A Poet Weaned on Pain and Reared by Adversity
Michael Montfort/Magnolia Pictures
The hard-living writer Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994, in John
Dullaghan's documentary "Bukowski: Born Into This."
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: June 4, 2004
NY Times
My father was a great literary teacher," recalls the famously scrappy,
hard-drinking poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, who died in 1994. "He
taught me the meaning of pain - pain without reason." Three times a
week, from the age of 6 to 11, he was beaten by his father with a razor
strap, he remembers in John Dullaghan's definitive and engrossing
documentary portrait, "Bukowski: Born Into This."
Revisiting his boyhood home in Los Angeles where the beatings took
place, Bukowski wryly calls it "the house of horrors" in a drawl that
filters Kevin Spacey through William S. Burroughs with a dash of
Tennessee Williams. Those beatings, he admits, were essential to the
formation of his lean, brutal literary style through which no
sentimentality was allowed to leak. When you're beaten that regularly,
he suggests, "you say what you mean."
Some of the film's interviews were done for European television.
Excerpts are skillfully woven with the reminiscences of former drinking
buddies, fellow writers and Bukowski's second wife, Linda, the keeper of
the flame, whom he married in 1985. Without straining, the film makes a
strong case for Bukowski as a major American poet whose work was a
slashing rebuke to polite academic formalism.
Bukowski didn't always revel in his outsider status. A pariah in high
school, he suffered from severe acne vulgaris, which covered his face
with running sores that left his skin deeply pitted. He recalls standing
miserably in the dark outside his senior prom, too humiliated to show
himself.
In later years Bukowski boasted of his sexual prowess. Yet he was a
virgin until he was 24, the same age at which his first story was
published. His description of sexual initiation with an obese woman whom
he wrongly accused of stealing his wallet is a spectacularly unpromising
beginning to the prolific sexual activity (described in his novel
"Women") that flowered after fame brought admirers.
Bukowski could be as pithy off the page as on. He cites as "the ultimate
compliment" being called "a good duker." He began writing at 13 because
it seemed "the easiest thing to do." Love he describes as "a fog that
burns with the first daylight of reality."
He began writing in earnest after traveling around the country for a
decade working as a laborer, drinking and brawling, and absorbing the
raw experience that informed his work. Later he supported himself as a
mail carrier for 14 years. His heavy drinking contributed to a case of
bleeding ulcers in 1956 from which he was not expected to recover. But
he went on to carouse for four more decades before succumbing to
leukemia at 73.
At the suggestion of a girlfriend he took up betting on horses as a
hobby, and it became an addiction, with the faces of the bettors and
their dreams of winning a crucial inspiration. One of his pet peeves was
Mickey Mouse, whom he said had "no soul," and he harbored a deep
loathing for Walt Disney and everything he stood for.
With the publication of a regular column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," in
the underground press, he gained notoriety beyond the world of little
magazines. His career solidified after John Martin, the founder of the
Black Swallow Press, volunteered to keep him afloat. Two decades later
Bukowski wrote the screenplay for Barbet Schroeder's 1987 movie,
"Barfly," in which Mickey
R
ourke played a Bukowski-like roustabout with
a swaggering bravado that the poet says was inaccurate. That unhappy
experience inspired his novel "Hollywood," a place he describes as "more
crooked, dumber, crueler and stupider than all the books I read about
it."
The documentary includes reverential tributes from Tom Waits, the singer
and songwriter who brought his tenderer version of Bukowskian alienation
into popular song, as well as from Bono, Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton
and the film director Taylor Hackford.
Subtly, without overstating the case, "Bukowski," which opens today in
Manhattan, shows its cantankerous subject mellowing with success. Near
the end of the movie, Bukowski even shows a flash of what he calls "the
bluebird in my heart who wants to get out." But then, having to be true
to his legend, he catches himself and asserts, "I'm too tough for him."
BUKOWSKI
Born Into This
Produced and directed by John Dullaghan; edited by Victor Livingstone;
released by Magnolia Pictures. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th
Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not
rated.
Stan Woodard
Communications Director
Atlanta Contemporary Art Center
535 Means Street
Atlanta, GA 30318
404 688 1970 Ext 213
swoodard@thecontemporary.org
www.thecontemporary.org
