A Justified Life
When's the last time you rented a movie just to watch the feautrette?
A Justified Life: Sam Peckinpah in the High Country made me want to watch
Ride the High Country again, but the main reason I rented it was to find out
more about the director's family, and background.
I remember seeing the movie
at a student bar when I was in college, on television, not knowing anything about
it, and realizing, as I watched it, that I was watching a good movie.
Watching
the featurette also reminded me of watching Cockfighter with Warren Oates:
Across the Border on the end of it.
If you made a short documentary
about Charles Willeford Cockfighter would be in it.
There have been
a couple of good documentaries made about Charles Bukowski, including the book and
CD by Tom Russell, Tough Company and Hotwalker: Charles Bukowski &
A Ballad For Gone America.
Who am I trying to justify my life to?
What do I offer as evidence in my own favor? What testimony do I give on my own
behalf?
Is what I have written pleading, and does it put people off for that
reason?
* * *
I do feel like I have to justify spending my life writing books I could not
sell. Defending myself. And that's like defending yourself against the charge of
being a racist. It can't be done. Anything you say just digs the hole deeper.
I'm looking forward to my trip to Alabama this weekend.
At the same time,
I feel like I don't deserve to go. I should be here, working.
Not writing
books. Doing something that brings an income in. Working at gainful employment.
I feel guilty about good fortune. I can't enjoy it. I feel like a phony.
* * *
I think of the scene in Pollock where Jackson Pollock says to Hans
Namuth, "I'm not the phony, you're the phony."
And I'm not even
famous.
Life magazine hasn't called me America's greatest writer.
* * *
Well, the ULA did call me a legend of the underground.
I'm known
in the circles I want to be known in.
I can take a reverse-snob pride in
not being better known.
The Making of Bukowski Never Did This
Interview for The Die, Issue 10 (and Online)
Q: On page 133 of Bukowski Never Did This (BNDT), you write, "I write about what it's like to write, and work, with the sack, and the blacklist hanging over you like the sword of Damocles." That, along with the pressures of family, is what BNDT is about. Why did you feel it was important to write a book on this topic?
A: Emerson said the first thing we ask, when we meet someone new, is, "How
does that man earn a blameless livelihood, without dishonest customs?"
That's the first thing I want to know about a writer. How did he get the time and
money to write a book? Without dishonest customs.
I ask that of myself each
day, when I face the blank screen, or finish my day's work. Did I pull my punches?
Did I look for an easier, softer way? Or did I make what I wrote as true to my
circumstances, experience, and hope for the future as I could. Did I neither quit,
sell out, nor turn bitter.
Q: Buk said that a person doesn't choose to be a writer; rather, writing chooses the person. Is that a fair description of what happened to you?
A: I'd say, "You don't choose writing, it chooses you. Or it doesn't."
What if you choose writing but writing doesn't choose you? How do you continue to
write in the face of rejection, bad reviews or no reviews, turned-down applications
for grants and writer-in-residence positions, and lost prize-contests.
That's
the test. Writing is a test of character. Is you is or is you ain't?
Many
are called but few are chosen is true. If you're called, you can't quit just because
you are one of the many who aren't chosen. You have to keep trying and not get discouraged.
Don't get your dauber down. Whittle you a pecker and peck shit with the chickens.
Q: Throughout your work, you mention that you've been writing for a long time (nearly 40 years now) without selling a word to New York, Hollywood, or Boston. In addition, you're not shy about criticizing the writing establishment (publishers, agents, reviewers, etc.). Is this criticism just sour grapes?
A: One way to look at it is that only someone who has mastered the fundamentals,
and proven he can operate within the system's rules, is qualified to (1) break the
rules, and (2) criticize the system. If you haven't proven that, you are just a
sore loser who couldn't hack it. Just another whiner.
On the other hand,
Ezra Pound said not to worry about the comments of somebody who hasn't done as much
as you have done. They're not qualified to criticize you because they can't see
from their angle of vision what you can see from yours.
Outsiders, or self-taught
artists, have always had this problem vis-à-vis the academy. The academy codifies
and formalizes the status quo. It doesn't try to change it. The self-taught artist
is following his own vision, not one that is taught in schools. I am not trying
to do what writing program writers are trying to do and failing. I am trying to
do what I am trying to do and succeeding.
I created a body of work, my stack,
and invented a form to present it in, daily typewriting. I also found a medium to
get it out to the reader through. The worldwide web. Those make me independent
of, and immune to criticism by, people following the charted path, the path of professionalism,
where one gets an MFA, a book contract, writes books that fit into neat genres, or
marketing niches, networks with his or her peers, and excludes outsiders from the
guild.
I can see where some of my books might be unworthy of publication
by commercial publishers. But all of them? I daresay something else is at work.
I ask what it is. In the spirit of Zola writing J'Accuse.
I attack.
I don't take it lying down.
You could as easily say that in rejecting me
and then saying it's because my work doesn't measure up they are blaming the victim.
But that's what always happens to a whistle-blower. He is counter-attacked, he
is blamed, he can't get a fair hearing, his accusers don't have to face him.