"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."--Leonard Cohen, songwriter Septuagenarian Stew is a combination of poetry and stories written by Charles Bukowski that delve into the lives of different people on the backstreets of Los Angeles. He writes of the housewife, the bum, the gambler and the celebrity to evoke a portrait of Los Angeles.
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"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author "He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."--Leonard Cohen, songwriter Septuagenarian Stew is a combination of poetry and stories written by Charles Bukowski that delve into the lives of different people on the backstreets of Los Angeles. He writes of the housewife, the bum, the gambler and the celebrity to evoke a portrait of Los Angeles.
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I celebrated my 70th birthday last week and began to think of an appropriate literary commemoration. I have been a reader of the underground writer Charles Bukowski (1920 -- 1994) for some time. Not my only writer nor my favorite, but someone I continue to read. I thought of his book "Septuagenarian Stew" (1990) which Bukowski wrote upon reaching seventy. He and I shared that milestone. I had read the book years ago but had mostly forgotten its contents. Since we were both septuagenarians, I thought the book would mean something more to me. It is a gift to reach the age of seventy and an occasion for reflection.
"Septuagenarian Stew" is a nearly 400 page collection of interspersed poems and short stories. The poems are unrhymed and unmetered and tell stories. The book's language is simple, raw, blunt, and easy to read. The book takes a look back at Bukowski's then long life. It begins with Bukowski growning up in Depression-era Los Angeles in the 1930s, already feeling unwanted and an outcast, and his unhappy relationship with his father. Bukowski appears to have had a lifelong quarrel with and hatred for his father. Then the book turns to Bukowski's storied years of wandering as a bum and an alcoholic. This is the aspect of Bukowski that remains best-known, and many of the entries in this book, such as the extended story "The Life of a Bum" capture it well. The stories and poems show Bukowski working in a series of deadening and dead-end jobs.
Bukowski appears to always have been writing. The book describes his early efforts and his discovery by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press who paid him a stipend and encouraged him to write. Slowly, Bukowski became a famous, successful writer with an international reputation. By the time he reached the age of seventy, the streets, cheap rooming houses, and jobs were well in Bukowski's past. He lived in a beautiful house and suburban Los Angeles and drove a BMW. Bukowski captures this turn of his life and in the latter poems of this collection especially reflects upon his life and upon impending death.
The collection is full of Bukowski's unrepentant alcoholism, his violence, crudeness, and his checkered relationships with many women, including long relationships, one-night stands, and prostitutes. Many poems and stories take place at the racetrack, a lifelong passion of the author. The works are irreverent, often laugh-aloud funny, and in your face. As the book progresses, it focuses on writing In an early poem, "the burning of the dream" about Bukowski's early days in the Los Angeles library, he says "I was a reader/then". He describes his early reading and his dream even as a child of becoming a writer. Some of the poems in this collection are about writers including Jeffers and Camus, and many of the poems deal directly or indirectly with Bukowski's writing life.
With all his alcoholism and skid-row background, Bukowski found a meaning and a purpose in his life in his writing and reading. He put himself into his work. "Septuagenarian Stew" is mixed and too long, but it captures what Bukowski found meant something to him over his life in his practice of writing. My own life is distinctly un-Bukowski like, but I still love the irreverence and lack of correctness in his books. I also can understand his thinking about death. Most of all, reading this book, as a new septuagenarian. I thought of how Bukowski for all his bluster, bravura, and self-pity, had found and pursued a life of some meaning to himself through literature and writing. The book helped me think about what gives purpose to a life as I turned seventy.
