‘Hollywood’ by Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of a number of writers who I first discovered not through the work of others or in a literary magazine as you might expect but through - wait for it - the Warner Bros. television series Gossip Girl. Yes, really. Amidst all of Chuck and Blair’s romantic hokey-cokeying and Serena’s irritating exploits you will often find allusions to authors such as Norman Mailer and Henry David Thoreau, along with whole episodes based on The End of the Affair and The Age of Innocence, AND novelist Jay McInerney (a longtime favourite of mine) has even appeared in a handful of episodes as an alcoholic caricature of himself named Jeremiah Harris. Anyway, Bukowski is mentioned way back at the beginning of the second series - the show is filming its sixth and final season as we speak, sob - when Dan Humphrey’s belligerent mentor urges him to get out of his writerly comfort zone and ‘find his Bukowski’ i.e., somebody willing to shoot a shot glass off his head. 'Yikes,’ I thought. 'This Bukowski guy must have been a real badass!’ So I resolved to do some research of my own and, yes, it seems I was half right.

Henry Charles Bukowski Jr., known to friends as Hank, was born in Germany in 1920 to a German mother and an American serviceman father. As a child he was brought to the United States, to Los Angeles, where he would go on to reside for more than fifty years. Bukowski’s hometown of Los Angeles was a great inspiration to him, as Howard Sounes writes in the introduction to this Canongate edition of Hollywood: 'When Charles Bukowski writes about Hollywood he is not usually referring to the movie industry, but to the place where he lived for many years: a scruffy residential district, at the unfashionable end of Sunset Boulevard, known as East Hollywood [ … ] This is Bukowskiland - the setting of many of his poems, stories and novels, of which there are six. This book is his fifth novel, first published in 1989, when the writer was in his late sixties. In contrast to the rest of his work, when Bukowski writes here about 'Hollywood’ he is concerned with the movie business.' In short, this book deals specifically with the film industry as well as the place itself.

Although Hollywood is classed as a novel, it is actually closer to metafiction - what Howard Sounes calls a 'fictionalised journal’ of the author’s experiences writing the screenplay for the movie Barfly. The protagonist, one Henry Chinaski, is essentially Bukowski himself, an alcoholic poet-turned-screenwriter struggling to stand the duplicitousness of Tinseltown, aided only by his supportive and well-meaning wife. However the thinly-veiled nature of Hollywood does give rise to some big laughs, particularly regarding the names Bukowski has chosen for some of his 'characters’: Jon-Luc Modard and Wenner Zergog anyone? Oh how I chuckled at those… The book is explicitly self-referential, however, and it does not so much pretend to be a novel as conform to some of the novel’s more superficial conventions. Moreover, at the very end of the book Bukowski makes perfectly clear his original intentions:
 

     'Oh, hell, I’ll write a novel about writing the screenplay and making the movie.’
    'Sure, I guess you can do that.’
    'I can, I think.’
    'What are you going to call it?’
    'Hollywood.’
    'Hollywood?’
    'Yes…’
    And this is it.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in July 2012.