636 The American Century: Literature since 1945Western society and in particular America, as one “rotting away, dying piecemeal,” a
denial of all that is truly life. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) and its sequel
Remember to Remember (1947) sum up his feelings about the American scene, which
he describes in terms of a prison or a cancer ward, a place isolated from real health
and life. And works like Sexus (1949), Plexus (1953), and Nexus (1960), The Rosy
Crucifixion as Miller called this trilogy, continue his fictive autobiography in a form
that is, as usual, deliberately formless, obedient only to what Miller saw as the
sprawling, insistent rhythms of existence, and the self.
“I AM. That covers all experience, all wisdom, all truth,” Miller wrote in Remember
to Remember. Charles Bukowski might have said something similar, although he
would have said it in a much more laconic, downbeat way. The son of an American
soldier and a German woman, Bukowski grew up in Los Angeles, worked mainly in
unskilled jobs and only began to write when he was 35. Bukowski shared a number of
impulses with Miller: a distrust of art and the artistic establishment, a commitment to
living his own life outside the norms of American society (in 1962, Outsider magazine
named him “Outsider of the Year” as a reward), a related commitment to recording
that commitment in forms that hovered somewhere between the imagined and the
literal, the fictive and the autobiographical. But Bukowski as he was and how he
perceived himself – in, say, the fictive persona of Henry Chinaski – was much more
the tough, lowbrow outsider, hard living and hard drinking, floating casually through
a world of sex and violence: in short, a drifter rather than, like Miller, a seeker. Bukowski
produced his first book of poems, Flower, Fish and Bestial Wail, in 1960. Like most of
his work, it was published by a small press and reached out to an underground rather
than a mainstream audience. It was followed by more than thirty poetic collections,
ending with The Last Night of Earth, Poems in 1992. His stories appeared in several
collections, such as Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary
Madness (1972), as well as in little magazines. And novels like Notes of a Dirty Old Man
(1969), Post Office (1971), Women (1978), and Ham on Rye (1982) turned his life on
the seedy edge of things into hardboiled narratives that, characteristically, combine
the eye of the camera, with its disposition for empirical detail, with the inner eye
of the fabulist, alert to the nightmare of the streets. There are no large gestures in
Bukowski’s work. Using an off-hand, free-flowing line or sentence and an off-hand,
casual idiom he simply records things as they pass in a cryptic, even sardonic way.
And what passes before him, most of the time, is the other America: life among the
underclass, the bums, the dropouts, the dispossessed who cast a shadow over the
national dream of success. This commitment to the writer as recording instrument
does not, however, inhibit judgment. Bukowski is a frustrated moralist, in a way. “I am
not aiming high,” he says in one of his poems, “ / I am only trying to keep myself alive /
just a little longer.” But the sheer difficulty of survival, for him and for the street people
that surround him, is a measure clearly of the failure of the society from which he and
they are excluded. Slyly, Bukowski reminds us of what another writer, Kenneth
Rexroth, called “the unfulfilled promise of ‘Song of Myself ’ and Huckleberry Finn.”
A writer who made the unfulfillment of that promise his primary subject was
J. D. Salinger. Salinger began writing stories for magazines, which he did not chooseGGray_c05.indd 636ray_c 05 .indd 636 8 8/1/2011 7:31:36 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 36 PM