More Notes of a Dirty Old Man

by Bukowski, Charles

  Bukowski’s column would also appear in NOLA Express edited by Darlene Fife and her husband Robert Head. Fife explains in her memoir Portraits from Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties that her husbandhad read Bukowski in one of the mimeo mags and wrote asking him for submissions. We published him from late ’68 [the first “Dirty Old Man” column was actually August 15–28, 1969] to the end of Nola Express in January, 1974. He sent us poems or, most often short stories every two weeks; always clean copy, always on time. He took his responsibilities to his editors seriously. His writings elicited more letters to the editor both for and against than any other. Bukowski occasionally responded to the letters with his own letter to the editor. We paid him $25 for each published piece. As little as this is, Bukowski told us it was this money that gave him the courage to quit his job in the post office.15

  Bukowski never met the couple and they spoke only once by phone, but he sent a letter of support when NOLA encountered censorship difficulties: it appeared in issue #53 of April, 1970 in the typical, mainly lower-case style he favored during this period:you are the liveliest thing happening in the U.S. right now. you’ve always layed your guts right on the line without laying on this juvenile hippy Romanticism which destroys papers like the Berkeley Tribe. don’t put me down as anti-hip or yip or whatever, but somehow building those paper heroes has destroyed the force of what really needs to be said. each issue of NOLA is a thing I read over and over. it’s magic . . . Wrote Evergreen about you people, hoping they can break the back of whatever is trying to break you. your courage is the quietest poem of all. you make me feel good when very few things do.16

  By this time, Bukowski had experienced difficulties of his own with the “authorities”: in 1968 the FBI began to investigate him. He would eventually leave the Post Office—not only because John Martin offered him a monthly stipend to quit and write full time, but most likely because he was about to be dismissed, not for supposed “absenteeism” but due to his work for Open City, a clear violation of his right to free speech. Bukowski’s FBI file also indicates that they began to investigate his “common law wife”—this was clearly Frances Smith, although her name has been redacted from the file—who “has been reported to have attended a number of Communist Party meetings in the Los Angeles area.” The file indicates “that one Charles Bukowski, poet, was the author of an article appearing on page 43 of the June, 1963, issue of ‘Mainstream.’” This essay, which Bukowski had submitted about the “little magazines,” contained some X-ed out language which the editor, Felix Singer, saw fit to censor. The report continues:The March, (1968) edition of the “Underground Digest, The Best of the Underground Press,” Volume I, published by the Underground Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 211, Village Station, New York, New York 10014, telephone WI 7-6900, contains an article by Charles Bukowski on pages 76-79 entitled “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” Page 79 indicates that the writer’s name may be Henry Charles Bukowski. The publication indicates at the end of the article on page 79 that the article may have originally appeared in “Open City” 5420 Carlton Way, Los Angeles, California 90027; $5 per year. Single copies of the article “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” together with a copy of the masthead of the Underground Digest are enclosed for New York and Los Angeles under obscene cover.

  New York and Los Angeles should make discreet efforts to resolve whether this article and the item appearing in the June, 1963, issue of “Mainstream” were written by the employee. If employee’s authorship is indicated copies of the articles should be designated as exhibits.17

  It is clear that the FBI was conducting surveillance in the attempt to fathom Bukowski’s political commitments during this time as well as to build a dossier against him in which his “obscene” writings for the underground press would be cited as evidence. Four “exhibits” were included at the end of the FBI report: (A) an essay about Leroi Jones from Open City, Dec. 8–14, 1967;18 (B) a column about a sexual encounter with a woman with red hair from Open City, Dec. 29–Jan. 4 1969, which is included in this volume; (C) a column from Open City, January 12–17 1968 collected in Erections as “Great Poets Die in Steaming Pots of Shit”;19 and (D) a March, 1968 column beginning “when Henry’s mother died it wasn’t bad” from Underground Digest, which appeared originally in Open City, October 18–24, 1967, and was included in Notes of A Dirty Old Man.20

  The final newspaper carrying the series (and the place where it had the longest run—February 1972–September 1976) was the Los Angeles Free Press. This incarnation was more artistically oriented, with a special “Dirty Old Man” logo appearing at the beginning of each installment depicting a comically mustachioed man with a bemused visage, a stubble beard, floppy hat, very large shoes, cigar in mouth, pen in hand making notes in a spiral notebook. “The Dirty Old Man” was now a recognizable brand. In addition, many of the installments were accompanied by Bukowski’s entertaining, Thurberesque drawings, placed at strategic points in the narrative. He even submitted a series of cartoons, “The Adventures of Clarence H. Sweetmeat,” which appeared in the September 19–25, 1975, and October 24–30, 1975, issues. The editor, Art Kunkin, continued the policy of Open City and NOLA Express of allowing Bukowski virtual carte blanche in terms of language, style, and subject matter.

  The late sixties and early seventies were a volatile time in the gender wars. Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), Norman Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex (1971), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1971), and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973) (the novel on the nightstand of the travel agent ravished in one of Bukowski’s columns) were all summary statements of the sexual revolution. The racial, political, social, and military convulsions of the times are also represented in Bukowski’s prescient commentary on current events such as gas rationing, as in the January 18, 1974, column: “Americans have cheated and lied for so long, have become so decayed under the great moral Bob Hope front that I wonder why justice hasn’t arrived and all our streets and boulevards do not have Chinese names. We babies, you and I, have been saved by our atomic stockpiles, not our ingeniousness, our guts, our souls, our courage.” And in another column he considered the oil crisis: “Who could have believed that the Arabs and their near–monopoly on oil could have caused massive layoffs here?” The story about the survivor Robert Grissom—a holdout in between the two forces of Revolutionaries and Government in a post-apocalyptic America—presages the plot of a famous recent novel, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Grissom has many characteristics in common with his creator: he listens to Mahler and Stravinsky, he is solitary, and he has gotten in trouble for his writings. This is clearly a reference to the period in 1968 when Bukowski began to be investigated by the FBI. And, in a later, 1982 incarnation of the column in Smoke Signals, Norman Mailer’s involvement in the Jack Abbot case is wittily observed.21

  Bukowski chronicled the sixties and seventies counterculture in his own inimitable fashion, and in some ways considered himself to have been the first “hippie” back in the thirties and forties. Bukowski had defended the hippies from the attacks of his publisher, Jon Webb: “Why not let your hair grow and smoke a bit of grass? Relax. Take each moment as a miracle gift. I was that way before the invention of the Bomb. I was hip on the premise born before the hips—if a man is going to die, why stockpile useless human possessions?”22 And during World War II, Bukowski was a pacifist:I was anti-war in a time of pro-war. I couldn’t tell a good war from a bad one—I still can’t. I was a hippie when there weren’t any hippies; I was a beat before the beats.

  I was a protest march, alone.

  I was in some Underground like a blind mole and no other moles even existed.

  This is why I couldn’t adjust my sights, make sense of it. I had already done it all. And when Tim Leary advised “drop out” twenty-five years after I had already dropped out, I couldn’t get excited. Leary’s big “drop out” was a loss of a professorship somewhere (Harvard?)

  I was the Underground when there wasn’t any Underground.23

 
This attitude is reflected in the story recounting his irritation with his co-worker’s attitude toward the counterculture, which he contrasts with his own more accepting stance. However, as we saw above, this did not mean that Bukowski was uncritical of the youth movement. As he wrote to Darlene Fife, he objected to “this juvenile hippie Romanticism which destroys papers like the Berkeley Tribe.” Bukowski wanted perhaps a bit of Realitätsprinzip—a bit of German toughness and backbone to accompany all the peace and love. Like Robert Grissom, Bukowski ultimately identified with neither side of the cultural conflict, rejecting conformity with mainstream American society even as he remained skeptical of the counterculture’s attempts to revolutionize it.

  Notes of A Dirty Old Man also allowed Bukowski the opportunity to explore his experiences from childhood to the present and to transform them into thinly veiled autobiographical fiction. The series became a kind of extended roman à clef in which the events of Bukowski’s life were treated in a variety of imaginative ways. For example, his traumatic childhood is portrayed in the tale concerning Petey, a 13-year-old boy with “strict parents.” At the close the narrative veers into the fantastic as his abusive parents meet their deserved terrible fate. In one column, Bukowski interviews his publisher Jon Webb and discusses the art of book-making: Webb and his wife Gypsy Lou published The Outsider magazine as well as Bukowski’s It Catches My Heart in Its Hands (1963); in another narrative, he describes a rollicking journey by train to New Orleans to visit the Webbs in order to work on the second, lavishly produced book of his poetry, Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965). Yet another story, describing a trip with his daughter to the beach at Venice, packs a good deal of Bukowski’s life aetatis 52 into a brief space: his separation from Frances Smith, the tension between the estranged couple, his love for their daughter Marina, and his struggle to preserve a balance in his own life between destruction and creativity, between hate and love. The swift narrative movement, deft dialogue, and terse descriptive style poignantly reveal the tender connection between father and daughter as adult ugliness and violence threaten the sand castle she has constructed, symbolic of the fragile innocent world of childhood.

  A love triangle involving Bukowski’s then-girlfriend Linda King becomes a tale of an evening watching the fights with “Patricia” at the Olympic Auditorium. And in July 1973, Bukowski went with King on a trip to Utah and got lost in the woods, which is reflected in an extended comic sequence which was later partially used in his novel Women, yet with significant passages omitted: for example, the lovely scene of his encounter with the brown eyes of the squirrel, which so moved him that he refrained from committing suicide. His burgeoning fame as a reader of his poetry is humorously sketched in a tale of his trip to Detroit. And we are given a portrait of the artist as an older man in “My Friend, the Gambler,” which describes the preliminary stages of the creation of the film Barfly. Now Bukowski is sixty-five, suddenly immersed in the Hollywood whirl (which he would satirize in his 1987 novel Hollywood) along with the film director Barbet Schroeder (“Jean Sasoon”) and Bukowski’s wife Linda Lee Beighle (“Cristina”).

  From January 1983 to December 1984, Bukowski contributed “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” to High Times magazine. In addition to the long story “My Friend, the Gambler,” he also composed a lively set of aphorisms entitled “Ecce Hetero.” Like La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche (the title is a play on Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo), and E.M. Cioran, he was especially fond of the form, examples of which are scattered throughout his work. In Notes of A Dirty Old Man, some of the finest are: “The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable” (a variation on Nietzsche’s “We have Art so we will not perish from Truth”); “I’d rather hear about a live American bum than a dead Greek God”; “There is nothing more boring than the truth”; “The well balanced individual is insane”; “Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing”; “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.” Other Bukowskian wisdoms include: “The problem with women is that they are problems” and “I like dogs better than men and cats better than dogs and myself best of all, drunk in my underwear looking out the window.” Thus we see in his High Times column his continued affection for the form.

  Notes of A Dirty Old Man—the book as well as uncollected columns—would have an impact on other artists. They would be read attentively by a young musician named Tom Waits: “I just thought this was remarkable . . . This guy’s the writer of the century and he’s being published in this kind of street rag, which seemed kind of poetic and perfect . . . and of course you felt much more like you had discovered him as well—that he wasn’t being brought to you but you had to dig and find him.”24 And Raymond Carver’s biographer notes that “Open City, the city’s alternative paper, ran a weekly screed of stories and opinion called ‘Notes of A Dirty Old Man,’ by Charles Bukowski, then a middle-aged postal worker and little-known poet. Ray liked Southern California so well for a couple of weeks that he thought of settling there.”25 Carver said that Bukowski had been “a kind of hero” to him.26 Bukowski’s “new journalism” was a creative and imaginative use of all his genius as a writer to inspire and shock his readers into a new engagement with the truths of intractable reality. And more than forty years after the Dirty Old Man was born, he will surely find new fans among those hungering for alternatives to the trivia offered by what still passes for American culture today.

  NOTES

  1 Aaron Krumhansl, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Primary Publications of Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1999, p. 41.

  2 “If I Only Could Be Asleep,” in Absence of the Hero: Uncollected Stories and Essays Vol. 2, 1946—1992, ed. David Stephen Calonne. San Francisco: City Lights, 2010, pp. 42–43.

  3 Bukowski, “Dirty Old Man Confesses,” in Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, ed. David Stephen Calonne. San Francisco: City Lights, 2008, p. 102. On the LA Free Press, see John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 37–46. According to McMillian: “In 1967, one irate staffer, John Bryan, left the Freep to start a rival paper (Open City) after Kunkin refused to print a photograph of a disfigured napalm victim (apparently for fear of offending advertisers),” p. 239, no. 84.

  4 Bukowski had published a review of the Artaud Anthology in the Los Angeles Free Press on April 22, 1966. See Portions, pp. 49–53. A week before the debut of the first “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column, Bukowski’s review of A.E. Hotchner’s biography of Ernest Hemingway, “An Old Drunk Who Ran Out of Luck,” appeared in the May 5–11 issue of Open City. See Portions, pp. 54–56.

  5 Scott Harrison, former proprietor of the Abandoned Planet bookstore in San Francisco, kindly supplied me with information about John Bryan and Open City.

  6 Bukowski, “Foreword,” Notes of A Dirty Old Man. San Francisco: City Lights, 1973, p. 6.

  7 Ibid. p. 6.

  8 “Bukowski on Bukowski,” Absence of the Hero, p. 57.

  9 On the “working class” and literature, see The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story, ed. Blanche H. Gelfant (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Larry Smith, “The American Working-Class Short Story,” pp. 81–93.

  10 See Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2010), p. 21; Dostoevsky was also a major influence on the Beats as well as on Henry Miller. See Maria Bloshteyn, The Making of a Counterculture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). On Bukowski and Dostoevsky, see Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am/Interviews & Encounters 1963–1993, ed. David Stephen Calonne (Northville: Sundog Press, 2003), pp. 41, 74, 139, 180–81, 198, 243, 267, 269, 275.

  11 Bukowski, Notes of A Dirty Old Man, p. 9.

  12 Ibid., p. 132.

  13 Bukowski, “what have I seen,” in The Continual C
ondition: Poems, ed. John Martin (New York: Ecco, 2009), p. 110.

  14 Michel Foucault, “The Repressive Hypothesis” from The History of Sexuality, Volume I, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 318–19. Bukowski’s work has been included in several anthologies of erotic literature. See Fetish: An Anthology of Fetish Fiction, ed. John Yau (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), “Love for $17.50,” pp. 23–28; Love Is Strange, ed. Richard Glyn Jones (London: Indigo, 1998), “The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California,” pp. 143–153; The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, ed. David Lehman (New York: Scribner Poetry, 2008), “Hunk of Rock,” pp. 67–74.

  15 Darlene Fife, Portraits from Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties (New Orleans: Surregional Press, 2000), p. 4. On Bukowski, NOLA, and an account of the “persistent harassment” the paper experienced, see Laurence Leamer, The Paper Revolutionaries: The Rise of the Underground Press (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 146–52.

  16 Ibid., p. 15. On Francisco McBride’s artwork, which illustrated Bukowski’s column, see p. 26. On Bukowski and New Orleans, see Jeff Weddle, Bohemian New Orleans: The Story of The Outsider and Loujon Press (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007); “Writing New Orleans” by Andrei Codrescu in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, A New Literary History of America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 405.