Watchful Convert: Charles Bukowski and the Perils of Happiness
by John Timpane
Many of Charles Bukowski’s poems seem spoken by an experienced cynic, tired of the world and resolved to be truthful, even though, or maybe because, the truth hurts. Throughout the poems throbs the sense that the cynical person is punishing life for having disappointed him or her. “Inside every cynic,” George Carlin is said to have said, “is a disappointed idealist.” Bukowski’s poetry is an epic of degradation and disappointments, especially in himself, what he really is, what he has become. That radiates throughout the backstreets world of his poetry.
Granted, he has good reasons for cynicism. Witness his famous lists of dives, fights, prisons, alcoholic sprees, meaningless or destructive intimacy, and other misfortunes: “those 4,500 dark nights, /the jails, the/hospitals...” (“The Icecream People”), “the/ wars and the/ hangovers/ the back alley fights” (“How Is Your Heart?”). We’re assured, as in “The Genius of the Crowd,” a down-and-out Sermon on the Mount, that people are phonies and second-raters, that the future is at least as dirty as the present, probably worse.
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
Do not, whatever you do, believe in something that “is average/ seeks average.” Once again, a note of disappointment, as if spoken by that idealist hiding within the cynic.
Let’s turn the other way and wonder aloud: what does Bukowski do with happiness? It’s not what he is most celebrated for, certainly. What’s surprising is that happiness does exist, at least sometimes, in the Bukowski universe. Biggest surprise of all, Bukowski believes happiness, if not lifelong then at least occasional, can be learned.
Mostly Bukowski is suspicious of it. It’s too often a delusion: people seek a happiness that doesn’t or cannot exist, and sometimes the pretense ruins their lives. Or it’s a put-on: people act happy even though they aren’t really. They pretend so others won’t see the truth. Worst, it’s too often merely a convention, something we’re taught we should have, or should seek to have; if we don’t, it’s a sign we’re not nice, or good, or successfully socialized. It’s the social cult of “be nice.” One heartbreaking treatment of happiness as a façade or convention is this reminiscence of his childhood:
A Smile to Remember
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, “be happy Henry!”
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?”
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw
one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled
The speaker surprisingly acknowledges that his mother “was right: it’s better to be happy if you/ can.” Note the superb way “can” hangs out by itself, swathed in a big ironic pause – before being overwhelmed by “but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week,” and so on. Happiness is not only useless; it’s defenseless.
His mother’s smile is out of register with the abuse and cruelty around her. Throughout, she is associated with the goldfish, her attempt to be homey, a touch of life, something pretty. His mother is called
poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: “Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?”
When the fish die and are thrown – in an act of symbolic cruelty – “to the cat/ there on the kitchen floor” – he and his father watch to see how she reacts, and the smile stays fixed. Meant as an example to her son, whom she plainly fears will grow up bent and angry, his mother’s is “the saddest smile I ever saw.”
He does report on a particular attitude, just short of happiness, that has gotten him through life.
How Is Your Heart?
during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment –
I wouldn’t call it
happiness –
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occurring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the back alley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade –
this was the craziest kind of
contentment
and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror –
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.
Contentment is a macho, survivalist equilibrium – “an inner/ balance/ that settled for/ whatever was occurring.” One learns to take what comes and let it go. Such balance is a Hemingwayesque “purity of line,” a repression of despair and outrage in the name of keeping steady. Like Hemingway, the speaker concludes that “what matters most is/ how well you/ walk through the/ fire.”
What’s missing in “How Is Your Heart?” is joy, the intense delight not just in the people and things that cause it but also in life in general. And Bukowski’s poems – some of them, anyway – acknowledge that that happiness exists. He has fun with it sometimes. In “Bluebird,” Bukowski, ever conscious of his public image, worries that letting himself be too obviously happy would endanger his professional reputation:
There’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
We get this again in “The Icecream People,” concerning a sober interlude. He and his love go to a Baskin-Robbins:
we park outside and look at icecream
people
a very healthy and satisfied people,
nary a potential suicide in sight
(they probably even vote)
and I tell her
“what if the boys saw me go in there? suppose they
find out I’m going in for a walnut peach sundae?”
This is a disorienting world: “I feel like a leper in a/ beauty contest.” While he does his best to satirize the people at the ice cream parlor, by the end of the poem, things are going so well that he writes that “the icecream people make me feel good,/ inside and out.”
All right then: what about when happiness happens? What does the avowed cynic, the tough veteran of a grinding life, do with it? Granting the good reasons Bukowski has for being suspicious of happiness – that it’s often insincere, a con job, a delusion, a convention, even a cover-up for the sadness of living – some of his best poems do encounter it. I’ve seen this one taped to more than one refrigerator door:
Marina
majestic, magic
infinite
my little girl is
sun
on the carpet –
out the door
picking a flower, ha!
an old man,
battle-wrecked,
emerges from his
chair
and she looks at me
but only sees
love,
ha!, and I become
quick with the world
and love right back
just like I was meant
to do.
Let’s revisit the first five effervescent lines:
majestic, magic
infinite
my little girl is
sun
on the carpet –
Quite a misdirect, those words majestic, magic, and infinite, startling to encounter modifying my little girl. Enormous, transcendent, they then reel us in with little girl. It’s charming and touched with humor, as in “Fooled you.” And the “sun on the carpet” metaphor is both homely and lucid, suggesting warmth, repose (in which we may appreciate such things), and, well, happiness. We have the three ha!’s, three flourishes, three violàs. And then the self-portrait of the speaker as “an old man,/ battlewrecked.”
But a surprise is in store for the battle-wrecked old man, because the little girl does not see him as he sees himself, or as he fears others see him: “she looks at me/ but only sees/ love, ha!”
The best poems enact or embody things. Sure, “show, don’t tell,” but it’s more than simply “showing” – the best poems happen. They make something happen to or for someone else. No happening here is bigger than the speaker’s reaction when he realizes his little girl looks at him and sees only love:
and I become
quick with the world
and love right back
just like I was meant
to do.
These lines remind me of repeated times in Bukowski when sexual response is an issue. Either the person he’s with isn’t interested, or he wants to be but can’t manage, often because of alcohol. We recall that the happiness of “The Icecream People” arises from a time of sobriety, and that poem begins with three seeming-cynical lines: “the lady has me temporarily off the bottle/ and now the pecker stands up/ better.”
Response is everything. Bukowski’s speakers are aching for response, aching to see it, know it for a fact, feel it themselves. In “Marina,” the little girl is first to respond, to show him she loves him without question or hesitation. She looks and loves. This is enough to engender in the speaker an immediate becoming “quick with the world,” as in awake, aware, in tune, connected with the fertile dynamics of life.
Who or what “meant” the speaker to be this happy, though? He’s happy, all right. But that word meant is resonant. To be sure, his daughter, in looking and loving, “means” on some level for him to return her love and feel good in it, and he does. It could also be that destiny “means” for him to be here and receive this look and this love and return them in kind.
But let’s hesitate to be this romantic with Bukowski. There may also be a mechanistic tinge to “meant,” as if the speaker slots reflexively into the response of father to daughter. That’s the machine we’re in; that’s our role in it. So even in “Marina,” his happiest poem, there may be a vague cynical hangover, a refusal to give in all the way. Not to say the happiness in “Marina” isn’t sincere or total or real. We can at least say that “just like I was meant/ to do” has a slight self-consciousness, a note of trying to see his happiness from outside. Still, if you want undoubtable connection and the joy of knowing it, it’s in “Marina.”
Some might say there’s nothing to be done about happiness. It’s an accident of living. We can enjoy it and be grateful for it when it happens, but beyond that, what? In Bukowski – I write this with pleasant surprise – there actually is an answer.
“Let It Enfold You” may be Bukowski’s most extended consideration of happiness and what to do with it. Like many of his poems, it arises from his autobiography; he reviews his past self, firing off a fulminating, truly epic dirty-laundry-list:
I was hard as granite, I
leered at the
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.
I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted, jailed, in and
out of fights, in and out
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at, I had no male
friends,
I changed jobs and
cities, I hated holidays,
babies, history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents, spain,
france, italy, walnuts and
the color
orange.
algebra angered me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.
peace and happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
and
addled
mind.
The attitudes floated here – distrust; rejection of conventional modes of beauty or happiness (“opera sickened me/ charlie chaplin was a/ fake/ and flowers were for pansies”); condescension to the masses who unthinkingly give in to such socialized delusions – arise in plenty of Bukowski’s poems and stories. According to this code, to accept the fictions of happiness at face value is weak, crazy, sick.
But a turnabout is coming in “Let It Enfold You,” a conversion experience in which over time a man assents to accepting happiness. Having surveyed his former self, he now considers what has happened to him since then. It strikes me as something like the moment in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony when the orchestra, as it were, tries out several themes that have sounded so far, and in various ways seems to reject them. Something new, something more is needed. That’s when the world gets “Song of Joy.”
The turn begins as the speaker comes to realize that “I wasn’t different// from the/others, I was the same.” As a confirmed cynic, he looked down on those who loved peace and happiness, seeing only weakness or addled minds. He saw himself as a guy with the real goods, a guy who knew the score, a guy who found out the truth and had the right to look down on those who fell for the scam. But that has changed.
Tough-guy reserve remains. “I could never accept/ life as it was,” he warns us, “ … “but there were parts,/ tenuous magic parts/ open for the/ asking.” There’s that word magic again. The word tenuous rides in front of it, warning further that, all in all, even the reformed speaker refuses to give in all the way to the magic. Magic exists all right, but it is flickering, insubstantial. Nevertheless, he sees these parts of life as “open for the/ asking.”
The poem comes close to a Bukowski happiness manual. Life must never be accepted for what it is; there must always be resistance, protest. (There’s the disappointed idealist again: we would not be protesting now unless we once expected life to be better.) Yet in the midst of resistance, as we always are, we must accept that magic is there, albeit momentary, and then we must ask, so to speak, for admittance. We must do the work of going to it, understanding it, and living accordingly. So in “Marina,” surprise love sparks a response that renders the respondent quick with life.
“Let It Enfold You” then does something very few happiness poems have the courage to do: it actually lists the benefits of abandoning tropistic cynicism and acknowledging happiness, or at least the potential for it. In many poems, happiness all too often is treated as emotional paydirt, an endpoint, a moral touchdown, instead of as a part of the weave, a dynamic within the dynamic. In Bukowski’s world happiness is rooted in a dirty, tough life. But it’s there, part of the process if you can find it, and the life that has it is better.
How? What are the benefits? “I began to see things,” he reports. Awareness comes upon him of coffee cups, dogs, mice – and he takes them for their own sakes. I recall the aware aesthetic of Japanese poetry and art, the realization of the quiet sadness and beauty in all things as they are. I recall, too, the words of a man who, for medical reasons, for a time lost all of his testosterone, accompanied by its associated feelings, drives, and orientations. How did life feel to such a person? I paraphrase here, but he said, “I could see every single thing. And it was … beautiful.” He could see it for itself. Thus happiness in Bukowski.
“I began to feel good” is another benefit, “in the worst situations,/ and there were plenty of those.” We recall the not-quite-happiness-more-like-contentment of “How Is Your Heart?,” credited with helping “during my worst times.” Here, though, we have something the speaker would call happiness: “I welcomed shots of/ peace, tattered shards of/ happiness.” He warns against “cockeyed optimism” and says he nearly tried suicide again, but that when the good feelings returned
I didn’t fight them off
like an alley
adversary.
I let them take me,
I luxuriated in them,
I made them welcome
home.
This speaker, who in so many poems sees himself as ugly, even likes what he sees in the mirror.
“And finally,” and this is the big one, “I discovered/ real feelings of others,” and he gives himself to a moment of tenderness toward his spouse. It’s not pity, it’s compassion:
I ached for her life,
just being there
under the
covers.
Allowing happiness into his life has led him to this discovery. The ache of compassion he feels is, if mixed with sadness, at least a sign that he has tuned himself more outwardly than before.
The poem goes so many places that we could almost forget that its most direct advice is in the title and first two lines: “Either peace or happiness,/ let it enfold you.” They begin as advice the former cynic knew but rejected before his conversion later. The work of happiness is to let good feelings take you, live within them, and above all make them welcome. Of course, this is Bukowski, and he wants you to realize there are limits. That warning against cockeyed optimism is worth reading in full:
(don’t get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems just for
the sake of
itself –
this is a shield and a
sickness.)
Happiness can’t just be a self-serving masturbation space that ignores the world. That’s not just selfish, Bukowski’s speaker says; it’s sick. That insistence runs throughout his poetry. “Let It Enfold You” does not say you have to “earn” happiness, as one sometimes hears. You do have to learn it, though, learn to recognize it when offered. The question is whether we can welcome it as it is, as shots and shards.
Can Bukowski be happy without being self-conscious? Not entirely. The word happiness, in most understandings, contains a measure of release, of surrender. Even as he recommends it, Bukowski stays on guard because it is all too often unthinking and all too often exposes the happy person to suffering down the line. Even converts to happiness, we feel, will keep an eye on themselves.
Funny thing about happiness, though: a lot of the time it is involuntary. It just happens, and there you are, all defenses down, happy. Bukowski doesn’t want to do happiness a stupid way. He’s gotten kicked around too much, and has done too much kicking himself, to sign up for that. Still, his conversion to happiness shows he knows what it’s like to surrender, if only for a moment. When his little girl smiles at him, and thus innocently shares her happiness, he instantly responds in kind. The danger of happiness, ironically, is that we are often happy without thinking about it. We just can’t help ourselves.
John Timpane was the Commentary Page Editor and later the Theater Critic and Cooks Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has appeared in Sequoia, Cleaver, The Painted Bride Quarterly, Vocabula Review, Per Contra, Apiary, and elsewhere.