Nick Cave Says Liking Bukowski Was a Low Brought On by Drug Addiction

Nick Cave, photo by Bruce on Flickr (CC license 2.0)

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Nick Cave is no fan of Charles Bukowski fan. Or at least not anymore.

Cave opened up about his years of drug addiction in an answer to a fan who asked if he has ever reached the highs while sober that he did while taking substances. While Cave said he was not sure if sobriety has ever brought him to the same highs as drugs used to, he countered that while sober he has avoided a number of lows that were brought on due to his addiction.

The musician and author, best known as the leader of the bands Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, said his sober self has never “reached the kind of lows that eventually came with taking those ‘lovely substances’— bashed up in police stations, dehumanised in rehabs, near-death experiences, suicidal thoughts, routine overdoses, reduced motivation, broken bones, being ripped off, liking Charles Bukowski, social and physical anhedonia, herd mentality, dead friends, fucked up relationships, abscesses, car accidents, psychosis, reading ‘The Hobbit,’ malnutrition, creative impotence, epic time-wasting, singing flat (still working on that), talking shit (still working on that too), life-threatening diseases, and not ringing my mother on her birthday.”

Ouch.

Related: Mickey Rourke Says Bukowski “Was Okay for a Drunk”

Cave’s feelings on Bukowski shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has heard the song “We Call Upon the Author,” from the album “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” in which he dismisses Buk and praises poet John Berryman, with the lines:

Bukowski was a jerk!
Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet papier-mâché
But he went the Hemming-way
Weirdly on wings and with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Another fan asked Cave about his anti-Bukowski stance, pointing to a 1994 Rolling Stone Q&A where, when asked, “Tell me, what should every high-school kid read?” he answered, “They should read the Bible, they should read ‘Lolita.’ They should stop reading Bukowski, and they should stop listening to people who tell them to read Bukowski.” The fan also notes the aforementioned “Bukowski was a jerk” line.

Cave writes that he doesn’t have “a particular problem with Charles Bukowski, other than I think his poetry sucks.”

He continues: “He once said, poetry was ‘like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away … writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible,’ which is all very well, except I think he was applying this to all poetry when he should have been applying it to his own poetry exclusively. His poems are indeed do-do — silly shit — and cloyingly sentimental about his own place in a world he held in absolute contempt. His is a particular view of humanity as abjection which I find difficult to stomach, especially in poetry, beautiful poetry, lover of life and the world that I am.”

It’s certainly hard to argue that Cave doesn’t have something of a point here. Bukowski did spend a lot of time condemning the world, although he also often condemned his place in it, alongside his tendency to sometimes romanticize said place, as Cave argues.

It is also, however, a rather narrow view of a man who was multifaceted and complicated, and who wrote an immense amount of poetry and prose, and who, like Whitman before him, was well aware that he had a tendency to contradict himself and an acceptance of that fate.

He also had a sense of humor about himself, which Cave sometimes seems to lack.

Take Bukowski’s poem “the meek have inherited,” for but one example, where he writes:

if I suffer at this
typewriter
think how I’d feel
among the lettuce-
pickers of Salinas?

While he clearly had a tolerance and penchant for lingering on how shitty and cruel the world can sometimes be, he also sometimes let on that he wasn’t solely the rough and misanthropic figure he played to, but that there was in fact a sensitive, empathetic side beneath it all. As they say, scratch a cynic and find a disappointed idealist.

In “The Icecream People,” he writes of being dragged to a Baskin-Robbins by his wife, Linda, and his fear of being seen among the type of people who happily lick at ice cream cones, “a very healthy and satisfied people” who probably even vote.

He’s playing with his persona, and how it has trapped him, and concludes that not only are the sundaes good, so too are the ice cream people, finishing the poem with the stanza:

the icecream people make me feel good,
inside and out.

It’s easy to reduce people down to their most obvious components, and it can make us feel clever and life ordered, but it’s rarely accurate.

And speaking of a clever and ordered life, while Cave has certainly had his struggles and personal tragedies, it seems worth mentioning the difference between the two men’s upbringings. While Cave’s father was a teacher who invited him into his study as a child and read him passages from great literature and his mother a librarian, Bukowski’s parents were anything but literary and discouraged his own early writing efforts. His father also regularly beat him and his mother.

Add to that the isolation that resulted from both being an only child, being a German immigrant whose parents prevented him from playing with other kids, and a severe case of acne that alienated him from his high school classmates, it’s not surprising Bukowski developed the worldview that he did. While that doesn’t give him an excuse to be, as Cave put it in song, “a jerk,” which he could most definitely be, it is important context.

Nick Cave on The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Speaking of his admitted tendency to talk shit, Cave also once famously dissed the Red Hot Chili Peppers, saying, “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the fuck is this garbage?’ And the answer is always: the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

The Chili Peppers, for their part, once included a Bukowski namedrop in one of their songs, but it was much more flattering than when he showed up on “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” It comes in the song “Mellowship Slinky in B Major,” from the seminal album “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” in which Anthony Kiedis sings:

I’m on the porch ’cause I lost my house key
Pick up my book, I read Bukowski

But perhaps the most famous instance of Bukowski showing up in a song is another less than flattering representation, which sits somewhere in the middle of the outright diss from Cave and the props from the Chili Peppers.

That particular instance comes courtesy of Modest Mouse in their song “Bukowski,” from 2004’s “Good News For People Who Love Bad News,” in which frontman Isaac Brock sings:

Woke up this morning and it seemed to me
That every night turns out to be
A little more like Bukowski
And yeah, I know, he’s a pretty good read
But God who’d want to be
God who’d want to be such an asshole?

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