Back to Humanity helps people live well in the modern world. We’re still dumb enough to believe in outdated ideas like reading, writing, romance, and limited technology use. Read along for free:
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m writing to you from my apartment in Leblon loaded up on five fantastical drinks from a cafe called Colombo. The top is cold whipped cream. Underneath, you ask? Don’t even get me started about underneath. Underneath is hot delicious coffee.
It is a dangerous game walking into that place. I have never been able to restrain myself to less than three of the elixirs, and since I normally go on Saturday mornings, my weekends start with the sensation of being strapped to a rocket ship. You can put a New Yorker in Rio de Janeiro, but you cannot take the frenetic energy out of him. He is addicted to it, and he will ingest it wherever he goes.
But—in this case—the energy was put to good use. Today, we are going to cover April’s novel from the book club: Post Office. Even if you did not start/finish it, I highly encourage you to read this piece for two reasons:
One: Bukowski’s influence spans from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Marco Ferrari to cities across the globe. (In Rio de Janeiro, I spent four drunk hours head banging to rock music blaring through the various rooms of the Bar Bukowski. In Buenos Aires, I bought Malbec from a shop that bore his name.) Likely—whether you were aware of it or not—he’s impacted an artist you respect; and it is always fascinating to learn more about such influential people.
Two: Bukowski’s work provides practical lessons on how the layman can become a better storyteller because—unlike many authors who write about spectacles—he solely focuses on the mundane. Bukowski proves that we do not need a Hemingway life to tell fascinating stories at work or on a date: there is more than enough material in the everyday if we learn how to convey it properly.
Bukowski
In recent years, I’ve had many debates on whether or not one should separate the art from the artist, a question that is easy to answer for dead artists and more nuanced as it relates to living ones.
When it comes to the deceased, there is no compelling argument for marring their works with their personal shortcomings. Cancellation will not repent for their sins nor affect their bank accounts, and humanity would be far emptier without the works of geniuses like Picasso and Hendrix. As a society, we need the maturity to admire their work as well as the positive aspects of their nature while condemning their misbehavior.
For living artists, it’s more complicated. Each person must weigh the severity of an individual’s actions against the value of their contributions in order to come to their personal decision on if they want to aid such a person. Mel Gibson has made abhorrent comments about every type of person, but I am not currently boycotting his films. On the other hand, when XXXTentacion was alive, I refused to listen to his music because of his pregnant girlfriend’s explicit descriptions of satanic abuse he admitted to. Naturally, different people will come to different decisions on who they choose to fund and shun.
What is more interesting to me, however, is trying to understand the experiences that created the artist. This biographical journey uncovers the ruins of their lives that were responsible for shaping their voices. In Bukowski’s case, the trauma of his childhood—one that he courageously recounts in Ham on Rye—illustrates how he developed his pervasive cynicism, anger, and wit.
Bukowski grew up in a household with a psychopathic father who was physically and psychologically abusive—harm that his mother endorsed. Outside of his weekly beatings at home, the young boy lived in a working-class neighborhood during the Great Depression where fights were a part of daily life from the age of five. In order to survive, the author became tough and aggressive, a sentiment that can be felt in his curt, muscular, masculine writing style.
The environment he grew up in also shaped his perspective on women. Where and when he grew up, they were often seen as creatures for sexual gratification armed with a minute fraction of the power and freedoms Western women have today. Rather than attempt to disguise this view in literary language, Bukowski bluntly delivers it to the reader as though he is talking to a male companion at a bar.
More than any of these factors, however, it was the heartbreaking isolation of his youth that created the artist. His parents did not allow him to play with other children. He was mocked for his German accent in the midst of the Nazi’s rise to power. He was scarred by boils and acne so horrific that he was forced to take a leave of absence from school to undergo ineffective surgical intervention; and through his teenage years, his face consistently disgusted onlookers who openly commented on its hideousness. To flee from this alienation, Bukowski escaped into reading and writing fiction during his youth:
The Baron went on doing magic things. Half the notebook was filled with Baron Von Himmlen. It made me feel good to write about the Baron. A man needed somebody. There wasn’t anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn’t make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around.
This passion led him to make a failed attempt at a writing career in his twenties; and—disillusioned with literature—Bukowski subsequently quit writing for a decade while he drank his way through odd jobs across the country. It was only in his late thirties that he picked up the pen again, this time catching success with his poetry.
But it was only in 1969—at forty-nine years-old—that he was able to quit his job at the post office to dedicate himself to writing full-time with the backing of John Martin, a man who believed in the then obscure writer so much that he started Black Sparrow Press to publish his work.
The deal consisted of two agreements: the writer would receive $100 per month while his heart continued to beat, and he had to give up other work. The author described his thought process in his quintessential style:
I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
Three weeks later, he finished Post Office, a semi-autobiographical novel written from the perspective of his fictional alter ego: Hank Chinaski. Though its success was limited upon publication, the work later gained a cult following because of its differentiated style, which we will turn our attention to now.
Humor
No matter how profound a lesson one wants to teach, it is impossible without attention. By using comedy throughout the novel, Bukowski makes the experience of reading pleasurable in and of itself, which allows him the space to add layers to his work.
The first method he uses throughout the work is to treat serious subjects flippantly. A good example of this can be found on the first page of the novel where he describes his approach to work—an aspect of life that Americans treat as its very core—with a level of thoughtfulness most would apply to deciding which drink to order:
It began as a mistake.
It was Christmas season, and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure.
Throughout the rest of the novel, he does not deviate from this voice. No matter the subject at hand—from suicide to alcoholism to poverty—the narrator speaks nonchalantly about even the gravest of tragedies.
Routinely, Bukowski sets the reader up in one direction before surprising him with an unexpected twist, a technique that comics regularly use. My favorite example from Post Office is when Chinaski returns home and finds an attractive woman in his apartment:
And you didn't adjust, you simply got more and more tired. I always picked up my 6 pack on the way in, and one morning I was really done. I climbed the stairway (there was no elevator) and put the key in. The door swung open. Somebody had changed all the furniture around, put in a new rug. No, the furniture was new too.
There was a woman on the couch. She looked all right. Young. Good legs. A blonde.
"Hello," I said, "care for a beer?"
"Hi!" she said. "All right, I'll have one."
"I like the way this place is fixed up," I told her.
"I did it myself."
"But why?"
"I just felt like it," she said.
We each drank at the beer.
"You're all right," I said. I put my beercan down and gave her a kiss. I put my hand on one of her knees. It was a nice knee.
Then I had another swallow of beer.
"Yes," I said, "I really like the way this place looks. It's really going to lift my spirits."
"That's nice. My husband likes it too."
"Now why would your husband ... What? Your husband? Look, what's this apartment number?"
"309."
"309? Great Christ! I'm on the wrong floor! I live in 409. My key opened your door."
"Sit down, sweety," she said.
"No, no..." I picked up the 4 remaining beers.
"Why rush right off?" she asked.
"Some men are crazy," I said, moving toward the door.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, some men are in love with their wives."
Mission, Obstacles, Stakes
It is common knowledge that good stories have a clear mission, obstacles, and high stakes; but unlike many novelists who spin up fantastic fictions to draw the reader in, Bukowski makes the quotidian captivating by explicitly stating each at the beginning of chapters, and thus injecting them with the tension and grandeur of Biblical events:
The rainy season began. Most of the money went for drink so my shoes had holes in the soles and my raincoat was torn and 14 old. In any steady downpour I got quite wet, and I mean wet— down to soaked and soggy shorts and stockings. The regular carriers called in sick, they called in sick from stations all over the city, so there was work everyday at Oakford Station, at all the stations. Even the subs were calling in sick. I didn't call in sick because I was too tired to think properly. This particular morning I was sent to Wently Station. It was one of those 5 day storms where the rain comes down in one continuous wall of water and the whole city gives up, everything gives up, the sewers can't swallow the water fast enough, the water comes up over the curbings, and in some sections, up on the lawn and into the houses.
I was sent off to Wently Station.
Later, he achieves the nearly impossible feat of making us care about water fountains:
Then some men came around and ripped out every other water fountain.
“Hey, look, what the hell are they doing?” I asked.
Nobody seemed interested.
I was in the third-class flat section. I walked over to another clerk.
“Look!” I said. “They are taking away our water!”
He glanced at the water fountain, then went back to stick his third-class.
I tried other clerks. They showed the same disinterest. I couldn’t understand it.
I asked to have my union representative paged to my area.
Content
Of course, none of this would matter if the content wrapped up in all of this style was meaningless. But the reason we remember Bukowski is because by he grabbing our attention and making us laugh, he is able to get us to listen.
When we do, we discover the sickness of alcoholism:
When I came to I was in the front room of my apartment, spitting into the rug, putting cigarettes out against my wrists, laughing. Mad as a March Hare. I looked up and there sat this pre-med student. A human heart sat in a homey fat jar between us on the coffeetable. All around the human heart—which was labeled after its former owner "Francis"—were half empty fifths of whiskey and scotch, clutters of beerbottles, ashtrays, garbage. I'd pick up a bottle and swallow a hellish mixture of beer and ashes. I hadn't eaten for 2 weeks. An endless stream of people had come and gone. There had been 7 or 8 wild parties where I had kept demanding—"More to drink! More to drink! More to drink!" I was flying up to heaven; they were just talking—and fingering each other.
The humanity children can elicit:
I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, and the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy.
The tragic and nostalgic passing of time:
I met Betty on the street.
"I saw you with that bitch a while back. She's not your kind of woman."
"None of them are."
I told her it was over. We went for a beer. Betty had gotten old, fast. Heavier. The lines had come in. Flesh hung under the throat. It was sad. But I had gotten old too.
Betty had lost her job. The dog had been run over and killed. She got a job as a waitress, then lost that when they tore down the cafe to erect an office building. Now she lived in a small room in a loser's hotel. She changed the sheets there and cleaned the bathrooms. She was on wine. She suggested that we might get together again. I suggested that we might wait awhile. I was just getting over a bad one.
She went back to her room and put on her best dress, high heels, tried to fix up. But there was a terrible sadness about her.
We got a fifth of whiskey and some beer, went up to my place on the 4th floor of an old apartment house. I picked up the phone and called in sick. I sat across from Betty. She crossed her legs, kicked her heels, laughed a little. It was like old times. Almost. Something was missing.
The painful realities of the working-class:
Well, as the boys said, you had to work somewhere. So they accepted what there was. This was the wisdom of the slave.
§
Hopefully, you learned a little bit about Bukowski and storytelling today. If you would like to discuss the novel with me over a call, you can choose a time here. See you next month for Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr!
Specific notes on Post Office:
Anachronistic. Clearly this book is written WAY before our time. Early on, he delivers to a church with a name but no address, for example. And, his talk of "girls" would not be tolerated these days. Part 3, Ch 17 someone "belt-whipped" a woman. No recognition of the woman here. The racial references are bald and without reflection.
These things would never happen now.
But, yet, I like the style.
Now, this is a book with dialogue I can read much easier than Faulkner.
I've never read this novel and thought it was fun. It was an easy read, not too contemplative, just contemplative enough. I particularly liked the ending with the pregnancy, the dismissal notices and then, of course, the return to the bottle.
This writer will always stand apart from all other American writers in that he's just so willing to be brash with literary style, like Burroughs. A little "blue" (as they used to say), without getting sloppy. LOL