Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  Bukowski was proud of all his books, but Pulp had a unique place in his affections and those close to him draw attention to its metaphysical aspects. ‘To me, it was incredible,’ says Linda Lee, ‘funny and poignant, sort of surrealistic.’ But aside from addressing impending death, it is hard to find much to commend Pulp. In abandoning the subject matter he knew about and could write convincingly about – low-paid work, relationships between men and women, and the predicament of the urban under-class – he seemed lost. It is significant that such a fluid writer, who did not like revising his manuscripts, had so much trouble getting the book how he wanted it. ‘He completely rewrote it after he finished the first draft,’ reveals John Martin. ‘He just didn’t like it. He said it was bad writing.’

  There was little to do after the book was finished, ‘horseless days’, not particularly uncomfortable but without action. He listened to Linda Lee vacuuming, the telephone ringing. A salesman called, trying to sell them the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He watched his cats basking in the sun on the red brick patio. The fattest, Craney, lay with its paws in the air oblivious to danger and its master’s illness. Bukowski followed shadows as the sun moved round the house, and he drank gallons of water to try and wash away the metallic taste that had stayed with him from chemotherapy.

  In the evenings, when he had enough strength, he went upstairs and wrote contemplative end-game poems:

  it’s a cool summer night.

  hell trembles nearby,

  stretches.

  I sit in this chair.

  my 6 cats are

  close by.

  I lift the bottle of water,

  take a large

  swallow.

  things will be far worse than

  they are

  now.

  and far

  better.

  I wait.

  (‘this night’)

  In August, Bukowski and Linda Lee drove down to a San Pedro store, Vinegar Hill Books, where Bukowski was presented with an elaborate birthday cake. He signed books and allowed himself to be the center of attention as his fans made speeches in his honor and fussed over him. It was peculiar to have become respectable at last. But never wholly so. As he prepared to leave, Bukowski froze the smile on the face of a newspaper journalist, saying: ‘I can see your headline: “Old man of seventy-three signs his last books.”’

  When Michael Montfort visited the house, Bukowski spoke to him about Pulp, which John Martin was planning to publish after a volume of letters. ‘I finally finished it,’ he told Montfort and Montfort’s friend, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, who had come to interview him, revealing his doubts about the work. ‘It’s going to ruin my reputation. Lot of bad stuff in it. I hope I’ve done it on purpose,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what made me write it. I guess I got tired of writing about myself, about what happened to me. So I wrote this entirely fictional thing about this fifty-five-year-old detective. Of course, part of the way he acts and talks is also me. I couldn’t get away from it.’

  Montfort had heard the doctors thought Bukowski might make a sustained recovery, but it didn’t seem possible. ‘I thought their view was way too optimistic. So I had kind of mixed feelings meeting my best friend, kind of knowing he is dying, and the doctor says he is not.’

  ‘Michael, we haven’t paid the hospital bills yet,’ said Bukowski.

  ‘You are insured, Hank. What’s the problem? Even if it’s $100,000, you’ve got the money.’

  Bukowski agreed, but he still seemed worried, never having come to terms with the fact he would not have to think about money again, with the house and cars paid for, and hundreds of thousands in the bank. If he sold everything and pooled his capital, he would have the best part of a million dollars.

  The remission lasted into the fall of 1993 when the cancer returned and Bukowski went back to hospital. He knew he was dying, but refrained from speaking about it with Linda Lee unless he had a particular concern to discuss. ‘In his writing he talks about that. I would never intrude,’ she says. He kept within himself, a tough guy who felt that showing emotion was to make himself vulnerable.

  It was decided he would be more comfortable at home in San Pedro. A nurse came in each day and Dr Dick Ellis, a friend he made at hospital, sometimes joined them for dinner. Marina, who came to stay, says her father faced death with the same phlegmatic attitude which had helped him through his twisted childhood, his difficult early life, the factory jobs and relationships. The recent years at San Pedro with Linda Lee had been comfortable, but most of his life had been hard and there were many times when he despaired of the future and wished himself dead. ‘In a way, it was just another hard time. Starting off from being a child, he was used to having a tough life and he wasn’t that much different in some ways. It was just another hard knock. It turned out to be the hardest one, I guess, but it didn’t change him.’

  In the meantime, it was a case of getting through the days as comfortably as possible. He got a fax machine and found this new form of technology pleased him, just as the Apple Mac had.

  On 18 February he sent John Martin what he called ‘my first FAX POEM’:

  it’s too late:

  I have been

  smitten.

  Then there was no more strength to write. ‘That was terrible to see – the mind was there, but he couldn’t do anything because the body gave up,’ says Linda Lee. ‘The body shut down.’ The chemotherapy that was attacking the corrupted blood cells had also destroyed his immune system. Bukowski contracted pneumonia and returned to hospital for treatment. ‘Within about five days, they got rid of the pneumonia, but he still had an infection and they couldn’t locate it,’ says Linda Lee, who was at the bedside with Marina. ‘They kept him in there. They kept him alive, injecting this stuff with catheters sticking in all over the place. Dreadful! Horrible! And he was the bravest soldier.’ At 11.55 a.m. on Wednesday 9 March, 1994, Bukowski died. He was seventy-three.

  John Martin was one of the first to be told. ‘At that point you can’t even believe a person is gone,’ he says.

  Because of the earning power of Bukowski’s books, Black Sparrow Press had grown from nothing into a company which turned over more than a million dollars a year, a remarkable collaboration started on Bukowski’s coffee table at De Longpre Avenue with the signing of a set of broadsides. ‘I was thinking what life would be without him. We’d been intimately engaged in one very purposeful and single-minded pursuit: him to write and me to publish him and others for thirty years. I knew I had enough material for a number of books after he was gone, but that wasn’t much consolation. I couldn’t talk to him every day.’

  The bond between Marina and her father had been extremely close. ‘I always knew that if anything was wrong all I had to do was get hold of him and he would fix it,’ she says. ‘Even as an adult who had been taking care of myself for many years, and doing just fine, I noticed, aside from missing him after he died, I was also left with a feeling of missing that security in the back of my mind, just knowing that everything would always be OK, but if it wasn’t I could call him and he would make it OK somehow.’

  Although Bukowski had maintained he was a loner, some one who did not need or want many close friends, there were a number of men and women for whom his death was a great loss, people like Carl Weissner who had been ready to come over from Germany at a moment’s notice; people like Michael Montfort, Sean Penn, Steve Richmond and John Thomas. In the early hours of the morning, John Thomas was unable to sleep and turned on the local twenty-four-hour news station. Bukowski’s death was announced in one of the bulletins and Thomas found himself weeping.

  It was not until three days later that Linda King discovered Bukowski had died. Her nephew told her after reading about it in a magazine. Linda and Bukowski had been apart for almost twenty years, but the memory of love endured, as she writes:

  the bright pleasantness of that bedroom

  on Edgewater Terrace will forever liv
e

  in my memory with pure pleasure

  the laughter and the witty stories

  the art, the sculpture, the reading

  the laughter, the love, the laughter

  At Bukowski’s favorite Hollywood restaurant, Musso & Frank, barman Ruben Rueda cancelled the order for sweet German white wine, Rieslings and Liebfraumilch. Bukowski had frequently drunk two bottles at the bar before sitting down to eat and had been such a good customer the restaurant stocked it especially for him.

  The newspaper obituaries concentrated on Bukowski’s low-life image. He was the ‘bard of the bar room’, an unsophisticated writer with an inexplicable cult following. Aside from the occasional good review for his novels, and the attention paid to Barfly, the mass media had always treated him in this dismissive way.

  Yet Bukowski stands alone in modern American literature, unclassifiable and much imitated. His simple prose and poetry style stemmed from common ideas: he was initially influenced by reading Hemingway and Fante, but, as he said, there weren’t many laughs in Hemingway, so he added humor. Everyday life was Bukowski’s chosen subject matter, not heroic deeds or glamorous people, but the experience of less successful Americans living in cheap apartments and working at menial jobs. He wrote convincingly about this world, although he exaggerated and edited his own life story. He also addressed human relationships with honesty: the relationship between a child and his parents, and between men and women.

  Because of his fondness for writing about drinking, his willingness to sensationalize his life and to be gratuitously vulgar, Bukowski laid himself open to critics. He also probably published too much, certainly too much poetry. But if one reads his work carefully – the six novels, the dozens of short stories, the screenplay and numerous books of poetry – there is an uncompromising personal philosophy running through that is convincing, if challenging: a rejection of drudgery and imposed rules, of mendacity and pretentiousness; an acceptance that human lives are often wretched and that people are frequently cruel to one another, but that life can also be beautiful, sexy and funny.

  Many critics say that he is a cynical writer, but maybe he simply had a realistic view of how people behave, and didn’t feel the need to give them the benefit of the doubt. ‘He is not a mainstream author and he will never have a mainstream public,’ says John Martin. ‘The kind of writing he does offends too many people. It’s too honest and too direct.’

  It was a typically hot, smoggy Los Angeles afternoon when Bukowski’s friends gathered at Green Hills Memorial Park for his funeral. Monday 14 March, 1994. His body had been dressed in a plaid shirt and wind-breaker with pens in his breast pocket, as if he were on his way to Hollywood Park, and sealed within a casket made from poplar wood.

  Apart from Linda Lee and Marina Bukowski, the mourners included John and Barbara Martin, Sean Penn, Red Stodolsky and his wife, Mina, John Thomas and his wife, Philomene Long, and Carl Weissner, together with friends and neighbors from San Pedro and Dr Dick Ellis from the hospital. Shortly before 3 p. m., they filed into the chapel, a nondescript building looking like a suburban bungalow, with the distinction of stained glass over the door. ‘There was a smell of a skunk going in there,’ says John Thomas. ‘I remember thinking that was appropriate.’ There was no minister, although Bukowski had been christened a Catholic. Instead, Linda Lee had arranged for Buddhist monks to conduct the service, with friends invited to give personal eulogies.

  John Martin said Bukowski had been a great writer and certainly somebody he would never forget. Carl Weissner tried to speak, but was too upset to say much. Sean Penn said a few words about their friendship. When the chief monk got up, many in the congregation found him unintelligible. ‘The one who gave the speech kept saying seven. I think he thought the body was seven years old,’ says Thomas. ‘You could almost feel Hank smiling from inside the coffin at how absurd that funeral was.’

  The mourners got back in their cars and drove up Bay View Drive, past the serried stone tablets, turned left on Avalon Drive and parked on the side of a hillock known as Ocean View where Bukowski was to be buried in a grave dug next to a young tree. One of the monks placed a rose on the casket. Bukowski’s friends tapped the lid for luck and walked away.

  and to think, after I’m gone,

  there will be more days for others, other days,

  other nights. dogs walking, trees shaking in

  the wind.

  I won’t be leaving much.

  something to read, maybe.

  a wild onion in the gutted

  road.

  Paris in the dark.

  (‘A New War’)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  From Andernach, Germany, to Los Angeles, California, more than a hundred people who knew Charles Bukowski were interviewed for this biography over a period of two years. Others contributed by correspondence and many granted me access to previously unpublished letters, manuscripts and photographs. I am grateful to everyone who gave of their time, but would like to thank the following individuals by name:

  My greatest debt is to Bukowski’s publisher/editor, John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press. Both John and his wife, Barbara, who designs the Black Sparrow books, were most helpful and hospitable. I am particularly grateful to John for allowing me access to his previously unpublished personal correspondence with Bukowski which covers a period of twenty-seven years and was an invaluable source of information.

  Of the members of Bukowski’s family, special thanks to Bukowski’s widow, Linda Lee Bukowski, and his only child, Marina Bukowski. Also thanks to Marina’s mother, FrancEyE; and to Bukowski’s cousins, Katherine Wood, in California, and Karl and Josephine Fett in Andernach, who granted me access to the family archive of previously unpublished letters and photographs. I am also grateful to the following relations of Bukowski’s first wife, Barbara Nell Frye: Tom Frye of Wheeler, Texas, and Sunny Thomas and Leah Belle Wilson of California. Leah Belle Wilson provided the photograph of Bukowski and Barbara Frye which is the first ever to be published. In Andernach, Matthew Davis was a skillful and patient translator.

  For Bukowski’s school days, thanks to the following alumni of Los Angeles High School, graduating class of summer, 1939: Roger Bloomer, Stephen Cavanaugh, John Corbeil, Fred Merrill, Robert Merryman, Mark Morton and Barbara Purdy. Thanks to the principals and staff at the following institutions: Virginia Road Elementary School, Mount Vernon Junior High School, Susan Miller Dorsey High School, LA High School and Los Angeles City College. Also thanks to Los Angeles Unified School District for supplying details of Bukowski’s education history.

  The staff at the Selective Service System at Arlington, Virginia, helped locate Bukowski’s draft record. Brenda Galloway of Temple University, Philadelphia, helped research the period Bukowski spent in the city, doing field work on my behalf around Fairmount Avenue.

  Most of the new material about Jane Cooney Baker came from Roswell, New Mexico, and thanks are due to friends and acquaintances of the Cooney family who still live in Roswell, including: Richard G. Bean, Orville Cookson, Lavora Fisk, Jean Rockhold and John H. Wyley. Thanks also to the Historical Society of Roswell, Roswell Library, the Roswell Daily Record and Roswell High School, the principal of which supplied the photograph of Jane which is the first ever to be published. I am also grateful to Ce´line Sanchez at the State of New Mexico Department of Health for helping me research Jane’s family history.

  I am grateful to the United States Postal Service for giving me copies of Bukowski’s personnel file and to Bukowski’s former co-workers at the Terminal Annex in Los Angeles: David Berger, Johnny Moore and Grace Washington.

  Of Bukowski’s literary associates, several of whom were close friends of Bukowski, thanks to the following: John Bennett, Douglas Blazek, John Bryan, Neeli Cherkovski, Judson Crews, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the late Allen Ginsberg, E. V. Griffith, Jack Hirschman, Philomene Long, Norman Mailer, Gerard Malanga, the late Marvin Malone, Ann Menebroker, the late Jack Micheline, Barry Miles, Haro
ld Norse, Ben Pleasants, Al Purdy, Steve Richmond, Kevin Ring, Jory Sherman, Ed Smith, Joan Smith, the late Nikos Stangos, the late John Thomas, Gypsy Lou Webb, Miller Williams, A.D. Winans, Carl Weissner and Leslie Woolf Hedley. Special thanks to Gerard Malanga, Steve Richmond and Nikos Stangos for giving me copies of their previously unpublished correspondence with Bukowski. Thanks also to the following: Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher; John William Corrington’s widow, Joyce Corrington; John Fante’s widow, Joyce Fante; and William Wantling’s widow, Ruth Wantling. Joyce Corrington kindly gave me copies of her husband’s voluminous correspondence with Bukowski.

  Several of Bukowski’s former girlfriends were brave enough to talk about their relationships with him and I am grateful to the following: Joanna Bull, Linda King, Amber O’Neil, Jane Manhattan, Pamela Miller (aka Cupcakes), Jo Jo Planteen, Claire Rabe and Liza Williams. Special thanks are due to Linda King for allowing me to read and print her previously unpublished love letters, and also to Ruth Wantling for talking about her encounter with Bukowski.

  Thanks to the following film actors who knew Bukowski: Ben Gazzara, Elliott Gould, Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke and Harry Dean Stanton. My special thanks to film director Taylor Hackford who arranged for me to view his documentary, Bukowski, at his home in Hollywood.

  Other friends and associates of Bukowski who were helpful include the following: Sheila Applebaum, whose late husband, Arthur, was Bukowski’s attorney; Jefferson Airplane singer-songwriter, Marty Balin; photographer Sam Cherry and his grandson, Dani Tull; Barfly actor Mick Collins; Bukowski’s former De Longpre Avenue landlord, Francis Crotty, and Bukowski’s former De Longpre Avenue neighbors, Paul Jenson and Sina Taylor; the artist R. Crumb; Bukowski’s friends when he lived at Carlton Way, Brad Darby, Tina Darby and George Di Caprio; Rolf Degen who met Bukowski in Germany; Linda King’s sister, Gerry; the singer-songwriter, Bob Lind; photographer Michael Montfort; artist Spain Rodriguez; author and journalist Lionel Rolfe; Ruben Rueda, who served Bukowski drinks at The Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood; the late Sholom ‘Red’ Stodolsky of Baroque Books, Hollywood; Ben C. Toledano who met Bukowski in New Orleans; and the cartoonist Robert Williams. Thanks also to Henry Bukowski’s former Temple City neighbors, Irma Billie and her late husband, Francis.