Spike Magazine

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a poem that touches any sentient person’s nerves: “It’s
not the large things that send a man to a madhouse.
Death, he is ready for, or, murder, incest, robbery, fire,
flood. No. It’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to a madhouse…”
Whatever we come to think of the man, he readily
acknowledges that the best compliment he can receive
is that he was “a good duker.” Taking the exigencies of
life in the chin, he never backed down from adversity.
In the end, we are reminded that, “What Matters Most
is How Well You Walk Through the Fire.” This is the
true-to-life wisdom of a man who lived out a very difficult
dream, and one who never came close to benefiting
from a silver spoon.
The film takes the major events of Bukowski’s life
and makes them bare. The viewer is treated to the
story of his first published works in Harlequin Magazine,
its editor, Barbara Fry later becoming his wife.
We also witness the hard times, how he lived on one
candy bar per day. We come upon Bukowski’s resolve
never to quit even though he encountered rejection
after rejection. Consider his wisdom as displayed in
his poem ‘Oh, Yes’: “There are worse things than being
alone but it often takes decades to realize this …
and there’s nothing worse than too late.”
We also laugh along with Bukowski’s stubborn
refusal to be anything but his own man. His struggles
with the now well-known US Post Office job that he
BUY Charles Bukowski books online from and
took in 1952, his having to work evenings, and his
will to write during the morning. Admirable too, is his
relentless will – sending out poems daily and getting
rejected – while he earned his living as a truck driver.
Bukowski was rich in worldly knowledge. Consider
his well-adjusted, don’t-tell-me-bedtime-stories
understanding evident in the following lines: “There
is enough treachery, hatred, violence, absurdity in the
average human being to supply any given army on
any given day. And the best at murder are those who
preach against it. And the best at hate are those who
preach love. And the best at war – finally – are those
who preach peace…”
Bukowski had very little patience for laziness and
people who do not meet the difficulties and demands
of life head on. He disliked hippies because of their
bourgeois, pampered refusal to get their hands soiled
by work. His upbringing during the depression had
given him a sound appreciation of the toil that people
who do not cut corners undergo throughout their lives.
Bukowski suffered a great deal from the resistance
offered him by naysayers. His Notes Of A Dirty Old
Man columns first appeared in a little magazine called
Open City. When this folded in 1969, he continued his
column in the LA Free Press.
Finally achieving critical and financial success in
the last decade of his life – his major break coming
at the hands of John Martin, publisher of Black
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