To Beat And Not To Bop
.... The Beatnik generation consists of the forefathers of this new way of writing, and if you do not think of Buk as one of these forefathers [the Beats] than you are just a damned fool.
Here's my take on it. I never considered Bukowski a "Beat" writer for a number of reasons. I could never imagine him sitting on his ass in a jazz club, snapping his fingers to the hip beat of the sounds. Why it's not mentioned more I have no idea, but my understanding is that the word "beat"
primarily refers to the beat of the music"”
jazz music. The Beats were into pot, drink, zen, the music and the "high" of it all. That may have been the problem too"”learning how to function on earth.
So the beats were inspired by the music and they were inspired by the spontaneous jazz improvisations of the great players of the time, particularly by the awesome genius of alto saxman Charlie Parker, who Kerouac used to rhapsodize about and idolize (he also idolized the great tenor players Zoot Sims and Al Cohn and did a recording with them). In the same way that impressionism in music (Debussy) was inspired by impressionism in painting, the Beats were inspired to write in the same way the Charlie Parker was inspired to play. They started out by trying to break out of themselves creatively and ended up on the road of incredible free-associative literature, with the problem being that, at least with Kerouac, he burned himself out, burned out his creative reserves, by his late 40s and then drank himself to death at the home of dear old mom. The point being, Bukowski's roots seemed to be related to none of this. While the Beats were searching for a new way of working, related to trusting the first thought that came to them and few if any revisions"”Bukowski had "it" from virtually the beginning. He merely refined his gift over the years but always felt that he had it. Plus he had his blue-collar work ethic and stamina rather than the ants in the pants restlessness that many of the Beat writers suffered from and which caused much of their work to be highly inspired but erratic and uneven, at least to the eyes of yours truly.
The two works of Kerouac I'm most familiar with are
On The Road and
Dharma Bums, and they are fantastic reads, especially when you're young and unformed. But they were written under white hot inspiration, and Bukowski was different in that he wasn't trying to say everything in one sitting, or all at one time in one book. He knew how to pace himself and knew how to wait for the words to come, rather then open himself as an oracle like Kerouac did, who exhausted himself to the point of no return.
I think Kerouac, the only Beat writer who interests me, also considered himself a failure, as a failed writer, because he felt that his message through his books had been misunderstood as pure self-indulgence. He was crucified by the literary establishment and was so opened wide, perhaps because of his philophshy of the Tao, let's say, the idea of going with the natural order of things"”that he took this criticism personally and lived out this hurtness for the remainder of his days. He gave into it and the bottle.
Bukowski,
au contraire, only got tougher and wiser with age and was, yes, self-indulgent in terms of certain habits (drinking and the horses), but not in terms of his creative self-discipline... and I believe that Bukowski and the Beats are separated not only by their dramatically different ways of working, but by an entirely different philosophy of life: Zen vs. Romantic Practical Realism. They were looking at some of the same things related to freedom and spontaneity, but viewing them through different ends of the telescope.
The irony is that Bukowski, through pacing himself creatively, ended up achieving the ends the Beats were yearning to stabilize and harness, but never seemed to do. Bukowski liberated modern poetry in ways that Ginsberg never could, though Ginsberg in a sense modernized poetry by writing about the madness of the times as in "Howl". I think however, that Bukowski went way beyond what Ginsberg achieved and tapped into a creative source that was ripe and fecund to the end... almost to his last very breath, whereas the Beats seemed more a product of the 50s and 60s. The world changed and it seems to me that the only one who kept pace with it all, within this group of writers, was Charles Bukowski, and Bukowski did it primarily on his own, while the Beats seemed to be constantly tampering with each others' creative heads and worshiping Kerouac's genius like he was a god. (Not that it matters, but as a point of speculation, to put it plainly, I also think that Kerouac may have been in love, though never overt or even admitted to himself, with Neal Cassidy, and Ginberg may have been in love with Kerouac, and something like that could complicate the emotions and the mind.) Kerouac was certainly inspired, but I think he, at the end of his life, felt that God had abandoned him, or it didn't matter one way or another; with Bukowski, it may have been the exact opposite. In the end, though, I'd have to agree with Kerouac about everything, at least in this moment"”"I don't know. I don't care. And it doesn't make any difference."
Poptop