How About Charles Bukowski's On Drinking

For Los Angeles Review of Books, Anthony Mostrom investigates a question Charles Bukowski sought answers to in the posthumous collection, On Drinking (HarperCollins, 2019): "Did L.A.’s beloved boozehound die of drink?" Well:

...Yes and no. You could even say that drinking kept “Buk” alive, kept him going. He said so himself, many times, and according to the official mythology, he’d predicted this early on with the now-famous declaration, dutifully quoted in the new thematic collection of his writings, On Drinking, edited by Abel Debritto: “[W]ell, now I have found something, I have found something that is going to help me, for a long long time to come.”

To read his early biography is to learn why he needed alcohol so badly. Growing up in interwar L.A. subjected to constant, insane violence from his Prussian parents (“my father was a monster”), he became a drifter, shirking life’s obligations at a time when the young men of his generation were off fighting … which of course he didn’t do. He took bus trips across the country, avoiding everything but menial jobs and bars.

He settled into the habit of hanging out in bars all day, slowly but surely turning into an alcoholic, a fall-down drunk and a “scrapper,” one of those strange people who enjoy getting into fistfights. On Drinking quotes Bukowski several times declaring that for years he rarely ate food. Eventually he would turn this existence into a literary shtick, endlessly repeated, which brought the onetime outcast fame.

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