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Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) - alter ego: Henry Chinaski |
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American author of the second wave Beat Generation, noted for his stories of survival and heavy drinking on the fringe of society. Before starting his career as a writer, Charles Bukowski worked in menial jobs and as a journalist at Harlequin and Laugh Literature. Henry Chinaski, his alter ego, appeared in five novels, and in several stories and poems. "There are so many," she said, "who go by the name of poet. But they have no training, no feeling for their craft. The savages have taken over the castle. There's no workmanship, no care, simply a demand to be accepted. And these new poet all seem to admire one another. It worries me and I've talked about it to a lot of my poet friends. All a young poet seems to think he needs is a typewriter and a few pieces of paper. They aren't prepared, they have had no preparation at all." ('The Upward Bird,' in Hot Water Music by Charles Bukowski, San Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2001, p. 182; first published in 1983) Heinrich Karl (Henry Charles) Bukowski, Jr. was born in
Andernach in
Germany, the son of Henry Bukowski, a US soldier, and Katharina Fett, a
German woman. His family emigrated to the United States in 1922, and
settled in Los Angeles, where Bukowski spent most of his life. The city
became an integral part of his writing. Bukowski's father was in and
out of work during the Depression years, regularly beating the boy. Bukowski depicted his childhood in Ham on Rye (1982),
portarying his father as a cruel, shiny bastard with bad breath. He
died in 1958. "He hit me again. But the tears weren’t coming. My eyes
were strangely dry. . . . I could see everything clearly. My father
seemed to sense the difference in me and he began to lash me harder,
again and again, but the more he beat me the less I felt. It was almost
as if he was the one who was helpless. Something had occurred,
something had changed." (Ham on Rye, introduction by Roddy Doyle, Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2000, p. 71) To shield himself, Bukowski began his life-long occupation with alcohol in his youth. He also suffered from acne – the boils were "the size of apples" – which left scars on his face. At school years Bukowski read widely, he was especially impressed by Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, Carson McCullers, and D.H. Lawrence. After graduating from Los Angeles High School, Bukowski
studied for
a year at Los Angeles City College, taking courses in journalism and
literature. He left home in 1941 – his father had read his stories and
threw his possessions onto the lawn. However, Bukowski still returned
to his parents' house when he was totally broke. Originally he hoped to
work for a newspaper, but as he said in Longshot Poems for Broke Players
(1962), "the closest I ever got to being a reporter was as an errand
boy in the composing room of the New
Orleans Item." During the war years, Bukowski lived the life of a wondering
hobo
and skid row alcoholic. He travelled across America, working in odd
jobs: petrol station attendant, lift operator, lorry driver, and an
overman in a dog biscuit factory. At night he gambled and drank.
Bukowski's story 'Aftermath of a
Lengthy Rejection Slip' (1944), a portrait of the quixotic young
artist, was published in the prestigious Story,
edited by Whit
Burnett and Martha Foley. He then stopped writing and concentrated on
drinking. By the early
1960, Bukowski had been arrested 14-15 times. "I thought I was tougher
than that but each time they put me in it tears my guts; I don't know
why." (Charles
Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters 1963-1993,
edited by David Stephen Calonne, Northville, Mich.: Sun Dog Press,
2003, p. 21) At
the age of thirty-five Bukowski began to write poetry. 'Hello,' his
first
published poem, appeared in the Summer 1946 issue of Matrix.
"I don't think I could do a novel – I haven't the urge, though I have
thought about it, and someday I might try it," he wrote in 1947 in a
letter to Burnett. (Charles
Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon
by Abel Debritto, New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, p. 72)
After returning to Los
Angeles, he met Janet Cooney Baker, with whom he lived the next decade;
she died in 1962. Janet was ten years older than Bukowski and also
drank heavily. Bukowski
started to work at a post office in 1952 – this
period lasted three years. He was then hospitalized with an
alcohol-induced bleeding ulcer and came close to death. "If there are
any good writers, I don't think these writers go around, walk around,
talk around, abound, thinking, "I am a writer." They live because
there's nothing else to do," Bukowski
once said. "It piles up: the horrors and the non-horrors and the
conversations, the flat tires and the nightmares, the screamings, the
laughtes and the deaths and the long spaces of zero al all that, it
begins to total and then they see the typer and they sit down and
pushes out, there's no planning, it occurs: if they are still lucky." (On Writing by Charles Bukowski, edited by Abel Debritto New York: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016, p. 170) Bukowski said that ninety-three per cent of his writings were
autobiographical. Like Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson, he blurred
the lines between fact and fiction in his journalism. Bukowski's marriage with Barbara Frye, the rich publisher of a small poetry magazine, lasted two years; she divorced him when she concluded that her husband was "an irredeemable bum." (The Hunchback of East Hollywood: A Biography of Charles Bukowski by Aubrey Malone, Manchester: Critical Vision, 2003, p. 125) Barbara published in her Harlequin magazine Bukowski's poems and he wrote several poems about her. To support himself, Bukowski worked as a Post Office clerk for twelve years. The salary was bad but Bukowski needed the money. For some years he lived with Frances Smith; they had one daughter, Marina Louise. Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,
which came out in 1959, was 30 pages long and the print run was only
200.
From the 1960s, Bukowski published books of poetry almost annually. The
early poems have much in common with the work of Robinson
Jeffers. Bukowski admired strength and endurance, and featured violent
and
sexual confrontations between men and women. Bukowski's first volume of
prose was All Assholes in the World
and Mine (1966). One of his publishers in the 1960s was Jon
Edgar Webb from The Outsider
magazine, which featured such writers as Gary Snyder, Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs.
Gradually Bukowski established a loyal following for his depictions of
down-and-out people. "A persistent rumor for many years declared that
those gusty poems signed with his name were actually written by a nasty
old lady with hairy armpits," wrote Arnold L. Kaye in his interview of
the author. ('Charles Bukowski Speaks Out' by Arnold
L. Kaye, Chicago Literary Times,
March, 1963) In the late 1960s, Bukowski shifted in poetry from
introspection to more expressionistic writing, as seen in At Terror Street and Agony Away (1968)
and The Days Run Away Like Wild
Horses Over the Hill (1969). His columns, "The Notes of
a Dirty Old Man" appeared in Open City and Los Angeles Free
Press.
The texts were later collected in a book (1969). In 1970 Bukowski left his job after the publisher John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press had offered him $100 a month for life to write full time. In the same year Linda King entered Bukowski's life; she was 20 years younger, raised as a Mormon in Utah. "I'll never get mixed up with a man again who doesn't like to eat pussy," she said and Bukowski had to confess that he never had done that. (Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes, drawings by Charles Bukowski, New York: Grove Press, 1998, p. 113) The tumultuous relationship ended in the mid-1970s. As his social situation changed, Bukowski's poems no
longer engaged
the adventures of an outcast, but became meditative and sarcastic
comments on his surroundings, trips to the race track or his daily
routines. Although prolific, Bukowski remained a literary outsider who
published his works with small presses, primarily on the West Coast. In
1973 Bukowski gained a wider audience when an award-winning television
documentary by Taylor Hackford was shown. Bukowski's alter ego in the books, Henry Chinaski, has his literary roots in Dostoyevsky's underground man, Nietzsche's hero, who is completely autonomous, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline's protagonist-narrators. Chinaski is a tough, hard-drinking womanizer, a kind of Mike Hammer-ish narrator, who lives with the bums and criminals, sometimes also visiting high society. The character was introduced in the autobiographical Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with the Beasts (1965). Chinaski's adventures were further chronicled in the novels Post Office (1971), in which he survives the tyrannical nature of paid labor, Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and Ham on Rye (1982), in which Chinaski returns to his childhood and youth. In 1985 Bukowski married Linda Lee Beighle, a health food
proprietor
twenty-five years his junior. They had met in 1976. This also started a
more balanced period of his life. "I'm not drinking / and I'm writing.
/ see this poem? / it was / written without drinking. / who needs a
drink now? // probably the reader." ('who needs it?,' The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems
1951-1993, edited by John Martin, New York: Ecco; Enfield:
Publishers Group UK [distributor], 2008, p. 313) Towards the end
of his days, the
author lived in a house with a swimming pool, drove a black BMW, wrote
on a computer, and listened to records of his favorites: Sibelius,
Mahler, and Rossini. "I don't want to draw / like Mondrian, / I want to draw like a
sparrow eaten by a cat." (On Cats by Charles Bukowski, edited
by Abel Debritto, New York: Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers, 2015, p. 5)
Like William S. Burroughs, he had a bunch of cats. Their relaxed nature delighted him and inspired him to write his
first
cat poem, 'An Animal Poem' (1984). Bukowski especially took care of felines who had been through tough
times. The one-eared
tomcat
Butch Van Gogh and the white tailless Manx were perhaps those that were
the most dear to him. Manx was the subject of the poem 'The History Of
A Tough Motherfucker' (written in 1983). "The more cats you have, the
longer you live," Bukowski said to the actor Sean Penn. "If you have a
hundred cats, you'll live ten times longer than if you have ten." (Writers and Their Cats
by Alison Nastasi, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2018, p. 31) A longstanding friend of Raymond Carver, Bukowski was numbered among the original "dirty realists". The Last Night of the Earth Poem (1992) was one of Bukowski's final books before his death. It consisted of reflections of people who have passed from his life, and forward visions of his death. Charles Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, in Los Angeles. He was buried in the Green Hills Memorial Park. Tales of Ordinary Madness (1981) was the first film
adaptation of Bukowski's stories. Directed by Marco Ferreri and
starring Ben Gazarra and Ornella Muti, it depicted a drunken poet who
is obsessed by sex but can't find a happy relationship with his women.
The script drew material from Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and
General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972). Another film, Barfly
(1987), directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke and
Faye Dunaway, was about a writer, who meets a lush who takes him under
her wings. Bukowski documented the making of the movie in his novel Hollywood (1989). Crazy Love / Love is a Dog from Hell (1989) was based on 'The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, Calif.', collected in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness and later published in The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories (2001). The film was directed by Dominique Deruddere, starring Josse de Pauw, Geert Hunaerts, Michael Pas, Gene Bervoets. In the story a frustrated boy, full of romantic longing, grows up to be a necrophiliac. Lune Froinde (1991), directed by Patrick Bouchitey, starring Patrick Bouchitey, Jean-Francois Stévenin, Laura Favali, was based on Bukowski's stories from the same collection. The actor and director Sean Penn dedicated his film The Crossing Guard (1995) to Bukowski. For further reading: Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Bibliographical Study by Hugh Fox (1968); A Bibliography of Charles Bukowski by Sanford Dorbin (1969); Bukowski: Friendship, Fame & Bestial Myth by Jory Sherman (1982); Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski by Neeli Cherkovski (1991); Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski by R. Harrison (1994); Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet by Gerald Locklin (1995); Charles Bukowski by Gay Brewer (1997); Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounes (1999); The Hunchback of East Hollywood: A Biography of Charles Bukowski by Aubrey Malone (2003); Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993, edited by David Stephen Calonne (2003); The Dirty Old Man Of American Literature: A Biography of Charles Bukowski by Paul Brody (2013); Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground: From Obscurity to Literary Icon by Abel Debritto (2013); 'Charles Bukowski,' in Writers and Their Cats by Alison Nastasi (2018); Bukowski: A Life by Neeli Cherkovski (2020); A Los Angeles con Bukowski by Enrico Franceschini (2021) Selected works:
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