Charles Bukowski: A Letter From a Kafkaesque Bureaucratic Hell

 

Charles Bukowski received an offer he couldn't refuse: a hundred dollars a month to quit his job at the post office and devote himself to writing. Editor John Martin had read what Bukowski had in the works and knew it was something unique.

Post Office was the result of a decade locked inside that absurd machinery, which left him with one brutal certainty: the American dream was a corpse.

To survive that bureaucratic darkness, Bukowski clung to two things: alcohol and classical music. Sibelius, Mahler, and cheap beers dictated the words with which he assembled the novel in just 21 days of literary obsession. What others take years to imagine, Bukowski vomited out in three weeks.

Post Office was a declaration of war. Through his alter ego Henry Chinaski, Bukowski fired at a system that turned human beings into disposable numbers in a machine that recognizes no one.

No one is a prophet in their own land, and Bukowski was no exception. In the United States he was dismissed as too radical. In Europe, on the other hand, literary circles welcomed him as the new Kafka, the most honest voice to have portrayed the absurdity of modern bureaucracy.

His favorite weapon was dark humor, the kind that hurts while you laugh. That is exactly what Post Office does: it hits you and makes you laugh at the same time. I think Bukowski sounds like Tom Waits, with that voice shredded by alcohol and cigarettes. But this singer of alleyways and gutters needs no piano to back him up. He is far more brutal, and could easily have a punk rock band like The Stooges to amplify his brutally honest fury even further.

I owned many Bukowski books, he was as direct as hardcore punk, and I loved him immediately. Bukowski was my grand entrance into literature when I was barely a teenager. Somewhere I read that the members of the thrash metal band Anthrax read Bukowski obsessively while recording their classic Among the Living. If Lou Reed could make a record with Metallica, I'm still waiting for the one with Tom Waits and Anthrax.