven’t read anything for ten years,” he told a perplexed questioner in 1987. “I can’t read. You put it in my hand, it drops out. Doesn’t do me any good. I like the ‘National Enquirer’ and the ‘Herald Examiner,’ that’s about it. I’m serious.”

More than one did believe him. Bukowski preferred, as he was once denounced in the “New York Review of Books,” to write “as an unregenerate low-brow contemptuous of our claims to superior being.”

Different as the use may be that Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller make of the cultural heritage, they both share the amoralism of their story telling. In the artificial contextures of fiction, such a monstrous lack of moral sensibility is usually perceived as less shocking and more enjoyable. In the semantics of autobiographic writing with its identifiable fragments of reality, however, this amoralism must provoke and polarize. Like Miller’s works, Bukowski’s struck a kind of emotional raw nerve and produced extreme responses from readers. What he writes is loved blindly or hated in blind anger. Those who have read his books are either fans or foes. Some are so jaundiced by their indignation about Bukowski’s topics, the brutal sex and the naked violence, the life on “zero grade” and the delight in “sexual shenanigans,” that they will not see the rhetorical qualities of his radically reduced prose: “He’s good, I suppose, if you like reading about toilets and whorehouses.” Others worship his symbol-free “texts in clear,” take everything literally like a pack of modern Till Eulenspiegels and refuse to recognize any difference between the portrayed adventures and their self-ironic literary composition.

What might well be the case with the majority of his readers - that in Bukowski’s texts they do not accept any boundaries between reality and fiction - certainly is the predominant perspective of the majority of his critics. “First I live, then I make a commentary about it,” an early reviewer cited the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal and added: “For no author is that more true than for Charles Bukowski.” Others saw all his books as “wild, unformed lumps of an autobiography.” They called him a “romancer without mystery” and would have preferred to re-classify his poetic prose as “non-fiction”: “Like all his work,” Adrian Dannatt wrote in the “Times” of London about “Hollywood,” “the term novel is merely a subterfuge for this exceptionally straightforward autobiography.”

The superimposition of life and work formed the solid basis on which “Bukowski, the myth” flourished - much stronger in Germany than in the United States. The large Bukowski fan club over there isn’t only geographically foreign to the everyday life of a West Coast underdog. Social as much as cultural distance makes it next to impossible to perceive the textual tension between the exotic reality and Bukowski’s fictionalization and stylization. The less one knew about the real Bukowski, the more one believed to know him well: Buddy Buk, permanently drunk, permanently chasing a woman, or already scoring; no distant god or king, but a scarface in whose vicinity one longed to live.

“Soon, I was struck by how gentle and courteous this reputed ‘wild man’ was,” novelist John Rechy remembers upon his first encounter with Bukowski. “I left with the notion that Bukowski’s rough image was as carefully cultivated as was the shimmery glamour of Warhol’s darling people.” He wasn’t the only one Bukowski surprised. Renee Tajima co-produced the documentary “Best Hotel on Skid Row,” for which the poet wrote and spoke the narration. “He was really incredible,” she says, “I thought he was going to be a monster, you know, because he writes about himself like a complete misogynist, a complete monster, but he’s actually a wonderful, wonderful person.” In fact, most of his critics and fans who met Charles Bukowski in person reported irritatingly normal experiences like these. Once “Bukowski, the myth” was established, the author faced the danger of becoming prisoner to his own texts and productions; and so he started personally to advance the dismantling of his myth.

“I never claimed to be the writing Bogart, or the best since Hemingway. The hacks take care of that,” Bukowski says. “It’s their business, and they probably thrive on it.”

Perhaps, “Bukowski, the myth” could have been revoked that easily if it had been nothing more than an artificial fabrication in the first place, concocted by skillful cooperation between the poet and the media. Bukowski’s reputation, however, rested more on his writings than on his amply publicized private life. Poem by poem, story by story, he had set the “autobiographic trap” he now found himself caught in - though not because of ignorance or want of skill. Mythicizing, and because of that, reconstructing the real life personality in an intertextual kaleidoscope is an inevitable consequence when a writer sets out to fictionalize his private matters extensively. Getting hurt by the distorted picture painted in his own works goes along, to some extent, as occupational hazards. Authors who dare to exploit the genre of autobiographic fiction suffer from image injuries like coal miners from black lung.

As a literary style, autobiographic fiction is mainly an offspring of the twentieth century. In European Modernism, vanguard writers like Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline developed the genre. Soon...