When the poet-critic Dana Gioia wrote last year in the New York Times that "Los Angeles is perhaps the only great city in the world that has not yet produced a great poet," there was an immediate public outcry, most of it pointing reproachfully in the direction of the late Charles Bukowski. The French poet-polymath Jean Cocteau liked to speak of the poetry of film, the poetry of dance, the poetry of song et al., and, had he been on hand and so inclined, would have no doubt entered the fray invoking a multitude of other names, beginning with Charles Chaplin and including such diverse figures as Edward Weston, John Cassavetes, Marvin Gaye, Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell and the Eagles. Staying more strictly within the given parameters, the protest has focused on Bukowski, and anyone who writes in Los Angeles can take heart from such public ardor in the name of literature. Still, there seems to me both more and less in this choice of our great man than has so far been discussed.
A virtuoso of the single note
Bukowski, whose third of five new books of unpublished poems is due in January, had endearing qualities. In a feminist age, he's unapologetically chauvinist, which makes him a sort of cockeyed hero, keeping the dark side in view. He was also in love with being a writer: one who after years of low-paying jobs to keep himself in booze with a roof overhead, got rich and famous for his stories, poems and novels about being a half-looped, rough-and-ready romantic. The laugh's on the people who bugged him in the first place, who are legion. Bukowski isn't generous in his assessments of others, or very interested anyhow. His novel "Hollywood," which is based on the making of the 1987 movie "Barfly" (directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway), contains only one fully drawn character, himself. Everybody else makes what might be called cameo homages.
More problematic to me is a younger generation, including actors Rourke, Sean Penn and Michael Madsen, who long ago awarded Bukowski a literary crown and laurel wreath. At the risk of ticking off one or more of these rumble-prone eminences, I need to protest. I know he's easy and enjoyable reading, my brothers, and I don't scoff at that, but so are Salinger, Hemingway and, well, Albert Camus -- to name only three -- and contrary to his own notions, Buk doesn't make it into their company. He's like a musician who can play only two or three tunes. The ending of the most popular one has an outraged blond yelling at the top of the stairs that, nine times out of 10, Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's stand-in, just fell down.
