Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski: A Laureate of American Lowlife

In 1969 Charles Bukowski was forty-nine years old and had been a filing clerk at the Los Angeles post office for most of a decade. John Martin of Black Sparrow Press offered him a monthly stipend to quit and write full time. Bukowski laid out the arithmetic without decoration: "I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve." He took the second option. Within a month he had finished his first novel.

Andernach to Mid-City Los Angeles

He was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski on 16 August 1920 in Andernach, in what was then Weimar Germany. His father, Heinrich Bukowski, was a German-American sergeant in the U.S. Army; his mother, Katharina Fett, was German. The family sailed for the United States on 18 April 1923, settled first in Baltimore, and moved to Mid-City Los Angeles in 1930.

A Razor Strop, Three Times a Week

His father beat him with a razor strop three times a week between the ages of six and eleven. The count is Bukowski's own, and so is the conclusion he drew from it: the beatings taught him what he called "undeserved pain," which is as near to an aesthetic programme as he ever committed to. Severe acne in adolescence finished the job that his German accent and imported clothes had started, and he withdrew into ridicule and isolation.

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The Ten-Year Drunk

He attended Susan Miller Dorsey High School and Los Angeles High School, then spent two years at Los Angeles City College studying art, journalism and literature before leaving at the outbreak of the war. At twenty-three his story "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" appeared in Story magazine in the March–April 1944 issue, and "20 Tanks from Kasseldown" followed from Black Sun Press in 1946. Then he stopped. He called the following decade his "ten-year drunk," moving through low-wage jobs and writing almost nothing. In the spring of 1954 a bleeding ulcer nearly killed him. He came out of hospital and began writing poetry — at thirty-five, a starting age the Academy of American Poets flags as conspicuously late. He married the Texas poet Barbara Frye in 1955 and divorced her in 1958, after which he resumed drinking heavily and kept writing anyway.

The Filing Clerk Years

By 1960 he was back at the Los Angeles postal service as a filing clerk, a job he held for over ten years. Poems went out to small magazines such as Nomad and Gallows; E. V. Griffith's Hearse Press printed the broadside "His Wife, the Painter" in June 1960 and the chapbook Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail that October. In 1962 Jane Cooney Baker, his first serious girlfriend, died, and the elegies that followed are the least armoured writing he produced. That same year his only child, Marina Louise, was born to his live-in girlfriend Frances Smith.

Black Sparrow and Chinaski

Post Office appeared in 1971, the month's work that bought his freedom. Factotum followed in 1975, Women in 1978, Ham on Rye in 1982, Hollywood in 1989 and Pulp in 1994, alongside poetry collections running from Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960) to The Last Night of the Earth Poems (1992) — more than forty-five books in all, and thousands of poems scattered through small literary magazines. Most of the fiction is narrated by or built around Henry Chinaski, a barely disguised version of himself.

Readings, Barfly, and the European Verdict

From 1962, beginning on KPFK radio in Los Angeles, he gave live readings that became notorious through the 1970s for the drinking and the combat with the audience; the last was in March 1980 at the Sweetwater in Redondo Beach. He wrote the screenplay for Barfly (1987), with Mickey Rourke as Chinaski and Faye Dunaway opposite him, and appears briefly himself as a bar patron. In 1976 he met Linda Lee Beighle, who ran a health food restaurant; they married in 1985. During his lifetime he received little attention from academic critics in the United States and considerably more in Western Europe, particularly Britain and Germany, the country of his birth.

Why Charles Is Called a Genius

The quality at issue is not intellectual and not formal. It is a voice with the artifice sanded off — a plain declarative line that reads as though it were never written at all, and which he produced thousands of times without the trick wearing out. Time called him "a laureate of American lowlife." Adam Kirsch, writing in The New Yorker, identified the mechanism precisely: Bukowski "combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero." Intimacy plus swagger, in the same sentence, is a harder combination to sustain than the apparent carelessness suggests, and the apparent carelessness is itself the achievement.

The counter-case is substantial and not merely snobbery. The work repeats itself, heavily; over forty-five books drawn from one life and one persona is a lot of the same terrain. Critics have consistently noted the sexism, and Hugh Fox's observation of the gap between the public "Man" and the accessible private person suggests the persona was partly costume. There is also a real textual problem: scholars have found that John Martin revised the manuscripts substantially, which means some of what reads as unmediated Bukowski was edited into that condition by his publisher. Bukowski himself would have refused the word. His gravestone reads "Don't Try," which he glossed as "You don't try... You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more." He is best described as a genius of register rather than of thought — which is a smaller claim, and still a rare one.

Legacy

He died of leukemia on 9 March 1994 in San Pedro, California, aged seventy-three, shortly after finishing Pulp. Buddhist monks conducted the funeral rites and he was buried at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. In June 2006 his widow donated his literary archive to the Huntington Library in San Marino. More than half his collections have been published posthumously, and the scale of Martin's editorial intervention in them remains an open scholarly question.