The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship by Charles BukowskiGerald Locklin
Charles Bukowski. The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. Black Sparrow, 1998. Illustrations by Robert Crumb. 144 pp. $27.50; paper: $14.00.
These intermittent journal entries (8-28-91 to 2-27-93) provide literary insights and personal glimpses. Many dwell on the boredom, ugliness, and depression of racetracks. The author encounters common cybernetic setbacks (cat spray in the hard drive) as well as welcome convenience. He has become a model of professionalism in manuscript preparation. More nihilist than Marxist, he suggests that he “never wrote any social protest stuff” because “you really can’t make something good out of something that isn’t there.” A sequence detailing a zany project for a sitcom based on Bukowski’s life has the understated hilarity of his funnier stories, as have the recurrences of a curmudgeonly senile neighbor. A mellower misanthropist, Buk drinks in moderation, suffers television for his wife’s company, and enjoys a productive year of what he considers (and I concur) the best poems and stories of his life. There are lapses, inevitably, into the same old shinola: hell is a poetry reading. Most humans are either “subnormals” or their defenders. He’s run out of good books to read. Unwitting postmodernist, he laments having missed the ’20s, while paradoxically continuing to exhibit Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” towards Hemingway. Gradually, though, the book takes on tragic overtones with the first symptoms of leukemia in June, 1992. He struggles with his hard-boiled parody/fantasy, Pulp. He begins to put his house in order. Having survived so much, he can barely credit his mortality. It would be instructive to be told how much, if at all, these journals were posthumously edited. Nevertheless, these reflections approaching endgame reveal the complex humanity of a too-often-caricatured figure who beat seemingly prohibitive odds to achieve the destiny he came to embrace as a world-class writer of uncompromising novels, stories, and poems. Robert Crumb’s illustrations are perfect. [Gerald Locklin]