Bukowski in WWII (1 Viewer)

We all imagine what would become out of us if, by some misfortune, we would end-up in predicament like one of war? Watched the Russian movie "The Ascent" last night, and can't shake up the sadness while watching it, and still feeling it..

I suppose he, we, were lucky that he never experienced the war - first hand. Him being already depressed and grief stricken from the young age, would he become callused to the suffering - as he would expect the capability for violence from fellow human being - and come out stronger than ever, pumping out literary masterpieces or...he would be pushed over the top and fizzled, remaining silent like many have after the war, for the rest of the life? We'll never know.
 
I think the only difference would be he would have been somewhere other than Philadelphia in 1944, so we'd have more poems about carrying a rifle than sitting in a bar.

As it was, they came looking for him as the war was reaching its end. He would have missed D-Day even if he hadn't failed the evaluation and been drafted, so he probably would have ridden out the end of the war on a ship somewhere, submitting poems to Stars and Stripes and dodging Kamikaze.

Whatever would have happened to him, I tend to believe that "remaining silent" would not have been an option.

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I watched a documentary about Kamikaze/Tokkotai pilots over the weekend, and Japan was so fucked in late 1944/45 that they were making auxiliary fuel tanks for the planes out of bamboo, and sealing them with some kind of persimmon extract. It took the leveling of most of the country to get them to give up. Their emperor was a lunatic.
 
I would agree that his horizons would expend with that experience - however his humor would probably be much 'darker.'

Yep, the Pacific theater was one ugly place to be towards the end of war - it's hard to fight one suicided lunatic, never mind the entire army!
 
It's hard to imagine any humor "darker" than Bukowskis, imho.

He probably would have planted his experiences in a lot of poems and stories, like (almost) everything else.

But who knows.
 

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