Bukowski was a disgusting person. That’s the whole point in reading his fiction. He would drink until he was able to write, womanise, gamble, and sleep all day. Women and money came and went for him. In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the dropouts of society; the addicts, the crazy, the losers. The idea of academia, the literacy world, disgusted him. He represented a form of counter culture, the people of “the alleys, and the bars and the jails,”.

I was first introduced to Bukowski by the television show Inside Number Nine. The episode ‘Tom and Jerry’ follows a man who quits his job to write a novel. His girlfriend walks into his messy, smoky room and tells him “you aren’t Bukowski, Tom,”. The name stuck in my head. I later saw a picture of Bukowski’s grave with its famous inscription ‘don’t try’. It was fascinating to me that a singular person could be so synonymous with idleness.

The first book I read of Bukowski’s was Women (1978). Following Bukowski’s alter-ego Hank Chinaski, it autobiographically details his various affairs and dating mishaps. My friend read a passage of it and handed it back to me, shocked. She’d opened it on one of his graphic descriptions, a particularly nasty part in which he describes sex as “raping the virgin Mary,”. Women is full of writings similar to this; sex as ugly and uncomfortable. Bukowski’s girlfriends are described by their bodies before they are named, focusing on their legs, breasts, and ‘wide pussies’. Throughout, the narrative describes women sending Bukowski nude photos, seducing him at drunken poetry recitals, cheating on their husbands. The women are as mean, sex-mad, and lazy as the men (Doyle, ix). However, within the grime Bukowski manages to capture tragic beauty; the passing of a loved one, comfort in strangers, voices to the voiceless. His girlfriend Betty ‘nice ass’ dies when the pair reconvene “yellow spittle had caked at the corner of her mouth […] I wiped it away,”. A strange sense of tenderness comes to fruition.

 After my friend’s reaction to Women, I questioned why I enjoyed it. The women of Women aren’t people. Lydia, Bukowski’s sometimes-girlfriend, is the only full character and that’s not for any good reasons; she drinks as much as him, screams, breaks his possessions. The pair have volatile fights and her daughter walks into the room during their sex. “Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you,” writes Bukowski. His love affairs, both on page and in his life, are born from desperation; often the only thing he has in common with his lovers is that they both are alone in the world.

“We need to discuss Bukowski’s explicit abasement of women,” wrote Matthew Tibble for Inciting Sparks, asking readers to stop dismissing his misogyny. It is no secret that the way Bukowski sees women is abysmal. In Post Office (1971) he describes breaking into a woman’s house to sleep with her, Women has him looking down on his partners who are just as low in life as him, and Ham and Rye (1982) shows that he saw his mother as a useless push-around. Bukowski was a disgusting person. But everyone in his works is a disgusting person.

Judith Butler noted that gender identities are not actual truths and are not biologically determined; they are performances (Butler, 2006). If Bukowski’s writings are dramatic representations of his own gender identity then does his widespread appeal mean his audience has a connection to this performance? The idea of the hard-done-by man, unable to live up to the standards of masculinity in the time of the American dream, is relatable to his readership (Tibble, 2016).

Bukowski’s fiction such as Women could be said to be a form of ressentiment. The term, coined by Nietzsche, describes the ego creating the illusion of an enemy; a cause that can be blamed for failure. Ressentiment is a process of imaginary revenge over this enemy. So, if Bukowski is the downtrodden man of the 60s, his writings are works of revenge against the status quo. Although the 1960s are famously known as a time of counter culture, in-fact gender roles grew stricter than ever and the hippy movement quickly became commodified. No wonder such a figure as Bukowski grew in popularity and remains well-read to this day. When one reads his works, one lives out a fantasy of life unconfined.

“He brought us all down to earth, even the angels,” wrote Leonard Cohen. Literature for some time has fought to capture all aspects of life. Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) was banned because as it describes a ‘day in the life’ it describes characters shitting and masturbating. Other modernist works such as D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) were banned for their explicit sexual descriptions, the court opening its 1960 trial by asking “would you approve of your young sons, young daughters, reading this book?” (Mclean, 2019).

Bukowski is the laureate of the American low life, depicting ugliness that we otherwise may not experience.

Bukowski was not loved, not by the people around him. He was born into an abusive household, so nervous as a child in school he didn’t even dare to use the restroom “kindergarten was mostly white air,” (Ham on Rye, 24). As an adult, his parents left him the family home, which he sold and used the money to pay for his debauch lifestyle. Money and people were disposable, and it would even be a lie to say that writing was his great love, as to him it was just something that drunkenly flowed. He is famous for his stark, childish writing style. “Bukowski’s writing was inarticulate, but deliberately so. Each word clung tight to the next, there was no room for any more. It was tightly choreographed clumsiness. And it was great,” wrote Roddy Doyle in the introduction to Ham on Rye.

So why do I like Bukowski? I think his works have honesty to them. Sometimes they are shocking and taboo, but they have this sense of newness, even decades on from when they were originally written.