Run with the Hunted
Charles Bukowski
It goes without saying that tastes change over time, both for individuals and for cultures. It’s hard to get high school kids into Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jane Austen, and it’s not just because high school kids lack sophistication. The language doesn’t resonate with them; the themes don’t resonate with them. And that’s OK with me. I’m no Platonist, and I don’t think that Quality is some inherent, well, quality of works of art. Art speaks to the context in which it was made, and some works have themes broad enough to span multiple contexts and so have staying power, but it’s simply a truism that Henry VIII doesn’t play the same on Broadway as it did in The Globe. That’s not Shakespeare’s fault; times change, and people have different needs. Part of Shakespeare’s greatness, no doubt, is that it still plays pretty well on Broadway because he was able to see past the troubles of his times, but I still don’t think we can utterly blame The Unwashed Masses for finding it boring.
The same is true for our personal tastes. When you’re fifteen, Catcher In The Rye rings awfully true. When you’re fifty, it’s still a good read, but it’s (hopefully) not still speaking to your current station in life. If it is, then you probably haven’t grown much. Again, the best books manage to span multiple contexts and multiple lives, but they can’t speak to everyone at all times, and it’s unreasonable to expect that they should.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, Charles Bukowski spoke to me. I read lots — most — of his work, and I felt that it was something real. Like Holden Caulfield and Bukowski himself, I felt that so many of the literary greats were phonies, that what they created was artificial, that it had nothing to offer to me. I felt that academic literature was so much verbal masturbation, that writers like Bukowski wrote from where it was really at. To some extent, I still feel that way. Jane Austen still doesn’t speak to me. I don’t find the misery of Raymond Carver characters to be picturesque or interesting. Even The Bard himself is still hit-or-miss for me.
So when I read through Run With The Hunted, I was a little surprised to find that it was hit-or-miss for me, too. When I was younger and more angry, stories about desperate drunks seemed pretty interesting. Even if I felt like trash, there were any number of people out there way worse off than myself who were finding slices of beauty in whatever ditch they awoke. But reading that stuff now, it just seemed like repetition. Bukowski drunk, Bukowski with bad women, Bukowski feeling superior to other writers, Bukowski at the racetrack. There are still glimmers of beauty in all of it for me, but it no longer speaks to where I am. I’m not that angry, I don’t have the need to feel superior to anyone, and there isn’t much left for me to get out of Bukowski’s writing. At this point, reading his stuff is just revisiting a chapter of my life that I’m glad to be over. There isn’t anything much more for me to learn from it.
By the time I’m ninety, I’ll probably be one of those guys who just scowls at the New York Times every morning. Of course, so was Bukowski, so maybe that fits.
