Betting on the Muse

Charles Bukowski

The general rule of thumb is that Bukowki's posthumously-published works are of lesser quality than those published during his lifetime. So far, I have come across two exceptions to this rule. One is The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, a wonderful book of journal-like observations and such. The second, in parts anyway, is Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories.

Much of the poetry in the book seems as if it was written in the fifties and sixties, during the peak years of Buk's quality output (though there are some of the later "I couldn't care less what it's about" poems scattered throughout). Much of it may well have been. Some, however, bears timestamps in the work that show them as having been written early in the nineties; makes me wonder what Buk might have come up with had he lived a few more years.

The final selection of poems (I divided the book up in my head while reading into sections, each bounded with short stories) is a series of meditations on death. Not Buk's normal death writing, which always had some fierce spark of hope in it, but writing that made it clear he knew he was facing his own demise. With the exception of the amazing "Last Call," which is roughly halfway through the book, this final selection is perhaps Buk's best work since Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame back in 1973. The process of "observe and write with as little translation is possible" is abandoned, and the work shows that either Buk revised these poems, or turned them over in his head a lot more before putting them down on paper. It shows.

The short stories (and one short nonfiction sketch about publishing his first chapbook in 1960 that is far more optimistic) are a pretty fair reminder that despite Buk being known mostly for his poetry, he was always a strong writer of short stories-- arguably, his short stories are stronger than his poetry. Reading them is like reading Spillane, if Spillane had spent most of his life drunk in a flophouse and didn't care about the mystery aspect of what he wrote. These are quick, easily slices of life, biting with satire and rife with well-drawn characters.

This is good stuff, and the first of Buk's books I've read in quite a while I would unhesitatingly recommend to those few people who have not yet encountered the writing of Charles Bukowski.