Charles Bukowski - South of No North (1973)

 

Just when I assume I've read all that Bukowski had published as prose - as distinct from poetry, despite the admittedly fine line - another one I've never heard of pops out of the woodwork. South of No North collects short stories, mostly four to six pages in length and reprinted from obscure sources, plus a couple of longer efforts which originally appeared as chapbooks. As you would expect, it's mostly autobiographical and remains approximately so even when swinging wildly off into adjacent genres, notably Stop Staring at My Tits, Mister - a Rabelaisian western which could have been lifted from the pages of Malcolm Bennett and Aidan Hughes' BRUTE! magazine - and The Devil Was Hot wherein our guy encounters Satan himself, currently inconvenienced as a sideshow attraction.

Whatever objections you may already have to the man's work - should you have any - are unlikely to be assuaged herein; and if you're one of those pricks who somehow dispute that the man could write, then you've mistaken something else for writing and your argument doesn't apply; and if you're overly fond of the term transgressive—well, that doesn't wash either given the complete irrelevance of whatever you believe he transgressed from.

Like anybody can tell you. I am not a very nice man. I don't know the word. I have always admired the villain, the outlaw, the son of a bitch. I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions. I also like vile women, drunk cursing bitches with loose stockings and sloppy mascara faces. I'm more interested in perverts than saints. I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

This is why he was great, and why his writing will most likely endure. It has a purity which resists all attempts to co-opt or to colonise, demanding that the reader take it entirely on its own terms and offering no concessions to whatever bullshit he, she or it may have been duped into buying this week; and if you can't appreciate that, then you can't appreciate nuffink.

Charles Bukowski - Factotum (1975)

 

I've read it many times before but it never gets old, never loses its relevance, and never fails to pack a punch as visceral as an actual punch in the face. The usual people continue to whine about either failing to get Bukowski, or otherwise expressing despair at those who do, for they must be simpletons and easily pleased because where's the fucking poetry? Anyone can describe a hangover or a fight in a dive bar and it goes to show how little you've read blah blah blah…

The poetry isn't so much in the words as in that which they evoke, because no-one ever congratulated Pablo Picasso on his decision to use blue paint. That which Bukowski evokes will be familiar to a few of us because we've been in the same places with the same people and the same diminished prospects; so it could be that Factotum may not resonate quite so strongly with you should you be sat reading it in the conservatory, or like the Goodreads twat who so loved Lawrence's Mornings in Mexico, early on a summer morning on the porch with a cup of coffee at hand. This is not just entertainment, nor mere diversion. It was never supposed to be entertainment. It's more serious than that, and maybe it just ain't for you. You ever think of that?

As for those of us who will get something from this, I don't know if there's really much point in trying to describe what it does, because most likely you will already know. This is how the real world works once you've got down beneath all the layers of bullshit, deception, and flim-flams; and, as such, Factotum is almost the perfect novel.

The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Charles Bukowski The Most Beautiful Woman in Town (1983)
Here's another after the fact assemblage of short stories Chuck fired off to assorted magazines of vaguely literary persuasion, possibly without remembering that he'd done so in a few cases. Most are probably autobiographical, but not all; and a couple of them could be counted as science-fiction if you felt inclined to do so, even if the speculative details of sex robots and Adolf Hitler mind-swapping with the president tend to be overshadowed by the familiar themes of booze, fucking, and hangovers. For someone who, according to his numbskull critics, only ever wrote one thing and wrote it over and over and over, there's a lot of variation here, and thankfully none of it in terms of quality - as has been the case with other, similar collections of the man's peripheral works. As usual, it's hardly pretty, and there are a couple of instances of surprising brutality, even for Bukowski, and yet everything is delivered with equal emphasis, no emotional bias, as the even drone of daily life in a hangover of existence, warts and all, and with the sort of pathos and even tenderness which few other writer's ever quite achieved. Each time you read Bukowski you learn something important, or if you don't learn it then you are reminded of it; and if you still don't get it, then you're probably doing it all wrong.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Charles Bukowski Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
This fell into the shopping trolley not through some burning need to read it, but more because I knew I'd eventually wonder why I hadn't picked it up when I had the chance. The posthumous Mathematics of the Breath and the Way from 2018 was likewise an assemblage of odds and ends, newspaper columns and so on, and while there was much to recommend it, as a collection it felt a bit of a slog where a Bukowski usually passes through the reader like curry at the end of a night on the sauce, at least in my experience. Notes, on the other hand, was compiled back when Chuck was still mostly in the land of the living, deriving from weekly columns in Open City, an underground Los Angeles newspaper. I gather Open City were happy with Bukowski submitting whatever the hell he liked in a general spirit of literary freedom; so if there's an occasionally topical observation to remind us this was a newspaper column, it's otherwise a principally autobiographical novel, albeit one with column length chapters written in whatever order he felt like writing them. There's quite a lot of booze, gambling, a fair bit of screwing, general grumbling about writing and writers, and even a few amusing pot shots taken at perceived literary golden boys of the day, Burroughs and Ginsberg. Chuck didn't really do sacred cows, or indeed anything which he saw as getting in the way of the truth. I quote the following in full understanding of some readers being too fucking stupid to understand.

I laugh. he's comfortable and he's human. every man is afraid of being a queer. I get a little tired of it. maybe we should all become queers and relax. not belting Jack. he's good for a change. there are too many people afraid to speak against queers - intellectually, just as there are too many people afraid to speak against the left-wing - intellectually. I don't care which way it goes - I only know: there are too many people afraid.

Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns out to be the collection I was hoping for when I picked up The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Bukowski's observations regarding all which continues to render life such an uphill and often joyless slog are on point and sadly timeless. It's ugly, uncomfortable and it smells bad, but truth is always more beautiful than the alternative, and that's what we have here.

American Victim

Meg McCarville American Victim (2023)
There was a bit of a commotion on social media when Amphetamine Sulphate published Four Circles, McCarville's previous volcanic eruption of righteous bile. I couldn't tell what had happened and felt disinclined to ask nosey questions, but the fallout seemed to be that Amphetamine Sulphate weren't going to be publishing this one which, as it so happens, provides substantial insight into the shit show which ultimately led to its publication by someone else, namely Ric Royer's Model City Books.

By her own testimony, Meg McCarville is a woman with issues who tends to find herself in unfortunate situations. The unfortunate situation was, in this instance, finding herself stalked by a nutcase who, amongst other things, dibbed her in to the FBI for alleged acts of terrorism which were obviously nothing of the sort, and all because he cared. He's identified in American Victim as Max Cady on Wheels, which seems fair, and whilst many of us will have met people like him, this goes a lot further than some disgruntled twat making a few prank phone calls. In fact it's terrifying, and even more terrifying than the aggressive-aggressive acts of sabotage dispensed by our boy is the fact that he gets to keep on keeping on, because while American law enforcement agencies excel in certain areas, not least of these being the dispensation of traffic citations, they're mostly fucking useless unless you're being menaced by an African-American with one of those candy bars that looks a bit like a firearm. If law enforcement did the job it purports to do, American Victim would have been a five-page pamphlet.

As ever, it's both a fucking tough read, and yet one which gets its hooks into you almost immediately because even at her absolute lowest ebb, Meg McCarville is very, very funny, wielding the kind of sarcasm which could have an eye out. It's Bukowksi with tits jammed on eleven, Lydia Lunch admitting she digs Kiss and rocking out, all directed by John Waters at his furthest remove from polite society and the closest I've come to writing with the face-punching intensity of an MOP album; and these aren't even necessarily its greatest strength, that being the words of truth spoken in dark, dark jest - truths that leave bruises.

I've gone through phases of surrounding myself with junkies and nobodies and ex-cons, but never in my life had I felt like I really fell in with the worst crowd until I found myself surrounded by phony progressive anarcho-feminist cunts and dopey woke boys (who really just pounded their politics so they can pound some psycho feminist pussy) who got into more of an uproar about someone getting misgendered even though they changed their pronoun every other week.

Honestly, this is one of the most powerful extended rants I've read in a long time, and anyone whose gag response has started kicking off would do well to remember that Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais and all those other sarcastic fuckers of yesteryear likewise delivered their testimonials with lashings of piss, vinegar, and castor oil. If you really want to understand the modern world, it's all here.

Ploughshares Fall 2021

Ladette Randolph (editor) Ploughshares Fall 2021 (2021)
Ploughshares is a quarterly literary collection of short fiction. Most contributions are approximately novella length, so this is going to be a long one. If you need to dash to the kitchen to grab a few cans of Kestrel and a packet of custard creams, I can wait.

Okay, in vague order…

I'm kicking off with Afsheen Farhadi whose The Mexican Detective takes its time, creeping up on the reader without giving away too much of where it's going despite the obvious focus on bereavement; and once everything has fallen into place, it leaves a lasting evocation of the unreality which tends to surround the death of a loved one, mapping a borderland in mythic terms - in this case by the seemingly implausible agency of a Mexican detective who admits he's mostly just a guy who attends a writing class. The aforementioned borderland incorporates Mexican streets terrorised by knife wielding infants, and I've always enjoyed reality described by that which is found beyond its outer limit.

Christie Hodgen's Bush v. Gore hits a lot of buttons for me, being set in Texas - albeit Dallas rather than San Antonio - with a regular gal, probably the author, abruptly stranded within one of those dysfunctionally over-moneyed families with which I'm now somewhat familiar thanks to the stepson. My bunch are of generally lesser toxicity than Phyllis and the gang, but not one of those people got where they are by playing nice; and the point at which our narrator finally pops, dumping an entire paragraph of home truths on her hosts - page 113, if anyone's wondering - is so satisfying that I had my wife read it too. The entire psychodrama is set against the backdrop of George W. Bush defeating Gore in Florida, or kinda sorta maybe defeating Gore in Florida. Why the election played out as it did seems adequately explained by the family dynamic of Jack, Phyllis and the rest, which in turn goes some way towards accounting for what happened more recently in November 2016.

Yxta Maya Murray's When the Prophet Gazed upon the Face of the Lord is incredible, and one of the tightest, most powerful pieces of writing I've read all year. It orbits - I suppose you could say - the true story of a partial nuclear reactor meltdown in Simi Valley, California back in 1959, additionally taking in the tangential horror of Nazi rocket scientists and other elements found so far beyond the edge of daily existence as to impinge on the spiritual, in this case the religion of corn, stone knives, and the Centzontotochtin of old Mexico. The reality of the tale and its telling is such that it's difficult to imagine it consciously composed and directed as a fictionalised narrative, such is its power.

Talking of which, Mona Susan Power is a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a Harvard graduate who was awarded the PEN/Hemingway prize for her novel, The Grass Dancer. Here she contributes Goodreads Warrior which tells how of a young Native American man from a town near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation gets into Harvard to be taught by a teacher whose last collection of short stories won the PEN/Faulkner prize, whatever that is. Whilst I very much like the theme of what it takes a Native to get ahead in such institutions, I had trouble getting past this one being writing about what it's like to be a writer - a genre I dislike because it feels self-involved and dishonest on some level. It probably doesn't help that our guy's own literary efforts, which appear nested within the narrative, aren't anything special and are conspicuously consistent with Power's own narrative voice, which is freewheeling and would, I suspect, better suit something a little less recursive.

A Procession of Beasts and Men is Will Schluter's first short story - according to the byline - and if it's a mostly decent effort and not lacking in poetry, most of it seems to comprise descriptions of the domestic texture through which his character moves without any obvious sense of direction. Accordingly, there are some long fucking sentences here.

Not unlike those waves of electric pole and line that rose and broke in a steady stream all the way from West Texas through New Mexico and into a rest stop just south of the headwaters of the Rio Grande where she ditched the Volvo for a Pinto left idling at a gas pump and urged that baby up up up and into the Rockies as that one cassette played over and over on fuzzy speakers because the car's broken antenna wouldn't pick up a radio signal that didn't give way to static after about three and a half seconds but the electric line never stopped no matter how high she went and that one song kept on playing Josie's on vacation far away as the woman not yet named Josie approached the crest of the Great Divide and the waves of post and line seemed to transfer into her own body starting in her abdomen and continuing on down through her pelvis over and over again until she felt the emptying that soaked her leggings and the whole carseat under them and she knew her water had finally broke up there among the snow-capped peaks.

I appreciate the reason for the absence of a pause anywhere in the above, but this sort of thing doesn't always work, and here it slows everything down which is, I suspect, the opposite of the desired effect. Additionally, Schluter strives to create mood by means of sentences broken into inactive segments. Such as this. Where a comma would work a whole lot better than a full stop. Never mind.

Having known Nick Sweeney since the nineties, I'm probably biased regarding his contribution, although you wouldn't actually be reading these words if I'd thought it was crap so make of that what you will. The Émigré Engineer is really a novella and the longest story in the collection, which is as it should be given the scale of the tale, trailing its main guy from his bloody coming of age during the Russian Revolution, to Paris, then small town America between the wars. It's about an engineer, one who forges with his hands, making his way by sheer bloody minded force of will in a difficult and occasionally fucking ridiculous world, as told with a satisfyingly nourishing cadence and a sense of the physical which reminds me of a folk tale or even Gogol, albeit without quite the same level of surrealism. I mainly know Nick as a friend of my friend Eddy and as - much to my excitement - a man who once auditioned for Adam & the Ants. I've no real idea from whence his interest in eastern Europe is derived, but he channels it like a native, I suppose you would say. My recent reading has brought me to the surprising conclusion that, despite the last few hundred years, the heart of our world has generally been that expanse of land between the Baltic, Adriatic and Caspian seas for the longest stretch of human history, with the rest of us fiddling about around the edges; and as an immigrant myself, and friends with at least one former Russian Jew, I recognise a lot of The Émigré Engineer, although thankfully not so much the more harrowing episodes. Nick Sweeney taps into something fairly fundamental here, yet without the need for anyone honking away on a trumpet.

Joan Wickersham's Mortal Enemy was an odd one for me, not least for being listed as non-fiction in the index - presumably through being directly autobiographical - which implies the potential for a technical discussion of scaffolding. It's an account, and a fairly harrowing one, of a one-time friend evolving into a violently bipolar stalker. The problem, which is possibly my problem rather than anything to do with the author, is the initial setting of writers, writing courses, and literary discussion amongst students at Yale, the sort of thing which hits me as vaguely adjacent to Wickersham's own assessment of a novel written by her mortal enemy.

The prose sounded like Bobby, Bobby eager to tell the world about itself, but what he knew about the world he'd learned from reading other books by men eager to tell the world about itself. He wrote in clichés. Every sentence congratulated itself for being that sentence.

This is why Charles Bukowski recommended time spent at the race track. To be fair, Wickersham writes without either cliché or sentences congratulating themselves, and the account begins to feel distinctly more vital once we move on from prestigious colleges and trips to Paris. It's honestly a respectable piece and one I'm glad to have read because I'm sure many of us have known Bobby at some point or other, although that whole deal of an insight into the lives of writers usually brings me out in hives which, as I say, is possibly just me.

Leslie Kirk Campbell's The Man with Eight Legs and Julian Zabalbeascoa's What We Tried to Bury Grows Here were both entirely decent without inspiring me to write about either, which is why I haven't.

I don't actively seek out new writers as any sort of official policy because I already have too many books stacked up on the to be read pile, some of which admittedly may be garbage, but these anthologies are always a pleasure when I make the time and I highly recommend this one, not least on the strength of the contributions from Afsheen Farhadi, Yxta Maya Murray, Nick Sweeney and Christie Hodgen.

The Road to Los Angeles

John Fante The Road to Los Angeles (1936)
It wasn't until I happened across this one in the second hand book store that I realised Fante had written a number of novels centred around Arturo Bandini, his fictional struggling novelist. This one features a much younger Bandini than Ask the Dust, and it's a very different novel, its tone seemingly informing Bandini's lousy personality. Where Ask the Dust maintains a sense of realism which patently inspired and is comparable with Bukowski, this one is just plain wild. My guess is that this younger Bandini represents a vicious satire on more or less every writer Fante ever met, and I recognise the type, much to my regret. These days he can't stop himself from name-dropping in all those endless repetitive posts on Twitter about who he's submitted a pitch to this week as though the rest of us have any reason to give a shit, or another blog post about what it's like to be a writer, or writing tips from the guy who can barely form an original or cohesive sentence as he vanishes up his own arsehole over and over and over. He's all plans and announcements and declarations but no action. He's got a literature degree and he may be just twenty-two but he already knows fucking everything and will happily tell you where you're going wrong, drawing on the great wealth of his worldly experience in fucking Sussex.

I said to Mona, 'Bring me books by Nietzsche. Bring me the mighty Spengler. Bring me Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant. Bring me books the rabble can't read.'

Mona brought them home. I read them all, most of them very hard to understand, some of them so dull I had to pretend they were fascinating, and others so awful I had to read them aloud like an actor to get through them.

I've known and even been edited by this barely coherent shithead*, so it's massively satisfying to watch Fante rip the piss out of him for 155 harrowing pages. It's horrible, but absolutely necessary, and I need more by John Fante.

*: Relax, Stuart. I don't mean you.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way

Charles Bukowski The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way (2018)
At the risk of becoming repetitive, today's bewildering Goodreads dunce is an individual who regards this book as representing the point at which Bukowski turned himself into a stereotype - as he puts it - seemingly referring to Chuck's emphasis on drinking, shagging, and manual labour - although the latter is referred to only in passing in The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way. Naturally, I had to ask, because the review in question read a lot like Charles Bukowski keeps talking about women's tits and how he's definitely not gay because he was a bricklayer which is really, really boring actually. Thankfully this wasn't quite what the reviewer meant, so far as I could tell, but his suggestion of Bukowski playing up to a certain image seemed kind of redundant given that the author actually states this in several places; while Chuck's purportedly macho pose is, I would suggest, somewhat undermined by the fact of his spending most of the book writing poetry while listening to classical music, activities which do nothing to suggest we're dealing with a sort of Los Angeles Gary Bushell here.

Never mind. I'm sure the man himself often had to contend with much worse.

The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way collects a series of columns written for various magazines and newspapers, some fiction, prefaces to other people's books, and a couple of interviews. Bukowski is mostly on form.

Oh, by the way, if you want to get one angle on a minor writer, it is one who throws a party or gets one thrown for him when his book comes out.

Even Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb - seemingly an experiment in non-linear pseudo Burroughsian narrative - yields the occasional gem.

Political fervour is the blight of the young. History is too long—the tail swings the dog.

Nevertheless, taken as a whole the collection is a bit of a slog. Much of the word count is taken up with musing upon the act of writing and the life of a writer, with unfortunate emphasis on poetry; which is interesting up to a point, or may have been when broken up into weekly or monthly instalments, but assembled between just two covers becomes a mammoth helping of what is essentially the same thing.

Excepting Bukowski, Billy Childish, Bill Lewis and no-one else I can think of off the top of my head right now - although I'm sure there must be someone I've overlooked - I really find it hard to care about poetry. Oddly, Bukowski feels the same way.

Probably the greatest thing here is the theme song, an essay amounting to writing advice for aspiring authors, and that advice is to go and spend an afternoon at the race track betting on the geegees. Almost all writing advice will be bullshit by definition, but this is pretty solid. To be fair, most of The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way is pretty solid, but possibly not all of it works served on the same plate.

The Magician

Christoper Zeischegg The Magician (2020)
This has been quite a surprise on several fronts, not least being its big fat four-hundred pages girth, stepped up from the Amphetamine Sulphate norm of forty or so. It's approximately a horror novel - albeit one which reads more like hallucinatory autobiography in all but a couple of places - and is a horror novel written by a former porn star, and one who won some sort of porn biz award for wife swapping action or something of the sort; so that's doubtless a whole stack of expectations set up right there. Additionally, there's the intimation of magic, or probably magick, given that we're never too far from that sort of thing when navigating waters such as we have here, which is a subject I tend to associate with persons in black clothes who talk complete fucking bollocks, usually with a flashlight held directly beneath the chin so as to appear spooky and mysterious like that Paul Daniels or someone from Coil.

All the same, by this point it's become clear that Amphetamine Sulphate aren't just going to publish any old shite, and true to form, not only does The Magician refrain from doing anything stupid or obvious, but it's yet another of those which isn't quite like anything I've ever read - which admittedly may say more about me than it does about Zeischegg. It took me a while to realise that the narrative wasn't purely autobiographical in the literal sense of Bukowski's efforts in the same direction, which I mention because it shares both Los Angeles and a stripped down, muscular prose which delivers without unnecessary distraction. Given a few of the scenes, I'm quite glad it's not purely autobiographical for the author's sake. There's arguably nothing more harrowing than you will have seen on an episode of, off the top of my head, Breaking Bad, so the actual horror - as distinct from individual horrific acts, which are in any case few and far between - is, I suppose, existential, being a catalogue of the seemingly inevitable decline of our author, brought down by his own existence, by his own will to live even in the knowledge of tomorrow being worse. There's a lot of Christianity involved, which put me in mind of half-remembered folk horror movies of the seventies transposed to California, but which seems to give the story some sort of structure. The Book of Job is referenced quite early on, seemingly implying that our narrator views himself as subject to similar trials. The Magician is fairly mild for something in which Satan (probably) makes an actual appearance (maybe), as written by a man who has been known to take it up the bum for cash, but its power is profound, and is to be found in the grinding inevitability of our man's descent in a seemingly hopeless world populated by the sort of spotty denim-clad losers who pass by in the background of comic strips drawn by Daniel Clowes. The Magician is sad and powerful without any of the usual button pushing one finds in the genres to which it is related. Additionally, while Bukowski's trials often seemed down to the basics of cause and effect, as with the aforementioned Job, there's not much to suggest that Christopher the Magician deserves any of what happens to him.

The Female Man

Joanna Russ The Female Man (1975)
Feminist science-fiction, so I am reliably informed, and one for which I was on the lookout on the grounds of Joanna Russ giving good account of herself in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, and The Female Man being listed amongst the ten greatest science-fiction novels of all time by someone or other, and because it sounded interesting; and yet I'm underwhelmed, doubtless - as some might suggest - because I have a penis and should have stuck to Robert Heinlein writing about mighty men piloting phallic rocket ships.

The Female Man seems to feature four versions of the author meeting up and comparing notes. One of them is from Whileaway, a supposedly far future Feminist utopia. I think my problem stems in part from certain themes having a didactic cadence, where Russ herself has stated that this was not her intention. As a general non-linear and arguably subjective fist shaken at useless arseholes and persons who make life unpleasant, it mostly works, or is artistically valid and at least as much so as the occasional descent into misogyny by Burroughs or Bukowski - here assuming that Whileaway represents a critique of Feminist utopia rather than something to which we might necessarily aspire. Most men are indeed useless sacks of shit, so I don't have a problem with this being pointed out, particularly as Russ seems to take a dim view of nearly everyone. The problem is that whilst certain passages suggest there might be a lot more humour here than is obvious from first glance, it's mostly lost amongst all the grousing and whining, and this muddying of the waters is further exacerbated by the random modernist structure of the narrative - another author doing the Burroughs thing but never quite striking the right balance. The problem, to really break it down, is that The Female Man is a little boring - the rigged matches against sad, saggy, priapic men get a bit obvious and repetitive, and the cubist progression of one scene to the next becomes a chore. I can't disagree with anything she says, but the telling gets in the way. I have no idea how it could have made the top ten anything.

Women

Charles Bukowski Women (1978)
I was told this one wasn't so great, but I can't remember the specific thrust of the objection. As with Factotum, Post Office and the rest, it's fictionalised autobiography with the author recast as Henry Chinaski presumably so as to allow for a little wiggle room where an artistic truth makes more sense than a literal one. Being rooted in autobiography, references to Bukowski's career as a writer - by this point fairly successful in so much as that strangers are now paying him to fly across the country to give readings - seemed initially awkward, at odds with the tone of the novel and its focus on smelly realism; but I stopped noticing once the narrative settled into a steady rhythm of arbitrary fornication. There might also, I suppose, be some objection on the grounds of it being difficult to mistake Charles Bukowski for Margaret Attwood, but I'm not convinced accusations of misogyny really hold, excepting readers who just really need to find something over which to get pissy.

If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women—good women—frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn't strong. So I continued to struggle with women, the idea of women.

Women might therefore be regarded as Bukowski struggling with the idea of women but failing to achieve any solid or consistent understanding. He drinks, he writes, he visits the race track, and he falls slowly apart as a seemingly endless succession of women beat a path to his bedroom door, one after another, each grubby union doomed before his pants have even hit the floor. His success, if we're going to call it success for the sake of argument, is bewildering, but its occurrence is massively enlightening, not through explaining anything but because of the range of questions it raises; and through all of this, despite Chinaski's raging libido and one track mind, he never quite reduces any of his girlfriends to just another series of holes. He remains transparent and committed to the truth, not least to the truth of his own bullshit.

I poured another wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to my life. I had lost my sophistication. I had lost my worldliness. I had lost my hard protective shell. I had lost my sense of humour in the face of other people's problems. I wanted them all back. I wanted things to go easily for me. But somehow I knew they wouldn't come back, at least not right away. I was destined to continue feeling guilty and unprotected.

I tried telling myself that feeling guilty was just a sickness of some sort. That it was men without guilt who made progress in life. Men who were able to lie, to cheat, men who knew all the shortcuts.

Women as a feminist text is probably a bit of a stretch, but it scores higher than you might think, at least as an unflinching inspection of one dude's attitude to women; and of course, he writes like a dream so it doesn't really matter whether we approve of his serial knobbing. No-one but an absolute fucking twat is going be cheering him on, or reading Women as an instruction manual.

Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski Ham on Rye (1982)
Bukowski only wrote a handful of novels, the bulk of his published work being poetry. This was the first one I read, recommended by my late friend Andrew, an unfortunately dedicated alcoholic who shared some of Bukowski's habits and much of his general outlook. It was a good place to start. The general composition of Bukowski's narrative has calmed down since Post Office, less of the screaming capital letters, and with thirteen additional years of boozing and falling over seemingly providing further distance from the emotional battering laid down during his childhood years, here described in roughly autobiographical terms through the fictionalised persona of Henry Chinaski. I didn't have a bad childhood, but neither was it one so idyllic as to leave me with any soft focus desire for a return revisit; and I think anyone who engages in at least some degree of honest reflection will recognise the description of reality kicking you in the teeth over and over, even if child battery played no actual part.

Ham on Rye is, unsurprisingly, a far from pretty picture, and it would be shocking to read of Chinaski's dabbling with the politically far right in any other context. Tellingly, this seems to have been a gut reaction, as I suppose it often is, inspired by a distrust of the vocally and demonstratively liberal, which I can at least understand. What's more significant here is the author failing to give a shit about presenting himself as a sympathetic figure, not even really a victim of circumstance - which seems a fairly rare thing; and the visceral element is perfectly balanced with glimpses of beauty snatched here and there for the sake of contrast, or if not beauty then at least reasons to be alive: discovering the novels of D.H. Lawrence at the local public library, solitude, drink, fighting just for the sheer fucking fun of it.

America, regardless of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and whatever else it has told itself, never really did rebellion. It's a nation of boy scouts, good little soldiers, and loyal snitches who regard diversity and imagination as dangerous gateway drugs to Communism and homosexuality, and whose minds are easily blown by Michael J. Fox dancing on the hood of a gridlocked car so as to teach the grown-ups a thing or two about what it means to be young. This is why America's fuck-ups and square pegs tend to be pretty hardcore, at least Manson levels of craziness; although of course they don't quite count as America, not officially, not until we get the commodified Tarantino version, probably with Brad Pitt saying motherfucker in an amusing way which will inevitably give rise to a thousand cool memes, as they will be regarded by those fuckwits who place stock in the term cool holding any value whatsoever.

So that's a massive generalisation right there, but I'd guess it explains Ham on Rye and is therefore a recommendation.

Post Office

Charles Bukowski Post Office (1971)
To begin at something of a tangent, I recall being told that no-one actually reads Bukowski - or William Burroughs for that matter - but we tell people we do so in order to appear sophisticated, or because we think we're lush when we really aren't or something of that sort. I was told this by a person on a forum dedicated to Doctor Who, the children's television programme, and it is, I suppose, typical of the sort of bollocks rattling around in the heads of those who can't cope with anything but adventures, one after the other, an endless fucking line of thrills, scrapes, and companions captured for the sake of shifting the story along towards yet another ballsachingly familiar conclusion. I mention this only in the hope of annoying anyone reading who might subscribe to this view, and in the hope of annoying them so much that it causes them to grow the fuck up and invest at least some of their time in something besides adventures, because we really, really, really, really need as many thinking adults in the world as we can get right now.

I first read Post Office many years ago back when I was working for Royal Mail. I wouldn't say I loved it, because it isn't the sort of book you love, but it is nevertheless a great book which left me with mixed feelings over how something written in the American sixties so precisely described my own working conditions in the English nineties - mixed feelings incorporating equal measures of depression and satisfaction, specifically satisfaction at having my suspicions confirmed regarding the universal experience of bullshit. Reading it again in 2019 is interesting from the point of view that although I'm no longer in the job, I now live in America and some of the other details have accordingly come into sharper focus.

Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, just the things you need to know but assembled in such a way as to resonate with a more or less common experience which ends up saying something arguably more profound than that which is given in the text. This is probably why dunces of the kind described in the first paragraph don't get Bukowski, because they lack either the common experience or the imagination to work with anything which isn't directly spoon fed to them as adventure.

To be fair, most people have Bukowski all wrong, also meaning those who need this to be considered transgressive literature because our man likes a pint and has sex with ladies. This probably accounts for his receiving notice in the same open mouthed breath as William Burroughs. The two of them never met, although they once stayed in the same hotel. Burroughs sent a message inviting Bukowski over for a drink, and Bukowski declined because he preferred to drink alone and didn't see what the two of them could possibly have to talk about, the only common ground being their shared disregard of authority. Burroughs dissects power structures, even proposes solutions up to a point, where Bukowski simply reports, tells it how it is, and we can take what we like from that because it's mostly bullshit - even the good bits, those details which might seem worth remembering.

Where the transgressives have it wrong is that this isn't even nihilism. Like I said, Bukowski keeps it plain and simple, the unsteady testimony of a drunk, but a gentle drunk, laced with warmth and humour in the face of horrible reality but without the wasted effort of cracking jokes, or any other ploy used by lesser writers in pursuit of your sympathy. Post Office probably isn't a great novel in the sense of Mountainhead by New Juche being a great novel, but it doesn't try to sell us any bullshit, which is a rare thing, and is therefore good enough.

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey to the End of the Night (1932)
I'm sure I remember hearing that it was Céline who first came up with the three little dots signifying a pause, although I don't seem to be able to find any sort of confirmation for this. Never mind.

Anyway, I've been meaning to read something for a couple of decades now, at least since discovering his writing to be an influence on that of Billy Childish, and of course Bukowski, and - as I've eventually realised - pretty much everyone else I'd consider worth bothering with. His innovations mainly seem to have been in introducing a crude - although not lacking eloquence - working class voice to literature, and a willingness to examine all of the gritty details, stains, and skidmarks from which we extrapolate reality at least as much as we do from prettier, less disturbing sights. He was never too worried about delivering a crowd pleaser.

I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me . . . and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my own class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.

Journey to the End of the Night is roughly autobiographical, kicking off with our man's experience of the first world war and the unpleasant truths accordingly revealed.

People moved flabbily about like squid in a tank of tepid smelly water. From that moment on we saw, rising to the surface, the terrifying nature of white men, exasperated, freed from constraint, absolutely unbuttoned, their true nature, same as in the war. That tropical steam bath called forth instincts as August breeds toads and snakes on the fissured walls of prisons. In the European cold, under grey, puritanical northern skies, we seldom get to see our brothers' festering cruelty except in times of carnage, but when roused by the foul fevers of the tropics, their rottenness rises to the surface. That's when the unbuttoning sets in, when filth triumphs and covers us entirely. It's a biological confession. Once work and cold weather cease to constrain us, once they relax their grip, the white man shows you the same spectacle as a beautiful beach when the tide goes out: the truth, fetid pools, crabs, carrion, and turds.

Driven to the end of his rope, Céline sits out some of the war in an asylum before being sent to French colonial Africa, itself only another variant of hell, from which point the narrative becomes oddly Swiftian, or at least more blatantly allegorical as he becomes a galley slave, rowing to the Americas.

Talk of surprises! What we suddenly discovered through the mist was so amazing that at first we refused to believe it, but then, when we were face to face with it, galley slaves or not, we couldn't help laughing, seeing it right there in front of us…

It's probably just me but this passage immediately put me in mind of Bernal Díaz describing the Spanish forces first arriving in the Valley of Mexico in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain of 1568.

With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

Of course, if it isn't just me, then the parallel probably constitutes weapons-grade sarcasm, given Céline's time in the Americas representing only a minor improvement on his time in Africa, and that it is characterised by escalating absurdity.

'I believe in the enumeration of fleas! It's a civilising factor, because enumeration is the basis of the most invaluable statistical data! . . . A progressive country must know the number of its fleas, broken down according to sex, age group, year and season . . .'

Indeed, this part of the novel might be taken as a descent into an underworld newly industrialised in the wake of the first world war.

The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

The power of Céline's testimony is such as to deliver something pithily quotable on more or less every other page, hence my thus far having used more of his words than my own. If there's a single theme to the novel it would seem to be humanity revealed as reduced to an industrial resource for the first half of the book.

'But you know, doctor, I'm an educated man. I even studied medicine at one time . . .'

At that he gave me a dirty look, I saw that I'd put my foot in it again, to my detriment.

'Your studies won't do you a bit of good around here, son. You're not here to think, you're here to make the movements you're told to. We don't need imaginative types in our factory. What we need is chimpanzees . . . Let me give you a piece of advice. Never mention your intelligence again! We'll think for you, my boy! A word to the wise.'

...and at the risk of hammering this one into the ground:

It's sickening to watch the workers bent over their machines, intent on giving them all possible pleasure, calibrating bolts and more bolts, instead of putting an end once and for all to this stench of oil, this vapour that burns your throat and attacks your eardrums from inside. It's not shame that makes them bow their heads. You give in to noise as you give in to war. At the machines you let yourself go with the two three ideas that are wobbling about at the top of your head. And that's the end. From then on everything you look at, everything you touch, is hard. And everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts.

All of a sudden you've become disgustingly old.

All outside life must be done away with, made into steel, into something useful. We didn't love it enough the way it was, that's why. So it has to be made into an object, into something solid. The Regulations say so.

The second half of the book describes Céline's return to France where he sets up a medical practice, which in narrative terms allows for further exposition and reflection on both his misanthropy and its attendant self-loathing. Unfortunately, this second half lacks the dynamic of the first, pinning its narrative to events of lesser consequence, and so feeling a little formless in places, at least to me.

Anyway, the significance of Céline should hopefully be apparent from the quotes, in so much as that as a writer he clearly strove to get to the bones regardless of stroked egos, sales, or pleasing images, and yet without going too far the other way and serving up what may as well be Lovecraftian disgust. That he is not so well remembered as might be the case is unfortunate but understandable given his later antisemitism, and not just the sort of thing we tend to pass off as being of its time, but properly antisemitic material written as a vocal supporter of Hitler and the axis powers.

In his defence, or at least in the defence of Journey to the End of the Night, there's nothing antisemitic here, and not even anything particularly racist, which seems noteworthy given the African setting of a few chapters, and when it was written. In fact, given Céline's generally poor view of authority figures, it's far from obvious how he could ever have ended up as cheerleader for the Third Reich. The key is most likely to be found in his enduring misanthropy.

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals come into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on. Endless waves of useless beings keep rising from deep down in the ages to die in front of our noses, and yet here we stay, hoping for something  . . .

Sadly it seems to be a thin line which divides this sort of general realism from that which gets so thoroughly pissed off at everyone apparently wallowing in their own shit as to get misty-eyed over anything punishing which just so happens to entail jackboots; so Celine's slide to the far right should probably be considered reactionary in the literal sense, a move facilitated by the desire to attribute blame - as he himself once acknowledged.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

It's a fucking shame, and that whole argument about whether it's possible to divorce a piece of art from the shithead who created it is more complicated than I have time to really consider right now, and is an issue which should probably be settled on a case by case basis; but for what it may be worth, Journey to the End of the Night is a genuinely great book, or at least the first half is a genuinely great book, regardless of anything else.

Ask the Dust

John Fante Ask the Dust (1939)
I first heard this guy's name on crackly old tapes of Bukowski readings in which Chuck occasionally took a break from burping, swearing, or describing a memorable hangover to tell his audience that they should be reading John Fante. Not knowing the name I assumed he was some younger, up and coming dude whose works had struck a chord with the Mighty One; but it turns out that it was the other way round, Fante being an earlier writer, one whose fame should perhaps have extended further than it did and who had served as an inspiration to Bukowski.

I had this book in my possession over ten years and somehow never got around to reading it, otherwise I would have realised the above. Rob Colson, one of the Seaton Point authors, lent it to me and then we lost touch; and shit happened, and we eventually found touch and I'll hopefully be seeing him for a pint in a week or so; and so of course it occurred to me that I should maybe get around to reading the thing before I return it.

It's not hard to see how Fante influenced Bukowski's writing. It's the same tight prose, clipped, functional and yet conveying nuances of mood and psychological subtext with a poetry that might be lost in any more floridly composed narrative. Similarly Fante's world is one of hacks, bums, and losers somehow maintaining their dignity regardless of shitty circumstances. There's a kind of romance, but nothing so cheap as sentiment.

I'm assuming Ask the Dust is at least partially autobiographical given that the main character is a struggling author lugging his typewriter around a succession of cheap rooms and dive bars, and although the territory is familiar from the novels of his more famous successor, the narrative follows quite a different course to the sort of thing Bukowski tended to write. Our boy is living off the precarious fame and earnings of having a short story published in some magazine when he falls into a love-hate relationship with a Latina working in a bar. Surprisingly though - at least to me - the guy's first short story leads to a second, then a novel and a big fat cheque with which he buys a house; but the riches seem sketchy and insubstantial, just background detail to his strained relationships with women and the not entirely appreciated admiration of Sammy, who also wants to be an author, but who writes the worst shit you've ever read. Ultimately our boy's success doesn't seem to add up to much.

Cliché though it may seem, Ask the Dust is a tale of beautiful losers, or at least losers who somehow retain their dignity in the face of adversity, and declaring it a lost twentieth century classic wouldn't be an understatement. That said, it's not without problems - our author's success doesn't feel entirely convincing, particularly not the part in which he suddenly buys a house, and Camilla's decent into reefer madness reads a bit like one of those public information films of the fifties warning about the debauched existence of the dope fiend - although that may be something to do with Fante just wanting to get published; but then neither of these details really get in the way of this being an exceptionally well written book; so Bukowski was right, just like always.

This Book is Fucking Stupid

Christopher Nosnibor This Book is Fucking Stupid (2013)
One problem with post-modernism is, in my view, that it's just too easy. Any fucking idiot can implement some ham-fisted attempt to disguise the fact of his masterpiece being a pile of shit by cleverly drawing attention to it being a pile of shit, and I'm not fooled. I've done it myself. When, after two years of a fine art degree specialising in the moving image, I experienced terminal exhaustion with my admittedly juvenile films and videos failing to garner the tutorial praise I thought they deserved, I switched to churning out a series of videos about the medium of video because I thought that was what my tutors wanted, or at least expected, and that seemed to be what they responded to. It was a piece of piss. I was spewing out that self-aware shit like a spigot. One of them was called Made in One Day and its subject was the fact of it having taken me only one day to make the piece from start to finish; and my 2.2 average grade accordingly went up to a 2.1 for about six months, at least until it became obvious that I was just working the system.

Post-modernism, Nosnibor suggests somewhere or other in this novel, or anti-novel as he calls it, seems mostly concerned with the death of certain media; and so this one is concerned with the death of the modern novel. This places me in an unfortunate position because I'm not really sure what that is, although hopefully it's not Fifty Shades of Shite. I have a hunch the modern novel may have been the stuff Marian used to read, usually either because she'd found it cheap in a charity shop or had read an article about it in Time Out - worthily yawnsome shite such as Life of Pi or Alexander McCall-Smith, the sort of thing which has generally made me feel slightly proud of my criteria being is there a fucking big spaceship on the front cover, or at least maybe an alien? I'm not entirely sure, but if Marian was into it, then it probably needs to die, so fair enough. I never quite worked out why she read what she read, or why she liked anything she liked, but I always had the impression that personal taste wasn't a factor, because she wasn't really interested in anything, not exactly.

Curiously enough, our relationship had certain parallels with that of Ben and Ruth in this anti-novel, and while this may not in itself be significant, it's significant to me as the reader, which is probably the point, or one of them. Nosnibor is clearly a massive fan of William Burroughs, and specifically the cut-up technique he employed to such dynamic effect, although Nosnibor is possibly unique in being a massive fan of William Burroughs doing something other than just going through the same motions. The principal of the cut-up technique is on one level the invocation of a degree of realism not found in the more traditionally structured narrative. The cut-up does to text - and by text we mean information - what, for example, Boccioni did for representational art when he painted The Street Enters the House, an image of his mother - so it is presumed - intersected by the details of her environment, street, balcony, buildings, noise, and even a passing horse; because if this sort of montage does not necessarily represent its subject, it is  nevertheless closer to our non-linear experience of the same. Yes it is.

Along the same lines regarding dialogue:

People don't speak in neatly formed and perfectly punctuated sentences, and don't wait for their interlocutor to finish speaking before they begin: words tumble from the mouth of everyone, they double back and repeat themselves, they contradict themselves, they stumble and stutter, they utter inanities, non-sentence, non-sequiturs, cutting one another up, speaking over one another and finishing one another's sentences, and not always correctly.

This applies to human experience as much as it does to what we say in that our descriptions of the same tend to follow particular types of linear narrative which don't always genuinely reproduce that which is described. This Book is Fucking Stupid therefore strives for something closer to experience by shattering its own narrative and blending it with other material, often written directly from the author's point of view. So we have the two friends described on the back cover as they wrestle with mid-life crises cut in with Nosnibor explaining what he's trying to do, reviews of the novel, or possibly reviews of other novels. It appears disjointed if you're expecting progress from one place to another in the traditional order, but nevertheless adds up to a surprisingly coherent whole.

There are problems, or at least I had a few problems, but they may be deliberate. Certainly the endless typos, fuck-ups and misspellings seem too incongruous to have been left in by accident, and almost seem to work as a way of involving the reader in the editing process, drawing us in to the narrative, making us accomplices - which is, by the way, almost certainly the wankiest sentence I've ever written. Additionally, the characters aren't particularly sympathetic and possibly because why should they be? Nosnibor slips in lines from Killing Joke, Whitehouse, Foetus and others, just like I've been prone to do back when I imagined a mention of my fave band would get the reader on my side, lending the scene I'd just written with my bright green crayon all the majesty of the closing bars of Killing Joke's Rubicon. I already wrote about how much I hate that sort of thing back in May, so I'll avoid repeating myself beyond stating that references to Editors, Interpol, Foo Fighters and others get on my tits at least as much as anyone else half my age going on about how I should check these guys out because they sound like Joy Division or Bauhaus, when the former were never as good as their legend would have it and the latter were shite even at the best of times - more or less just some cartoon vampire saying behold the spider in a spooky voice through an echo box over and over; but, I've a feeling that's exactly the point.

Fucking Stupid invokes the boredom of a meaningless existence founded on half-assed hopes and cultural detritus circling round and round and round, connecting with its subject like nothing before - or not very much before - leaving the modern novel with nothing else left to do; or something like that. I suppose I still prefer Bukowski and his like for this sort of thing, but Nosnibor kind of goes one further by making his characters such unglamorous wankers that he kills all potential for romance stone dead. I'm assuming that was his intention.

The funny thing is that I read this immediately after a couple of nights spent watching James Corden and Matthew Baynton's The Wrong Mans on Hulu - a generally amusing but faintly irritating comedy more or less epitomising the BBC's rebranding of artistic spontaneity and freewheeling chuckles as a generic corporate resource - and so I found myself reading Ben and Stuart as characters played by James Corden and Matthew Baynton in the show, because they kind of are, except rather than being funny, it's just depressing, and there's thankfully no-one to pull a comic long-suffering face every ninety seconds.

This Book really should be Fucking Stupid, or at least just plain awful, and yet somehow it succeeds, because it is; and therefore isn't, if you see what I mean. I'm impressed.

Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

Spider Robinson Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1977)

I'm a little torn by this one - a bunch of short stories all sharing the same basic setting and cast of characters, namely a bar which counts the occasional time traveller or representative of an alien invasion force amongst its customers - at least just enough to render the book recognisable as science-fiction, but with otherwise sufficient restraint as to prevent it turning into an episode of Red Dwarf, sort of.

In relation to a great many of his contemporaries rising up through magazines such as Analog, Spider Robinson's prose comes as a breath of fresh air, a shot in the arm, or whichever simile you prefer. His style is worldly and conversational, well-suited to the sort of jovial horseshit you'll hear in a bar - imagine a cheerier Bukowski who knows when he's reached his limit. Given the setting, most of the actual content of this collection occurs as what I suppose you might almost term Socratic dialogues, in this case a bunch of guys sat around in a bar talking about stuff, right and wrong, guilt, absolution, and occasionally rambling accounts of life on other planets or a tour of duty in Vietnam.

I went off to Nam soon after that—tried to get word to Steve in the stockade, but it couldn't be done. He got left behind with the rest of America, and I found myself in a jungle full of unfriendly strangers. It was bad—real bad—and I began to think a lot about Steve and the choice he had made. I couldn't tell the people I was fighting from the people I was fighting for, and the official policy of kill what moves didn't satisfy me.

At first. Then one day a twelve-year old boy as cute as Dondi took off my left earlobe with a machete while I got some K-rations out of my pack for him. The kid would have taken off my head instead of my ear, but a pretty tight buddy of mine, Sean Reilly, shot him in the belly while he was winding up.

'Christ, Tony,' Sean said when he'd made sure the kid was dead, 'you know the word: never turn your back on a Gook.'

I was too busy with my bleeding ear to reply, but I was coming to agree with him. Just as Nam had been easier than jail, catching the rifle easier than refusing to, killing Gooks was easier than discussing political philosophy with them.

In case it isn't apparent from the above, there's a well-reasoned liberalism underlying Robinson's fiction, nothing too shouty or cornily illustrative, but we're left with a clear impression of where he stands on issues of racism and even homophobia - subjects which seem infrequently tackled so openly in many strains of science-fiction literature, presumably for fear of alienating cuntier sections of the readership.

The only problem with this is that, for all it's wonderful turns of phrase and vivid sense of invention, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon may as well be Cheers with an occasional extraterrestrial dropping in to shoot the breeze, and is as such a little dull when it really shouldn't be. The gags work fine, but most are told as things said by some guy in a bar followed by how funny everyone else found it, and the more anecdotal narratives are related with interjections about beer nuts and the like, so the book tells it's story with just the faintest suggestion of perhaps you had to be there. This is a shame because there's obviously some good stuff here, not least when one customer turns out to have been Adolf Hitler in a previous existence and the encounter is plausibly played as a morality tale rather than for laughs; but it really should have been better, and I really wanted to like it, but I'm afraid I was kind of bored for the most part.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

Jack Kerouac & William S. Burroughs
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (1945)
I walked right past this one when I first saw it in the used book store. I'd heard the title from it being listed amongst a vague group of Burroughs' lesser works and related oddities, but had never really considered it as something which would interest me, which is partially due to the involvement of Kerouac. I have nothing against Kerouac, but neither have I ever felt a strong desire to read anything he wrote, which is possibly an adverse reaction to people who don't really know me telling me to read On the Road because it's just the sort of thing I would like. Such recommendations further foster my impression of Kerouac as a sort of written equivalent of Jim Morrison - great singles and a decent voice, but I probably wouldn't want a whole album, and anyone who seriously regards all that frowning and glowering as indicative of something profound is probably an idiot.

Anyway, I bought it on my second visit to said book store because I realised that I would have been pissed off had I gone back to the rarities shelf and seen that someone else had beat me to it; and I'm glad I did because it's a fascinating curio, you might almost say Burroughs' first novel. In 1944, he and Kerouac were unpublished writers, or aspiring writers, hanging around together, drinking beer, taking on the occasional dead end job and generally just drifting. When one of their loose assemblage of friends murdered another, they decided to write a novel about it, each fictionalising the tale in alternate chapters told from his own point of view. It's fascinating as a period piece of life amongst not quite Bohemian types in New York as the second world war grumbled towards its conclusion across the other side of the horizon, and it's decent as a novel in its own right, even beyond the element of curiosity.

I gather both Kerouac and Burroughs had agreed to stick to a fairly basic, stripped down form of narrative so as to maintain a certain consistency; and although I'm not familiar with Kerouac, Burroughs' voice is already beginning to take shape:

Later, when we were sitting in Riker's at the counter eating eggs, Ryko told me that Betty-Lou had taken a great dislike to Philip.

'There's something rotten about him,' she had said. 'He has the smell of death about him.'

'That's one for the book all right,' I said.

The title derives from a news report coming over the radio during a conversation between Kerouac and others, with alternate lines of unrelated dialogue mashed together in a way which prefigures Burroughs' later use of cut-up technique - which probably indicates the intimacy of the collaboration given that it isn't Burroughs writing it in this instance.

Most of the detail of daily life falls somewhere between Hemingway and Bukowski, albeit a Bukowski who hangs out with poets or occasionally considers paintings by Modigliani. It is vivid and well-paced, with Kerouac's efforts to find work on a ship and travel to Europe providing a backbone of narrative across which is framed the complicated relationship of David Kammerer and Lucien Carr, leading to the murder of the latter by the former. An odd note is struck by the defining of the Kammerer-Carr relationship as homosexual in contrast to whatever else the other characters have going on, which isn't really given a name beyond a heterosexual default suggested by occasional use of the term fag as applied to David Kammerer, or Ramsay Allen as he is named in the novel. Initially some of this read a little like self-loathing on the part of the authors - at least to me - but given that neither of them were otherwise particularly reticent regarding expression of their respective sexual preferences, I'm guessing they simply may have felt it prudent to tone things down to some extent in hope of getting published; and it is clear that this was written in hope of publication, but then forgotten following a series of rejections.

Additionally there seems to be a theme tantamount to the random, meaningless interactions of wild animals gathered at a waterhole, and the occasional frictions which might arise: the hippos boiling in their tanks, one lion killing another over a piece of meat, or Lucien braining the obsessive David before pushing him from the top of a tall building. I suppose that might be the existential element of the narrative, as promised by James Grauerholz in the afterword.

The fact of this remaining unpublished for over half a century says more about the publishing industry than the formative talents of its authors, although I suppose had it seen print they might both have ended up on very different paths.

... and it's great, by the way - seeing as I haven't actually yet said that out loud; which means I should probably read me some Kerouac.