The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

vividly described some sexual hijinks involving “Hank” (Bukowski), “Lou,” and a young lady in a cellar, and demonstrates Bukowski’s newfound, jaunty, erotic style. In the early 1970s, it now seemed natural for him to begin writing for the men’s magazines in order to supplement his income. Four stories in this volume—“The Looney Ward,” “Dancing Nina,” “No Quickies, Remember,” and “A Piece of Cheese”—were submitted to Fling, published by Arv Miller in Chicago. Bukowski created the title “Hairy Fist Tales” as the rubric for the series, and the phrase likely derived from a poem he had published in the Grande Ronde Review 6 in 1966, “the hairy, hairy fist, and love will die,” a fierce and frightening description of total spiritual defeat: “your soul / filled with / mud and bats and curses, and the hammers will / go in / there will be hairy / hairy / fists and / love will / die.”¹⁶ These tales, however, are light-hearted and rambunctious. Bukowski had read Boccaccio, and the fabliau technique of folk-story telling familiar from Chaucer can be seen as well in “No Quickies, Remember” in which, as in a joke, the same story is repeated several times, leading to a surprise ending.

      Bukowski began writing a series of stories about the women he met during the period 1970–1976 which would ultimately take shape as the novel Women, and the Los Angeles Free Press began serializing them in the February 13–19, 1976, issue with an editor’s note calling the sequence a “novel-in-progress” under the title Love Tale of a Hyena. (The title was kept for the German edition of the novel: Das Liebesleben der Hyaene.)¹⁷ His relationship with Linda King is portrayed. Liza Williams appears in several; at one of her parties, Bukowski describes meeting Robert Crumb (but declines the invitation to meet the editor of The Realist, Paul Krassner). Writing and women form a constant counterpoint in his stories. He plunges into the cauldron of love, passion, sex, attempting to heal the wounds of his past, attempting to find in romantic love a salve for the demons that try him. Yet he can only momentarily find such redemption, and returns to his self, and gains distance from his solitude by crafting the experiences into narrative. His life exists mainly to be transcribed and transformed into words. He goes to Arizona, describing himself writing, and immediately refers to Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, weaving in his encounters with women and children and the life immediately taking place around him at the moment. Sex is a matter of occasional ecstasy and frequent laughter; love is a matter of life and death: He gives us both, in alternation. The stories also exemplify the gender wars of the period, during which women’s liberation had begun. Bukowski typically reverses the situation to show how the “politically correct” stance can be easily turned on its head. He also, however, satirizes men, and shows the absurdity of the whole romantic love complex. Pathos, farce, tragedy: Often, humor saves the situation. He is able to defuse the pain by poking gentle fun at the entire absurdity of love relationships. Massage parlors, a pornographer engaging in late-night discussions with his wife, adult bookshops, older women picking up younger men: The entire panoply of the fading sexual revolution is held up to satire and ridicule.

      Bukowski’s shift to becoming a “professional writer” in 1970 in some ways altered his method of composition. He had always reshaped the same material into poem and story, but now he was devoting his time to writing novels as well as submitting to the adult magazines. Several of the stories included in this volume demonstrate how he worked and reworked this material. He creates the same narrative anew; he doesn’t copy, but starts over. He is always telling his autobiography but selecting different details, reinventing instead of rewriting. For example, “An Affair of Very Little Importance” about Mercedes exists in another version in Women, but the narrative and emphasis are different. And the story “I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed with Girls,” for example, also exists as the “Dirty Old Man” installment included here: It keeps some of the plot, but takes a completely different approach to the meeting with Gregory Corso.¹⁸ It is typical of Bukowski’s method of selecting episodes from his life and reworking them, adding specific details and usually elaborating on reality by adding invented plot elements. He is constantly engaged in telling and retelling his life, giving it the structure of myth so that the two become inseparable. The basic structure of his life is mythic, a variation on the hero’s journey, the genius as hero: his abandoned childhood, primal wounding by his father, and his skin disfiguration, his wanderings in the wilderness, his near-death by alcoholism in 1954, and his resurrection.¹⁹

      These stories from 1948–1985 demonstrate Bukowski’s growth as a writer of short fiction. He gradually hones his craft and learns how to combine the tragic and comic modes effortlessly. In his late phase, Bukowski had mastered his style to the point of making the laconic, finely modulated prose we see in “The Bell Tolls for No One.” The mood is swiftly established, and not a word is wasted. His goal in his fiction was to entertain, yet he was driven to explore the dark places, the Nietzschean cave with the monstrous Minotaur. As he once said: “I can’t name it. It’s just there. The thing is there. I have to go see it. The monster, the god, the rat, the snail. Whatever’s out there I have to go see it and look at it and endure it and maybe not endure it but it’s needed. That’s all. I really can’t explain it.”²⁰ The unspeakable, monstrous, inscrutably violent and tender mystery at the heart of existence will not leave him in peace.

       INTRODUCTION NOTES

      1. “The Reason Behind Reason,” Matrix, vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 1946 in Absence of the Hero, ed. David Stephen Calonne (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010).

      2. Charles Bukowski letter to Whit Burnett, Box 19, Folder 13; Princeton University Library.

      3. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, p. 677; “Ultimate Religion,” in The Essential Santayana, ed. Martin A. Coleman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2009), p. 344.

      4. Absence of the Hero, pp. 255–270.

      5. See David Stephen Calonne, Charles Bukowski (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), pp. 31–32; also see footnote 8, p. 185).

      6. See Erin A. Smith, “Pulp Sensations” in David Glover and Scott McCracken, The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2012); on Bukowski and Pulp, see Calonne, Charles Bukowski, pp. 171–173; Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street (Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 296–297.

      7. Charles Bukowski, “the lady in red,” in Dangling in the Tournefortia (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), p. 13.

      8. Jack Black, You Can’t Win, Introduction by William S. Burroughs (Edinburgh: AK Press/Nabat, 2000).

      9. Wallace Fowlie, “Shadow of Doom,” in The Happy Rock: A Book About Henry Miller (Berkeley, CA: Bern Porter, 1945), p. 102.

      10. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 150.

      11. Kauri 15, July-August 1966, p. 4; on Healey, also see “Eyes Like the Sky” in Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness (San Francisco: City Lights, 1983), pp. 175–180.

      12. Hillary Chute, “Graphic Narrative,” in Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds., The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 410. Also see Patrick Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963–1975 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2002).

      13. For reproductions of Wilson’s illustrations of Bukowski stories, see Patrick Rosenkranz, Demons and Angels: The Mythology of S. Clay Wilson, Volume 2 (Seattle: Fantagraphic Books, 2015).

      14. Crumb remarked about Bukowski: “I like his ironic humor and his alienated attitude about the world in general. He expresses that in very succinct and eloquent terms.” See D.K. Holm, ed., R. Crumb, Conversations (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2004), p. 208.

      15. On The Way the Dead Love, see Abel Debritto, Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), pp. 127, 135–6.

      16.