Tales of Ordinary Madness (book rant)

Last night I finished reading:

For the past week or so the book has provided virtually all of my bedtime stories, offering a kind of perverted, alcoholic lullaby that is only slightly less twisted than the fairy tales most people read their children. Why the story of a young girl (or three little pigs for that matter) being terrorized by a wolf makes for appropriate bedtime fare is beyond me.

It reminds me of a poem I wrote several years ago:

What lupine
machinations
operate
(un/seen)
giving us
safe
clean
well-lit
places in the night?

But this is beside the point.

The point is that I, like most people, was introduced to Charles Bukowski when I was 19 years old. As far as I'm concerned, this is the perfect time for a young person to be introduced to Hank's work because: 1) he or she is still young enough to assume the author's constant references to drunkenness, constipation, and hemorrhoids point towards some underlying profundity; and 2) he or she is not yet old enough to realize that the profundity of said subject matter is self-evident.

Bukowski's other great gift is his ability to write about the truly banal, without pretense or contrivance. Take, for example, this description whose misogyny is surpassed only by its conciseness:

"There was a girl whose ass looked like the bottom of heaven." (88)

There are no drawn-out, flowery descriptions in Tales of Ordinary Madness, and this holds true throughout the dozens of short stories that comprise the book. I do not know if this pattern exists in his longer fiction, but Bukowski's short stories are masterful in their ability to communicate a mood (typically alienation, longing, and/or disappointment) through the sparsest use of words imaginable.

Did I mention there is more simile in life than metaphor?

"The waitress was fat and stupid as a roach, unthinking – she’d never had a toothache, she’d never been constipated even, she never thought about death and only a little about life." (96)

While this description begins predictably, using the insect as shorthand for the woman's disgusting and contemptible nature, the middle portion gives teeth (pun intended) to what would be an otherwise boring characterization. Toothaches and constipation connote specifically human discomfort, pains from which the waitress is forbidden. Finally, and this is his genius, Bukowski makes the leap from the banal to the existential, framing the woman's stupidity as ultimately a matter of her inability to consider death and mortality.

These were the subtleties I missed when I was 19. Back then I could care less for Bukowski. His writing seemed needlessly grotesque and intentionally offensive. But as I've grown older, I've come to understand that his writing is about that very troubling (and very troubling) subject: the grotesquery of aging itself. This, more than anything else, seems to be Bukowski's strongest and most recurrent theme, and I wonder if it was because he was already middle-aged when he "made it."

Most authors seem to achieve Importance, if not Fame, by their late twenties, and I feel certain that these cultural phenomena interfere with what might be called the more "normal" aging process. We live in a society that not only values, but idealizes youth; a society where a distinction must be made between "growing old gracefully" and merely getting older. Bukowski's late-arriving recognition shielded him from this, allowing him to undergo the disappointments that seem part and parcel with the transition into one's thirties.

"I remembered when I was kid, I thought, I’d like to live to see the year 2,000, I thought that would be the magic thing, with my old man beating the hell out of me everyday I wanted to live to be 80 and see the year 2,000; now with everything beating the hell out of me I no longer have that desire." (154)

This passage communicates Bukowski's essential understanding of man's place (yes, always man with Bukowski) in the world: the chasm between the projections of youth and the disillusionment of experience. For him, this process is inevitably one that pulls one closer towards nihilism and emptiness, in spite of the individual's longing for liberation.

Booze, Sex, and Gambling fill this void; they are his trinity as much as the Christians have their Father, Son, and Ghost. A better analogy, though, might be to the Hindu understandings of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Sustainer, and Shiva the Destroyer. In Bukowski's pantheon, Sex is the Creator, giving birth to desire and inspiring impossible aspirations. Herein lies the source of his misogyny because woman comes to embody this hope that gives rise only to disappointment. Gambling is Vishnu, sustaining him in the time between disappointments, and Alcohol is his Destroyer, obliterating the Sex and Gambling only to give rise to it all again.

Caught in this mêlée, man (yes, always man with Bukowski) is trapped in an inescapable cycle:

"All the people in Los Angeles are doing it: running ass-wild after something that is not there. It is basically a fear of facing one’s self, it is basically a fear of being alone." (190)

In the end, it is this solitude that exists as the sole constant of the universe, existing independently of the booze and the gambling, the heartache and rambling. Bukowski is the Buddha of post-War America, a Siddhartha who realized the first noble truth and went no further. And it would be simple enough to dismiss him as a depressive, an alcoholic, a madman, a coward, and a fraud... if only I had never heard his voice: