"All Her Books of Terrified Loneliness..."

“All Her Books of Terrified Loneliness…”
a self-indulgent 1,575 words about Charles Bukowski

“Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.”

For me, it all comes back to that sentence. It is a beautiful construction; the true essence of whichever velvety truth-speaker actually observed that “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin.” The trouble with words is that they have much in common with alcoholic drinks. You have to try all the combinations you possibly can to stop yourself from getting bored. As a writer (if I may be so bold as to presume I know) one is constantly searching for new and invigorating ways in which to present a new angle on a senescent world, ways of making the prose glitter and sparkle and come alive, and – by no means least importantly – ways of elating the poor souls who have come to cast their careful, trusting eyes over the sentences you have produced. Well, Henry Charles Bukowski did all of those things. Not pretentiously, or falsely, but joyously, and with all the unassuming grace of a true visionary.

When Jarvis Cocker, the super-sexual former Pulp frontman and now superiorly-sexual bearded messiah, was hospitalised after falling out of a window in some daft attempt to impress a girl, he decided that looking up, that elevating oneself to the position of “the artist”, was futile and uninteresting. So, bandaged and broken, he started to look down. And there, in the mundane, he identified an alternative beauty.

Suddenly, the loss of a young couple’s virginity in a Sheffield park became sacred – even glorious. Had it not been for that experience (in which, like all sex-obsessed human males, he risked his life – and worse, his dignity – trying to snooker a girl into sleeping with him) we might never have been exposed to the exquisite snapshots of urban romance and decay we now celebrate in songs like “Do You Remember the First Time?” and “Mile End.” I wonder now as I write this, two beers deep on a Friday afternoon, whether Jarvis would cite Bukowski as an influence of any kind. Perhaps not, but what I’m getting to (what I’m slowly and desperately sliding towards through a haze of topped-up intoxication and gushy prose) is that Bukowski – for all the faults and terrors people so often attribute him – was always looking down.

Or, rather, he was looking SIDEWAYS - all around himself and all of the time - at the filth and the squalor and the magnificence of his country and its people. So often in his writing we are treated to the monologues of the barfly, and the piquant portraits of characters and places so few other authors are willing – or, worse, able – to paint.

It is his poetry I care for most dearly. Written predominantly in free verse and often lacking capital letters or punctuation, each poem is a spectacular love letter, a lyrical sensation. One can lose hours, mornings, days getting lost in his numerous printed collections. By degrees he is joyous, touching, misanthropic, alarming – and always fascinating. Of course I have my favourites, those poems to which I return, and will continue to return until I slip beneath the wheels of a metaphorical 86 bus. I keep with me also a collection of his most divine concoctions, those virginal sentences with their immortal symmetry. (I shan’t name them all here – there are too many - but if you want to talk about them afterwards, I’ll be at the bar...)

I risk the fierce reprisal of several friends and colleagues then when I submit that I don’t particularly find much pleasure in the canon of Bukowski novels. Admittedly, I have only read a few of them (“Post Office”, “Factotum”, “Ham on Rye”) and I am certain that, in time, when the inevitable cries of, “You mean you haven’t even read INSERT BOOK TITLE HERE?” have subsided, I will come to be proven cataclysmically wrong. However, it seems I am somewhat incapable of consuming the man’s novels with the same alacrity I do his poetry and short fiction.

It is worth noting that Bukowski began his career solely as a short story writer. Like Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway before him, he mastered short fiction’s peculiar form. He collected numerous rejection slips from literary magazines and publishing houses before a piece of his work was accepted. Unsurprisingly, brilliantly, and using a technique that would re-emerge often in his later work (specifically, taking an event from his own life and half-fictionalising it) his first “success” was entitled, “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip.” This self-reflection, this investment in writing so touchingly about the blessed plight of the writer, is one of the reasons I love him so.

I was published for the first time in 2008 - two years after leaving university. I struggle to bring to mind even now a sensation which even closely rivals the strange physical excitement that grips the aspiring writer as they read the words, “Congratulations! Your fiction has been accepted for publication in INSERT RIDICULOUS MAGAZINE TITLE HERE.” It is the truest, most unbridled kind of pleasure one can experience. It is recognition: a dangerous affirmation and celebration of the talents you always suspected you might possess but have – contrarily - spent long, excruciating nights and miserable, brooding mornings fearing you most certainly do not.

That cold January, before the acceptance email dropped into my inbox, I read a lot of Bukowski poetry. So much so in fact that the protagonist of my own story, “Rain on Film”, whilst holed up in a fictional American jazz bar (it’s not as terrible as it sounds – honest) is forced to consider his hero:

“He could have, I figure, written the simplest of postcards and still made it infinitely readable.”

Indeed, there is something indestructible in the words Bukowski throws together which conjures a telepathy between poet and reader. It’s what great literature does. It communicates. It entertains and inspires. It never expires.

I have never longed to write like Bukowski (for one, his subject matter is almost entirely at odds with the life I lead); neither have I ever attempted to emulate his literary style. But he’s always there when I do write. Every time I sit down in front of this computer and start typing (often without a clue as to where I’m going to end up) he’s there, sitting in the corner of the bedroom with a bottle of beer, or hanging precariously out of the window in front so that I don’t forget what it is I’m here to do.

Bukowski is the perfect inspiration. At certain times during his life he was writing five or more short stories per week, each of which was dutifully printed (often without a carbon copy), stamped and posted off in pursuit of publication. And this is his greatest gift to writers. To me. Like the old phrase says: the muse will always find you but it needs to find you working. Well, for a writer that “work” is writing – and Bukowski wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

He smoked and got drunk and gambled and womanised but he always wrote. He was ill and hospitalised and when the doctors told him, “One more drink and you’re dead,” he wrote and drank more. Throughout countless menial jobs, throughout happiness and marriage and fatherhood and heartbreak, throughout hangovers and poverty, he wrote.

In “So You Wanna Be a Writer?”, a poem given to me many years ago by a friend and poet who in his purest moments writes with much the same force as the master himself, Bukowski tells us that if it’s in you - and if that “it” is effervescent, restless and beautiful - then it must be channelled onto the page. If on the other hand what you are writing is laboured, tedious, boring or flat, then it isn’t going to amount to much.

“Unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,” he says, “don’t do it.”

If you’re doing it because you want pretty girls to fellate your ego, don’t bother. Or if it’s the money, the fame and the recognition you long for, give up now.

“Don’t be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers,” he goes on. “Don’t be dull and boring and pretentious.”

It is Bukowski’s informal, immortal advice and you’d be forgiven at first for thinking it was disheartening. But the truth is that we all have history weighing down upon us. Why start a band if you don’t think it’s going to be better than The Smiths? Why write a novel if it’s not going to be better than “To Kill a Mockingbird?” Come to the typewriter, Bukowski says, with anything but apathy. “Unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don’t do it.”

So whenever I’m in between stories, and the world around me appears gloomy and unforgiving, and when I feel like I can’t write anything but a dull word, I read “So You Wanna Be a Writer?” and a strange comfort settles over me.

Why?

Because -

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
there is no other way.

and there never was.