From the Popular Front to the Underground Press: Notes on Charles Bukowski 20min Paper for Lancaster University

English & Creative Writing Departmental Research Seminar, Wednesday 7th December, 2012 Over the last three years Ive been undertaking research on The American Short Story in the 1960s, with a particular focus on experimental literary practices, and on the emergence of American literary postmodernism in the 1960s and 70s. Ive aimed in my research to make connections between the specificities of textual practices and the specificities of the social formations in which they occur; to note the ways in which experimental ways of writing relate to social change and social movements; the ways in which certain responses to literary problems constitute forms of allegiance or strategic renegotiations of literary form from a particular social perspective. This general method applies also to my work on Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is a polymorphous figure: his work spanned from the 1940s through to the 1990s, as well as across a variety of forms - poetry, short fiction, essays, novels, screenplays, as well as his infamous Notes of a Dirty Old Man column. Likewise, evaluations of Bukowski and interpretations of the significance of his work are enormously divergent. Variously constructed as representative common man and as singular outsider, as hack purveyor of pulp obscenity and as exemplary avant-garde artist, as reactionary bigot and anarchist countercultural hero, Bukowskis (in both senses) prodigious oeuvre allows us to explore many of the tensions, contradictions and antinomies of postwar cultural formations in general and of the American short story in the 1960s in particular. Unfortunately, my paper must be more modest and restrained than Bukowski himself though this may be for the best given that his public readings often ended in brawls. The place Id like to begin is with Bukowskis first published short story, which was titled Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip, and originally appeared in Whit Burnett and Martha Foleys Story magazine in 1944. There are several particularly significant things I want to note about this story. The first of these is that, whilst Aftermath appeared in Story magazine, it was written and submitted as a response to the rejection of earlier Story submissions. In fact, it is a skit on this rejection an extended joke at the expense of Storys editor, Whit Burnett. Including

a fictional representation of himself and a trendy life insurance salesman mistaken for Burnett as characters in the story, Bukowski playfully uses autofictional satire as a means of writing back against this rejection. He begins this by disclosing by making public the rejection slip itself: Dear Mr. Bukowski: Again, this is a conglomeration of extremely good stuff and other stuff so full of idolized prostitutes, morning-after vomiting scenes, misanthropy, praise for suicide etc. that it is not quite for a magazine of any circulation at all. This is, however, pretty much a saga of a certain type of person and in it I think youve done an honest job. Possibly we will print you sometime, but I dont know exactly when. That depends on you. Sincerely yours, Whit Burnett (PWN, 1) As the story progresses, Bukowski appropriates and dtourns the language and presumptions of the letter.1 For example, at the conclusion of the story, whilst his girlfriend, Millie, attempts to seduce an insurance salesman she mistakes for Whit Burnett, the Bukowski character states: I ran like hell toward my room hoping that there would be some wine left in that huge jug on the table. I didnt think Id be that lucky, though, because Im too much a saga of a certain type of person. (PWN, 10). One of the things Bukowski is clearly doing throughout the story is politically situating Burnetts vague but loaded term - a certain type of person. In doing so, he is simultaneously attacking Burnett and forging and reproducing a distinct political consciousness. His attack makes clear that the rejection by Burnett of his stories in fact constitutes the exclusion of certain forms of working-class experience by the literary establishment Burnett is made to represent. Conversely, just as this literary exclusion is a political exclusion, this political exclusion also constitutes a limiting of the scope and form of
1

See: Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, Lettrist International, Dtournement: A Users Guide, Les Lvres Nues ,#8 (May 1956), in Situationist International Archive Online. <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/usersguide.html> [Nov 2012] Dtournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding. It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism. (Unpaginated.)

literature. Bukowski is also making an implicit defence of the worth of writing about what is dismissively called the other stuff (besides the good stuff): a defence of the worth of dealing with the everyday in literature. Something that is important to note about the form of this critique is that his methods the intertextuality, the appropriation of Burnetts language, the vulgar and iconoclastic humour, the vernacular language, the combining of different forms - autobiography, letter, essay, satirical sketch within the short story form all of these methods reveal a deep ambivalence about literature and prevailing conceptions of literariness. This is important in that it connects Bukowski with other working-class writers who, as Raymond Williams notes, had tended to have a deep ambivalence about the novel form, which has traditionally been based around problems of the inheritance of property and propertied marriage, and beyond these on relatively exotic adventure and romance. More specifically, it relates Bukowski to the narrative forms cultural historian Michael Denning sees emerging out of the Popular Front movement which display similar ambivalences, and develop similar formal strategies in order to find ways of adequately representing everyday experience in working-class neighbourhoods. One more thing must be mentioned here, which adds another dimension to the politics of Bukowskis story. In his compelling account of the working-class Popular Front social movement of the 1930s, Denning emphasises that it was a product of the multi-racial, multiethnic metropolises of modernism, and that it was the children of these proletarian migrants, the second-generation ethnic workers, [who] were the rank and file of the new CIO unions [and] the creators of a new militant working-class culture, which, in the process of challenging social relations, also challenged the idea of American national identity.2 One thing that is very significant about this early Bukowski story is that it is one of the few places in which Bukowski openly identifies himself as part of an ethnic minority group, connecting this directly with his literary practice as well as with his exclusion from Story magazine. After having read out the rejection slip, Bukowski has his fictional persona engage in a very telling if self-delusional - monologue in which he convinces himself that his fiction is to be published: But Millie, Millie, we must remember art. Dostoevsky, Gorki, for Russia, and now America wants an Eastern European.
2

Denning, p.7.

America is tired of Browns and Smiths. The Browns and Smiths are good writers but there are too many of them and they all write alike. America wants the fuzzy blackness, impractical meditations, and repressed desires of an Eastern European. (PWN, 2) In his first published story, then, Bukowski consciously aligns himself and his textual practices with the ethnic working-class of the Popular Front. The writing and submission of Aftermath to a Lengthy Rejection Slip represents, then, not only an act of defiance, but of literary class war aimed at appropriating and transforming a particular literary space. Unfortunately, however, his success in this particular instance was mixed for, although Aftermath was published in Story, it was not included in the main body of the magazine, but relegated to the end pages as something of a curiosity piece.3 According to his biographers, Bukowski was so crushingly disappointed by this that he never submitted to Story again and soon stopped writing fiction altogether until the mid-1960s.4 Thus, the term Denning chooses to designate the narrative forms that developed out of the Popular Front subaltern modernism is peculiarly applicable to Bukowskis prose: for, on the one hand, it deals with an experience of modernity mediated by class and ethnic antagonisms, whilst, on the other, most of his stories from this period were lost or destroyed after being rejected, whilst others that might have emerged between the late 1940s and 1960s (incidentally, the decade of McCarthyism) were never written.5 -~If in many ways it was his experiences in the 1930s and 40s that shaped Bukowskis fiction, nonetheless it was in the context of the West Coast counterculture of the 1960s that Bukowski really found an audience for his prose. This was in part due to two (related) forms of publication which have a specific bearing on Bukowskis reputation and
3 4

Cherkovski, p.79.

Cherkovski, p.79; Sounes, p.23. However, we can see from Portions that Bukowski did have a story published in 1946, another in 1948, and a self-interview published in 1960.
5

A similar picture emerges with regards his poetry. In the late 1940s through to 1951, little magazine, Matrix, provided him with an outlet. After that, there is a pause in publication for half a decade, until 1956. The rise of the New York School, the Beats and the Black Mountain Poets helped him find an audience in the mid1950s, though his work was strictly small press, and his first poetry collection was not published until 1960, issued by small press publisher.

readership but also, I would argue, on the form and content of his work. These two forms of publication are the rise of the mimeo scene and the rapid development of a countercultural underground press. Its the latter that I chiefly want to discuss here, for it was in the countercultural underground press that Bukowski found a place to really begin writing prose again. In 1967, Bukowski was offered a weekly column in Open City, and this was the start of the Notes of a Dirty Old Man series which ran from 1967 into the early 70s, in a host of underground newspapers including The Berkeley Barb, NOLA Express and the LA Free Press, as well as Open City. This column massively increased Bukowskis readership and provided him with the opportunity to hone the characters, style, and even many of the plots that he would later use in his short stories and novels. What is crucial here, however, is to sketch out how Bukowski adapted the working-class subaltern modernism outlined above to the New Left counterculture of West Coast underground press, and how his demonstrates certain continuities between these two distinct literary cultures. In his analysis of the print culture of the early mimeographed newsletters and newspapers produced by Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, John McMillian points out that the print culture of SDS publications itself had a remarkable influence on the form taken by the underground press. The emphasis on participatory democracy within the SDS, the sense of urgency that came with political organising, and the privileging of authenticity that Douglas Rossinow describes as a central part of New Left politics, led to the radically inclusive editorial policy of the SDS newsletters and papers, and were constitutive of the direct, familiar and polemical character of the letters and articles they published, their often epistolary form, and their use of a hip vernacular.6 Much of this was to chime with both Bukowskis experience of the underground press and with his literary work. About writing his Notes column, Bukowski said: I sat down and wrote the heading, NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN, opened a beer, and the writing got done by itself. [] Anything that wanted to arrive, arrived. And Bryan [Bukowskis editor] was never a problem. [] After a while Id
6

McMillian, pp. 6-7; 21-25. Douglas Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity

just hand him copy and he wouldnt read it; hed just jam it into a cubbyhole and say, Its in. Whats going on? [] For action, it has poetry beat all to hell. Get a poem accepted and chances are it will come out 2 to 5 years later. With NOTES, sit down with a beer and the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city. Much that was typical of Bukowskis early prose was valorised by the countercultural New Left: its apparent spontaneity, its outsider perspective, its insider language, its emphasis on personal experience and the direct, apparently unmediated form Bukowski was able to give his prose through further compression of the hardboiled blank prose style of his earlier work. Also important here is that, having developed out of the attempt by working-class writers to find new means of representing their lives and their neighbourhoods, Bukowskis work had always engaged in a critique of everyday life. Not only did this correlate with the New Leftist critiques of the racism African-Americans experienced in the course of their everyday activities, and the surplus repression experienced in the so-called affluent society, but also, as Bukowski makes clear above, the underground press allowed him to take his stories of street life back out into the streets. What is important to stress, however, is that Bukowski did not do this through a simple naturalism; his work was not the spontaneous expression of the working-class and it was never presented in this way by Bukowski himself. Rather, what we see in Notes is Bukowski ceaselessly experimenting. In the early prose we can see clearly how Bukowski appropriates many of the formal strategies of Popular Front writer John Fante. Both make use of a lilting, repetitive prose; using long sentences, they avoid unnecessary punctuation and instead use many conjunctions. In doing so they achieved a poetic, lyrical effect, whilst creating verbal structures that were flexible enough to echo the rhythms of the vernacular language of ethnic working-class American neighbourhoods. However, in Notes Bukowski departs from this in various ways: he avoids the poetic effect created by Fantes repetition and aims instead for an increasing compression of sentence structure. He also experiments with capitalisation and non-verbal typographic forms dollar signs, Xs, ampersands, abbreviations, as well as typographic errors and misspellings. In doing so, he does not aim to straightforwardly simulate real speech, but foregrounds the process of literary production itself.

He also takes his autofictional mode further to experiment with the boundaries of the literary object. In one of his earliest columns he presents a set of aphorisms scribbled on shirt cardboards during two day drunks; more frequently, his stories detail occurrences and encounters in bars, small apartment rooms, at parties. These are not merely crude boasts and self-indulgent reminisces. Rather, Bukowski creates the Dirty Old Man persona as a means of shocking his readers and challenging the limits of literary form. His drunken exploits; his assaults on his own body and others bodies; his random encounters on the streets of LA become a part of the work, recorded in the detritus left behind, in a way that is comparable to the work of the Fluxus and Actionist artists. All of these strategies, I would suggest, are attempts at refunctioning literary practices. The underground press constituted a challenge to existing institutions and mechanisms of production and distribution, opening up space for new forms of journalism by and for the New Left and Black Power movements. The corollary of this was the opening up a space for literary experimentation aimed at attacking the specialisation and exclusivity of existing forms of literary production. In continuity with many aspects of the counterculture, Bukowskis aim in publishing in the underground press was to destroy any illusion of artistic autonomy, and to demonstrate that, as Raymond Williams put it, culture is ordinary. Beyond this, his work constituted a direct intervention in the political and cultural struggles of LA in the late 1960s. This emphasis on the everyday, on personal and social experience, was a way of foregrounding the conjunction of the two senses of culture Williams mentions in his 1958 essay Culture is Ordinary: that is, culture as a whole way of life rooted in experience, and as a special process of discovery and creative effort. The connection with Williams is also important in that Bukowskis attempts at refunctioning literary practices were part of a broader struggle over the meaning of culture under the pressure of postwar social change and the social movements by the working-class, ethnic minorities and African Americans struggles that were particularly visible in LA in the late 60s. As such, his Notes columns mark out an important point of continuity between the subaltern modernism of the 1930s Popular Front and the counterculture of the 1960s.