Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  * Sanford is the name of the postal district of LA that Bukowski had learned by rote.

  5

  FAMILY LIFE AT DE LONGPRE AVENUE

  When FrancEyE became pregnant she didn’t tell Bukowski straight away, but considered having a termination because her circumstances were not ideal for having a child. She had little money. She was living in a rooming house, and Bukowski had made it very clear he didn’t want a family. The only reason they hadn’t used contraception was that he hated condoms and, at forty-one, FrancEyE believed she was too old to get pregnant. Yet despite all the problems, she decided to have the baby. ‘I thought, well, I’ll go to Bukowski and, if he doesn’t want to help, I’ll go to my mother. Somewhere I’ll get help.’

  When she did tell him, Bukowski unexpectedly asked FrancEyE to marry him, not because he particularly wanted to repeat an experience that had ended so unhappily with Barbara Frye, but because he wanted to do the right thing. FrancEyE thanked him, but said she never wanted to marry anyone again and they compromised by agreeing to live together as a family with Bukowski paying the bills. They found a suitable home on De Longpre Avenue, where Bukowski would stay for the next nine years and where he wrote some of his best work.

  The 5000 block of De Longpre Avenue runs parallel with Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood, still within walking distance of Ned’s liquor store. There is a Ukrainian church, a scattering of modest family homes and a few low-rent apartment courts, one of which was owned by a middle-aged couple named Crotty who worked as extras at the nearby film studios. Theirs was not exactly ‘the last Skid Row court in Hollywood’ as Bukowski was fond of describing it, but it had seen better days. It consisted of four bungalows built on one side of a driveway that led from the sidewalk to a five-room boarding house. FrancEyE remembers it was ‘half a court’ because there was no facing row of bungalows, just a vacant lot, as if the builders had run out of money.

  Francis Crotty was a short, pugnacious mid-Westerner with sparkling eyes, slightly bulbous nose and a moustache, a busy and resourceful landlord who was adept at fixing things. His wife, Grace, was a thick-set woman with red hair. Because they owned the court outright, and didn’t have to worry about every cent, the Crottys charged reasonable rents and made sure their tenants got enough to eat by going on ‘dent runs’ to stores which sold damaged cans of food and day-old bread at a discount. ‘They would buy a whole bunch of it and give it to people who were poorer than they were,’ remembers former neighbor, Sina Taylor. There were also communal dinners at Thanksgiving and the Crottys would host ‘drinking days’ when they handed around whiskey and Eastside beer until everybody in the court was pleasantly smashed. The Crottys were tolerant of eccentricity in others and didn’t care that Bukowski and FrancEyE weren’t married, even though many landlords wouldn’t have rented to them. Bukowski decided they were the best landlords he’d ever had.

  He and FrancEyE moved into the one-bedroom end bungalow, next to the sidewalk. The lounge had an old couch, a rickety coffee table and book shelves constructed from building blocks. At the back of the room was a desk and over the desk Bukowski kept what he called his ‘cheeseboard’, a set of post office pigeon holes which he used for scheme test practice because, although he was a regular mail clerk, he still had to pass tests to hold his post office job. The rest of the time he used it to file papers. The typewriter and typing table his parents had given him were by the window so he could watch people while he wrote, as he described in ‘the new place’:

  as I type people go by

  mostly women

  and I sit in my shorts

  (without top)

  and going by they

  can’t be sure I am not entirely

  naked. so

  I get these faces

  which pretend they don’t see

  anything

  but I think they do:

  they see me as I

  sweat the poem like beating an

  ugly hog to death

  as the sun begins to fail over

  Sunset Blvd.

  over the motel sign

  where hot sweaty people from

  Arkansas and Iowa

  pay too much to sleep while

  dreaming of movie stars.

  Although Bukowski and FrancEyE liked the new place, they were not suited to living together. She involved herself in causes and with groups which Bukowski, the outsider, considered a waste of time. He wrote to the Webbs that FrancEyE was fighting ‘to save and understand all mankind’ and it was not a battle he thought she had much chance of winning. He was also contemptuous of her poetry workshop friends, people like Stanley Kurnik who sometimes came over to talk about literature. ‘Hank did not like my workshop friends,’ she says. ‘My workshop friends were cardboard. They were an intrusion on him. They were Hollywood People. They were phonies. But they were my only friends!’

  The fact he was about to become a father didn’t make him at all happy and, when Jory Sherman visited, Bukowski suggested the baby might not even be his. ‘I was furious,’ says FrancEyE. ‘But at the same time I knew he was drunk, so I didn’t make a thing out of it. He was doing that as part of his posturing in front of Jory.’ Bukowski moaned about FrancEyE in letters to friends, making fun of the books she read, even complaining that she was getting fat. His dissatisfaction also came out in poems, like ‘the new place’, where the poet is interrupted in his work by ‘the woman’ calling him to dinner:

  the food is getting cold and

  I’ve got to go

  (she doesn’t understand that

  I’ve got to finish this thing)

  ‘The new place’ was published later that year in The Wormwood Review, a small literary magazine edited in Connecticut by Marvin Malone, who became a great supporter of Bukowski. Another poem in the issue, ‘poetess’, which Bukowski dedicated to FrancEyE, showed a more affectionate side to their relationship. Bukowski describes how she looks after him when he has been drinking, and praises her own poetry by saying ‘she wrote like a man’. FrancEyE was not entirely comfortable with the idea that writing like a man should be a compliment, but she knew he meant well.

  Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb arrived in LA in August, 1964, to talk to Bukowski about a second book, because the first had been such a success. Bukowski met them at the Crown Hill Hotel, introducing FrancEyE, pompously, as ‘my woman’. Jon Webb told him that no man owned a woman, he just borrowed her. After a few drinks they went back to the bungalow on De Longpre where Gypsy Lou noticed the Outsider of the Year plaque they had sent from New Orleans was hanging prominently on the wall, next to a pyramid of empty beer cans. Bukowski sat staring at the plaque when he was drinking. ‘He would look at it and almost cry and say he didn’t understand how anybody could ever have done anything so beautiful for him,’ says FrancEyE. ‘He didn’t think he would live to have such a wonderful thing happen.’

  Jon Webb made Bukowski promise he would write new material for their next book, because they’d already used the best of his old stuff, and they spent four days working out the details. When Bukowski took the Webbs to Union Station to catch their train back to New Orleans, the bond of friendship had been forged strongly. From the Webbs’ point of view, Bukowski had shown himself to be worthy of their hard work, a man who ‘said it like it was’, also some one rather different from the image he presented in his writing. He was not tough at all, decided Gypsy Lou. ‘He was a gentle giant, really a sweetheart.’

  Bukowski had grown so fond of the couple he told Gypsy Lou they would name their baby after her, if it was a girl, and when they had gone he wrote them a letter saying they were the sort of people he always hoped to meet but rarely had and, if they could work the miracle of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands again, his life would be complete.

  As the expected date of the birth approached, Bukowski remembered Barbara’s miscarriage and became anxious that his years of drinking might cause the baby to be born damaged. He also worried the pregnancy might
be rough on FrancEyE, who was now forty-two, becoming quite angry that she had allowed herself to get into this condition, as if it were nothing to do with him. But on 7 September, 1964, she gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl. She chose Marina as the first name, after a courtesan she had been reading about, and Bukowski chose Louise as the middle name in honor of Gypsy Lou.

  Marina would be Bukowski’s only child and he was a devoted father from the beginning. ‘He would change her, take care of her. He loved to watch her when she was finding her toes and fingers,’ says FrancEyE. ‘I was so grateful for having her when I saw what a wonderful father he was.’

  He began to include news of the baby’s progress in letters to friends, praising her beauty, good nature and intelligence. In a letter to Corrington, he wrote: ‘The girl-child is Marina Louise Bukowski and I am a sucker for it. Very large mouth and eyes and when that mouth opens and spreads into the big grin laugh, all sunflowers and sun, and I break in half, she has me.’ Now, when the suicide complex came upon him, there was one good reason to resist.

  The arrival of the baby did not make his relationship with FrancEyE any happier, however. Bukowski’s night work made it almost impossible to organize a domestic routine that gave them all enough sleep. FrancEyE mostly stayed up until Bukowski came home from the post office, in the early hours, before going to bed. Then they were woken by Marina at dawn, and again at 8 a.m. by construction work on the vacant lot next door. Bukowski liked to sleep until noon, so FrancEyE tried to take Marina out in the mornings, but when she came back he wanted to write. He wouldn’t say she had to be quiet because he was working, but if something bothered him he would come and yell, so she crept around with Marina, frightened even to turn the radio on.

  Jon Webb was concerned Bukowski was not writing the poems they needed for the completion of the new book, the early pages of which he and Gypsy Lou were already in the process of printing, so in March, 1965, he invited Bukowski to New Orleans for a break.

  The Webbs were renting a bug-infested room on the ground floor of a building on Royal Street, in the French Quarter. It was more workshop than home with a printing press taking up most of the floor space, art materials on the shelves, and reams of paper everywhere, paper the manufacturers guaranteed would last eight hundred years. Webb had built the bed on stilts so they could store paper underneath, and Bukowski was amazed to see pages of his book stacked on wooden slats over the bath tub. ‘It was a terrible place,’ says Gypsy Lou, who was becoming increasingly irked with the conditions. ‘There wasn’t room for anything.’ Bukowski drew a cartoon in which she tosses the pages in the air, yelling: ‘Bukowski! Bukowski! I can’t stand it anymore!’

  The Webbs were utterly dedicated to the book and regularly worked twelve-hour days, leaving Bukowski to his own devices. He drank with the artist, Noel Rockmore, whose etchings would be used on the cover, and spent evenings flirting with Minnie Segate, a friend of the Webbs who was putting him up during his two-week stay. He was having such a high old time that Jon Webb told him sharply to stop larking about and get down to writing the poems they needed.

  ‘Got any poems, Bukowski?’ he would ask, when he saw the poet at his door. If he had none, Webb told him to go away and write.

  Bukowski feared working under pressure would turn his writing ‘into journalism’. He was also uneasy about the book’s proposed title, Crucifix in a Deathhand, which Webb chose from a line in one of the new poems, even though Bukowski thought there were many better titles. He had begun to outlive his welcome at Minnie’s, coming home drunk at all hours and generally making a fool of himself, and wrote to his friend, Al Purdy, that he felt he was just getting in the way.

  Towards the end of the vacation, John William Corrington drove over from Baton Rouge to meet Bukowski. Corrington was flushed with success having recently returned from England where he had taken a doctorate at the University of Sussex. He had also recently had his first novel published. Neither achievement impressed Bukowski who made his feelings clear in letters. When they began corresponding, in 1961, Bukowski addressed him with the utmost courtesy as ‘Mr Corrington’, impressed that an academic was interested in his work, but the relationship had degenerated to the extent that he had started a recent letter, ‘fucker’. Despite this, Corrington was excited about meeting Bukowski. ‘He believed they would immediately become fast friends,’ says the poet Miller Williams, who came along for the ride.

  Bukowski was sitting on the loft bed drinking beer when they came in the room. Also present were Jon Webb and two of his young friends, Ed Blair and Ben C. Toledano. There was an uneasy atmosphere from the start. According to Blair, Corrington was very gregarious, very confident in himself, and thought everybody loved him, ‘the kind of person Bukowski wasn’t going to go for’. Corrington and Williams talked about literature and university life, and Toledano chipped in about being a lawyer. Bukowski felt at a disadvantage in such company and said nothing.

  When Corrington started telling Bukowski what his English Dean had said on the subject of James Joyce, he couldn’t stand any more. ‘Fuck your Dean,’ he said.

  Corrington was deeply offended, but Bukowski was not about to apologize and began sneering at everything Corrington said, especially when he tried to talk about Republican politician Barry Goldwater, saying he was a good man. They were at loggerheads now, too stubborn to back off and decided to pout at each other throughout the rest of the evening. Miller Williams believes Bukowski was chiefly at fault. ‘It was the kind of self-destructive defensiveness that an early adolescent will engage in,’ he says. ‘Corrington was very hurt that he had been rejected by someone whose work was important to him and whose approval he very much wanted.’ It was the end of their friendship.

  With a relatively large print run and New York publisher, Lyle Stuart, handling distribution, Crucifix in a Deathhand was the biggest book of Bukowski’s career to date, and the Webbs did another beautiful design job. Printed in a large format, and illustrated with nightmarish etchings by Noel Rockmore, it looked like an album of Gothic fairy tales. But with the benefit of hindsight, Bukowski was correct to fear his poetry would be compromised by writing under pressure.

  In his more honest moments, he admitted he had slipped. He knew Webb wanted better, but he could not produce poems to match the standard of the first book. Jon Webb reported that Henry Miller was enthusiastic, but when Bukowski wrote to Miller, whom he admired and whose book Tropic of Cancer has much in common with his own later novels, suggesting they get together, Miller declined and scolded Bukowski for drinking too much. He said it was a sure way to kill inspiration.

  There were notable poems in the book, however, few better than ‘something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you …’. This was virtually a polemic against capitalism, although Bukowski maintained he was not a political writer. ‘I am not a man who looks for solutions in God or politics,’ he said. He did not align himself with the Left – although FrancEyE remembers him expressing admiration for Communist Dorothy Healey – any more than his college flirtation with Nazism had matured into a sympathy with the Right. At the same time some of the poems in Crucifix in a Deathhand, and later work like Factotum, show an interest in the problems of the urban under class. ‘What I’ve tried to do, if you’ll pardon me, is bring in the factory-workers aspect of life,’ he said. ‘The screaming wife when he comes home from work. The basic realities of the everyman existence … something seldom mentioned in the poetry of the centuries. Just put me down as saying that the poetry of the centuries is shit. It’s shameful.’ He achieved his goal in ‘something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you …’ without political posturing.

  … the days of

  the bosses, yellow men

  with bad breath and big feet, men

  who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk

  as if melody had never been invented, men

  who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and

  profit, me
n with expensive wives they possess

  like 60 acres of ground to be drilled

  or shown-off or to be walled away from

  the incompetent, men who’d kill you

  because they’re crazy and justify it because

  it’s the law, men who stand in front of

  windows 30 feet wide and see nothing,

  men with luxury yachts who can sail around

  the world and yet never get out of their vest

  pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men

  like slugs, and not as good …

  and nothing. getting your last paycheck

  at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an

  aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a

  barbershop, at a job you didn’t want

  anyway.

  income tax, sickness, servility, broken

  arms, broken heads – all the stuffing

  come out like an old pillow.

  By this stage in his career, his work was familiar to the readers of practically every small literary magazine in America, and a good many in Europe. Well-produced if obscure books like those made by the Webbs enhanced his reputation and many young poets began to look to him as a leader. One of these was Douglas Blazek, a Chicago poet and foundry worker who produced his own little magazine, Ole, on a $100 Sears & Roebuck mimeograph machine. This sort of primitive technology was responsible for the sloppy appearance of most little magazines, but in Blazek’s case it was in keeping with the gritty nature of the work.

  When Blazek discovered Bukowski had written short stories, back in the ’40s, he asked for some prose for Ole and Bukowski responded with a breakthrough piece, A Rambling Essay On Poetics And The Bleeding Life Written While Drinking A Six Pack (Tall). It was meant as an essay, more than a short story, a statement of his literary beliefs, but what came across most strongly was that he was writing about himself.