Roddy Doyle's introduction to the first edition of Ham On Rye
'This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody.' These are the first words I ever read by Charles Bukowski. I'd just picked up a second-hand copy of Post Office, his first novel. I'd never heard of the man, and the cover, a bad drawing of a postman, wasn't promising. But the words on that empty dedication page had grabbed me. 'Presented as a work of fiction' suggested that there was more than story-telling going on inside, that there was real living behind the disclaimer, and 'dedicated to nobody' yelled anger, frankness, desolation and a sense of humour that was right down my alley. I forked out the 50p and started it on the bus home.
'It began as a mistake.'
That was the first sentence, and paragraph. It was plain, yet intriguing, a good start to a crime novel perhaps, or a story of love gone wrong. I liked it, and read on.
'It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought.'
What writing, I thought. It wasn't just the words that made this a tough, real world. It was the awkwardness of the writing, its closeness to speech. ' . . . and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back.' So you went where? And what happened then? And then? It was the absence of this information that appealed to me. It reminded me of kids telling me a video, charging through the plot of a ninety-minute film in less than thirty seconds, arms, head and shoulders supplying the action and special effects. It had the same rush, the same fight for attention. It was the men I'd listened to when I'd worked as a sweeper for Westminster Council, every lunch-time in the depot canteen. Men from Scotland, Galway, Jamaica, men who lived in hostels, councils flats or nowhere, who wore their uniforms to and from work, who stood up in the canteen to describe last night's sex, who took their brown envelopes on pay-day and never came back. The book's narrator, Hank Chinaski, was one of these men. The city, Los Angeles, was different but the world was the same. Bukowski's writing was inarticulate, but deliberately so. Each word clung tight to the next; there was no room for any more. It was a tightly choreographed clumsiness. And it was great.
