Charles Bukowski

Anyone asking who was Charles Bukowski usually starts with a surprise: the writer so identified with Los Angeles was born in Germany. Heinrich Karl Bukowski arrived on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, a small town on the Rhine, the son of Heinrich Bukowski, a German-American serviceman who had stayed on after the First World War, and Katharina Fett, a local German woman ^[1]. Economic collapse in postwar Germany pushed the family to emigrate, and in 1923 they settled in the United States, moving within a few years to Los Angeles, the city that would dominate nearly everything he wrote ^[2].

His childhood was grim. Bukowski described his father as a violent disciplinarian who beat him regularly with a razor strop, and he recounted those years in unsparing detail in his 1982 autobiographical novel Ham on Rye ^[1]. Adolescence brought a second torment: severe acne vulgaris that left his face and back deeply scarred and required hospital treatment. The disfigurement isolated him from classmates at Los Angeles High School and, by his own account, hardened the outsider's perspective that runs through his work ^[2].

He found early refuge in the public library and in writing. After graduating from high school in 1939, he attended Los Angeles City College for about two years, taking courses in journalism and literature before dropping out at the start of the Second World War ^[3]. In 1944, while living in Philadelphia, he was briefly detained by federal agents on suspicion of draft evasion; he was held for a short period at Moyamensing Prison, then released after failing a psychological examination administered for military induction ^[2].

Bukowski's start as a writer came early and then stalled for a decade. His short story "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" appeared in Story magazine in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and another piece followed in the international review Portfolio ^[3]. The scattered acceptances did not add up to a career. Discouraged, he largely stopped writing fiction and spent roughly ten years drifting through American cities, working stints in warehouses and factories, and drinking heavily, a period he later called his "ten-year drunk" ^[1].

The turning point was medical. In 1955 he was hospitalized in Los Angeles with a bleeding ulcer that nearly killed him ^[2]. After recovering he began writing poetry in volume, and the small press world of the late 1950s and 1960s gave him an outlet. His poems appeared in dozens of little magazines, and chapbooks such as Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail (1960) began to circulate his name among readers of underground literature ^[3].

Steady income came from the government. Bukowski worked for the United States Post Office in Los Angeles, first as a mail carrier and later, from 1958, as a mail sorting clerk, a job he held for more than a decade while writing at night ^[1]. In 1967 he started "Notes of a Dirty Old Man," a weekly column for the Los Angeles underground paper Open City, which widened his audience and fixed his public persona as a hard-living chronicler of the city's lower depths ^[4]. The decisive relationship of his professional life began soon after: John Martin, founder of Black Sparrow Press, offered him one hundred dollars a month for life if he would quit the post office and write full time. Bukowski, then forty-nine, accepted, resigning in late 1969 ^[4].

Any honest list of Charles Bukowski achievements begins with the speed of his first novel. Post Office, written in a matter of weeks after he left his job and published by Black Sparrow in 1971, introduced Henry Chinaski, the thinly veiled alter ego who narrates most of his fiction ^[4]. The book's flat, comic account of soul-grinding work found readers far beyond the small press circuit, and it was eventually translated into many languages, selling especially well in Europe ^[2].

Five more novels followed: Factotum (1975), which traced Chinaski's wartime years of odd jobs; Women (1978), drawn from the affairs that followed his late fame; Ham on Rye (1982), widely considered his strongest book for its portrait of a brutal Depression-era childhood; Hollywood (1989), a satire of the film industry; and Pulp (1994), a detective parody completed shortly before his death ^[3]. Alongside the fiction he produced an enormous body of poetry, published in collections such as The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (1969), Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977), and War All the Time (1984); by most counts he wrote thousands of poems across more than forty books ^[1].

He also worked in film. Bukowski wrote the screenplay for Barfly (1987), directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke as a young Chinaski and Faye Dunaway as his companion Wanda; the experience of the production became the raw material for the novel Hollywood ^[5]. He appeared briefly on screen himself, including a cameo as a bar patron in Barfly, and his short stories supplied the basis for the Italian film Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) and later adaptations such as Factotum (2005) ^[5]. Among the plain Charles Bukowski facts that convey his standing: Time magazine in 1986 called him a "laureate of American lowlife," a label that has trailed him ever since ^[2].

Bukowski's private life supplied most of his subject matter, and he rarely disguised it. In the 1940s he began a long, turbulent relationship with Jane Cooney Baker, a widow ten years his senior who shared his drinking; her death in 1962 devastated him and inspired some of his most direct elegiac poems ^[1]. He married the Texas poet and small press editor Barbara Frye in 1955 after a correspondence conducted through her magazine Harlequin; the marriage ended in divorce in 1958 ^[2].

His only child, Marina Louise Bukowski, was born in 1964 to Frances Smith, a poet with whom he lived for several years without marrying ^[1]. Friends and biographers noted that whatever chaos surrounded him, he remained an attentive father by his own rough standard, and Marina appears with unusual tenderness in his poems. In 1976 he met Linda Lee Beighle, the owner of a health food restaurant in Redondo Beach; they married in 1985 and stayed together until his death ^[2].

Alcohol was the constant. Bukowski drank publicly, wrote about drinking constantly, and made it part of his performance at the poetry readings that supplemented his income in the 1970s, where he traded insults with audiences and sometimes read with a refrigerator of beer beside him ^[4]. He was also a lifelong devotee of horse racing, spending afternoons at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park; the track functions in his work as both an economy of small hopes and a place to study human behavior ^[3]. Classical music, played on the radio while he typed, was the quieter habit; he wrote often about Sibelius, Mahler, and late-night broadcasts as the accompaniment to his work ^[1].

Success arrived late and changed his circumstances more than his routine. Royalties from European sales, especially in Germany where he became a bestselling author, allowed Bukowski in 1978 to buy a house with a garden in San Pedro, the harbor district of Los Angeles, and to trade decades of rented rooms for domestic stability with Linda Lee ^[2]. He acquired a BMW and a swimming pool, facts he reported in his writing with self-mocking amusement, and he kept writing daily, switching in his final years from a typewriter to a Macintosh computer ^[1].

The 1980s brought the widest public exposure of his life. A 1978 appearance on the French television program Apostrophes, from which he was ejected after drinking through the broadcast, made him notorious in Europe ^[2]. The release of Barfly in 1987 brought Hollywood attention, profiles in mainstream magazines, and visits from celebrity admirers, all of which he treated as material for the sardonic novel Hollywood ^[5].

His health gave way in the early 1990s. Bukowski was diagnosed with leukemia, underwent treatment, and continued working on the novel Pulp, which he finished shortly before his death. He died on March 9, 1994, in San Pedro, California, at the age of seventy-three ^[3]. His funeral rites were conducted by Buddhist monks, and his gravestone at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes carries the two-word epitaph "Don't Try," a phrase drawn from his advice about writing and ambition ^[1].

The publishing afterlife has been unusually productive. John Martin and Black Sparrow Press, later succeeded by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, issued volume after volume of uncollected poems and letters after 1994, so that a writer dead for decades kept appearing on new release tables ^[4]. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into dozens of languages, with Germany, the country of his birth, among his largest markets ^[2].

Critical opinion remains split, which is itself part of any serious Charles Bukowski biography. Admirers, including the French novelist Jean-Paul Sartre era intellectuals' successors and American writers drawn to plain speech, credit him with stripping poetry of academic ornament and giving literary voice to clerks, drunks, and boarders; detractors object to the misogyny in his work and to the unevenness of his enormous output ^[3]. Scholars have increasingly examined how deliberately he constructed the "Bukowski" persona, noting gaps between the dissolute narrator and the disciplined daily writer who produced the books ^[1].

The institutional record is now substantial. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, acquired his literary archive, placing manuscripts of the poet of rooming houses alongside Gutenberg Bibles and Chaucer manuscripts, an irony reporters noted at the time ^[6]. Andernach, his German birthplace, marks its connection to him, and his influence is audible in generations of writers and musicians, from the American poets of the small press world to songwriters such as Tom Waits and filmmakers who keep adapting his fiction ^[2]. Whatever verdict individual readers reach, the work continues to find an audience that most poets of his era never approached.