Shakespeare Never Did This

By Charles Bukowski

An account of Charles Bukowski's 1978 European trip. In 1978 Europe was new territory for Bukowski holding the secrets of his own personal ancestry and origins. En route to his birthplace in Andernach, Germany, he is trailed by celebrity-hunters and paparazzi, appears drunk on French television, blows a small fortune at a Dusseldorf racetrack and stands in a Cologne Cathedral musing about life and death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 16, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062046215

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp. Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

Book preview

Chapter One

First there was trouble with the French editor, Rodin, he said 2 tickets and then he said one ticket and then I said, all right, and I bought Linda Lee a ticket and then it was Saturday, the day of the flight and I phoned the airport and they said, yes, I had a reservation but there was no prepaid ticket waiting for me. So I got into my car and started looking for travel agencies. One after the other they were closed. In Los Angeles on a Saturday, for some reason, travel agencies close. After a couple of hours I found one at the Farmer’s Market. Then I had to wait an hour. I walked around with the tourists, got a turkey sandwich and a coffee and went back and got my ticket.

Not much on the way over: Linda Lee and I were accused of smoking dope. After a good ten or twenty minutes we convinced the captain, or whoever he was, that we were not smoking dope. We drank all the white wine on the plane, then all the red wine. Linda went to sleep and I drank up all the beer on the plane.

We were driven to a Paris hotel which was right across the street from the French editor’s office. There were 2 French editors: Rodin and Jardin. I sent down for 5 bottles of wine and Linda Lee and I went to bed and started drinking. These 2 French editors were publishing 4 of my books. After a bottle or 2 I picked up the phone and called them. One of them answered. Listen, you son of a bitch, I said, are you Rodin or are you Jardin? Whoever it was, I cussed him good for 5 or ten minutes. Then I hung up and Linda Lee and I drank some more. Then I phoned again: "Listen, you son of a bitch, are you Jardin or are you Rodin? I demand to know who I am talking to! Are you Jardin or are you Rodin? Are you Rodin or are you Jardin? I demand to know!" After a while we all went to sleep.

To be awakened by Rodin who said there would be an interview at 11 a.m. in the patio. A very important newspaper … All right, I said, not knowing that there would be 12 interviews in 4 days. The morning interviews were always the hardest, hung-over, trying to get the beer down. No, I have no idea why I am a writer. No, my writing has no particular meaning that I know of. Celine? Oh sure. Why not? Do I like women? Well, I’d rather fuck most of them than live with them. What do I think is important? Good wine, good plumbing and to be able to sleep late in the mornings. Are you really disturbing me? Of course you are. Do you expect me to start lying at the age of 58? Buy me a drink. No, I’m not smoking dope. This is a sher bidi from Jabalpur, India …

One of the last interviewers was the head punk of Paris. He arrived in a leather suit with zippers all over it. He said he was down low, that he needed a hit of smack to get going. I told him I wasn’t carrying. He had a tape machine. We drank beer with icecubes. I interviewed him while he ran his zippers up and down. I was tired of being interviewed. I asked him if his mother was still alive, various other things. One of the nicest things he said was that he liked pollution …

On Friday night I was to appear on a well-known show, nationally televised. It was a talk show that lasted 90 minutes and it was literary. I demanded to be furnished 2 bottles of good white wine while on the tube. Between 50 and 60 million Frenchmen watched the program.

I started drinking late in the afternoon. The next I knew Rodin, Linda Lee and I were walking through security. Then they sat me down before the make-up man. He applied various powders which were immediately defeated by the grease on my face and the holes. He sighed and waved me off. Then we were sitting in a group waiting for the show to begin. I uncorked a bottle and had a hit. Not bad. There were 3 or 4 writers and the moderator. Also the shrink who had given Artaud his shock treatments. The moderator was supposed to be famous all through France but he didn’t look like much to me. I sat next to him and he tapped his foot. What’s the matter? I asked him. You nervous? He didn’t answer. I poured a glass of wine and put it in front of his face. Here, take a drink of this … it’ll settle your gizzard … He waved me off with some disdain.

Then we were on. I had an attachment to my ear into which the French was translated into the English. And I was to be translated into the French. I was the honored guest so the moderator started with me. My first statement was: I know a great many American writers who would like to be on this program now. It doesn’t mean so much to me … With that, the moderator quickly switched to another writer, an old time liberal who had been betrayed again and again but who had still kept the faith. I had no politics but I told the old boy that he had a good mug. He talked on and on. They always do.

Then a lady writer started talking. I was fairly into the wine and wasn’t so sure what she wrote about but I think it was animals, the lady wrote animal stories. I told her that if she would show me more of her legs I might be able to tell if she were a good writer or not. She didn’t do it. The shrink who had given the shock treatments to Artaud kept staring at me. Somebody else began talking. Some French writer with a handlebar mustache. He didn’t say anything but he kept talking. The lights were getting brighter, a rather viscous yellow. I was getting hot under the lights. The next thing I remember I am in the streets of Paris and there is this startling and continuous roar and light everywhere. There are ten thousand motorcyclists in the streets. I demand to see some cancan girls but am taken back to the hotel upon the promise of more wine.

The next morning I am awakened by the ringing of the phone. It was the critic from Le Monde. You were great, bastard, he said, those others couldn’t even masturbate … What did I do? I asked. You don’t remember? No. Well, let me tell you, there isn’t one newspaper that wrote against you. It’s about time French television saw something honest.

After

Reviews for Shakespeare Never Did This

[smichaelwilson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Read this without fully realizing that Bukowski dies back in 1994, which ironicly is the same year I first discovered him when I cam across Post Office in a used bookstore (I was working for the USPS at the time). I didn't get him then. Much more on his wavelength thirty years later.

Shakespeare Never Did This is more of a travelogue along the lines of The Curse of Lono, famous author paid to write about their trip to a foreign country, in this case a reading/signing tour of Germany and France.

Reading this, I can see the casual brilliance that has drawn people to Bukowski's work. He'll just prattle on in concise, matter-of-fact language, flippant and casual, and then suddenly he'll spit out a clump of pure, deep, profound prose that makes you go back and read that sentence over and over. The quote from Picasso that opens this book serves a perfect definition of what Bukowski means to his audiences; living, breathing evidence that there is the potential a poet in all of us, and with that proof a glimmer of hope for humanity, if not for us personally.

[dinoreader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't looking for anything serious; I'd heard this was a breezy account of Bukowski's European book promotion tour; and, it is. I read Bukowski more to look at how he structures story telling and his use of different sentences structures. So, for me, I saw here what I think is the longest sentence I've ever seen Bukowski write. It's in the section about his trip to a cathedral and his thoughts about God. I didn't think I'd ever see a sentence that long from Bukowski. The story of the trip itself is not unusual, no transformations occur or any personal growth. Some observations supplement things already said in earlier novels. It's short and very quickly read, cheap entertainment.
Maybe the most interesting thing about this short piece is the ease with which Bukowski contradicts himself in making observations about places in Germany, France and the USA. It feels completely normal and genuine. It's the ability to do that, to capture it on paper, and have the reader accept it, that is part of Bukowski's skill.

[Neiyons Romero · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

SHAKESPEARE NEVER DID IT was the book with which I started my readings of 2017, so I have it very fresh in my mind. A book with notes from a strange journey, containing everything that Shakespeare would never have said or done. Narrated with the sincere brutality that characterizes Bowowski and accompanied by good photographs.

It is a kind of negative of ATLAS, that book that Borges wrote with the help of his wife María Kodama. (Translated from Spanish)