bukowski on lowry

Bukowski responds to an inquiry regarding Malcolm Lowry's novel 'Under the Volcano' by claiming it put him straight to sleep. He argues that conventional writers lack pace, quickness, sunlight, and life because they spend excessive time painting leisurely backdrops, such as flies crawling on a porch chair. This elaborate scaffolding promises a grand emotional payoff that ultimately fails to materialize. He contrasts this lethargic style with his own ideal: rapid, punchy sentences that hit like steady percussive beats and compel the reader to keep turning pages.

• Malcolm Lowry's celebrated novel is dismissed as dull and deficient in narrative velocity.
• Leisurely scene-setting is a false promise that drains emotional momentum.
• Prose must possess a musical, percussive cadence ('Bim Bim Bim') that drives reader curiosity.

It contains Bukowski's core artistic manifesto on prose rhythm and immediate aesthetic engagement.

Bukowski asserts that the contemporary era—the atomic age—demands a prose style radically distinct from past literary traditions. Every single line of text must exist as an autonomous entity packed with its own internal energy, flavor, and emotional juice. He mocks mundane exposition by creating an absurd parody of Southern regional writing involving Mrs. McGillicuddy sitting in a chair on a Georgia morning. To Bukowski, such passive descriptive padding is already dead on the page, and the author must instead present the essential thing without ornamental delay.

• Modern literature must match the accelerated reality of the atomic era.
• Every single sentence must stand alone as a vital, potent statement rather than mere narrative connective tissue.
• Mundane domestic logistics and temporal stage-setting represent dead, obsolete writing.

This section explains Bukowski's concrete criteria for sentence-level editing and stylistic urgency.

The interviewer points out that Lowry died of alcoholism and asks if Bukowski is confusing him with William Faulkner, whom Bukowski promptly labels another of the worst practitioners. Bukowski dismantles the romantic trope of the self-destructive literary martyr, declaring that drinking oneself to death does not make dull prose good. He comically critiques Lowry's fatal alcohol poisoning, arguing that a true veteran drinker knows to position their head over the mattress edge to avoid aspirating vomit. Bukowski dismisses Lowry as incompetent even at being a drunk, before urging the interviewer to drop the formal interview posture and share a glass of Scotch.

• A tragic death from alcoholism provides zero artistic validation for mediocre literature.
• William Faulkner is categorized alongside Lowry as an exemplar of unreadable, over-padded writing.
• Romantic bohemian suffering cannot substitute for leaving powerful, electrically charged words on the page.

It offers an iconic, humorous demystification of the romanticized tragic artist myth.