Charles Bukowski Defies your Literary Pretensions
Evolve
Underground poet Charles Bukowski posed this addressed this ironic question to all those who, like him, want to transit the uncertain path of writing.
Between the damned names in literature, few are as significant as Charles Bukowski, the man who turned alcohol, sex and the precarious lifestyle of the outsider into the imperishable (and sublime, it’s true) material of which books are made of.
However, to assume that the praise of these circumstances is the very raison d’être of Bukowski’s work would be quite reductionist. Bukowski aligned himself to this headcount of writers that begun mainly with the 19th century Russian writers (Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Chekhov, who plunged into the depths of society’s dirty pearls to discover the heroism of hasty bureaucrats in dirty coats looking for a daily vindication and even perhaps redemption) only to be transformed by the route of literature.
At the same time, leaving aside for a moment these accidents (in the Aristotelian sense of the term), it’s possible to trace a common zone where Bukowski binds himself to other writers through their shared, urgent need to write in order to survive the day. They write in order to live, nothing more.
Proof of this is the following poem in which the author of Love is a Dog from Hell examines the task of writing. “So you want to be a writer”, Bukowski says ironically and with a certain defiant contempt for others who, like him, are bound by their profound and authentic vocation and who would dare to respond to him with an absolute Yes, rendering the issue settled.
so you want to be a writer
.
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.
.
if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.
.
don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.
.
when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.
.
there is no other way.
.
and there never was.
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