THIS IS NO PARABLE. No well-researched,
seventeen-draft mishmash
of literary exhaustion. Post Office is without extended
metaphor, without clever allusion, without plot or character development,
without positive role models, patriotism, pride, or civic virtue.
It does, however, have punchlines. In bitterness and exhaustion and
even glee Bukowski cracks wise. In each brief chapter, in each blunt
paragraph, he shows his poet's flair for the suspense in beginning,
for the shock of ending. But ultimately this
is a serious novel, a novel of struggle,
of frustration, of quiet desperation—and of the
moments (I won't call them redeeming, never redeeming)
that allow life a certain bearability. A novel
of the working life.
Charles Bukowski spent fifteen years working for the
Post Office. For three years as a mail carrier, for nearly
twelve as a postal clerk—working overtime, overnight,
working for sadistic supervisors and alongside certifiable
coworkers, through various wives and dogs and sleeping
arrangements. And at forty-nine years old he quit the Post Office, sat
down, and in three weeks wrote this novel.
It is this burst of storytelling that, much like Kerouac's
On the Road (also written in three weeks), transmits
a certain frenzied pulse to the text. Bukowski had, on leaving the
Post Office, convinced his small-press
publisher to pay him a salary for life to write full-time;
one can imagine the rush of freedom, of unburdening, that came with those
first days as fifteen years of life flowed over his fingers, rattling
into his "typer." It was not until nearly the end of his life, having recovered
from a two-year bout with tuberculosis, that he would replicate the same sort
of pent-up storytelling, in the excellent collections Septuagenarian Stew
and The Last Night of the Earth Poems.
POST OFFICE IS A NOVEL of short anecdotes, "presented" (its dedication reads)
"as a work of fiction"; and in so presenting it, Bukowski does
change names and chronologies and even details. It is a work, like most of
his work, of augmented autobiography—and
as in most of his work he writes here of his alter-ego Hank Chinaski.
Bukowski writes in simple sentences—the logical conclusion, I suppose,
of something Hemingway started—and he tells simple
stories. In my own simple way I think of these as "gut" stories, a label to
which I don't think Bukowski (or Hemingway for that matter) would have
objected. And for the sake of not taking my word for it, I'll tell you one:
HANK CHINASKI IS MARRIED to a small-town Texan at this point, living in
L.A., working 12-hour night-shifts at the Post
Office. In the middle of the day, one day, his wife, Joyce, wakes him, telling him
she's gotten them a dog and named it "Picasso."
I walked in and looked at the dog. He couldn't see.
Hair covered his eyes. I watched him walk. Then I
picked him up and looked at his eyes. Poor Picasso!
"Baby, you know what you've gone and done? . . .
He's a subnormal. He has an I.Q. of about 12. You've
gone out and gotten us an idiot of a dog."
. . .
Just then Picasso started to piss. Picasso was full
of piss. It ran in long yellow fat rivulets along
the kitchen floor. Then Picasso finished, ran and
looked at it.
Eventually Hank housebreaks Picasso, but he has to be careful—the
dog will happily sit outside and collect hundreds of fly-bites if left
to its own devices. And Joyce is little help: "Well," she says, "you
were the one who housebroke him."
Later on, Hank walks in on Joyce and Picasso:
I got up for a glass of water and as I walked into
the kitchen I saw Picasso walk up to Joyce and lick
her ankle. I was barefooted and she didn't hear me.
She had on high heels. She looked at him and her
face was pure small-town hatred, white-hot. She
kicked him hard in the side with the point of her
shoe. The poor fellow just ran in little circles,
whimpering. Piss dripped from his bladder. I walked
in for my glass of water. I held the glass in my hand
and then before I could get the water into it I threw
the glass at the cupboard to the left of the sink.
Glass went everywhere. Joyce had time to cover her
face. I didn't bother. I picked up the dog and walked
out. I sat in the chair with him and petted the little
shitsnot. He looked up at me and his tongue came out
and licked my wrist. His tail wagged and flapped like
a fish dying in a sack.
I TELL THIS STORY because it stays in my mind. Because, while
watching the film American Psycho, I've seen a room full
of people barely notice axe-killings and decapitations and all the
more mundane murder techniques only to groan in some sort of
primal outrage at the stomping of a bum's mutt. Because just today
I read Halspal's The Perfect Puppy, which makes a hell of a
point about dependency, among other things.
There's something very telling in how a person treats a dog.
I tell this story finally because it begins to explain Bukowski.
His core philosophy seems to be one of fatalism, of acceptance: to take the pleasures
he can out of life, knowing that most of the rest of it is ugly and demeaning
and pointless. To watch in bewilderment the rush of emotion all around
him, to draw his characters as products of this emotion, and yet in himself
to detach his voice from any rage or love or jealousy. To speak of these
in very nearly the third person.
I catch myself calling this detachment a weakness, his greatest weakness
I nearly write—because Bukowski is such a
documentarian—but then I consider the alternative: to write of
rage or to write with rage, to write stories of moral weight
or stories of thick sentiment, to write fiction of truth or that
paperback bin that is the alternative. No, the more I think of it,
the clearer it is that the numbness, the detachment, is all more of
the same fatalism that always has been the center of his work.
THIS IS A FUNNY NOVEL, but it is not comedy; it's sad though
indeed not tragedy; it is explicit, yet finally not pornography.
This is a life—a life told bluntly and well, with a certain
necessary detachment. Most, I suppose, have a more sophisticated
definition, but for me it is this very sort of undefinable humanity
to which I refer when I use the word "literature."
Post Office by Charles Bukowski
184 pages, Copyright © 1971 by Charles Bukowski
Black Sparrow Press
ISBN: 0-87685-086-7 (paper)
ISBN: 0-87685-087-5 (cloth)