Much appreciated
David, thanks for the scans and your research into the meaning of 'scribendi cacoethes,' and your other thoughtful comments. It's fascinating and instructive to see Bukowski's genius as it develops. I read the story 3 times and to me many of the characteristic Bukowski earmarks are there:
-the love of unusual language that straddles the line between prose and poetry. When he says, "His writing was mostly a tautology of the popular mode..." I can't imagine any writer putting it quite like that other than Bukowski. The same as when he later says... "sometimes a little too valiant with experimental pageantry." The use of language is something other than straight prose, at least to me.
-the even, steady, rhythm and flow, though the prose sometimes sounds a little stiff, flat and laborious. I had a hard time wadding through it to the end but got more out of it the second time around.
-his journalistic eye for taking in and recounting an incredible amount of human and circumstantial detail.
-his writing about his failure to get the job rather than his success - not being the hero but moving onto the next situation.
-he brings the article full-circle with the recurring use of the word 'abstraction.' He appears to have a fascination with the sound of certain words in and of themselves. He seems to come across a word or term, fall in love with it, then find a way to work it in as a recurring theme or build an entire story from it. (Bukowski's 'Ignus Fatuus' is another mystical-sounding term that was part of his great poem on solitude, loneliness, and death.) So I think certain words set him off beyond their literal meanings and he liked to roll them around in his mouth.
This story might somehow be an example of the numerous kinds that Bukowski repeatedly submitted to publishers that were repeatedly rejected in his earlier days. (We know they were rejected because Bukowski said they were rejected. So either he just wasn't good enough at the time, or he had to wait for the world to catch up with him.) I would imagine that some of his stories just missed and he had to bring all the areas of writing that he loved into a sharper focus before he would finally gain acceptance. Plus it appears that he was not trying to write the standard story with the standard punch-line. That hadn't been done before and he had to find a way to make it work. But I believe that many of the elements of his later writings are already here.
Thanks again.
