Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  2 See “Carson McCullers” in The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001, p. 35.

  3 Juvenal, Satires VII, ll. 50–52: “Nam si discedas, laqueo tenet ambitiosi/consuetudo mali, tenet insanabile multos/scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde sensecit.” “You can’t escape [you’re caught up in the noose of bad ambitious habit]; there are so many possessed by an incurable endemic writer’s itch that becomes a sick obsession.” Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. Peter Green, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 56. On literary creativity and hypergraphia, see Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

  4 For Bukowski and the little magazines see Abel Debritto, Who’s Big in the “Littles”: A Critical Study of the Impact of the Little Magazines and Small Press Publications on the Career of Charles Bukowski from 1940 to 1969. Ph.D. thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2009.

  5 Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982, Chap. 34, p. 146.

  6 Debritto, Who’s Big in the Littles, p. 118. Debritto also reveals that Bukowski corresponded with Burnett from 1945 to 1955, again dispelling the myth of his dropping out of the literary world during his “ten-year drunk.”

  7 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. p. 40.

  8 Carl Weissner’s translations led directly to Bukowski’s success in Germany and Europe. For Bukowski’s connection to Germany and Carl Weissner, see Jay Dougherty’s interview with Bukowski, “Charles Bukowski and the Outlaw Spirit” in Charles Bukowski, Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews & Encounters 1963–1993, ed. and with an Introduction by David Stephen Calonne. Northville: Sundog Press, 2003, pp. 231–235. On Bukowski’s German reception, see Horst Schmidt, The Germans Love Me For Some Reason: Charles Bukowski und Deutschland. Augsburg: MaroVerlag, 2006.

  9 Maurice Berger, “Libraries Full of Tears: The Beats and the Law,” in Lisa Phillips, Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965. Paris/New York: Whitney Museum of American Art/Flammarion, 1995, pp. 122–137.

  10 See Barry Miles, Charles Bukowski. London: Virgin, 2005, pp. 152–153 and Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, New York: Grove Press, 1998, pp. 83–84.

  11 Steven Clay, Rodney Phillips, and Jerome Rothenberg, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1969–1980. New York: Granary Books, 1998, p. 48. On d.a. levy, see d.a. levy & the mimeograph revolution, eds. Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, Huron, Ohio, Bottom Dog Press, 2007. For Bukowski’s essay in support of Lowell, see Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, pp. 61–62. On the underground, see Jean-Francois Bizot, 20 Trips from the Counter-culture: Graphics and Stories from the Underground Press Syndicate. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006; Diane Kruchkow and Curt Johnson, eds., Green Isle in the Sea: An Informal History of the Alternative Press, 1960–85. Highland Park: December Press, 1986; Roger Lewis, Outlaws of America: The Underground Press and its Context: Notes on a Cultural Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

  12 Jack Micheline, Sixty Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints. San Francisco: FMSBW, 1999. See Miles, p. 160; Sounes, p. 93. Micheline on Bukowski, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, ed. David Meltzer, pp. 226–227. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001.

  13 Kenneth Rexroth, “There’s Poetry in a Ragged Hitch-hiker,” The New York Times, July 5, 1964. Bukowski on Rexroth, Screams from the Balcony: Selected Letters 1960–1970, ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993, p. 165, p. 330. On Bukowski and the Beats, see Jean-François Duval, Buk et Les Beats: Essai Sur La Beat Generation. Paris: Editions Michalon, 1998. English edition, trans. Alison Ardron, Bukowski and the Beats. Northville: Sun Dog Press, 2002.

  14 Harold Norse on Bukowski, see Memoirs of a Bastard Angel: A Fifty-Year Literary and Erotic Odyssey. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989, pp. 420–422; 424–426; and “Laughter in Hell,” in Drinking with Bukowski: Recollections of the Poet Laureate of Skid Row, ed. Daniel Weizman, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000, pp. 91–96.

  15 Bukowski’s fine memoir in Open City of his meeting with Neal Cassady and Cassady’s death in Mexico is anthologized in Ann Charters, The Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin 1992, pp. 438–444; David Kherdian, Beat Voices: An Anthology of Beat Poetry. New York: Henry Holt, 1995, pp. 120–123; and in Jeffrey H. Weinberg, ed. Writers Outside the Margin. Sudbury: Water Row Press, 1986, pp. 94–96. Charters also included another of Bukowski’s “Notes” columns in The Portable Sixties Reader, New York: Penguin, 2003, pp. 436–439.

  16 On Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, see Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. San Francisco: City Lights Books and Harper and Row, 1980, p. 210, p. 221; also see Barry Silesky, Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time. New York: Warner Books, 1990, pp. 177–178; Bukowski’s poem “The Bard of San Francisco” is an homage to Ferlinghetti; see onthebus Issue 14, Vol. VI, No. 2, 1997, pp. 30–32, collected in Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1996, pp. 233–235.

  17 See Sounes, pp. 140–141.

  18 See Debritto, p. 214, 330.

  19 Bukowski remarked, “I give poetry readings—for money. Strictly survival. I don’t like to do it but I quit my job last January 9 and now I’ve become what you’d call a literary hustler. I do things now that I wouldn’t have done before. I don’t like to do it at all.” See Sunlight Here I Am, p. 47.

  20 Bukowski’s obsessive returning to the site of his traumatic wounds also recalls Lacan’s conception of the unconscious. Slavoj Zizek declares that “the unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. Therein lies Lacan’s version of Freud’s motto Wo es war, soll ich werden (Where it was, I am to become): not ‘The ego should conquer the id,’ the site of the unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare to approach the site of my truth.’ What awaits me ‘there’ is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with.” Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007, p. 3. Bukowski often uses humor to live with that unbearable truth.

  21 e.e. cummings, A Selection of Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965, p. 155.

  22 On Rabelais see Bukowski’s “he died April 9, 1553” in The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps: New Poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001, pp. 218-19. And in an interview from 1981 he explained: “. . . the Decameron, Boccaccio. That is what influenced Women a great deal. I loved his idea that sex was so ridiculous, nobody could handle it. It was not so much love with him; it was sex. Love is funnier, more ridiculous. That guy! He could really laugh at it. He must have really gotten burnt about five thousand times to write that stuff. Or maybe he was just a fag; I don’t know. So, love is ridiculous because it can’t last, and sex is ridiculous because it doesn’t last long enough.” Sunlight Here I Am, p. 179.

  23 For Bukowski’s favorite films, see Sunlight, p. 230. On black humor, see Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties, New York: Basic Books, 1977, “Black Humor and History: The Early Sixties.”

  24 On the UPS, see Bizot, pp. 6, 226–227.

  25 For a superb study of Bukowski and violence, see Alexandre Thiltges, Bukowski ou Les Contes de la Violence Ordinaire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Thiltges’ monograph, unfortunately not yet translated into English, is the best single work of Bukowski scholarship to have appeared to date.

  26 Bukowski had submitted the story to Curt Johnson, publisher of Candid Press, to whom he wrote a letter dated December 3, 1970: “Just glad I could curve one by you guys. That $45 check didn’t bounce anyhow and allowed me to get some repairs on my old ’62 Comet to get it running again so I could get around to my chickenshit poetry readings where I read half-drunk and hustle up a few more bucks. Now listening to Haydn. I gotta be crazy. Enjoyed writing
the story, though. Read in the paper where they had caught some cannibals somewhere—Texas I think—and when they pulled them over this gal was just cleaning the meat off the fingers of a hand, nibbling. . . . I took it from there.” Uncollected letter, Brown University Library.