There had never been anything like it before. The crowd rose as the President’s car entered the arena. Here is Bukowski describing himself as a Los Angeles high school student writing, from imagination, of a visit to the city by President Herbert Hoover: By general agreement, his long-form masterpiece is his 1982 novel Ham on Rye, which conjures up a wonderfully louche, autobiographical account of an acne-riddled adolescent of the 1930s and his successive discoveries of alcohol, girls, and the public library’s collection of D. H. Whatever the final tally of the Bukowski canon, it adds up to a lot to fit in with a life as a full-time character and suggests there was more to him than the pantomime boozer he presented to the world. “Yes, botulism,” his colleague replied), and that this may or may not have been adorned by anything so sordidly conventional as a stamp. “If I keep carbons, I too am a posturer looking for gravy and light,” he remarked.īy 1967, Bukowski claimed to have lost some five hundred poems in this fashion, which seems extreme, but perhaps less so when you remember that he was in the habit of sending his stuff out wrapped in the same greasy and bloodstained bag he’d previously used to bring home slabs of raw beef from his butcher (“I think you’ll get a lot out of this,” one Bukowski editor remarked to another on the arrival of a manuscript. One says “estimated” because in the 1950s and early ’60s many of his poems and stories got lost in the mail (a particular irony for one who frequently sustained himself by working at the post office), and Bukowski didn’t make copies. In the period between 19, it was estimated that he wrote more than three thousand poems, at least ten collections of short stories, four novels, and the autobiographical screenplay Barfly. He wrote at a furious pace, often in a race to stay one step ahead of the bailiff, and in a lean, masculine style exactly suited to the nature of his subject, which was more often than not a lightly fictionalized account of his own life and times. Thompson was just another officially tolerated, self-mythologizing moral slob with a passing gift for comic hyperbole.īut Bukowski, unlike so many others of our artistic demimonde, actually delivered the goods. Compared to Bukowski, his devotee and sometime friend Hunter S. In every way he was the embodiment of twentieth-century literary bohemianism. Bukowski did all this, and more, eventually gravitating to the dockside community of San Pedro, Los Angeles, holding court there most days in some waterfront establishment on a steady diet of Schlitz, Cutty Sark, and Dexedrine before precariously making his way back, often on foot, to his current, and almost invariably short-term, suburban lodgings.įor nearly fifty years, his world was one of smoky rooms, constant if only fitfully rewarded creative endeavor, stopgap jobs, and spectacularly failed love affairs. Anyone familiar with his archetype as a writer will know that there’s a long if not always proud tradition of debauched-looking men with sandblasted faces and ragged shirts loitering around downtown bars all afternoon, a cigarette clenched between carious teeth, haranguing their audience about their latest work-in-progress, and not infrequently settling any critical dispute on the subject with their fists. Probably the first thing to say about the quintessentially flamboyant, bibulous, and, to some, surprisingly prolific author Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) is that he could really write. This essay appears in the Winter 2021 issue of Modern Age.
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