Bukowski's first book of poetry, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail -- his titles are always excellent, though he relied on others to edit and shape his books -- appeared at the very beginning of the decade, in 1960. Profiting by the "Mimeo Revolution" of the 60's, Bukowski found his work appearing in all sorts of underground magazines -- the "littles," he called them. One publisher, R. R. Cuscaden, wrote that his own aim was "to find a legitimate response to the Corso/Ginsberg/Ferlinghetti syndrome (and imitators) on one side and the tea- cozy POETRY mag gang on the other side. Buk obviously was the answer."

It was during this period that Bukowski discovered that he had, in addition to talent, a real capacity for self-promotion. With help from his editors, the "Bukowski myth" of the hard- drinking, wild man of literature -- the underground man -- began to emerge. This is the kind of myth -- the poet as entertaining suicide -- that Americans are always willing to accept, and Bukowski's name began to be widely known. With Bukowski, as with some of the Beats, poetry began to seem not only "moving" but dangerous. "We were a fairly tough crew," he wrote, "American poetry needed a good going over...Call me a hardhead if you wish, uncultured, drunken, whatever...come here to [the magazine] Ole where you have to squint at what you read and laugh because we can't spell or punctuate."

From 1958 to January 2, 1970 Bukowski was a postal worker. He hated the job, and the day after he quit he began his novel, Post Office. The book was finished in nineteen days and quickly became a best-seller. Cherkovski writes, "The novel became a high-water mark not only for the author but for his publisher as well...The edition of two thousand paperback copies quickly sold out, prompting a new printing and eventually the sale of more than forty thousand copies." More books of prose and poetry followed, as did translations and an international readership.

Cherkovski writes that "Hank never knuckled under to his father's belief system, in which a person must achieve material wealth in order to succeed." One of Bukowski's fellow postal workers, an aspiring writer, is described as having "the kind of attitude toward writing that Hank did his best to avoid: he wanted money."

But Bukowski is a complicated and in some ways contradictory man. He understood that it was only through prose that he could make enough money to liberate himself from the post office. "Not with poetry," he tells a friend who encourages him to support himself with his writing: "It has to be prose." Later, when he is making a fair sum from his books and readings, Bukowski delights in it ("You have no right! Only I should have a BMW...I paid cash. It's top of the line."). Similarly, Cherkovski describes an incident at L.A. City College when the young Bukowski "pretended sympathy for Nazism purely to stir things up on a campus where most of the other students were espousing a patriotic, anti-Nazi line." But one wonders: Did Bukowski's Germanness move him at least a little in the direction of the Nazis? Later in the book, when Cherkovski fails to make an appointment, the unforgiving Bukowski says, "Listen. You're Jewish, right? We Christians have a lot of shopping and tree buying and tree decorating and gift wrapping to do. So let's just forget the whole thing." Cherkovski tries to apologize but Bukowski "had already hung up the phone." How much of that "pretended sympathy" for the Nazis is in Bukowski's "We Christians"? -- though one should add that many of the poet's strongest friends and supporters were, like Cherkovski, Jews.

One can also ask what sort of "outsider" this "outsider of the year" was. For an "outsider," Bukowski was awfully popular with "the mob" -- the very people he disdained. In what way was Bukowski "anti-Establishment"? This is a more complicated question than it seems to be. For many reasons which I can't go into here -- and which perhaps have something to do with our revolutionary past -- in the United States, being "against" the Establishment is precisely our mode of being in the Establishment. American heroes who are solidly on the side of the Establishment, of Law and Order, etc., are frequently represented as "outsiders" of some sort: John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. An important myth of the American Establishment is that everyone in it is an "individual" -- that is, some sort of "outsider." If we make a film about a policeman, he must be a "rogue" policeman, a "dirty Harry." All the same, this "rogue" policeman is finally on the side of law and order and never does anything "really bad."

No one would deny Charles Bukowski's poverty and suffering and the ravages his drinking caused him. He was in a way a "wild man." But, at the same time, he was the kind of wild man who never does anything really bad. Partly because of his identification with the working class, Bukowski is very careful to keep his poetry "accessible," available to everyone. But isn't that at some odds with his outsider status? Do outsiders make their work accessible, available to everyone? Lines like these, by Larry Eigner, point to an "outsider" consciousness which goes far beyond anything ever achieved by Charles Bukowski:

                                  out in the wind
             space   But a rainbow?

                                 What is a bursting color?

      The edge in the room
      and it was wild from
      place to place

close to the sun