More Notes of a Dirty Old Man (30 page)
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Authors: Charles Bukowski,David Stephen Calonne
Bukowski went on to describe the
Sturm und Drang
involved with writing and publishing poetry—sometimes he would wait two to five years to see a poem in print after it was accepted—but “with NOTES, sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.”
7
Sturm und Drang
involved with writing and publishing poetry—sometimes he would wait two to five years to see a poem in print after it was accepted—but “with NOTES, sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.”
7
Bukowski was thrilled by the birth of his first volume of prose and dashed off a happy self-review for
Open City
:
Open City
:
How many times can a man go through the thresher and still keep his blood, the Summer sun inside his head? How many bad jails, how many bad women, how many sundry cancers, how many flat tires, how many this or that or what or what or what? . . .Frankly I read my own stories in easy wonderment, forgetting who I was, almost almost, and I thought: Ummm, ummm, this son of a bitch can really write.
8
The offer from Bryan actually came just at the right time, because Bukowski had already been composing prose for the past few years. In 1965, Douglas Blazek published
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
—a story in nine sections dealing with Bukowski’s life from childhood through his marriage to and divorce from Barbara Frye—and in the following year
All the Assholes in the World and Mine
, a hilarious account of his hemorrhoid operation. Now he had contracted to produce a weekly column: the discipline of the deadline opened the creative floodgates.
Open City
, and subsequently
NOLA Express
and the
Los Angeles Free Press
, gave Bukowski the opportunity to mine his past experiences and to try out various treatments of material which he would later transform in his novels
Post Office
,
Factotum
,
Women
, and
Ham on Rye
.
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
—a story in nine sections dealing with Bukowski’s life from childhood through his marriage to and divorce from Barbara Frye—and in the following year
All the Assholes in the World and Mine
, a hilarious account of his hemorrhoid operation. Now he had contracted to produce a weekly column: the discipline of the deadline opened the creative floodgates.
Open City
, and subsequently
NOLA Express
and the
Los Angeles Free Press
, gave Bukowski the opportunity to mine his past experiences and to try out various treatments of material which he would later transform in his novels
Post Office
,
Factotum
,
Women
, and
Ham on Rye
.
Notes of A Dirty Old Man
was reprinted in 1973 by City Lights and since then has been continuously in print. The series became a forum where Bukowski presented stories, essays, poems, interviews, even several cartoons (now more elegantly christened “graphic fiction”). However, the original book contained only forty of the hundreds of works he submitted under the “Dirty Old Man” rubric: other columns would later be collected in
Erections
,
Ejaculations and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness
(1972),
South of No North
(1974), and
Hot Water Music
(1983), as well as in the posthumous volumes
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook
(2008) and
Absence of the Hero
(2010).
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
met with international success: Bukowski had broken through into new territory in American literature. He was a strange, compelling creature: a “drop out” from the mainstream, a “working-class” artist in love with “high culture”—Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Catullus, Li Po, Céline, and Dostoyevsky—and composing a hip, direct, swiftly moving prose, a new American argot: “vulgarity” punctuated by sudden, exquisite flights of lyrical sensitivity.
9
was reprinted in 1973 by City Lights and since then has been continuously in print. The series became a forum where Bukowski presented stories, essays, poems, interviews, even several cartoons (now more elegantly christened “graphic fiction”). However, the original book contained only forty of the hundreds of works he submitted under the “Dirty Old Man” rubric: other columns would later be collected in
Erections
,
Ejaculations and Other Tales of Ordinary Madness
(1972),
South of No North
(1974), and
Hot Water Music
(1983), as well as in the posthumous volumes
Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook
(2008) and
Absence of the Hero
(2010).
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
met with international success: Bukowski had broken through into new territory in American literature. He was a strange, compelling creature: a “drop out” from the mainstream, a “working-class” artist in love with “high culture”—Beethoven, Mahler, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Catullus, Li Po, Céline, and Dostoyevsky—and composing a hip, direct, swiftly moving prose, a new American argot: “vulgarity” punctuated by sudden, exquisite flights of lyrical sensitivity.
9
Bukowski first read Dostoyevsky in the early forties in the El Paso Public Library.
10
And on the opening page of
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, the narrator tells us that he was “a student of Dostoevski and listened to Mahler in the dark.”
11
Like Dostoyevsky’s character in
Notes from Underground
, many of Bukowski’s Dionysian poets, dreamers, and misfits are half-mad, angry, impetuous, inspired, ecstatic. The title precisely describes Bukowski’s aim: he combines Dostoyevskian “notes” with the American slang expression “dirty old man,” thus mixing the Eastern European tradition of dark psyches at war with themselves and others with a cool, subversive American style informed by all the counter-cultural themes and obsessions of the sixties and seventies.
10
And on the opening page of
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, the narrator tells us that he was “a student of Dostoevski and listened to Mahler in the dark.”
11
Like Dostoyevsky’s character in
Notes from Underground
, many of Bukowski’s Dionysian poets, dreamers, and misfits are half-mad, angry, impetuous, inspired, ecstatic. The title precisely describes Bukowski’s aim: he combines Dostoyevskian “notes” with the American slang expression “dirty old man,” thus mixing the Eastern European tradition of dark psyches at war with themselves and others with a cool, subversive American style informed by all the counter-cultural themes and obsessions of the sixties and seventies.
For example, in the story depicting his trip to New Orleans, his wit and verve can be seen in the abrupt, telegraphic opening: “Going east. In the barcar. They had sent me money for the barcar. Of course, I had a pint getting on and had stopped for a pint at El Paso. I was the world’s greatest poet and he was the world’s greatest editor and bookmaker (and I’m not talking about horses).” The repetition of the primarily mono- and disyllabic words—“barcar,” “pint,” “greatest poet,” “greatest editor”—and stop-and-go syntax mirror the sound of the chugging and clattering train as it sets out on its journey. The narrative then grows organically, one element of plot added to another in a natural, effortless way. This skill was the product of years of labor, although what was new in Bukowski’s style of the sixties was this rapid movement of a shrewd, tough intelligence under the influence of the new, heady, casual openness of the Age of Aquarius.
The compulsive eroticism of the series was at once a clever way to attract attention to his writing (as well as to sell newspapers) and an exploration of sex and love as the ultimate arena in which the frequently comic struggle for selfhood takes place. Bukowski often sees the sexual drama as an insane farce:
So, to some writers, including the gloriously impertinent Bukowski, sex is obviously the tragicomedy. I don’t write about it as an instrument of obsession. I write about it as a stage play laugh where you have to cry about it, a bit, between acts. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote it much better. He had the distance and the style. I am still too near the target to effect total grace. People simply think I’m dirty. If you haven’t read Boccaccio, do. You might begin with
The Decameron
.
12
Interestingly, Pasolini’s film version of
The Decameron
(1970) appeared the year following the publication of
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, and Boccaccio (1313–1375) served as Bukowski’s thematic and structural model for his novel
Women
:
The Decameron
has 101 chapters,
Women
, 104. The other great Italian (Roman) writer to whom Bukowski was most devoted was Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84–54 B.C.), to whom he wrote several homages, including the humorous poem “what have I seen” in which he imagines seeing Catullus at the race track bar in the company of a lady of questionable virtue: “I like your way, Catullus, talking plainly about the / whore who claims you owe her money, or about / that guy who smiled too much—who cleaned / his teeth with horse piss, / or about how the young poets / come with their blameless tame verse, or about / how this or that guy married a slut.”
13
Although he played brilliantly the role of an anti-intellectual primitive, Bukowski would bring his considerable knowledge of world literature to bear in his portrayal of the human sexual comedy.
The Decameron
(1970) appeared the year following the publication of
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
, and Boccaccio (1313–1375) served as Bukowski’s thematic and structural model for his novel
Women
:
The Decameron
has 101 chapters,
Women
, 104. The other great Italian (Roman) writer to whom Bukowski was most devoted was Gaius Valerius Catullus (ca. 84–54 B.C.), to whom he wrote several homages, including the humorous poem “what have I seen” in which he imagines seeing Catullus at the race track bar in the company of a lady of questionable virtue: “I like your way, Catullus, talking plainly about the / whore who claims you owe her money, or about / that guy who smiled too much—who cleaned / his teeth with horse piss, / or about how the young poets / come with their blameless tame verse, or about / how this or that guy married a slut.”
13
Although he played brilliantly the role of an anti-intellectual primitive, Bukowski would bring his considerable knowledge of world literature to bear in his portrayal of the human sexual comedy.
Bukowski explores a good deal of taboo territory, every form of sexual expression, “perversion,” or “deviancy.” We are introduced to a gallery of characters worthy of Wilhelm Stekel, or Krafft-Ebing’s
Psychopathia Sexualis
. Although he surely did not intend in a conscious way to present such an encyclopedic summary of paraphiliae, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” over the course of the column’s lengthy run, would provide portrayals of child rape, castration, anal intercourse, three females picking up and ravishing a man, intercourse with a high-heeled shoe, voyeurism, bestiality, sexual role playing (in which a man is treated as a child by a middle-aged woman), fetishism, onanism, necrophilia, and violent sadism. Surely part of the success of the series was due to the fact that Bukowski said things that many people would have liked to say but lacked the courage to express. He took the lid off the id; he is “unrepressed” in his insistent uncovering of the submerged activity of the libido in the unconscious.
Psychopathia Sexualis
. Although he surely did not intend in a conscious way to present such an encyclopedic summary of paraphiliae, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” over the course of the column’s lengthy run, would provide portrayals of child rape, castration, anal intercourse, three females picking up and ravishing a man, intercourse with a high-heeled shoe, voyeurism, bestiality, sexual role playing (in which a man is treated as a child by a middle-aged woman), fetishism, onanism, necrophilia, and violent sadism. Surely part of the success of the series was due to the fact that Bukowski said things that many people would have liked to say but lacked the courage to express. He took the lid off the id; he is “unrepressed” in his insistent uncovering of the submerged activity of the libido in the unconscious.
As Michel Foucault asserts in
The History of Sexuality
:
The History of Sexuality
:
The legitimate couple, with its regular sexuality, had a right to more discretion. It tended to function as a norm, one that was stricter, but quieter. On the other hand, what came under scrutiny was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the sensuality of those who did not like the opposite sex; reveries, obsessions, petty manias, of great transports of rage. It was time for all these figures, scarcely noticed in the past, to step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were. No doubt they were condemned all the same; but they were listened to; and if regular sexuality happened to be questioned once again, it was through a reflux movement, originating in these peripheral sexualities.
14
Bukowski provides an often humorous opportunity—as if to lessen the pain of the revelation—for these various characters to make a “confession of what they were.” And even “the legitimate couple”—in, for example, the story of the couple in bed in which the wife is dreaming of intercourse with another man and the husband confesses to incestuous longings—is exposed in Bukowski as harboring dark secrets lurking beneath the surface of conscious awareness.
Yet Bukowski, like D.H. Lawrence, sought a more natural expression of sexuality which was constantly frustrated by our alienating, cold, technocratic society. He writes in his
NOLA
essay of December 31, 1971–January 13, 1972 about
NOLA
essay of December 31, 1971–January 13, 1972 about
all these people, the love-lost, the sex-lost, the suicide-driven . . . somewhere in the structure of our society it is impossible for these people to contact each other. Churches, dances, parties only seem to push them further apart, and the dating clubs, the Computer Love Machines only destroy more and more a naturalness that should have been: a naturalness that has somehow been crushed and seems to remain crushed forever in our present method of living (dying). See them put on their bright clothes and get into their new cars and roar off to NOWHERE. It’s all an outside maneuver and the contact is missed.
It is possible to read Bukowski’s elaboration of all the varieties of sexual behavior as a kind of diagnosis of the ills of our culture, of the ways this “naturalness” has been subverted. The inhibition of this need to make “contact” with one another is precisely what has led to the frequently frenetic efforts of the caged human animal to break out of its traps in whatever ways it can devise—even if this means amputating parts of itself as it attempts to break free from the manacles.
Bukowski’s column would also appear in
NOLA Express
edited by Darlene Fife and her husband Robert Head. Fife explains in her memoir
Portraits from Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties
that her husband
NOLA Express
edited by Darlene Fife and her husband Robert Head. Fife explains in her memoir
Portraits from Memory: New Orleans in the Sixties
that her husband
had read Bukowski in one of the mimeo mags and wrote asking him for submissions. We published him from late ’68 [the first “Dirty Old Man” column was actually August 15–28, 1969] to the end of
Nola Express
in January, 1974. He sent us poems or, most often short stories every two weeks; always clean copy, always on time. He took his responsibilities to his editors seriously. His writings elicited more letters to the editor both for and against than any other. Bukowski occasionally responded to the letters with his own letter to the editor. We paid him $25 for each published piece. As little as this is, Bukowski told us it was this money that gave him the courage to quit his job in the post office.
15
Bukowski never met the couple and they spoke only once by phone, but he sent a letter of support when
NOLA
encountered censorship difficulties: it appeared in issue #53 of April, 1970 in the typical, mainly lower-case style he favored during this period:
NOLA
encountered censorship difficulties: it appeared in issue #53 of April, 1970 in the typical, mainly lower-case style he favored during this period:
you are the liveliest thing happening in the U.S. right now. you’ve always layed your guts right on the line without laying on this juvenile hippy Romanticism which destroys papers like the
Berkeley Tribe
. don’t put me down as anti-hip or yip or whatever, but somehow building those paper heroes has destroyed the force of what really needs to be said. each issue of NOLA is a thing I read over and over. it’s magic . . . Wrote
Evergreen
about you people, hoping they can break the back of whatever is trying to break you. your courage is the quietest poem of all. you make me feel good when very few things do.
16
By this time, Bukowski had experienced difficulties of his own with the “authorities”: in 1968 the FBI began to investigate him. He would eventually leave the Post Office—not only because John Martin offered him a monthly stipend to quit and write full time, but most likely because he was about to be dismissed, not for supposed “absenteeism” but due to his work for
Open City
, a clear violation of his right to free speech. Bukowski’s FBI file also indicates that they began to investigate his “common law wife”—this was clearly Frances Smith, although her name has been redacted from the file—who “has been reported to have attended a number of Communist Party meetings in the Los Angeles area.” The file indicates “that one Charles Bukowski, poet, was the author of an article appearing on page 43 of the June, 1963, issue of ‘Mainstream.’” This essay, which Bukowski had submitted about the “little magazines,” contained some X-ed out language which the editor, Felix Singer, saw fit to censor. The report continues:
Open City
, a clear violation of his right to free speech. Bukowski’s FBI file also indicates that they began to investigate his “common law wife”—this was clearly Frances Smith, although her name has been redacted from the file—who “has been reported to have attended a number of Communist Party meetings in the Los Angeles area.” The file indicates “that one Charles Bukowski, poet, was the author of an article appearing on page 43 of the June, 1963, issue of ‘Mainstream.’” This essay, which Bukowski had submitted about the “little magazines,” contained some X-ed out language which the editor, Felix Singer, saw fit to censor. The report continues:
The March, (1968) edition of the “Underground Digest, The Best of the Underground Press,” Volume I, published by the Underground Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 211, Village Station, New York, New York 10014, telephone WI 7-6900, contains an article by Charles Bukowski on pages 76-79 entitled “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” Page 79 indicates that the writer’s name may be Henry Charles Bukowski. The publication indicates at the end of the article on page 79 that the article may have originally appeared in “Open City” 5420 Carlton Way, Los Angeles, California 90027; $5 per year. Single copies of the article “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” together with a copy of the masthead of the Underground Digest are enclosed for New York and Los Angeles under obscene cover.New York and Los Angeles should make discreet efforts to resolve whether this article and the item appearing in the June, 1963, issue of “Mainstream” were written by the employee. If employee’s authorship is indicated copies of the articles should be designated as exhibits.
17
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