Bukowski: Betting On The Muse

The Language of Violence, Language of the Heart

Our world is not a pleasant one. Our everyday lives are punctured with graphic images of sex, violence and apathy. Unfortunately, people tend to ignore the holes in the social fabric all around them. As Bukowski wrote the poems that were compiled into Betting on the Muse, he realized this, and incorporated it into his poetry. In his narrative works he creates a living, breathing world. He tends to concentrate on the low points of life, though. The world is a dark one, where personal rotting begins with an all-too-early maturation. Bukowski's collection should be read by those who want to experience the lives of people in a decaying, violent world.

Being young in Bukowski's world is not a pleasant experience. Even youth is full of violence, sex and self-delusion. The simple concept of a playground friendship with another kid in school is turned into a materialistic affair in Bukowski's "those marvelous lunches". The speaker (Henry) talks of being poor and making a "friend" who gave him parts of his lunch every day. It seems that throughout the course of the poem, Henry manages to delude himself into thinking that he truly was friends with Richardson, when it slowly becomes quite obvious that it's the lunch he truly loves. There is a striking difference in the descriptions of Richardson himself and Richardson's lunch. "Richardson was/fat,/he had a big/belly/and fleshy/thighs" the speaker states of his "friend", as compared to "his potato chips looked/so good-/large and crisp as the/sun blazed upon/them". This difference lets us see where the preference really lies. At a certain point, Richardson is violently accosted in front of Henry, and Henry does nothing but pick up his lunch pail afterward and carry it home. Yet throughout the course of the poem, almost obsessively, the speaker repeats the phrase "he was the only/friend I had" in one form or another, seemingly trying to convince himself of it as much as try to convince us.

The concept of this sort of delusion is also present in Bukowski's "to hell and back in a buggy carriage". Speaking of himself in retrospect the speaker recalls standing with his friends on a street corner during the Depression. The speaker talks of his friends hating the collective view of their fathers. "They couldn't find work, their guts hanging/out and their lives hanging out - dried dead useless" he speaks of the fathers, yet he is slowly turning into someone as "useless" as they are. "We were tough with nothing to be tough about" he says of himself and his friends. Much like their fathers, they have "nothing near enough to fight". The lines of the poem seem to grow choppier after the speaker refers to the father mid-way through the poem. Instead of an even, almost essay-like style of the first stanza, the remaining part of the poem is littered with line breaks in the middle of sentences and so forth. It's as if the speaker comes into the light about his own self delusion and slowly descends into lyricism, but first lets out a final statement acknowledging all this. "We knew something.../it was all a matter of which one of us/got there first" he says before a final, out-of-character (for this poem) metaphorical line. The ambiguous, unsure tone of this statement, as compared to the concrete, self-righteous descriptions of the previous lines, lets us see that perhaps, all the boys knew how they were going to turn out. The idea that the speaker is deluding himself seems to be a bit more obvious to the speaker himself, making it all the more dismal.

The idea of sex and violence at a very young age also figures into Bukowski's poetry. In his poem "panties" the speaker talks of a time when he was "maybe 7" and his 6-year-old neighbor Lila lived next door. One day she just lifted up her dress to the speaker, and left, with him chasing after her, and this happened every day. The speaker describes her panties with a feeling that is almost affection: "they were a nice clean white/and fitted snugly". Through his speaker, Bukowski speaks of early maturation, with love and lust at an age where these things shouldn't even be a factor in life. We can all concur on the familiar presence of sexual tension in this poem, as undoubtedly have all faced it in our lives. Unfortunately, Bukowski decides to hit us in the fact with our own feelings as we quickly realize we're sympathizing on sex with a 7-year-old. Due to the rather violent scenes that occur in this poem, it's easy to forget the speaker is that young, but he is, and that's the point. This poem is told plainly and nonchalantly, most of the graphic descriptions and detail being given to the fight. It's as if Bukowski wants to tell us that in his world, this "young lust" is a common occurrence, which is a bleak fact.

The father figure in Bukowski's family-related narrative poetry tends to be an incredibly aggressive, abusive, and at points almost childish figure, affecting his child (the speaker) in awful ways. "the monkey" is a prime example of the random violence the father is prone to and it's effects on the speaker (who, in all the following cases, is his son). When a grinder and a monkey appears on his lawn, the father gets terribly aggressive. Unlike the rest of the neighborhood's adults

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