Charles Bukowski

“Don’t try”.

So reads the epitaph on the headstone of one of the iconic forefathers of the Transgressive Fiction/ Dirty Realism movement in American Literature. Born in Germany around the same time Mickey Mouse was introduced to the world under the guise of Steamboat Willie, his life was a million miles from a Disney fairy tale. Abusive parents, dyslexia, social banishment and alcoholism were the nuances of his “normal”, the accoutrements to his life’s wardrobe. It was this DNA that filtered throughout his body of work and made his name royalty amongst the communities of poets, short story writers, novelists and screenwriters of the modern era.

Charles Bukowski.

Royalty, even if only amongst the working class. He was the scribe behind hundreds of short stories, the creative force that inked thousands of poems. His novels and smaller works produced over sixty books; in film, he has been immortalized many times over. His narratives were universal, largely penned with such themes as alcoholism, poverty, illicit debauchery with women and the drudgery of the workplace. It was these everyman vantages that made him the voice of the real and a curiosity to the fantasy peddlers in literature, the elitists with noses forever planted in the spine of the happy-go-lucky classics. TIME magazine dubbed him “A laureate of American lowlife”. A nation of these theoretically labeled lowlifes named him King.

Bukowski approached the trials and tribulations in his life with a jubilant acceptance that poured into his creations. His alter ego, the irrepressible Hank Chinaski, was Bukowski in high def- an unapologetic drunk who welcomed his demons and shunned a culture that judged him for his vices. Essentially, Charles Bukowski simply shrugged his shoulders at things that caused the more tightly wound citizens of his time to shriek in horror. Bukowski, who in earlier years halted writing altogether after unsuccessfully breaking into the publishing realm (opting instead for a ten year drinking binge-the “lost years”), simply wrote what he knew. His research came from staring at a reflection in a glossy bottle of Pabst.

Ham on Rye, Factotum, Notes From a Dirty Old Man, Horses Don’t Bet On People & Neither Do I…a small scattering of genius that he left behind that stands as important a reference tool to an aspiring writer as an English Degree. Charles Bukowski may have very well been a poor man’s Hemingway, but in a world increasingly set upon a 99% versus 1% demographic, perhaps it was Hemingway who was the rich man’s Bukowski. Either way, both men had a masterful way of imbibing just a touch too much and creating the definitive reflection of the life they knew-themselves, in a visceral form.

Creating.

It brings us full circle to the headstone that marks Bukowski’s final drying out spot. And it is the perfect summary to his imperfect life, stolen from a letter the author wrote to a colleague in 1963, an absolutely brilliant piece of craftsmanship from a wordsmith that could only be Charles Bukowski:

On the set of Barfly with Faye Dunaway & Mickey Rourke  

"Somebody at one of these places asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillac’s, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”