Charles Bukowski: A Solitary Life

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"Build then the ship of death for you must take the longest journey to oblivion."--D.H. Lawrence

Tales of Ordinary Madness: A Tribute to Charles Bukowski NEW!

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Charles Bukowski was known as the "poet laureate of the gutter," but he never lived a day in Los Angeles’ skid-row district. He wrote about being "down and out," but, in reality, held a job with the U.S. post office for 12 years. Stories of Bukowski’s drinking are legendary, but some of his closest friends claim to have caught him "nursing" beers. He boasted of his sexual prowess, but there were long stretches of his life when he couldn’t get laid "in a morgue." The self-proclaimed "barfly" lived out his later years in a ranch-style house in San Pedro, California, with an attractive young wife 24 years his junior, expensive German wines on the rack and a BMW in the driveway. Howard Sounes’ new biography, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (Grove Press, $25, 320 pages), attempts to separate Bukowski’s actual—and often contradictory—life from that of his alter ego, Henry Chinaski.

The basic details of Bukowski’s life are widely known to most of his fanatical readers. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany, on August 16, 1920, the son of a local seamstress and a U.S. Army soldier stationed there after World War I. The family set sail aboard the U.S.S. President Fillmore in 1923 in hopes of finding a better life in California. According to Bukowski’s third novel, Ham on Rye, he had a miserable childhood courtesy of his father, a sadistic tyrant who regularly beat young Henry and his mother over the slightest infractions. To make matters worse, Bukowski suffered from a rare skin disorder, diagnosed as acne vulgaris, once he reached his teens. His only refuge was the local public library, where he voraciously devoured the writings of "The Lost Generation" school of American novelists such as Hemingway (whose later works he despised), Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos, as well as the works of European writers, including Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of Night.

During his 20s, Bukowski drifted from job to job (including work in a dog biscuit factory, slaughterhouse and potato chip warehouse), drinking, fighting and getting rejected from publishers along the way. He did manage to get his first short story published during this period, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip," in Story magazine. The great love of his life, Jane Cooney Baker, was a widowed alcoholic 11 years his senior with an immense pot belly. She served as the model for "Wanda" in the 1987 Bukowski-scripted film Barfly starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. After a long stint as a postal worker, Bukowski worked out a deal with Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin to quit his job, freeing him to write poetry, drink booze and bet at the racetrack. By the late 1980s, Bukowski had received a measure of success in the United States and a couple of films had been released based on his writings, including the entertaining Barfly, the abysmal Tales of Ordinary Madness starring Ben Gazarra and the European production Love is a Dog from Hell(which he considered the most faithful rendition of his work). During his final years, he visited the track every day, listened to classical music, drank expensive wine and wrote poetry well into the night. Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, at the age of 73.

Neeli Cherkovski covered much of the same ground in his 1991 biography, Hank, but the book was a stale, scholarly piece of shit. Bukowski himself called it "virtually unreadable," "dull" and "inept." Sounes’ biography delves much more deeply into some of the truthful, and often unpleasant, episodes that even Bukowski felt were lacking from Cherkovski’s tome. For instance:

• Bukowski claimed a great affinity with the hobos who rode the rails during the ’30s and ’40s, but he never rode a boxcar nor hitchhiked in his life.

• Shortly after his first chapbook, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was published in 1960, Bukowski attempted suicide by gassing himself in his room, but quickly changed his mind.

• According to friends, Bukowski suffered from one of the world’s worst cases of hemorrhoids, evident by the tubes of Preparation-H always visible in his waste basket.

• Bukowski refused to admit he was an alcoholic since, on occasion, he could refrain from drinking for up to a day.

• The first word Bukowski’s daughter, Marina, learned to read was "liquor" since Hank spent so much of his leisure time in a drunken stupor.

• Bukowski often denounced the ’60s drug culture, but friends remember him smoking marijuana, taking uppers and downers, and on one occasion, dropping acid.

• Bukowski used his weekly column in the periodical Open City, "Notes from a Dirty Old Man," as a method of spreading untruths about acquaintances that he felt had betrayed him, in the process trashing a number of close friendships.

• After a young poet Bukowski had befriended drank himself to death, Hank tried to seduce his grieving widow.

Sounes’ biography lays down all of the sordid details of Bukowski’s complex life. We come away with a truer picture of the sources of pain and rejection that led to so many of his most memorable writings. One minor disappointment: The book fails to mention anything about a derelict friend of Bukowski’s known simply as "Red Strange" or "Kid Red," a mentally ill tramp who wandered the highways and byways of America. Bukowski often plied Red with beer and encouraged him to relate his wildest stories, many of which ended up in Bukowski’s own poems and short stories. Red’s influence is acknowledged by Bukowski in The Bukowski Tapes. It would have been nice to learn more about the background and current whereabouts of this mysterious source of inspiration.

What will Bukowski’s legacy be? He successfully opened up the field of poetry to include the lower tier of American society—cheap motel rooms, menial factory jobs, skid-row alcoholics, social outcasts and the boredom of everyday life. Can you imagine T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden writing poems like "the night I fucked my alarm clock", "I have shit stains in my underwear too" and "I saw an old-fashioned whore today"? Not likely! Five years after his death, I still prefer to think of him sitting in a small room somewhere in front of an old Remington typewriter laying down the line. It’s late at night, the radio’s tuned to Gustav Mahler and there’s a bottle of wine at his side.

By the way, Bukowski is buried in Green Hills Memorial Park, Palos Verdes, California. His epitaph? "Don’t Try."

"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is . . ." —Henry Chinaski, Factotum, 2006

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