Carlos Marmol: “There is nothing more universal than the experience of vulgarity, which equals us all”

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Carlos Marble. Seville, 1971. The writer and journalist has just published ‘Charles Bukowski. A Shot in the Dark’ (Athenaica), a headline-riddled literary essay on the last great savage of American letters.

Is it possible to define Bukowski in a headline?

Of course: “When I write I’m the king of my shit. Is that clear, baby?” A verse from the most crepuscular Rubén Daro would also be worth: “To be sincere is to be powerful.” He would add a third option: “A man is his style and his way of telling the truth.”

“He writes like a machine gun,” he says of the writer in his book.

Writing is the most peaceful way there is to wage war. Even to win it! Existence is a battle against others. Writing, at least in my case, has helped me defend myself. It serves to bring order to chaos, it helps you save your neck and, if you’re lucky, it saves someone else’s too. Also, it has no side effects, except the joy of starting the next paragraph, finding the right word, starting the next chapter. Writing is like listening to good music or riding a roller coaster.

And why “shot in the dark”?

Because we all believe blindly. Bukowski, reflecting on creation, says that wanting to write is not enough to create something good. Dedication and will are required, but talent is necessary. Without talent, writing doesn’t work. I think it’s a bright idea in a world where people think that telling their frustrations is enough to make art. We are all surrounded by shit around us, but only creators manage to turn it into the emotion of a poem, a song or a movie. Dilettantes do not create art. Art is created by artists.

For many, Bukowski is a depraved writer, obsessed with alcohol and sex.

Well, I don’t think this definition is a problem, right? This image responds to the literary mask that Bukowski created with his biographical experiences. From them is born the alter-ego of his literature, especially in novels and stories. Actually, and this is one of the central ideas of the book, Bukowski is much closer to the classic authors than we think. Drinking and having sex are pretty traditional topics. Nothing is more universal than the experience of vulgarity, which makes us all equal.

Is he an antihero?

It is to the extent that his epic includes the certainty of failure and, despite this, the protagonist of his literature fights his battle. He knows in advance that he is not going to achieve anything in life, but he does not stop fighting to become who he wants to be. It is an admirable attitude. Especially in a world where so many people hide his true identity.

ls “starved” for his art.

His unverifiable years, the decade in which he crisscrossed the United States surviving with junk jobs and sleeping on p.andnsions, drunk most of the time, are filled with times when he had nothing to eat. To get money he had to stop writing and relate to society. In general, he preferred to stay alone in his room, writing even though he didn’t have many options to publish. Penniless. There he was himself. Anyone else would have given up. He persisted and wrote about this choice. In his own words: “The courage of the individual facing extinction without the help of society, God, flag, friend or family. This is the hidden world you never read about in the paper.”

Bukowski quit his job as a postman to write. How was it?

Thanks to an (insane) proposal from John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, which was then in the business of selling office supplies. Martin wanted to set up a publishing house to publish the poetry of Bukowski, then 50 years old and working at the Los Angeles Post Office, sorting letters. I offered to pay him $100 a month in alimony whether he wrote or not. Bukowski did the math for him and he accepted. I quit my job and soon after handed Martin his first novel, ‘Post Office.’ How did you write it so soon? Martin asked. “Panic,” Bukowski replied.

Collaboration with dozens of publications, some of little prestige.

They called him ‘The King of Underground Magazines’ [El Rey de las Revistas Underground]. Throughout his career, he published poems and narratives in 1,414 different headers. It was his way of trying to become a professional writer. Many did not accept his writings. The rejection letters – his first account of him goes on this matter – were constant, but he insisted relentlessly until he managed to get some editor to notice his work. Although his first success as a writer, the ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ columns, were not published in literary magazines, but in ‘Open City’, a Los Angeles countercultural newspaper in the sixties.

Erotic magazines paid him $60 for each “in-out” story. Now, newspapers don’t pay much more for an article.

Well, I suppose that means that we newspaper writers are on the same level of precariousness as pornographers. If we stick to the rates paid by newspapers, there is no doubt. Bukowski charged for each column in ‘Open City’ ten dollars of 1967. At the current exchange rate it would be 80 euros. Some Spanish newspapers with a national circulation pay less money in 2022 than an American underground newspaper 50 years ago. The big news companies constantly talk about the importance of journalism, but they don’t pay for it as they should. They didn’t do it before and they don’t do it now.

He was a pioneer of cancellation culture. There are the feminists burning his books.

Bukowski writes his truth. If he stopped doing it, he wouldn’t be him. Feminists accused him of being a misogynist and sexist, homosexual groups considered him homophobic, and African-American organizations called him a racist. Many wanted to ban his books because in them he does not give an idyllic image of these groups. Was he forced to do it? They even called him a sadist. It is the usual delusion of fanatics who believe that literature should be dedicated to exalting them instead of telling reality from the personal perspective of a writer. A social pathology that, unfortunately, has gone further.

Now we live in times in which the list of ‘offended’ continues to grow and what is politically correct prevails. None of this goes with Bukowski.

A writer, like a journalist, does not write to please people. He writes to tell life. Bukowski used to say that if there were blacks, homosexuals and bad women in his books, it’s because the ones he knew were like that. And he added: “The only bad guys who don’t complain when you write about them are the white guys.” As a writer he describes what he sees. If he did anything else, he would lie as an artist. “Censorship,” he would say, “is the tool of bitter little people who need to take reality away from themselves and from others. The only thing they fear is their inability to face reality. Somewhere, growing up, they taught to look only to one side, when there are many others”.

He is one of the most influential writers, but part of the critics despise him. why?

Bukowski criticized institutional literature and denounced the cultural mandarins. The Academy is accustomed to arriving late to the great literary phenomena. He thinks that until he validates them they don’t exist. The only assessment that he counts is that of the readers. And today, in the poetry sections of bookstores, Bukowski is there. His books are still alive. That said, there are interesting academic contributions to his work, such as those of Rusell Harrison, David Stephen Calonne or the Spanish translator Abel Debritto.

He is best known for his prose and short stories, but you have delved into the secret poet.

Bukowski is basically a poet. His novels and stories made him famous, but the bulk of his work is devoted to a prosaic, minimalist form of poetry, capable of creating emotion with the minimum possible elements. It is a lasting poem. A poetry that does not sound like poetry and that, precisely because of this, recovers the original spirit of the poetic.

The author said “the family is hell; work is a sentence; love, an absurd accident, and politics, a swindle”.

Bukowski has what Nietzsche called bermensch: the ability to distance yourself from herd morality and move away from the comfort of resentment. Who does not support reality, practices optimism, that form of self-deception. This is not the case with Bukowski: he looked the world in the face and described it as he felt it. We already know that sincerity is not the best way to make friends. But who the hell needs friends?

He was a lover of classical music. You have written his book following the outline of a symphony.

The publisher’s proposal was to make a 120-page breviary, with notes. A format that Bukowski used for his first poetry books. I found it interesting that the book, which is a literary essay, not a biography, was a small chamber piece, with four movements, an overture, and an opening. grand finale. Writing is composing a score.

Bukowski demands authenticity from art.

It is that in a world full of lies the only worthy attitude that a writer can have is to be sincere.

What would the writer think when he saw that the house in which he grew up in Los Angeles is now a kind of museum-hotel where he can spend the night?

I suppose it would turn his stomach. In that house-“the house of horrors”, he called it- he was mistreated by her father. That today it is a customized hotel shows the immense frivolity with which society treats some tragedies and sacralizes others, depending on the interest.

If Bukowski were suddenly resurrected in Spain, what would he think of our politicians?

That they are clowns to whom we have given the ability to decide on our lives. “People who believe in politics” – he writes in a poem – “are like people who believe in God: they suck air with crooked straws”.

Bukowski only writes a poem: life sucks.

Exact. But he does it more powerfully than anyone. And he wrote something even more exact: “An intellectual is one who says a simple thing in a complicated way. An artist is one who says a complicated thing in a simple way.” That is talent.

If I had him in front of me, what would I ask him?

Do you have fire, Hank?

The image that accompanies him in the photograph that illustrates this interview is not that of Bukowski…

LOL. No. It is a game that only my dear ones will understand. indigenous (Sevillans). Represent one of the artists punk from the South: Francisco de Ass Palacios, The Pali, the last troubadour of Seville. Author of a colossal verse: “Less missiles and more cod turkeys.”

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