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February 1, 2004
On the 23rd of January I wrote some things about Bukowski that prompted Hugo to reply. He was a little unsure of what I was saying. Was I saying that Bukowski actually liked Céline and Hamsun but pretended not to? If so, he knew of examples of Bukowski explicitly acknowledging these influences. I’ll try to explain.
I began by noticing that Bukowski didn’t write poetry to be read. This seems to me an important thing to say not just about poetry but about writing in general, and it is arguably very close to the position of Karen Blixen, who dismissed writing for the general audience and for critics. Who was left? she asked. You must write for God. Don’t ask me what God is. It’s the thing (the person?) you write for when there is no one else to read your words but you still have to write them down. This is a soulful activity in Klossowski’s sense. Isn’t this what Bukowski was doing, sitting in his shorts (we call them ‘underpants’ in Australia) surrounded by beer bottles, with another one next to his writing hand? Seen from this perspective, literature is writing for God. All other writing simply isn’t literature.
No one could ever accuse Bukowski of writing a word to woo an audience, or to impress a critic. He didn’t give a fuck about them. That point is made over and over in his writings. He fights with them. If they’re females he sexually harasses them. He gets drunk and abusive. He makes an exhibition of himself.
Bukowski is like Céline in this sense, but not just in this sense, I should add. If Bukowski was uncompromising with any human audience, this was doubly so in the case of Céline. They’d all heard of him but no-one thought of giving Céline a Nobel Prize, although as a writer though he crapped all over everyone to receive one in the twentieth century. Hemingway, for all his seriousness, recognised the idiocy in getting a Nobel Prize while Karen Blixen didn’t have one. If he was going to wait till then he would have had to live for ever. Who did Céline write for? There’s no way of avoiding it. On my definition his writing has to be literature, but it’s not just literature, it’s the best literature.
Céline’s literature isn’t the best literature because it’s completely unique and unlike anything else. In fact, it’s like much of the literature of its time. It’s like Proust, in whose writing the nineteenth century novel form breaks down into fictional autobiography, it’s like Canetti who abandoned fiction after one book for aphorisms, autobiographical works, travel books, essays. Benjamin and Adorno were poking around in the same area. It’s like Bataille’s trilogy, Summa Atheologica, the third volume of which was puzzling Gary over the Christmas period. Gombrowicz wrote five strange novels but he also made his diary into literature. There are also elements of these developments in two of Bukowski’s favourite American writers, Saroyan and Fanté.
Last year Greg Hainge, who teaches at Adelaide University, gave a talk on Céline. We exchanged a couple of emails after the talk. In one Greg quoted Céline from Rigadoon. The quotation says it all really, including what I was saying before.
“Ah, turpitude! shameless falsehood!... full of style I am! oh yes! and
worse!... much worse! I’ll make all of them unreadable!... all the
others! impotent wimps! prize-winning manifester-writing fuckers! I can
just hatch my plot quietly, the era is mine! I am the blessed of the
Arts! he who does not imitate me does not exist!... simple as that!...”
Céline made those not influenced by him ‘unreadable’, irrelevant. He marked a certain point in the history of the literary tradition from which writing must henceforth begin. He set a new standard.
Benjamin knew exactly what Céline was doing, as evidenced in exchanges in his correspondence with Scholem. Benjamin called Céline’s writing the voice of the lumpenproletariat. He was at his most Marxist at the time and criticised Céline’s voice for lacking the power to see through the prevailing conditions. Scholem, who was a Zionist, raged against Céline’s anti-Semitism but Benjamin wasn’t really concerned about that element of his writing. He said that everybody in France was anti-Semitic at that time. Benjamin’s concern was that while the voice of the déclassé masses, the everyday voice of the ordinary people had been made into literature, the voice was compromised. From his perspective, perhaps it was. Benjamin’s goal was a literature that could never be of use to fascism. It’s a big ask.
Obviously, from what I’ve said, I think Bukowski belongs to an identifiable twentieth century tradition – the modernist tradition. Modernism is first and foremost a radical reappraisal of constructive standards. It typifies the twentieth century. Within the sphere of literature all the writers I have mentioned were engaged in his process, and in a way, Bukowski’s writing marks the endpoint of this process, not because he resolved anything but because we got to the end of the twentieth century just after his death.
Now, Bukowski is ambivalent about his relation to this tradition. This is what I see as an element of playfulness in his writing. He often speaks up for the writers who influenced him. In Hollywood, when an Italian reporter asks Chinaski if he has any advice for Italian fans he says, ‘Yes, tell them to try to be less noisy and read Céline’ (the quoting is from memory so it may not be exactly right, but you get the drift). On the other hand, talking about literature all sounds very high-brow and he is very low-brow. Remember, he’s the voice of the lumpenproletariat, the great unwashed, the rough part of Los Angeles (assuming it has any smooth parts).
During our exchange I sent Greg an email containing Bukowski’s poem ‘History’:
“he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said, ‘not much
chance...give him these pills...his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there...also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off...’
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat – I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
‘you can make it,’ I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left...
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, run over de-tailed cat and I say, ‘look, look
at this!’
but they don’t understand, they say something like, ‘you
say you've been influenced by Céline?’
‘no,’ I hold the cat up, ‘by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!’
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows...
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.”
Greg sent this reply:
“very touching. And so funny, cos even though he’s saying he’s not
influenced by Céline in the poem, it’s kind of a hommage to Céline as
well, both Céline as cat, and Céline as cat-lover.”
Readers of Céline’s final trilogy in particular will be aware of Céline’s view of cats (and other animals). So here Bukowski pays secret homage to tradition while he appears to reject it for real life. Indeed, this very act with its two meanings is so characteristic of Céline that it cannot be allowed to pass without mention.
Beyond these games of acknowledgement, the real point is that these writers belonging to the modernist tradition need not have influenced one-another consciously or directly. Indeed, Céline had a low opinion of Proust, for example. It’s not a tradition that developed by one person being consciously influenced by another. Instead, these writers should be seen in terms of what Adorno called ‘windowless nomads’. Working away, inwardly-focused, the works of these writers come to resemble the others because they come to reflect the larger cultural totality of which they are a part. They are little models of the larger thing, but little models that don’t see out. They are not looking and copying. I go back to my original point. They are doing their own thing.
I don’t know whether this clarifies things for you Hugo or whether it makes things worse.
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I really love that cat story.