To suck deep into the soul of the City of Angels you must first of all be angels – of good or evil – you choose it. There are no temples of tourism in Los Angeles, but streets and houses, ocean horizons and people in love like Charles Bukowski: «I love this city. Well, it’s not really that I love it, but it’s the only place I’ve ever wanted to live. I couldn’t write anywhere else. I hope to die here ». And why on earth if there is nothing? Because the void contains the whole: “it is understandable that a city of cars, freeways and exhaust gases, in which there is nothing significant to see, do not please everyone. But I like it. Much”. For this, the writer and journalist Enrico Franceschini sets out on the poet’s footsteps in one of the cities he loves most for a book, To Los Angeles with Charles Bukowski, which is poetry and geography, which is deep, poor and marginalized America. Which is the soul – a little bit – of each of us, where the angel ends and the demon begins.
In search of true poetry
Franceschini thus photographs that black and luminous heart, at the same time: «Bukowski is not a drunkard who writes, he is a writer who gets drunk. He is not a “dirty” poet, he has absolutely nothing dirty: he limits himself to looking for poetry in the slums, among whores and wretches, rather than in literary salons, where in fact there is very little worthy of being handed down to posterity “. In the corners of the last, poetry lights up in the streets, as Bukowski himself writes: «I went on the road not like Kerouac to have a fulfilling experience, I went on the road because there was nowhere else to go. I kept moving because everywhere I went everything was bad. I just wanted to find a room somewhere, a bottle of wine and get drunk. ‘
He gets drunk and writes, gets lost and finds himself: in 1960 the first book comes out, a collection of his verses; in 1971 Post Officein 1972 Erections, performances and other stories of ordinary madness. When he died of leukemia in 1994, at the age of 73, he wrote seven novels and sixty other titles of short stories and poems, plus a number of unpublished works so large that, thirty years later, his writings continue to come out. Many, from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy, Roman Polański (Chinatown) to Damien Chazelle (La La Land) sought the roots of Los Angeles but Bukowski is a star key to open the city: “By following his itineraries and passions we can learn what lies behind Sunset Boulevard and the canyons of Mulholland Drive, the hippie beaches of Venice and those vip of Malibu, the labyrinth of highways perennially clogged with traffic and the celluloid stars’ cemetery, the Santa Anita racecourse and the neighborhoods where his most loved writers lived, John Fante’s Bunker Hill, Henry Miller’s Pacific Palisades ».
The places of the author: Sunset Boulevard, beaches and racecourses
Bukowski lives among rented rooms and houses, wanders around the streets and highways, because getting lost is the only thing that makes him feel drunk with life. His addresses in Los Angeles are dozens; when his fame as a drunken writer turns into sounding royalty dollars, he has a real home, a steady woman, eats often at Grand Central Market, the fast food market and restaurants along Sunset Boulevard. And then there are the beaches, Santa Monica, Venice, Malibu where Bukowski is dazzled by Ask the Dust by John Fante, so much so that he made him known and considered “a God who saved his life”. But above all on the beach, Bukowski meditates on human destinies: «And there under the ocean the fish, the poor fish fight for life, they eat each other. We are like those fish, only we are up here. One wrong move and it’s over ». But the writer of the Beat Generation, between blacks, workers, prostitutes and people of the slums, knows how to keep his personal balance, like that day in August 1979, when at his door in San Pedro three Italian friends show up around the USA. One is the author of this book (who shares the privilege of meeting Fernanda Pivano and Silvia Bizio) and the welcome is like Bukowski, naked except for a pair of underwear: “Before entering, however, why don’t you go to buy some beers? I was dry ».
«Don’t try»
The book runs full of life, Full of Life in the words of John Fante, between racecourses and beers, stories underground and grace-kissed writing, culminating in Hank’s grave at Green Hills Memorial Park. In addition to the dates of a lifetime (1920-1994), it says “Don’t tryAs in a letter from old Buk. Don’t try desperately to do something. Do it, Bukowski begs us. From loving to getting your hands dirty, from writing a poem to running. Even in the slums, where adrenaline fades the skin but makes you feel alive forever.