SOURCE: “Short Changed,” in The Spectator, Vol. 233, November 30, 1974, p. 711.

In the following review, Ackroyd provides a disparaging review of Life and Death in the Charity Ward.

I wish that critics would nail the ‘down and out’ routine for the lie it is; it is all very well for socialist journalists to revel in the dead prose of George Orwell, but that game came to an abrupt halt in the 'thirties. Now we have an American writer, Charles Bukowski, who writes about alcoholism and poverty as if they somehow increased his stature. Degradation, it seems, can make philosophers of us all, but it does not necessarily make writers.

Life and Death in the Charity Ward is a collection of short stories which are not improved in the retelling. The ‘poet’ (this is his term, not mine) is taken to the charity ward and is sick; he goes to a...