Post Office by Charles Bukowski

After I graduated from Cal Arts in 1985, I worked for a few years at a book store in Hermosa Beach. I knew a lot about books, but one writer I hadn’t known was Charles Bukowski. The store owners loved him, describing him as kind of a poet-punk of the low life. The store carried beautiful quality paperback editions of his books from Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara. I read another Black Sparrow Press author, John Fante, but Bukowski didn’t seem like my style. He was coarse. Too much of the life he wrote about revolved around three things I didn’t care about: sex with women, drinking, gambling.

Bukowski lived in Los Angeles (he died in 1994) and used to come into the bookstore. Occasionally a shopper would come up to the desk to tell us that a man was loitering in the fiction section writing in the books. We’d check it out and it would turn out to be Bukowski pulling his books off the shelf and autographing them. He was a big, ugly guy, didn’t introduce himself when he came in and didn’t talk to anyone while he was there. Not attractive. The copy of Post Office I read was a hardback from the library: a signed and numbered first edition from 1971, (number 217 of 250), so it would probably be worth something except it’s in pretty bad shape.

Post Office is Bukowski’s first novel, published in 1971. He’d been publishing poetry and short stories for nearly three decades by that time. The story is autobiographical, based on his life and work experience at the Post Office, first as a substitute carrier, and later as a clerk sorting mail in an office. I read it, because Bukowski has been on my mind since that time in the bookstore, and he’s such an L.A. author, which I’m always interested in. But I read him now because a guy from the church was reading him.

It turned out to be exactly as I imagined: low life, gambling, drinking, sex. This is not the kind of novel you take home to meet your mother. I still wouldn’t call it my style, but I loved it. He’s very funny. He’s a great story-teller. The novel is really a memoir consisting of a long series of short anecdotes. It’s divided into six big sections, headed by Roman numerals, and within each big section, twenty or so very short numbered stories. The novel moves in chronological order, but it doesn’t really progress, time just goes by. The main character, the Bukowski stand-in, Henry Chinaski, doesn’t change or grow. He doesn’t want much from life, just a woman and a drink, and enough money to buy a steak dinner now and then. What he wants at the beginning of the novel is exactly what he still wants at the end of the novel. The only change that happens comes in the very last three sentences. Having finally quit the Post Office and coming off yet another bender he writes, “In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I’ll write a novel, I thought. And then I did.”

He’s also a very good writer. I was reminded of Hemingway, of course, for the content. But the style is more like Fitzgerald. Really beautiful. Surprisingly beautiful. And he’s great at making instant humorous, generous, portraits of the other characters in his stories: people he works with, folks he meets on the mail routes, women he hooks up with.

Section I. Chinaski gets a job as a substitute mail carrier. He tells stories of delivering mail in the rain, encounters with dogs, sex with a couple of the women he delivers to. He lives with a woman named Betty. He suffers through a long-standing feud with an unreasonable supervisor, Mr. Johnstone. After a couple of years, at the end of the section, he resigns.

Section II. Instead of working, he gambles at the race track. Betty gets a job and then is upset that she goes to work and he stays home. They split up. Immediately, Chinaski meets a new woman, Joyce. They get married. There’s a section here in Texas, with Joyce’s family. She has money and a big sex drive, which sounds like a nice situation. But once they’re back in L.A., Joyce insists Chinaski get a job so folks don’t think he only married her for her money. He goes back to the Post Office, but gets an office job, sorting mail. Long hours. Boring work. The same unreasonable supervisors and bureaucracy. Joyce also gets a job and meets someone new. She divorces Chinaski.

Section III. He hooks up with Betty again. “We drank a little longer and then we went to bed, but it wasn’t the same, it never is–there was space between us, things had happened. I watched her walk to the bathroom, saw the wrinkles and folds under the cheeks of her ass. Poor thing. Poor poor thing. Joyce had been firm and hard–you grabbed a needful and it felt good. Betty didn’t feel so good. It was sad, it was sad, it was sad. When Betty came back we didn’t sing or laugh, or even argue. We sat drinking in the dark, smoking cigarettes, and when we went to sleep, I didn’t put my feet on her body or she on mine like we used to. We slept without touching.” (p. 57). Betty dies.

Section IV. He gambles at the race track and does well enough that he starts taking leaves from the Post Office. He meets another woman, Fay. He describes her as a kind of hippy, activist. She gets pregnant. She gives birth to a girl, Marina Louise. (Bukowski changes the names of the three major women he writes about, but Marina Louise is the real name of his daughter, born in 1964.) At work he talks to the black guys. It’s the time of the Watts riots in LA. Fay moves out, taking the baby. She moves to New Mexico.

Section V consists entirely of disciplinary notices that Chinaski receives for missing work at the Post Office.

Section VI. Still at the Post Office. He’s still in trouble with his supervisors and dealing with the ridiculous bureaucracy. The repetitive, sedentary work is affecting his health. He decides to resign, but without a plan, so when he quits he goes on a bender. And then, in the final sentences, wakes up and decides to write a novel.

The real story, so I understand, is that John Martin of Black Sparrow Press had been a long-time fan of Bukowski’s writing and he offered to give Bukowski some financial support if he quit his job and turned to writing full time. Bukowski decided being a starving writer was better than going crazy at the Post Office. Post Office was completed within a month of his quitting.