Adam Kirsch published this in The New Yorker, March 14, 2005:
The contrast with KNUT HAMSUN reveals just how conventional a writer CHARLES BUKOWSKI remained. There is nothing in his work even remotely like the episode in “Hunger” where the starving hero, having encountered an old man on a park bench, starts to make up fantastic lies about his landlord: that his name is J. A. Happolati, that he has invented an electric prayer book, that he was once the Prime Minister of Persia. The old man patiently accepts all of these outrageous stories, and even asks polite questions about them, sending the narrator into a rage: “‘Goddamnit, man, I suppose you think I’ve been sitting here stuffing you full of lies?’ I shouted, completely out of my mind. ‘I’ll bet you never believed there was a man with the name Happolati. . . . The way you have treated me is something I am not used to, I will tell you flatly, and I won’t take it, so help me God!’” The comic fury of this episode does seem to take us to the edge of insanity: Hamsun, like Dostoyevsky, shows that the most frightening symptom of madness is the immolation of self-esteem, the urge to humiliate oneself at the same time as one humiliates everyone else. And this is the risk that Bukowski never takes. Even at his most unheroic, he is the hero of his stories and poems, always demanding the reader’s covert approval. That is why he is so easy to love, especially for novice readers with little experience of the genuine challenges of poetry; and why, for more demanding readers, he remains so hard to admire.
Bukowski had his moments (“When love becomes a command, hatred becomes a pleasure”) but he fundamentally is a writer for teenage boys, an easier-to-read Henry Miller, taking up the shelf that Friedrich Nietzsche has on the philosophers’ part of the store.
Hamsun was a great Fascist writer, and was too old to change his ways after his beloved Adolf Hitler was defeated, unlike younger, more nimble minds; so it’s no wonder he’s pretty much forgotten these days, except by lovers of high literature.
Neotenianos 