Charles Bukowski Read online

  It is also worth adding a few words on the way the book was written. Like Bukowski, I used short, simple sentences and brief chapters. Like his novels, the biography is a slim volume. Furthermore, I adopted an American voice, using US spellings and the terms and phrases Bukowski himself employed. I am English, moreover a Londoner, and do not normally speak or write as I do in the body of this book, but I didn’t want my Englishness to jar against Bukowski’s idiomatic American style of speaking and writing, which I quote from liberally. I also refrained from discussing my sources in the text, because I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of the story. (There are fulsome source notes at the end.) In short, I did everything I could to write a book in Bukowski’s style, or at least one in which his own voice wouldn’t seem out of place. The result is a biography that, while being very revealing about the life, reads at times like fiction. In fact, one of the most pleasing reviews came when a critic in the magazine Deluxe wrote that Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life ‘reads like a great lost Bukowski novel’.

  Because the book reads like fiction please do not assume, however, that it cannot be relied upon for accuracy. Despite my background as a tabloid journalist, I was scrupulous not to sensationalise Bukowski’s life, though I didn’t shy away from stories that reflected badly on him either. In writing the biography I was leaving behind the hyperbole and other vices of tabloid journalism and seeking to tell a story completely straight. I do not pass judgement on Bukowski’s behaviour in the book, as newspapers are so fond of doing. Rather I saw my job as presenting you, the reader, with the facts of Bukowski’s life in an entertaining but always reliable way. The research is as good as it could be. It’s up to you, having read the story, to decide what sort of man you think Bukowski was, though of course we both start off from the point of admiring the books, and thereby the author. I wouldn’t have written the biography if I didn’t feel warmly towards him, and you would be unlikely to be reading it unless you shared my enthusiasm.

  As I say, I never met Bukowski and as a result I am asked occasionally: ‘How can you write a biography of somebody you never knew?’ In reply I point out that many eminent biographers and historians would be made redundant by this logic. Evidently Vincent Cronin didn’t interview Napoleon for his 1971 biography of the emperor; Peter Ackroyd wasn’t able to sit down with William Blake. Yet both got to know their subjects by a process of deep research and as a result they wrote compelling lives of these men. In fact, there are at least two significant advantages for the biographer not to have his or her subject around. Firstly, and very importantly, they can’t influence you to write about them in the way they would prefer to be portrayed. (Many biographies written with the co-operation of the subject are bad because the author is hamstrung in this way, the result being hagiography.) Secondly, without direct contact with the subject, one is obliged to dig deep for material, and interview widely, which is healthy and helps one get at ‘the truth’ (though lives always remain slightly mysterious, which is as it should be). I travelled extensively to meet and interview virtually everybody of significance in Bukowski’s life, much more so than anybody else who has written about Bukowski, and this book is the concatenation of many memories. I also turned up a small mountain of documentary evidence, including hundreds of letters and previously unpublished photographs, many of which appear in this book, others in my companion book Bukowski in Pictures. So I didn’t meet the man, but like Cronin and Ackroyd I got to feel I knew my subject, and I hope you get that feeling too, reading the book.

  My interest in Bukowski faded after the biography was published in 1998, as happens when you finish a book that has been a central part of your life and other subjects and concerns take its place. Rereading the biography recently was like looking at the work of a stranger. I was amazed by it. Part of the magic of books is that, if they are any good, they have a life of their own beyond that of their author, and that has been the case with Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. It was well-received when first published and has made its own way in the world successfully ever since, selling steadily in the UK, the USA and in translation in more than a dozen languages, the translations ranging from Japanese to Hebrew. My best hope is that it will come to be seen as the classic biography of this remarkable American author, entertaining and informing readers while also returning them to Bukowski’s own marvellous stories and poems.

  Howard Sounes

  London, 2006

  PROLOGUE

  Charles Bukowski raised himself up from his chair and got a beer from the refrigerator behind him on stage. The audience applauded as he drank, tipping the bottle until it was upside down and he had drained the last golden drop.

  ‘This is not a prop,’ he said, speaking slowly with a lilt to his voice, like W.C. Fields. ‘It’s a necesssssitty.’

  The crowd laughed and clapped. A young girl in front exclaimed that he was a ‘funky old guy’. Indeed, at fifty-two, Bukowski was old enough to be the father of most of the kids who had come to hear him read, and his behavior was all the more amusing because of it.

  Bukowski looked odd, as well as speaking in a peculiar way. He was a tall man, a quarter-inch under six feet, heavyset with a beer belly, but his head seemed too big for his body and his face was alarming, like a Frankenstein mask: a long jaw, thin lips, sad slitty eyes sunk into hollows; a large boozer’s nose, red and purple with broken veins; and a scraggly grey beard over greasy skin mottled with acne scars, skin so bad he looked like he’d been in a fire.

  He had been flown up to San Francisco, in September, 1972, by his publishers, City Lights Books, because of the success of a collection of his short stories, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. The book was dedicated to his young girlfriend, Linda King:

  who brought it to me

  and who will take it

  away

  Eight hundred people paid to get into a gymnasium on Telegraph Hill, eager to see the author of Life in a Texas Whorehouse and the other outrageous, apparently autobiographical stories. The idea of appearing before them terrified Bukowski. Although he looked intimidating, he was chronically shy and hated himself for hustling his ass in the home town of the beat writers, a group he neither liked nor considered himself part of.

  He’d been drinking all day to get his courage up, on the morning flight from Los Angeles, in the Italian restaurant where he and Linda King had lunch, and behind the curtain while waiting for his cue to go on. His face was grey with fear, and he vomited twice.

  ‘You know it’s easier working in a factory,’ he told his friend, Taylor Hackford, who was filming a documentary. ‘There’s no pressure.’

  The crowd knew him for his short stories, but Bukowski read poetry. Poems about drinking, gambling and sex, even going to the crapper – he knew that the title alone, ‘piss and shit’, would make them laugh.

  ‘Listen, some of these poems are serious and I have to apologize because I know some crowds don’t like serious poems, but I’ve gotta give you some now and again to show I’m not a beer-drinking machine,’ he said. He chose a poem about his father, whom he had hated with a passion. It was called ‘the rat’:

  with one punch, at the age of 16 and 1/2,

  I knocked out my father,

  a cruel shiny bastard with bad breath,

  and I didn’t go home for some time, only now and then

  to try to get a dollar from

  dear momma.

  it was 1937 in Los Angeles and it was a hell of a

  Vienna.

  …

  me? I’m 30 years older,

  the town is 4 or 5 times as big

  but just as rotten

  and the girls still spit on my

  shadow, another war is building for another

  reason, and I can hardly get a job now

  for the same reason, I couldn’t then:

  I don’t know anything I can’t do

  anything.

  It seemed h
e might cry as he finished the last sad lines. But he snapped out of it and began playing the wild man again.

  ‘Do I know you?’ he asked a fan who called out a request. ‘Don’t push me around, baby …’ he threatened, breaking into a grin. ‘One more beer, I’ll take you all.’ He threw his head back, showing ruined teeth, and cackled. ‘Ha Ha Ha. Watch out!’

  Another fan tried to get up on the stage.

  ‘What the hell you want, man? Get away from me,’ said Bukowski, as if talking to a dog. ‘What are you, some kinda creep?’ The crowd whooped with laughter.

  Somebody asked how many beers he could drink. Others were less impressed, demanding that Bukowski stop wasting time; they had paid to hear poetry, not to watch a drunk.

  ‘You want poems?’ he teased the college kids, disliking their expensive clothes and untroubled faces. ‘Beg me.’

  ‘Fuck you, man!’

  ‘Any other comments?’

  The more drunk he became, the more hostile he was towards the audience and the more hostile the audience got. ‘It ended up with them throwing bottles,’ recalls beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, who had Bukowski hustled out back for his own safety.

  There was a party afterwards at Ferlinghetti’s apartment in North Beach. The place was packed with poets, musicians, actors, members of the audience, and almost everybody was drunk or stoned. Bukowski had little time for drugs, but he was roaring drunk. He asked every woman he met whether they wanted to have sex with him, and snarled at Taylor Hackford when Hackford tried to film a close-up:

  ‘What do you want, mother-fuck?’

  Bukowski was talking to his friend John Bennett when a fan came over to compliment him on a great show. They told him to get lost.

  ‘Fuck you, and your mother!’ said the fan.

  Bukowski didn’t mind people insulting his mother – he had disliked her himself – but Bennett took offence at the remark and threw the man down the stairs.

  ‘Oh God, here we go!’ exclaimed Linda King as she watched a chair smash through a window in the fight that ensued. Bennett put his fist through another window, gashing his hand, and soon half the men in the room were throwing punches at each other.

  Bukowski grabbed Linda’s hand and pulled her after him into the kitchen. She assumed he wanted to protect her, or maybe give her a kiss, but he accused her of flirting with John Bennett, saying she was no better than a whore, and tried to hit her over the head with a frying pan.

  ‘I looked in his eyes and it was like a creature who was not Bukowski at all,’ says Linda, who had been the victim of his jealousy many times in the year and a half they’d been together. ‘I always claimed he got possessed when he was drunk. I could see he was really going to get me.’

  He blocked her in a corner with his left arm, and was brandishing the frying pan in his right hand, ready to bang her on the head. She bit him hard on the hand, ducked and made a run for it. He lunged after her with the pan, but tripped and cut his face on the stove as he fell.

  ‘To hell with you, bitch, you’re out of my life,’ he screamed.

  Linda heard the familiar sound of police sirens wailing towards them through the city. This often happened when they went to a party, even though Bukowski promised to behave. In her frustration, she kicked a panel out of the door and clattered down the stairs into the street where a crowd was gathering. The police soon showed up, but Linda stayed back, knowing it was better not to get involved.

  Marty Balin, leader of the rock group Jefferson Airplane, wanted to make a movie out of Bukowski’s short stories and came to the party to meet him. ‘The windows were broken and glass was all over the floor,’ says Balin who arrived just after the fight. ‘Bukowski was on a mattress on the floor with no other furniture in the place, broken glass all over, bottles. His face was all cut up.’

  When he saw Marty Balin’s girlfriend, Bukowski scrambled to his feet and squared up to the couple.

  ‘You know, I could take that woman away from you like that!’ he said, snapping his fingers in Marty Balin’s face.

  The poet Harold Norse turned up to find Ferlinghetti outside on Upper Grant Avenue, apparently appalled at the goings on. Norse asked what had happened and the mild-mannered Ferlinghetti replied that Bukowski and Linda King were wrecking his place.

  ‘Didn’t I warn you?’ asked Norse. He knew Bukowski of old and that, when he was sober, Bukowski was quiet and polite, even deferential. But when he got drunk – especially in sophisticated company, which made him uneasy – he became Bukowski the Bad: mischievous, argumentative, even violent. They could hear him up there now being Bukowski the Bad. He was howling like a lunatic.

  ‘FUCK ALL THIS!’ he bellowed.

  Morning broke with beautiful warm autumn sunshine, a fresh breeze blowing in from the bay, and the sound of broken glass being swept up. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Harold Norse came back to the apartment and picked their way upstairs, through the shards of glass and splintered wood, until they found Bukowski. He was sitting on the floor, still dressed in the clothes he had on the day before, his face smeared with dried blood, drinking a beer for breakfast. He had been in residence for only one night, but, as Ferlinghetti says, the place ‘looked like a nest of junkies had been living there a month.’

  Ferlinghetti greeted Bukowski remarkably affably, considering the state his home was in, and told him he had brought his money for the reading. His share was $400.

  ‘And to think I used to work for 35 cents an hour,’ said Bukowski in genuine wonder. He was talking about the factory jobs he had worked at nearly all his adult life, most recently as mail clerk in Los Angeles, sorting letters while the supervisor yelled at him to hurry up. He held that terrible job almost twelve years before leaving, when he was forty-nine, to become a writer. Everybody said he was mad – what about his pension? – but this proved he had been right. He held the money to his face.

  ‘Poetry, I love poetry,’ he said, kissing the bank notes. He meant it seriously, but couldn’t help making a joke that lived up to his image. ‘It’s better than pussy,’ he added, ‘almost.’

  1

  TWISTED CHILDHOOD

  Bukowski claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life. Essentially that is what his books are all about – an honest representation of himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. He even went so far as to put a figure on it: ninety-three per cent of his work was autobiography, he said, and the remaining seven per cent was ‘improved upon’. Yet while he could be extraordinarily honest as a writer, a close examination of the facts of Bukowski’s life leads one to question whether, to make himself more picaresque for the reader, he didn’t ‘improve upon’ a great deal more of his life story than he said.

  The blurring of fact and fiction starts with the circumstances of Bukowski’s birth.

  ‘I was born a bastard – that is, out of wedlock,’ he wrote in 1971, and he repeated this story many times both in interviews and in his writing.

  His parents met in Andernach, Germany, after World War One. His father, Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski, was serving with the US army of occupation and Bukowski’s mother, Katharina Fett, was a local seamstress. She didn’t like Henry at first, ignoring him when he called to her in the street, but he ingratiated himself with her parents by bringing food to their apartment and by speaking with them in German. He explained that his parents had emigrated to America from Germany so, by ancestry, he was German too. Henry and Katharina started dating and Henry soon made her pregnant.

  There was a delay before they got married because Henry had to get demobbed from the army first. But Andernach city records show that they did marry, on 15 July, 1920, before their child was born.

  They rented an apartment at the corner of Aktienstrasse, near the railway station, and it was here Katharina gave birth to a boy at 10 p.m. on 16 August. A few days later the child was baptized at the Roman Catholic cathedral, at a font decorated with a bird very
much like a black sparrow. The priest named the child Heinrich Karl Bukowski, like his dad.

  They stayed in Andernach for two years while Henry worked as a building contractor, and then moved to nearby Coblenz where they lodged for a while with a family named Gehrhardt on Sclostrasse. Gehrhardt family letters reveal that Katharina shocked them by telling sexy jokes, and that Henry kept postcards of nude girls hidden in the wash stand in his room.

  Henry and his bride probably would have settled in the town if it hadn’t been for the collapse of the German economy in 1923. Everyday life became so difficult after the crash that Henry had little choice but to return to the United States, and so they set sail from Bremerhaven, on the SS President Fillmore, on 18 April, 1923.

  When they arrived in Baltimore, Bukowski’s mother started calling herself Kate, so she sounded more American, and little Heinrich became little Henry. They also changed the pronunciation of their surname to Buk-cow-ski, as opposed to the harder European pronunciation which is Buk-ov-ski. Henry worked hard and they soon saved enough to move out to California where he had been born and raised.