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Deadbeat as cult writer, 6 June 2004
Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California
For those of us who haven't read any of his writing, Charles Bukowski, as seen in this informative, engaging new documentary by John Dullaghan, is a craggy deadbeat everyman, a working class L.A. writer with enough cult status to have some cool famous fan admirers. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Waits, Bono of U2, and Sean Penn are the main guys who read lines or speak in admiring and affectionate terms of Bukowski. He also had a string of women, some wives, the last one, Linda Lee, a beautiful, classy lady with a tough and tender edge worthy of Lauren Bacall. More important yet for his reputation perhaps, he had an editor and publisher who put him on a monthly salary and brought out a lot of his books, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, who saw Bukowski as an updated Whitman, a man of the people spewing wild poetry.
Somebody else told me he was the kind of writer you like if you're young and wild and drink a lot, the kind of tortured outsider persona that appeals to a 22-year-old, but that you wouldn't go back to. If you used to hit the sauce and gave it up you may feel Bukowski's prose has lost its flavor, like a doper's stoned insights. There are those who consider the writer a case of arrested development. Be that as it may, all his life Bukowski never wanted to be anything but a writer and never stopped writing, poems, then stories, finally novels. Two of his books most often mentioned are Post Office and Ham on Rye.
These may be young men's books with more rough flavor than depth of thought, but the fascination, for the young man, is with something solid: the hard nuggets of brutal boring existence, the courage of the deadbeat who's seen it all and bravely slogs on. First there's the six years, age six to twelve, of being beaten severely once a week with a razor strop by his ex-soldier father. An experience like that, Bukowski says, is good for a writer because it teaches you to tell the truth. Next he had ulcerative acne vulgaris as an adolescent and his face was covered with pullulating boils that left his face craggy and pitted for life -- though there are angles in some of the varied films from different decades that show him tanned and sunny, almost elegant-looking and possessed of an evident macho sexiness that explains in part the many women in his life. The other part is that he was a late bloomer as a ladies' man and took advantage of the fame of his later years to make up for lost time.
After the beatings and the acne Bukowski started visiting Skid Row to prepare for his future life. As his second decade wore on he wandered round the country staying at flophouses, rooming houses and cheap hotels, drunk, obviously, most of the time, throughout the Forties, excused by a psychiatrist from wartime military service. In the Fifties he settled into a minimal working stiff existence: employee at the post office, delivering mail (`living hell'); later on sorting it all night (which was so monotonous he'd get so he couldn't lift his arm), and, because he couldn't sleep, spending the day drinking and writing. Then, when a new addiction to gambling kicked in, he'd be at the racetrack playing the horses and play barfly in the afternoons brawling and flirting. He trashes the Barbet Schroeder movie from his screenplay about that part of his life, says Mickey Rourke is too theatrical and flowery; and he wrote a book called Hollywood after the filmmaking experience to show the dream factory was even stupider and faker than he'd ever imagined.
Eventually a regular column in an L.A. weekly got Bukowski noticed. Then John Martin stepped in with his financial and moral support and through the Seventies and Eighties the man's reputation and financial success grew to the point where he moved to a nice house in San Pedro with his lovely wife. He wasn't expected to live after developing severe bleeding ulcers in his thirties (1956) but he recovered and had a new burst of creativity. In his last few years he got tuberculosis, lost 60 pounds, and gave up heavy drinking. He died soon after being diagnosed with leukemia, at 73.
Watching this documentary you feel good because of the man's clarity and humor. Simplistic his expression may be, but it has the brilliant directness of the practiced writer who wears no mask. But despite all the tastes of his writing he and his celebrity admirers provide, I still don't know if I'd want to read some of his prolific oeuvre, and the picture of a similar, but sober, figure named Harvey Pekar in American Splendor (Bukowski too was wildly re-imagined by R. Crumb) seems more complex and multilayered, while no less down to earth. It's no secret that Harry Dean, Bono, Sean, and Mr. Waits are enthusiastic boozers themselves, and that's one big reason why `Hank' Bukowski's their bard and patron saint.
And if you compare Bukowski to another heavy user (but a more wildly adventurous one), William Burroughs, his mind and work don't seem as rich or as interesting as Burroughs', nor his life as intensely engaged with the issues of his times as the Beats'. Nevertheless, that's not to impugn the authenticity of his voice. There's nobody quite like Bukowski; hence, no doubt, his cult status, and the way people from other countries, places where the brawling and the articulate life are less often combined, find him so fascinating and so accessible.
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Struggling With Bukowski
by John Dullaghan, director of Bukowski: Born into This
Author Charles Bukowski is best known as the real-life model for the movie Barfly. In prose and poetry, he takes the most desperate rock-bottom experienceslcoholism, bad jobs, turbulent relationships, life innumerable heartbreaksnd writes about them in a way that virtually anybody can relate to. His language is simple and sometimes salty; his perspective is almost always original, unexpected and brilliant.
I discovered Bukowski's work in 1994, just after his death. At that time, I was working in an advertising agency, writing commercials for Apple Computer. While the computer itself may have been ntuitive, easy and friendly,the agency, and client, were not. One day I checked myself into the emergency room with chest painshanks to five straight years of sixty-hour work weeks. Around that time, I read Post Office, Bukowski's account of his fourteen-year stint with the U.S. Postal Service. He was describing the intolerable hell of the post office, and also my office. And my life. I was instantly hooked.
I started reading and collecting Bukowsk's books. Soon, I encountered all kinds of people, such as bookseller Red Stodolsky, who knew Bukowski personally. Hearing their incredible stories, I realized somebody had to collect them. At first, I thought of doing so in a book. I contacted Linda Bukowski who, somewhat amazingly, agreed to work with me. She also suggested I do a documentary. Why the hell not?
So, armed with zero knowledge, experience or credibility, I began. I read all of Bukowsk's books; I visited special collections at university libraries; I hired a private investigator to find people; I worked with Linda Bukowski, and helped her organize the Charles Bukowski archive; and I started shooting interviews, paying for it all with my advertising salary.
To say that I was in over my head is an understatement. Luckily, I did have two things going for me: passion and perseverance. The people I interviewed must have picked up on this, which kept them from laughingt least to my face. Along the way, divine intervention must have also played a part, for the right people, the right information and the right help always arrived at just the moment they were required. In many ways, I truly believe, this film was the creation of some kind of universal will; I just helped.
After five years, I had shot seventy-five interviews and had collected roughly thirty hours of Bukowski footage, and hundreds of photos, from around the world. By this time, I had also quit my agency job, had become a father and homeowner, and was freelancing full time. For my wife, the hand wringing began in earnestut she stayed the course, and has provided a strong foundation throughout.
In 2001, I contacted Victor Livingston, the editor of Crumb, to help me bring order to this Mount Everest of material. Over the next year and a half, we began the painstaking task of viewing, organizing and transcribing hundreds of hours of material. Eventually, Victor began to assemble scenes, and a structure emerged. Along the way, friends viewed our progress, offering invaluable suggestions.
By October 2002, the film was only two-thirds completed. It still had a visible time code, the sound was barely audible, key scenes were missing and it had no ending. Nonetheless, we submitted it into the Sundance Film Festival. When it was accepted into the festival a month later, out of thousands of entries, we were shocked. From that point, we secured domestic and foreign distribution deals. The critical reviews were also very positive, the film was invited to subsequent festivals, and audience reaction has been overwhelmingly gratifying.
That was the film part. Then, there the Bukowski part.
By the end of the project I had interviewed over 150 people in total, who had some level of personal involvement with Bukowski. I talked to relatives, teenage friends, fellow postal workers, other poets, girlfriends, and particularly his wife Linda, at great length. I tried to capture his life accurately in two hours, with a film aimed at both Bukowski neophytes, as well as hard-core fans. Within these limitations, I believe the film solidly succeeds as a biographys a number of Bukowsk's friends have told me.
Victor and I wanted the film to be authentic, using as much of Bukowski as we couldelling his story in his own words, rather than using the voice of the mniscient narrator.This was supplemented by the narration of those who knew him. For the score, composer Jim Stemple employed the style of the classical music Bukowski listened and wrote to. Sara Hodges, our title designer, even created a typeface out of his actual handwriting.
From the very beginning, we tried to dig beyond the ukowski Mythhat of the raunchy, vulgar, eer-drinking machineto show the highly perceptive artist underneath. Then again, this ythwas carefully created and sculpted, mostly by Bukowski himself. So the facts keep looping back upon themselves. In movie scripts, people lives can follow perfect haracter arcs.In reality, they rarely do. People go to their graves deeply conflicted and mysterious, with loose ends still unraveled. With someone as complex as Bukowski, a biographer or filmmaker has to accept and embrace these kinds of contradictions. Sometimes there just no easy answer.
At the end of the process for me, howeverar more important than the myriad biographical detailss what Bukowski represents. As I began experiencing the gut-wrenching financial hardships of making my own film, I came to empathize with his own struggle to express himself. Throughout all the pain he endured in his life physically abusive father, alcoholism, disfiguring acne, artistic failure, a string of unfaithful, abusive relationshipse prevailed. He took the negatives and, through decades of perseverance, transformed them through his writing. Being an outsider, he used his loneliness as a haven to create. He wrote poetry and stories that other outsiders could also relate tond be inspired by. In the end, Bukowski's life is a supreme example of self-empowerment. And the real meaning of the story isn just how wonderful Bukowski was. But how wonderful we all are, when we really decide to go for it.
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