With a great pleasure and a can of Coca-Cola I have finished Charles Bukowski's Post Office this evening, the first book I am able to read in less than one week in a very long time. This short novel of 160 pages in pocket edition (Virgin Books, 2009) flows down your throttle as easy as Henry Chinaski, Hank, gulps down a fifth of whiskey. Niall Griffiths, in his 2009 introduction to the novel, gives a better idea about it: "the book tosses you about like a choppy sea (...). The book throws you about all over the place". Exactly. The reader is like a toy of flesh and bone being savagely waggled by a frantic child. But one loves the ride, the roller coaster of feelings and emotions going up and up. Two quids, Griffiths says the book cost to him, and that he took the money off food in a moment of shortage. Two quids cost tome, in pretty much a similar moment of shortage, although I can still eat. The scene has been like this: chicken breast being roasted in the oven, and I am sitting outside; fine breeze cooling down the tropical, unrecognizable weather, and the dusk coming along gentle and peaceful. And the chirp of birds... .
Griffith says that the novels of Bukowski, with no exception, "are messy, ramshackle, rambling, structurally chaotic" and "held together, it seems, by bits of Sellotape and string". (Sellotape is the British branch -Griffith is from Liverpool). "Even the punctuation defies basic grammatical rules", he adds. However, he is absolutely in loved with it: "I took the book home, sat in my chair by the window and, in a few hours I had to myself before I had to clock on at the sorting office [Griffith himself worked in a Post Office], read the entire thing twice". The book made life easier, much easier for him. And "yet to criticize it with the exegetical tools of formal literary appreciation is to entirely miss the point; the disorder of it, the near illiteracy of it, even, is of a piece with the explicit command it contains to construct a uniquely personal set of rules and beliefs as a way of resisting absorption and remaining, in a very real sense of the world, alive".
I share Griffith's feelings: the story of Chinaski is simply devastating, but it has the power to relief. It is the chalice of the despaired. Life flows warm like blood through the veins of its pages. And one loves it. However, I can't actually believe that all that can be acquired with such a literary mess. Quite the opposite, I don't see any mess at all. In fact, the style of Bukowski is the only possible literary approximation and, as Griffith says, it is the pulse that sets the heart of the novel in motion. It has rhythm. Rhythm and contrast. The words are just the proper words, in quality and number. Sentences, though simple, are white hot iron. Magnificent, thrilling at times: Bukowski was a poet. Nothing seems to be missing nor to be disposed of.
And, at the same time, the style is the only possible style for a guy like Hank Chinaski. He tells the story when he is about 50, one morning he wakes up, after being half-dead, from several days of madness and intoxication, and all of a sudden, following the impulse of a neurotic: "In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did". That is the end of the novel. The rest above is the account of his last 15 years of his life. Chinaski tells his life as anyone would remember it, there is nothing artificial in it, anecdotes and all. The book is a thunderstorm made out of the electric flashes of the memory of a perfectly credible man. And everything around him is equally real: the checking in and out to work, the two 10-minute breaks, the write-up or warning notes, the call-in sick, the notes of leave, the furtive escapes to smoke a cigarette of make a phone call, the stories of people (the only thing you get away with at the end of the day). All this I even had the chance of witnessing, not too long ago, while working in a pharmaceutical facility, by then owned to Mr. Propps.
Now, most important: Chinaski is not stupid. On the contrary, he is a smart ass animated by this witticism that resembles the Evil in person to the average man abiding the rules of the average society. He could be a good negotiator, perhaps, or even a good Union representative, if he would have cared about. But he is not the victim of any brutal society, unmerciful and cruel, playing nasty on his pure and innocent soul, as Griffith seems to imply. No. The association to the beatnik generation and such is wrong, not only because the novel was written almost 20 years after (in 1971), but also, because Hank Chinaski has nothing to do with drug experimentation or the search for new forms of spiritualism, sex or art. Not at all. He is just a cynic and chooses his way to just don't give a damn shit about anything.
It is precisely in the attitude of Chinaski where I find a quite unsettling insight out of Bukowski's novel. His attitude cannot be justified. Far from beget any symbolism linked to the post-war America, the suffocation of man by technology, the consumerism or the jettison of the human soul, the figure of Chinaski has no hunger whatsoever for spiritual sustenance or improvement. He occupies the role, quite common today, of a man who has given up, for whatever reasons, the world. He is a lonely, hollow man, a drunkard. But, again, he is not a moron, he could have been something. But he chooses not to. In the same way that Vargas Llosa wondered the exact moment Peru screwed Itself up, we can ask ourselves: when did Hank Chinaski become such a fucked up dude?
And here it comes the realization that this could happen to anyone. We might be cynic or justify it, but it actually can happen to anyone. With horror I have read these words of Griffith when explaining how he became aware of Bukowski novel: "I'd read the novel Women, and a couple of his poetry collections had been my sole companions on many daytime drinking sprees". Oh, God! It sounds like a sentence I could write in this blog. It sounds like me!... One would never realize whether the transformation has started yet or not, whether nails and hair show any symptom of unusual growth. It will be too late to realize whether one is on one side or another of the socially accepted behavior or whether that process is reversible or not... It seems to me so many people out there are at the edge of their lives' rope, like a gypsy trapeze artist 30 feet above ground.
Post Office (a double-meaning construction, perhaps. The Spanish translation, Cartero, is just wrong). Charles Bukowsky. Great novel.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
Griffith says that the novels of Bukowski, with no exception, "are messy, ramshackle, rambling, structurally chaotic" and "held together, it seems, by bits of Sellotape and string". (Sellotape is the British branch -Griffith is from Liverpool). "Even the punctuation defies basic grammatical rules", he adds. However, he is absolutely in loved with it: "I took the book home, sat in my chair by the window and, in a few hours I had to myself before I had to clock on at the sorting office [Griffith himself worked in a Post Office], read the entire thing twice". The book made life easier, much easier for him. And "yet to criticize it with the exegetical tools of formal literary appreciation is to entirely miss the point; the disorder of it, the near illiteracy of it, even, is of a piece with the explicit command it contains to construct a uniquely personal set of rules and beliefs as a way of resisting absorption and remaining, in a very real sense of the world, alive".
I share Griffith's feelings: the story of Chinaski is simply devastating, but it has the power to relief. It is the chalice of the despaired. Life flows warm like blood through the veins of its pages. And one loves it. However, I can't actually believe that all that can be acquired with such a literary mess. Quite the opposite, I don't see any mess at all. In fact, the style of Bukowski is the only possible literary approximation and, as Griffith says, it is the pulse that sets the heart of the novel in motion. It has rhythm. Rhythm and contrast. The words are just the proper words, in quality and number. Sentences, though simple, are white hot iron. Magnificent, thrilling at times: Bukowski was a poet. Nothing seems to be missing nor to be disposed of.
And, at the same time, the style is the only possible style for a guy like Hank Chinaski. He tells the story when he is about 50, one morning he wakes up, after being half-dead, from several days of madness and intoxication, and all of a sudden, following the impulse of a neurotic: "In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did". That is the end of the novel. The rest above is the account of his last 15 years of his life. Chinaski tells his life as anyone would remember it, there is nothing artificial in it, anecdotes and all. The book is a thunderstorm made out of the electric flashes of the memory of a perfectly credible man. And everything around him is equally real: the checking in and out to work, the two 10-minute breaks, the write-up or warning notes, the call-in sick, the notes of leave, the furtive escapes to smoke a cigarette of make a phone call, the stories of people (the only thing you get away with at the end of the day). All this I even had the chance of witnessing, not too long ago, while working in a pharmaceutical facility, by then owned to Mr. Propps.
Now, most important: Chinaski is not stupid. On the contrary, he is a smart ass animated by this witticism that resembles the Evil in person to the average man abiding the rules of the average society. He could be a good negotiator, perhaps, or even a good Union representative, if he would have cared about. But he is not the victim of any brutal society, unmerciful and cruel, playing nasty on his pure and innocent soul, as Griffith seems to imply. No. The association to the beatnik generation and such is wrong, not only because the novel was written almost 20 years after (in 1971), but also, because Hank Chinaski has nothing to do with drug experimentation or the search for new forms of spiritualism, sex or art. Not at all. He is just a cynic and chooses his way to just don't give a damn shit about anything.
It is precisely in the attitude of Chinaski where I find a quite unsettling insight out of Bukowski's novel. His attitude cannot be justified. Far from beget any symbolism linked to the post-war America, the suffocation of man by technology, the consumerism or the jettison of the human soul, the figure of Chinaski has no hunger whatsoever for spiritual sustenance or improvement. He occupies the role, quite common today, of a man who has given up, for whatever reasons, the world. He is a lonely, hollow man, a drunkard. But, again, he is not a moron, he could have been something. But he chooses not to. In the same way that Vargas Llosa wondered the exact moment Peru screwed Itself up, we can ask ourselves: when did Hank Chinaski become such a fucked up dude?
And here it comes the realization that this could happen to anyone. We might be cynic or justify it, but it actually can happen to anyone. With horror I have read these words of Griffith when explaining how he became aware of Bukowski novel: "I'd read the novel Women, and a couple of his poetry collections had been my sole companions on many daytime drinking sprees". Oh, God! It sounds like a sentence I could write in this blog. It sounds like me!... One would never realize whether the transformation has started yet or not, whether nails and hair show any symptom of unusual growth. It will be too late to realize whether one is on one side or another of the socially accepted behavior or whether that process is reversible or not... It seems to me so many people out there are at the edge of their lives' rope, like a gypsy trapeze artist 30 feet above ground.
Post Office (a double-meaning construction, perhaps. The Spanish translation, Cartero, is just wrong). Charles Bukowsky. Great novel.
(PLEASE, LEAVE YOUR COMMENT).
