There was a perverse pleasure lounging around in the empty bungalow while ‘the old man was down in the dirt’ and Henry’s attorney totted up what he would inherit. Bukowski remembered his father saying a family could get rich if the sons of each generation bought property and willed it to their heirs. It had seemed a stupid idea and he felt vindicated in his disdain for his father’s lifestyle when the attorney informed him that Henry had less than $300 in savings and still owed $6,613 to the Bank of America on his mortgage. Apart from the equity in the house, the only real assets were a pension fund, a painting by Erich Heckal and a four-year-old Plymouth. Still, when everything was settled, Bukowski received a little more than $15,000. After he became famous, he claimed to have drunk and gambled away the inheritance, but he never revealed he had inherited $15,000, a substantial amount in 1959, and it’s unlikely he frittered it all away. Friends remember him having thousands of dollars in savings within a few years of his father’s death, and the truth is that, from this point on, he became careful with money.
As Bukowski produced and submitted a greater volume of work – never bothering to keep carbons so he had no copies unless the poems were published or returned – his poems appeared more frequently in the little magazines. This was partly because he was writing darker, more realistic poems reflecting his recent experiences of loss and death. In 1959, he had poems accepted by magazines including Nomad, Coastlines, Quicksilver and Epos. Success fired up his ambition, as Jory Sherman recalls: ‘He said, “I want to beat them all, beat every one of them.” He wanted fame, he really did.’
His first chapbook was published in October, 1960, two months after his fortieth birthday. E. V. Griffith, a small press editor from Eureka, California, who had already published broadsides of two Bukowski poems, spent two years sweating over Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail. ‘There were numerous delays in getting the book into print and the correspondence that ensued between poet and publisher was often testy,’ says Griffith. ‘But any ill-will dissipated quickly when copies were at last in Bukowski’s hands.’
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is little more than a pamphlet, twenty-eight pages long and only two hundred copies printed, a good proportion of which went to friends of the publisher and author, yet it had a special significance for Bukowski being his first book.
Many of the poems, like ‘soire´e’, were dark and introspective:
in the cupboard sits my bottle
like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.
I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,
sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,
the phone rings gamboling its sounds
against the odds of the crooked sea;
I drink deeply and evenly now,
I drink to paradise
and death
and the lie of love.
Also in his fortieth year, Bukowski was show-cased in Targets, a New Mexico quarterly whose editors turned over an entire section of the magazine to ‘A Charles Bukowski Signature’. This included a number of his most accomplished early poems, like ‘The Tragedy of the Leaves’ which again is a gloomy, claustrophobic poem. It concludes with a confrontation between the poet and an angry landlady in a rooming house not unlike the place Bukowski was living:
and I walked into the dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating and final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both.
A further step towards what Judson Crews calls the ‘Hank persona’ came with the chapbook, Longshot Pomes (sic) for Broke Players, published in New York. There were poems about prostitutes, the race track and classical music, not the best work Bukowski ever wrote on these subjects, but getting closer to what he would become famous for. The change of direction was indicated by the cover art of a man playing cards at a table while a woman waits in bed. Inside was a brief biography giving the salient points of the emerging Bukowski mythology: his unhappy childhood; the years bumming around the country, living in rooming houses and working at menial jobs, crazy jobs like being the oven man in a dog biscuit factory and ‘coconut man’ in a cake factory. These jobs may have been invented to add colour, as they are not recorded on the very detailed work experience forms Bukowski later completed for the post office.
Of all the small press publishers Bukowski dealt with in these early years the most significant, by far, were Jon and Louise ‘Gypsy Lou’ Webb and their extraordinary Loujon Press.
As a young man, Jon Webb took part in the hold-up of a jewellery store in Cleveland, Ohio, and served three years in a reformatory. It was whilst he was inside that he developed a passion for literature, editing the reformatory weekly and writing crime stories. Upon being paroled, he returned to Cleveland where he met and married an Italian girl who came to be known as Gypsy Lou because of her colorful clothes and long dark hair. In 1954 they moved to the French quarter of New Orleans where Jon Webb decided to become a publisher of avant-garde writing. He contacted William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller and other leading underground figures urging them to submit work to The Outsider, a journal he and Gypsy Lou were setting up. Jory Sherman was appointed West Coast editor and suggested they might also publish Bukowski. The Webbs loved his work. As Gypsy Lou says, they were greatly impressed with, ‘the realness, you know, not phony at all. He was just very honest and down to earth.’
The Webbs published eleven Bukowski poems in the first issue of The Outsider, some of the best he had written, alongside work by fashionable beat writers. The Bukowski selection was all the more impressive because Webb took a professional approach to being an editor, rejecting much of what Bukowski submitted as sub-standard. The best Bukowski poem in the issue was ‘old man, dead in a room’, which he meant as his own epitaph:
and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.
At times it seemed the poem might be prophetic. Bukowski was drinking hard, hitting the cocktail lounges night after night, getting into fights, and often waking up in city drunk tanks with the other ‘silverfish’, as he called his cell-mates. He retched so hard in the morning he saw blood in the toilet pan. Maybe he would die as the doctors had predicted, ripped apart by another hemorrhage. His drinking caused him to suffer small injuries and unpleasant ailments: he jammed a shard of glass in his foot when he was stumbling about drunk one night; and developed hemorrhoids to beat a world record. Thoughts of killing himself returned and he made an abortive attempt at gassing himself in his room one afternoon.
Once again, he started seeing something of Jane who was in an even more desperate state than when they were living together. She was working as a maid at The Phillips, a dive hotel in Hollywood, in exchange for a room rent-free and a few dollars drinking money. Her legs had lost their shapeliness and her pot belly had grown to a grotesque size. Bukowski referred to her as ‘the old woman’ and they enjoyed the companionship of fellow alcoholics, as he wrote in ‘A Nice Place’:
I uncap the new bottle
from the bag and she sits in the corner
smoking and coughing
like an old Aunt from New Jersey
Sometimes they had sex, but Jane was so far gone that intercourse repulsed him. He wrote to his pen friend, the Louisiana academic John William Corrington, that it made him think of a film he had once seen of a Cesarian operation.
There was a sense of impending tragedy about Jane, that nothing much could help her. In Post Office, Chinaski visits Betty at her hotel a few days after the Christmas holidays and the scene Bukowski describes is probably an accurate descript
ion of how low Jane had fallen by January, 1962: it is early in the morning when Chinaski calls at her room, but Betty is already drunk, surrounded by bottles of liquor given as Christmas gifts by the tenants, all cheap brands. Chinaski fears she will keep drinking until the bottles are empty, or until she is dead.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I ought to take that stuff. I mean, I’ll just give you back a bottle now and then. I won’t drink it.’
‘Leave the bottles,’ Betty said. She didn’t look at me. Her room was on the top floor and she sat in a chair by the window watching the morning traffic.
I walked over. ‘Look, I’m beat. I’ve got to leave. But for Christ’s sake, take it easy on that stuff!’
‘Sure,’ she said.
I leaned over and kissed her goodbye.
A couple of weeks later, on a Saturday, Bukowski went back to see her. There was no answer when he knocked at her door, so he went in and saw the bottles were gone, the bed covers had been pulled back and, when he came closer, he saw blood on the sheet. Frenchy, the landlady, told him an ambulance had taken Jane to Los Angeles County Hospital.
Her body was riddled with cancer; she also had cirrhosis of the liver. She had suffered a massive hemorrhage, and was in a semi-coma when he arrived, in a ward with three other women, one of whom was laughing loudly as she entertained her visitors. Bukowski pulled a curtain round Jane’s bed for privacy and sat beside her holding her hand, saying her name over and over. He got a rag and wiped away some blood from the corner of her mouth.
‘I knew it would be you,’ she said, rousing herself for a moment.
Jane died on the evening of 22 January, 1962, while Bukowski was trying to place a telephone call to her son in Texas. She was fifty-one.
After the funeral at the San Fernando Mission, north of LA, Bukowski went on a five-day drunk and, when he couldn’t stand his own company any longer, drove over to see Jory Sherman in San Bernadino. They worked their way through a six-pack of Miller High Life as he talked about how it had only been ‘half a funeral’ because there had been a mix up about whether Jane was a bona fide Catholic – the priest didn’t want to do the full service. Bukowski said more of Jane’s family should have been there. Just because she was a scrub woman in a cheap hotel didn’t mean she was nothing. He said he wished he had telephoned her more often; maybe if he had called after he saw her that morning, with the bottles, it might have made a difference. ‘Hank felt he had lost someone that he allowed himself to get very close to, which was rare for him,’ says Sherman. ‘I have seldom seen a person so grief-stricken. He was weeping and he was drinking heavily and his world had just crashed.’
In the morning, Bukowski drove to the races where he picked up a girl he knew from the post office, but he was unable to have sex when they got back to her place because he imagined Jane was watching. He returned to his room on North Mariposa where he still had some of her belongings: black beads which he moved through his fingers like a rosary while listening to the silence of the telephone, the telephone he used to pack with a matchbook cover so he wouldn’t be disturbed when he was working. The closet door was half open, more of her things hanging there – blouses, skirts and jackets, the lifeless fabric her body had given shape and movement to. When the hangover cleared on 29 January, he began to write a series of grief poems which are among his most affecting work.
…. and I speak
to all the gods,
Jewish gods, Christ-gods,
chips of blinking things,
idols, pills, bread,
fathoms, risks,
knowledgeable surrender,
rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad
without a chance,
hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,
I lean on this,
I lean on all of this
and I know:
her dress upon my arm:
but
they will not
give her back to me.
He called the poem, ‘for Jane, with all the love I had, which was not enough––’
4
CONVERSATIONS IN CHEAP ROOMS
For months after Jane’s death, Bukowski was profoundly depressed, and unable to get her out of his mind. Women he saw in the street reminded him of Jane. He saw her face in his mind’s eye when he woke, and she was there again at night when he tried to sleep.
‘Even though he hadn’t been living with her at the time, he mourned her. He really had an attachment,’ says Ann Menebroker, a poet from Sacramento who began corresponding with Bukowski at this time. He felt so depressed he hid knives, scissors and razors out of sight, saying he couldn’t remember the last time he’d suffered such a serious attack of his suicide complex, and Ann believes the desire to kill himself was real enough. ‘I’m sure he felt he wished he was dead sometimes, with his drinking and his going back and forth to jail. It was a terrible existence. I think the writing and the drinking was all that he had to keep things going and, yes, I think he meant it. His whole life was an extended suicide.’
He drank to try and forget his problems and spent hours touring the bars of East Hollywood, sometimes visiting the burlesque shows on Sunset Strip where he yelled at the go-go girls.
‘SHAKE IT IN MY FACE, BABY!’ he would holler, the beads on the girl’s top flicking up an erotic wind of promise as she bent down and jiggled herself for Bukowski, hoping he would tip her well.
‘YEAH, SHAKE IT!’
After a while, management gathered, correctly, that he was mocking the performance and kicked him out.
When he woke in his room the following morning, with a pounding head and dry mouth, Bukowski discovered the $450 he had won at the track the previous afternoon had gone from his pocket. Another calamity: Jane’s goldfish, which he had taken from her room at the Phillips Hotel after she died, was not in its bowl on the table. It was on the floor having apparently leapt out during the night, either trying to catch a fly, he presumed, or in an attempt at suicide. Looking at its discoloring body, he was reminded of Jane and all the regrets he had about her death.
He was so upset he called Jory Sherman to tell him what had happened. ‘It crushed him; he couldn’t stand to see animals die. He was just emotionally overcome because that was a part of Jane,’ says Sherman, who was a little put out by the call because Bukowski hadn’t been much of a friend to him during a recent crisis. ‘He was a very tender-hearted guy – not towards people necessarily, but towards goldfish…’
Bukowski wrote an extraordinary poem about the death of the fish, ‘I thought of ships, of armies, hanging on …’, describing how he tried to revive the fish by putting it back in the water, but it floated dead so he had to flush it down the toilet. The tone is so sombre, it becomes comical, although that was almost certainly not his intention:
I put the bowl in the corner
and thought, I really can’t stand
much more of this.
There were many sad, hung-over days like these when he stayed in his room watching the birds in the trees on North Mariposa, laying on the bed with a bottle in his hand listening to classical music. Late in the afternoon the other tenants returned from what he assumed were their miserable jobs, and began scampering up and down the concrete stairs like rodents. He was convinced he would die alone in that ‘1623 place’, his stomach ripped apart after a heavy night drinking, gobs of blood staining the sheets round his head, empty bottles in the wastebasket, the yellow bathrobe Jane had worn hanging like a shroud in the closet, flies shuttling about on the screen. Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Jake were his next of kin, now both parents were dead, but what would they care about his work, his chapbooks and collection of magazines? They would probably throw the mags out with the garbage, along with the racing forms and old newspapers.
He tried to write himself out of his depression, firing off submissions to editors all over the country, including newspaper journalist, John Bryan, who recalls how amazingly productive Bukowski was: ‘He
started sending me boxes of material. He sent cartons, a couple of hundred poems, thirty or forty short stories. I could pull anything I liked out of it, which was a nice choice, and I would send back the rest.’
John Bryan visited Mariposa three months after Jane died and found Bukowski in a dreadful state, broke, hungover and suffering all manner of ailments. ‘He had a waste basket full of hemorrhoid Preparation-H tubes. He apparently had the worst case of hemorrhoids in the world.’ Bukowski gave him some more poems, four of which Bryan printed in his magazine, Renaissance. The work was punk-like in its nihilism. The poem ‘an empire of coins’ concludes with the words ‘fuck everybody’, and ‘the biggest breasts’ ends with these sneering lines:
the waiter came smiling with his watery mouth
but I sent him running right off
for a couple of motherfucking
drinks.
This sort of provocative material added to his growing notoriety and a number of editors, critics and academics began to champion Bukowski as a fresh new voice. Small press publisher R.R. Cuscaden wrote an essay in Satis magazine likening Bukowski’s estrangement from society to that of Baudelaire. It was Cuscaden who also published the third limited edition Bukowski chapbook, Run with the Hunted, dedicated to John William Corrington, the Louisiana-based poet and English teacher who wrote a thank-you letter so effusive it made Bukowski cringe: ‘I just got immortal: at least a footnote when they write up Charlie.’
The sound of Bukowski bashing out all these poems on his manual ‘typer’ continued to irritate his neighbors, even when he tried to work within the hours agreed with the landlord, and the old woman downstairs began thumping the ceiling with her broom again. This made him very angry because he had to listen to the canned laughter coming from her television. He didn’t think those television shows were funny, anyway, except The Honeymooners which he enjoyed whenever he caught an episode in a bar. He took a page of a letter he’d been writing to the Webbs and scrawled his neighbor a note which he took downstairs and slid under her door:
Charles Bukowski Page 7
