Madman Incarnate
EVANIER, DAVID
Madman Incarnate Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness By Charles Bukowski City Lights. 478 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by David Evanier Author, "The Swinging...
...He will never be a peaceful or a happy man...
...He has also been accorded the recognition of being included in the Penguin Modern Poets series...
...Bukowski may be right on both scores...
...The Bukowski phenomenon is a peculiar one...
...Such recent counterculture gurus as Hermann Hesse, J. R. R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut are already fading from the scene...
...His words rip across the page, angry, intense, sometimes hilarious and, at his best, as finely honed as the masters...
...During those years of obscurity, he developed considerable self-discipline, depth, and a unique, acerbic writing style...
...The pot comes AFTER the Art is already there, after the artist is already there...
...Typically, his new book, largely a collection of his old Open City columns, is a very mixed bag of good, mediocre, and awful fiction...
...For several years his column was carried by the now-defunct Los Angeles underground newspaper, Open City...
...The pot does not produce the Art...
...he feels that he is the only readable writer to emerge from the comicbook mentality of the underground press, and that he has been exploited by it...
...Reviewed by David Evanier Author, "The Swinging Head-hunter...
...Apparently, the latest campus generation has little interest in even those writers who try to discard the old forms in order to understand the irrationality of us all: Ionesco, Beckett, Kafka, Celine, Pinter, Barthel-me, etc...
...Wherever he appears in print (usually in publications with names like Unmuzzled Ox or Camels Coming), he makes the other writers look bad indeed...
...His popularity with the counterculture stems from his vulnerability, self-destructiveness, honesty and erraticism: He is the writer as madman incarnate, bottle in one hand, challenging the world, and doomed...
...This, of course, is what distinguishes madmen from motorcycle policemen...
...He has had 20 books published by little presses...
...Still, his is an original talent...
...Well into middle age, he is still at war with landladies, recalcitrant girl friends, and other states of helplessness...
...Whatever their shortcomings, they say things in a way that has never been said before...
...A long period of self-deprivation affords an artist two alternatives: to create a finely wrought vision of life from his suffering, or to abandon control and bellow at the moon, cursing his fate...
...Bukowski vacillates between the two...
...He is a man working out of the desperation of his own life...
...we realize they are the ones whose presence cannot be denied...
...Suddenly, out of some trick, he's known...
...Had to walk down to the hall bathroom to take a crap...
...But no matter how much fame Bukowski may win—and it is unlikely his following will grow very far beyond its present size—there is little danger of his severing the links between him and his student admirers: his bohemian lifestyle, his penury, his psychological hangups, his neurotic obsessions...
...instructor, Department of English, Douglas College, Vancouver, British Columbia Upon returning to my favorite Berkeley bookstore haunts last fall, I was amazed to find stacks upon stacks of sexually perverse comic books replacing the old stock of literary and political journals my parents, I, and last year's student body had grown up with...
...The lack of a middle course will, I am sure, characterize him always...
...They sweep aside our boredom, indifference and sophistication because their style is compelling...
...Unfortunately, as is frequently the case with reprinted journalism, the gutsy, audacious quality of Bu-kowski's writing loses some of its freshness in this collection...
...In fact, many young people seem to have opted for no literature at all...
...In general he is scornful of the counterculture, of hippies and radicals...
...At one point, Bukowski describes himself as "the guy who'd been drinking cheap wine in a small room for 15 years...
...When we reflect on the writers who have made the deepest impression on us...
...Despite being thus elevated to the pantheon of literary drug-advocates, Bukowski himself is indifferent or even opposed to marijuana: "That pot creates art, si, it's doubtful, and how...
...There is no question that Bukowski is more consistently disciplined in his poetry...
...Half of the material would have been omitted by a discerning editor...
...His faults are irremediable, even if endearing...
...Perhaps he is leary of success...
...When I asked the clerks if any poet or writer was selling, the name I heard most often was Charles Bukowski...
...In a letter to the poet William Wantling, Bukowski made an observation about another artist that applies equally to himself: "Artaud said what he had to say, not what he should say...
...And when he typed, old ladies beat on their ceilings and floors with broom handles, scaring hell out of him...
...Nonetheless, it is doubtful that he would have survived without the underpinning given him by the passive, uncritical, anti-intellectual counterculture...
...at age 52, his newest work has been brought out by that epitome ol avant-garde chic, City Lights, whose list ranges from Timothy Leary to William Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg...
...He draws no line between the reader and himself and, for all his flashes of brilliance, in the end one is sick of Bukowski—of his hemorrhoids, his cruelty, his endless rounds of bars and racetracks and prostitutes, his contempt for women...
...Moreover, in many of the pieces his prose is slack, rambling and uncontrolled, with the result that the precise, incisive passages become blurred in the memory and lose much of their impact...
...Such is Bukowski...
...and he will never understand women, or himself, very well...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 8
