“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.
Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought.
And then I did.”
Post Office is an almost entirely autobiographical account of Bukowski’s years working for the US Postal Service in Los Angeles throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. It was written over the course of three weeks immediately following his decision to leave the Post Office and write full-time. “I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy … or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.” Bukowski had written poetry and for magazines since the 1940’s, (he was born in 1920) but this was to be his first novel. It contains a lot of detail about the role of an American postman, and as such there is an unlikely parallel with another memoir of someone working in this role at about the same time in the UK, Alan Johnson’s Please Mr Postman.
The speed with which the text was written and its reliance on his personal experiences are the dominant features of the novel. These are both positives and weaknesses. The unfiltered nature of the narrative – Bukowski is brutally frank about all aspects of his life, his gambling, drinking and womanising – gives the text a raw immediacy. But there is a contradiction between the image Bukowski projects of his life as a complete nihilist and the fairly mundane existence of a postman and mail clerk. There is enough detail in the novel for the reader to understand that Bukowski – or strictly speaking, Chinaski, the author’s avatar here – took his work as a postman seriously, and kept working hard at his job despite being badly treated by an unsympathetic supervisor, terrible weather, and the ubiquitous ankle-biting dogs. Chinaski may have gone to work with a hangover every day, smelling of booze, he may have cheated at his postal service exams, he may have been written up for insubordination and lateness all the time, but he stuck at the job for a decade or more.
In terms of its plot, Post Office is insubstantial. Chinaski gets a job as a substitute post man, which he works half-heartedly at for a few years until he quits to become a professional ambler. Inevitably this can’t last forever, however scientific his approach, so he goes back to working for the Post Office as a mail clerk. His relationships during this period are casual and based on a shared enthusiasm for alcohol. The novel ends with copies of disciplinary letters sent to him – I think it is fair to say these were almost certainly replicas of letters Bukowski would have received – warning him against lateness etc, and finally with his decision to quit and become a full-time writer. But the plot is not really the point of the novel – it is a sketch of a counter-cultural life-style, living within the system (because where else is there?) but rejecting its norms and standards. Getting drunk becomes an act of rebellion; not trying hard at work a blow against society.
John Martin, the founder of Black Sparrow Press, who was responsible for launching Bukowski’s career, has explained that “he is not a mainstream author and he will never have a mainstream public.” This is an odd thing to say about a poet who sold millions of books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Bukowski has been more recently been called “an established part of the 20th-century literary canon“, an observation which I suspect he would have hated. The New Yorker in a recent review called him “the man who occupies the most shelf space of any American poet”. That’s the contradiction inherent in the life of any writer or artist who struggles to live and work outside the mainstream of society but whose success eventually leads to them being courted and adopted by the very same society they reject.
It’s always difficult for a modern reader when out-dated attitudes are portrayed uncritically in texts. There’s the temptation to offer excuses – the author is just reflecting the consensus of views at the time, and one should not confuse the views of the characters with those of the author, however closely we are encouraged to see the two. Sometimes these points are sustainable, but I don’t think they will stand up to any scrutiny here. Yes Post Office is a product of its time, as are all novels, and yes it is a work of fiction, but there are some painful misogynistic attitudes represented in the novel, including a scene where Chinaski appears to rape a woman on his post round. This is an integral and difficult part of the dark, farcical element which overshadows Bukowski’s prose. He is arguably the post-war heir to Henry Miller. Both their work was self-consciously rule-breaking, transgressive, nihilistic and focused on people living on the margins of society. They also share a brutal attitude towards women. Of course Miller was writing in the 1930’s when there were a lot more taboos about discussing sex than there were thirty years and one World War later. The question I am not sure about is whether Bukowski had anything more to say than Miller, and whether his work has stood the test of time imposed by the last fifty years or so?
The Reading Bug 