A virtuoso of the single note

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.

Bukowski, whose third of five new books of unpublished poems is due in January, had endearing qualities.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.

Henry James’ measure for literature was the amount of “felt life” it contained. A great part of Bukowski’s value is that he brings into view a darker world than is generally permissible in mainstream American writing. William Burroughs’ first novel, “Junkie,” though impeccably written, wasn’t considered publishable after World War II, not because its subject was criminal lowlife in Manhattan but because the narrator never spoke of his own or anyone else’s moral rehabilitation. It was originally published in the early ‘50s as one side of an Ace “double giant” mass paperback under Burroughs’ pseudonym William Lee. Bukowski’s work has similarities to “Junkie,” though that wouldn’t include the Californian’s romance with being a writer come hell or high water.

I don’t want to diminish a considerable achievement. Bukowski has given writing and reading to a large public that might otherwise shine it, as they say. At the same time, one might hope that such an act would provide an entree into the larger house of literature. What seems to happen instead is that getting to the front room where Bukowski presides doesn’t spur many readers to move farther inside.

That may be traceable to the writer’s general disdain for his literary peers and elders. In “Hollywood,” he remarks that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heart attack at 44 in Los Angeles was the result of his going on the wagon. Presumably if Bukowski had been there, he could have saved the author of “The Great Gatsby” by pouring him another drink. On the other hand, Bukowski might have written him off as a has-been and not bothered.

In the end, despite his let-’er-rip persona, Bukowski is a practiced literary stylist with a product that never seems to spur him to another threshold. This may or may not have something to do with alcoholism. In the 12-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous, they say that an addict or alcoholic remains at the emotional age he was when his addiction took hold and advances only when he goes into recovery. Bukowski appears to have been uninterested in recovery and by this measure presumably remained emotionally the same age throughout his career. What you encounter in his stories is a man who is palpably thrilled to be able to write about being a drunk: that is, to be a practicing drunk and a practicing writer at the same time. It’s a macho turn of, I suppose, unexpected originality.

What about that, then? What about risking getting into a car wreck or setting fire to the bed or getting beaten up badly after having gotten loaded one too many times? That is the drama of a Bukowski story. “The only thing that matters is how you walk through the fire,” he wrote, a phrase somebody put on a billboard on Olympic Boulevard recently.

The crux of it, I think, has to do with keeping one’s humanity and vulnerability in play after signing off on the give-and-take of an ongoing relationship. In effect, the macho hero moves us in his willingness to face death in lieu of a letting-go in tamer circumstances: love, friendship, study or any other less physically threatening form of surrender.

In his book “A Separate Reality” about the Yaqui Indian brujo Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda, a writer very much in the Hemingway lineage, speaks of death as “an advisor.” And surely awareness of death quickens one’s sense of vulnerability, in lieu of more domestic concerns that seem to play on the self to the same effect: mate, children, parents and social and political commitments.

For a man of Bukowski’s generation, one problem with being a writer, a poet into the bargain, was that such a calling could cast doubt on one’s manhood. The finer feelings can get a man into trouble in our day of corporate gunslingers, let alone the earlier one of the John Wayne-Ernest Hemingway male prototype that was Bukowski’s immediate inheritance. In his Paris Review interview, James Jones, who wrote the epic World War II novel “From Here to Eternity,” thus becoming one of two primary inheritors of the Hemingway mantle (the other being Norman Mailer), remarks that in a period in which men are challenged to fight to prove their masculinity, not fighting could be a sign of greater courage.

Jones’ remark opens a window into the deeper levels of male consciousness in our time. On the other hand, here is our old friend Bukowski/Chinaski, shot to pieces again after his latest roisterous romantic encounter. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, anyway, with the exception of getting in a dig now and then at some presumed competition in the room. Bukowski is fine, I want to say. But can he really be a model of the first-rank artist? Or isn’t he, rather, an easy interlude -- and thank God for it -- before you move on to something actually great. “Middlemarch,” say. Or “Fathers and Sons.” Or, closer to our own time, “Doctor Zhivago.” Or Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

Getting wrecked may be one way to access a larger color palette of self than might otherwise be available to a man of Bukowski’s time and temper. But the result is not going to be complicated, and it isn’t likely that he’s going to be able to see or write more than one character in the round. Finally, that’s what the limit is: It all keeps coming back to the rugged, beleaguered one, all alone in his room with a bottle and his typewriter. *