Tender Only When Boiled : SEPTUAGENARIAN STEW Stories & Poems <i> by Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow Press: $25 cloth; 0-87685-795-0 $14, paper; 0-87685-794-2; 380 pp.) </i>

Charles Bukowski is the author of 45 books, and to read one is perhaps to read them all. Bukowski is the chronicler of ragged, unkillable winos, the pale, beer-bellied, out-of-work writer lounging in twisted sheets, the cuckold and those dreaming of becoming cuckolds--in short, a world inhabited with bad luck and smart-alecky snipes.

This beautifully grimy life certainly is evident in his new collection, “Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems,” which, at nearly 400 pages, is a hefty portion of poems and short stories.

For Bukowski, the sordid life is inexhaustible. His first book, “Flower, Fists and Bestial Wail” (1960), was peopled with oddballs on the edge of reaching their destiny: the exquisite hangover that resonates into another afternoon of cheap (and sometimes expensive) drink. Thirty years later, his new collection still feeds off the old obsessions--drink, “bad women,” a few good women, his father and mother, the race track, his years sorting mail at the post office--and his loyalty to friends to whom the average pedestrian would give room passing on the sidewalk.

The pedestrian would make room for the hunkering characters in the story “Vengeance of the Damned.” The story is about Tom and Max who one evening, as they settle to sleep in a flophouse, begin to think that they can organize the bums--the damned, as he calls them--so that they, too, can cash in a piece of the material world. The next day, they organize a band of bums and spur them on to crash a fancy store in downtown Los Angeles and swipe what they please. They carry off coats and watches and then quickly blend into downtown, which, for the poorly dressed, is easy to do.

It’s a convoluted and implausible story. It’s the dream of a child saying to himself, “I wish I had a lot of money. Then I would buy myself a rich house and feed the poor, which is me.” It is a story where the down-and-out can root for his kind. In some ways, it’s the reverse of what a reader feels when picking up a romance novel: Instead of tears for the lovers on a beach, embraced in their passionate speech, the readers of Bukowski are slamming their fists on fly-specked table tops and egging on the ever-resourceful bums to trespass even deeper into commerce for what is rightly theirs.

The portraits of downtown life are almost always moving--in spite of the grime and foul language spit through rotten teeth--in part because the author’s identification with the common life is honest and so bewilderingly caring that it can stump more than one reader wondering why he relishes this seediness. In the poem “Great Slob,” he praises himself, beer bottle in hand, bragging that he is a natural slob. In “Moving Up the Ladder,” he is the writer sitting in the rubble of unpublished manuscripts, with yet another beer. In “Isn’t It Funny,” he is switching channels in search of the right face, this time with no beer.

The finest story in the collection is “The Life of a Bum,” which is about, well, a bum named Harry who wakes to a hangover and a sky that is “tall as hell.” Harry raises himself up. There is no God to save him from his headache, and no devil with his sack of temptation. Life is flat. Harry walks about while black, white, red and brown soldiers--”those flowers of hatred” as he so beautifully describes them--scream at him as they pass in their Army truck. Truckers scream, too, and punks mock his ragged clothes. So for Henry, the author’s alter ego who has appeared in other stories, poems, and even in novels, life is not Brie and stone-ground crackers. In the early part of his day, Henry staggers about in his odyssey for something to eat.

But how much can the reader take? We see the author drag a cardboard suitcase from one state to the next. We see plenty of rats and buckled beer cans. Vomit explodes on walls. Smoke and profanity stinks up the air. A character urinates into a wash basin, cleans it with a splash of water from a spittoon, and then lowers his face into the basin to wash away his drunken sleep. How much can we read of this before the story is the same, and in its sameness begins to grow a long beard of boredom and repetition? Bukowski obviously attracts a sustained readership, many of whom feel, as I do, for the glimpse of common-day horrors that repel, yet at the same time, make us want to continue to eyeball them for their richly disheveled mess.

In terms of writing itself, a complaint could be raised that Bukowski’s poems don’t seem individual enough but are rather jottings that grumble out a few lines. In almost all cases, the poems that tend to be linear--that is, thin in appearance--are in fact thin on poetry. In “We Must,” he chants that we must face our own private darkness, that we must take that ski slope of life and ride with our boyish beauty. The idea is fair enough, but the writing is devoid of memorable lines. The writing falls off to a flat ending: “Nobody is going/to do it/for us.”

Bukowski is playing out his role of the dirty old man with a comic grudge. To the timid onlooker, this may seem too grotesque and even pornographic, the kind of writing that would make Jesse Helms and his censoring cohorts feed his name into a computer for future reference.

While we can say that the arena of experience is the same, for many of his readers it’s the welcome familiarity that calls them back.