Bukowski on Work

This content was published first in The Sunday Letters Journal: https://sundayletters.larrygmaguire.com/p/bonus-bukowski-on-work by Larry G. Maguire on Wed, 31 Aug 2022 17:31:10 GMT

I discovered Bukowski a few years back, and he immediately caught me with the sharp end of what he wrote. He wrote from the inside out, saying what he saw and what he felt without censorship, often to the point of being crude and offensive. I think people hated him as much as they loved him, but it seems that despite it all, he stuck by his principles.

He hadn’t outlined any particular philosophy as such, other than that most people were full of shit and incapable of being real. At poetry readings, he’d abuse his audience. I think that’s why they came to see him. Regarding the work of an artist, his advice was to do it or not to do it. If it is there, go with it; if it isn’t, wait. Trying is counter-productive. You’ll find some of Bukowski’s thoughts and feelings on the craft of writing and other topics in the collection, On Writing.

In 1964, Bukowski wrote to author Jack Conroy about Conroy’s novel The Disinherited, a work of fiction that tackled the plight of the working classes in the 1920s and 1930s United States. Bukowski insisted that from his point of view, the poverty of the 1920s working classes portrayed in the story was still relevant forty years on. When we read what Bukowski said about work, he could be writing about today. Those of us in western industrialised nations may have a materially better standard of living and fancier gadgets than in 1964, but the marginalised remain many. Given the current energy crisis and increasing cost of living, many who were already struggling to stay afloat are probably drowning.

Here’s Bukowski;

“It’s hell to be poor, that’s no secret; it’s hell to be sick without money, hungry without money; it’s hell to be sick and hungry forever down to the last day. The God-forsaken jobs that most of us must hold; The God-forsaken jobs that most of us must hunt for, beg for; The God-forsaken jobs which we hate with all our tiring spirit and must still engage in…my God, the alcoholics, the poets, the suicides, the addicts, the madmen all this vomits up! I do not understand why we must live in such horrible, dreary and obviously abject fashion in a century where a civilisation has devised through all its energy the force large enough to kill us all. I think that if it is possible to destroy life completely then, by Christ, it is also possible to allow life to live completely. And I mean completely; I don’t mean just enough to allow our millionaires and statesmen a chance to escape to some planet after they’ve fucked up the works here…”

Regardless of whether you’re financially secure or not, many people feel this same way about work. Money seems to soften the blow, but not always. And so this perplexing situation forces the question: what is wealth, why do we assume cash and things can ever make us happy? Why, when we have become so efficient and productive a species, do so many of us have to live without basic physical needs being met?

Remarkable when so much time has passed that we are pretty much in the same place. We live in a society constructed on the premise of survival of the fittest, and you’re either in or out. If you’re on the inside, you must play the game of kill or be killed. One-upmanship and a perpetual ladder-climbing exercise are your lot. If you’re on the outside, then you might get enough to keep you barely alive if you’re lucky. We have enough resources to clothe, feed, and house everyone on the planet to an excellent standard…but we don’t.

The top 0.1% sell their story and fight it out from a distance for power and control. Armies of men and women with guns are their proxies. We lap it up, then blame one another and fight amongst ourselves. Black against white, catholic against protestant, worker against worker. We give the unemployed and the vulnerable just enough to survive while we maintain our foolish hard work ideology. It says debt and plastic things are good, and you’re worth a damn if you subordinate yourself for a lifetime to the demands of others. Only now have you earned the right to live materially comfortably. Meanwhile, we burn up the earth and everything and everyone on it. It’s a fool’s game, and we know it but pretend that it’s equitable. It was so in Bukowski’s time as it is just so today.

“We work too hard. We try too hard. Don't try. Don't work. It's there. It's been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There's been too much direction. It's all free, we needn't be told.”– from a letter to William Packard, 1990

“The gods have blessed me by not making me famous,” Bukowski wrote in a letter to Harold Norse in 1967. “I still shoot the words out of a cannon, which beats drippings from a limp cock.” As he put it in his usual abrasive and sexualised tone. The Evergreen Review had recently published him alongside literary big hitters such as Tennessee Williams, Karl Shapiro, and John Rechy. Even so, he was scathing in his assessment of the quality of their work.

“The now famous”, Bukowski wrote, “did some good writing at one time, and now no longer do good writing, but go around attached to their names and the public and the magazines eat their shit.”

In reading his letter to Norse, it’s easy to see that the situation had split him. On the one hand, he was grateful and even a little proud that he was making a dent in the world. But on the other hand, he was sharply aware of the risk of losing his edge. It seems that the struggle in obscurity allowed him to stay honest. When nobody knows you, you can fuck up all you want. You can sell out to get published, and no one will bat an eyelid. But if one piece of genuine work — real art — manages to fight its way to the top of the shit pile and suddenly people take notice. The choice remains: do we sell out and write what people want to read, or do we stick with art for art's sake?

“I am probably writing all this shit about Evergreen because I have a bad conscience and fear that I am slipping as a good writer in order to get into their slick pages. On the other hand, there is a kind of kid’s Christmas joy at opening the big stocking for the goodies. It’s nice. After all, after the poem is over, then you are nothing but a chickenshit salesman, and who wouldn’t rather appear in Evergreen than in Epos? Perhaps the truely good men have not yet arrived.”

I think creative integrity is vitally important in all work. If you don’t have “final cut”, as David Lynch puts it, you don’t have control of the work. And it, therefore, is not your own. Other people have their hands all over it. Now, if you’re working for money and that’s what you need today, then do what you need to do. But something else must motivate us to work, something intrinsic rather than extrinsic. That goes for whether you’re a writer, artist, salesperson, plumber, accountant or whatever. It must have meaning and purpose. Otherwise, it’s soleless shit, and that breaks a man or a woman down eventually. I think that’s what stress and anxiety, and depression are. They are the product of being too far out there in the world and not on the inside of ourselves.

“I’m 70 now, but as long as the red wine flows and the typewriter goes, it’s all right. It was a good show for me when I was writing dirty stories for the men’s mags to get the rent, and it’s still a good show for me as I write against the hazards of a little fame and a little money—and those approaching footsteps on that thing with the stop sign. At times I’ve enjoyed this content with life. On the other hand, I’ll leave it without regrets.”