Among my favorite writers, Harvey Pekar and Charles Bukowski share an
uncommon distinction. Despite having lowly jobs as a Cleveland veterans
hospital file clerk and sorting mail in the post office, they received
the highest accolades for their work. In a 1985 New York Times book
review, David Rosenthal wrote that “Mr. Pekar’s work has been compared
by literary critics to Chekhov’s and Dostoyevsky’s, and it is easy to
see why.” As for Bukowski, Jean-Paul Sartre described him as “America’s
greatest living poet today,” although his biographer Howard Sounes
discounts that as a tale Bukowski circulated. As for me, I don’t need
Sounes’s imprimatur to evaluate Bukowski’s literary merits. I regard him
as one of our best writers of the past half-century, and the kind of
writer that helped me keep me feeling less isolated in a
mammon-worshiping nation. Writers who have held down regular jobs like
Herman Melville on a whaling ship or Jack Kerouac as a railway brakeman
are closer to our reality than those churned out on the Iowa Writer’s
Workshop assembly line.
Charles Bukowski died in 1994, not from cirrhosis of the liver but
leukemia. Well-known for his alcoholism, it surprised me that he made it
to the age of 73. As was also the case with Pekar, it was like losing a
friend. As I read all of Pekar’s comic books, I always made time to read
a new Bukowski novel. Since both writers mined their workaday lives,
disappointments, and loneliness for deeply affecting literature, you
felt as close to them as if they were good friends. Moreover, once they
became celebrities, you appreciated how ambivalent they were about such
glory. Pekar refused to make any more appearances on the David Letterman
show, even if it meant cutting into comic book sales.
full: https://louisproyect.org/2020/08/07/homage-to-charles-bukowski/
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