I know Miller's influence on Bukowski has been mentioned now and again in various threads but I find the parallels between the two fascinating, they're like two aspects of a single entity.
I was reading an essay on Miller by Kenneth Rexroth from the 60's earlier, and he describes Miller as a 'Lover of disharmony', taking almost sadistic, misanthropic pleasure in the eventual breakdown of mankind. In retrospect, Miller's alienation and misanthropy appears almost tame when compared to Buk's best polemics!
As Bukowski quit the Post Office, Miller took an even bigger leap of faith when he quit the "Cosmodemonic Cocksucking Corporation", left his wife and family and fled to Paris penniless with only his genius to declare.
Rexroth claims that what Miller found so invigorating about Pre-war Paris was that it reminded him of the Brooklyn of his childhood. 'Miller's Paris' triggered an eidetic memory of an unmediated, un-sanitized, gritty, 'true' America, where individualism still reigned and group-think collectivism was still relatively unheard of.
Miller escaped to Bohemia and ultimately metaphysics. Bukowski is like the younger brother who stayed at home, the younger aspect of Miller, preferring sensuality over intellectualism, still in love with the idea of being an all American loner, a drifter, an urban cowboy.
Both writers were intensely masculine and honest, both despised the yoke of wage slavery and 'family life' that Miller described as belonging to those "Heroic little souls whose very obsession is to liberate themselves from the thraldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and misery of their lives."
Miller chronicled bohemian depravity, Bukowski everyday blue-collar depravity and both achieved an almost supernatural lack of sentimentality in doing this.
Read Tropic of Capricorn and Ham on Rye together and the parallels are spooky.
Miller wrote of his hatred of Walt Disney,and Buk despised Disney's greatest creation 'Mickey Mouse'. Both wanted an America before the cartoon had overlaid the reality - both sort the truth out at great cost to themselves and their sanity.
Maybe Miller had sensed the birth of his 'younger brother' when he wrote in 1945:
"What I like about (some of the artists I've met in the U.S.), Is that they know enough not to want to do a stroke of honest work. They would rather beg, borrow and steal...They look at their fathers and Grandfathers, all brilliant successes in the world of American flapdoodle. They prefer to be shit-heels, if they have to be. Fine! I salute them. They Know what they want."
As Buk and Miller and many other people have found, becoming a 'shit-heel', quitting your job and just taking a long hard look at this world, is often the first and most important step to enlightenment.
I was reading an essay on Miller by Kenneth Rexroth from the 60's earlier, and he describes Miller as a 'Lover of disharmony', taking almost sadistic, misanthropic pleasure in the eventual breakdown of mankind. In retrospect, Miller's alienation and misanthropy appears almost tame when compared to Buk's best polemics!
As Bukowski quit the Post Office, Miller took an even bigger leap of faith when he quit the "Cosmodemonic Cocksucking Corporation", left his wife and family and fled to Paris penniless with only his genius to declare.
Rexroth claims that what Miller found so invigorating about Pre-war Paris was that it reminded him of the Brooklyn of his childhood. 'Miller's Paris' triggered an eidetic memory of an unmediated, un-sanitized, gritty, 'true' America, where individualism still reigned and group-think collectivism was still relatively unheard of.
Miller escaped to Bohemia and ultimately metaphysics. Bukowski is like the younger brother who stayed at home, the younger aspect of Miller, preferring sensuality over intellectualism, still in love with the idea of being an all American loner, a drifter, an urban cowboy.
Both writers were intensely masculine and honest, both despised the yoke of wage slavery and 'family life' that Miller described as belonging to those "Heroic little souls whose very obsession is to liberate themselves from the thraldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and misery of their lives."
Miller chronicled bohemian depravity, Bukowski everyday blue-collar depravity and both achieved an almost supernatural lack of sentimentality in doing this.
Read Tropic of Capricorn and Ham on Rye together and the parallels are spooky.
Miller wrote of his hatred of Walt Disney,and Buk despised Disney's greatest creation 'Mickey Mouse'. Both wanted an America before the cartoon had overlaid the reality - both sort the truth out at great cost to themselves and their sanity.
Maybe Miller had sensed the birth of his 'younger brother' when he wrote in 1945:
"What I like about (some of the artists I've met in the U.S.), Is that they know enough not to want to do a stroke of honest work. They would rather beg, borrow and steal...They look at their fathers and Grandfathers, all brilliant successes in the world of American flapdoodle. They prefer to be shit-heels, if they have to be. Fine! I salute them. They Know what they want."
As Buk and Miller and many other people have found, becoming a 'shit-heel', quitting your job and just taking a long hard look at this world, is often the first and most important step to enlightenment.
