Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  ‘Oh yeah?’ drawled Bukowski.

  After what seemed a long time, Martin stopped reading and said he was thinking of starting a small press. He would like to take three or four of the poems with him, look them over at home, and maybe print them up as broadsides. ‘There’ll probably be some money in it for you. I don’t know how much. We’ll have to see,’ he said. Bukowski shrugged and said he could go ahead. Hell, he’d put his hand in his own pocket to help editors publish his work. The Webbs had paid him in kind with copies of the books. To get paid money would be something new.

  Apart from being a successful businessman, John Martin was a serious book collector who had an impressive library of first editions. It was his interest in D.H.Lawrence that led him to read about the career of B.W.Huebsch, founder of Viking and Lawrence’s American publisher. He discovered Huebsch had started out by publishing writers who were not yet established, and Viking grew as they became more successful. It dawned on Martin that many of his favorite writers, including Bukowski, had been ignored by the New York publishers. He also wanted to work with his wife, Barbara, in the way Harry and Caresse Crosby had worked together on the Black Sun Press. Inspired by the example of Huebsch, the Crosbys, and by a William Carlos Williams poem about a sparrow, he decided to launch Black Sparrow Press. ‘I liked the combination of the e´lite black and very common sparrow,’ he says, explaining the name.

  He selected five of the poems from the bundle he had taken from Bukowski’s closet and decided to print thirty copies of each, twenty-seven numbered and three lettered: A, B, and C, for author, publisher and the press operator at work who had agreed to print them up.

  The first poem was ‘True Story’, which concerns a man who has castrated himself. Martin says he chose it because ‘it’s a pretty grim poem and it just struck me as being very existential.’

  they found him walking along the freeway

  all red in

  front

  he had taken a rusty tin can

  and cut off his sexual

  machinery

  as if to say–

  see what you’ve done to

  me? you might as well have the

  rest.

  In March, 1966, Bukowski went into hospital to have his haemorrhoids removed. He took time off work afterwards and wrote a hilarious account of the operation, All the Assholes in the World and Mine, which was published by Douglas Blazek. He was still off work in April when John Martin brought the first Black Sparrow broadsides over to be signed. He also gave Bukowski a check for $25. It was money he badly needed because his post office sick pay had run out, his medical insurance didn’t cover the hospital bills, and the child support was due.

  Bukowski and Martin were very different personalities, but their differences worked to their advantage, forming the basis of a long and happy association. Once Bukowski came to terms with dealing with a teetotaller, although he never wholly understood it (what did Martin do if he didn’t drink?) he trusted him more than a fellow drinker. ‘He knew I’d never make a drunken stupid move, make a deal I shouldn’t make,’ says Martin. And although Martin is an astute businessman, Bukowski realized he was far from being conventional, and that he really did appreciate the work. Mutual friend and poet, Gerard Malanga, describes Martin as a paradox: ‘He is kind of a straight guy in a funny way, but he is very hip. You can be straight and hip.’

  Both men were pleased with the way the broadsides turned out and almost right away Martin decided to try and publish books. He sold his collection of first editions to the University of California at Santa Barbara and used the $50,000 he raised to build Black Sparrow into a company that could publish Bukowski and other new or neglected writers. He was soon bringing out broadsides and chapbooks as striking in the simplicity of their design as the Loujon books were ornate.

  Barbara Martin was responsible for the distinctive Black Sparrow artwork. Her use of classic typography, with plain rules, turned out to be the perfect complement to Bukowski’s pared-down poems, work like ‘a little atomic bomb’ which they published in a chapbook called, simply, 2 Poems:

  o, just give me a little atomic bomb

  not too much

  just a little

  enough to kill a horse in the street

  but there aren’t any horses in the street

  well, enough to knock the flowers from a bowl

  but I don’t see any

  flowers in a

  bowl

  enough then

  to frighten my love

  but I don’t have any

  love

  well

  give me an atomic bomb then

  to scrub in my bathtub

  like a dirty and lovable child

  (I’ve got a bathtub)

  just a little bomb, general,

  with pugnose

  pink ears

  smelling like underclothes in

  July

  The best of Bukowski’s mature poetry was written in this minimalist style, although it is not to everyone’s taste. ‘Bukowski’s poetry was essentially stories, just like his prose,’ says Lawrence Ferlinghetti. ‘It just happened some days that he didn’t get the carriage of the typewriter to the end of the line. Depends how badly hungover he was when he started to type.’ But Bukowski was achieving the trick he’d been trying to pull off since his twenties. Inspired by the direct prose style of John Fante and Ernest Hemingway, and more recently by the poetry of Pablo Neruda, Robinson Jeffers and others, he was ‘writing down one simple line after another’ and bringing humor in as well, because he believed ‘creation cannot be all that serious, or you fall asleep.’ John Martin loved the work and saw Bukowski as a totally original voice.

  ‘When I started Black Sparrow, I was publishing guys who thought they were French symbolists. I was publishing guys who thought they were surrealists, and you had to sit and work with the poems to get the meaning,’ he says. ‘Then here comes this voice out of nowhere and you have no doubt what he means, and what he is trying to say.’

  Bukowski liked to mock the counter-culture, having little time for drugs, pop, music or radical politics. But many of the young writers and publishers who liked his work were deeply involved in these things and Bukowski was inevitably drawn into what was happening in the late 1960s.

  Another of his new admirers was a student called Steve Richmond whose wealthy family had set him up in a cottage by the ocean at Santa Monica. He studied law at the University of California, but spent most of his time getting laid, dropping LSD with his buddy Jim Morrison, and writing poetry about the amazing things going on in his head. What really freaked Richmond out was reading Bukowski’s poems in Ole magazine. Like John Martin, but in a spacier way, he decided Bukowski was ‘a genius of the world’ and made a pilgrimage to De Longpre Avenue to meet his hero. Bukowski made such an impression on him that he abandoned his plans to become a lawyer and opened a poetry book shop where he sold Bukowski chapbooks.

  Flattered by the attention, Bukowski began hanging out at Earth Books, where he cut a very different figure from Richmond and his hippy friends. Bukowski’s hair was very short and slicked back. His nose was red with broken veins. He wore short-sleeve button-down shirts, the neck open to reveal a triangle of white T-shirt. On his feet were brown or black lace-up shoes, ‘post office shoes’ as Richmond called them, and he wore a shapeless sports jacket if it were cold.

  He was usually toting a brown paper bag containing two six-packs of beer. Everybody else was smoking dope and dropping acid, which didn’t impress Bukowski at all. ‘Bukowski thought it was so phony,’ says Richmond. ‘Timothy Leary and the hippies. He was right in a way.’

  In a letter to Richmond, Bukowski wrote: ‘LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody’s doin’ it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me.’

  The hippies who drifted into the store, off Ocean Park
Boulevard, generally liked Bukowski’s work. But if they had read his latest chapbook, The Genius of The Crowd, they would have seen that, although he was against many of the conventions of society, he was not for the counter-culture either:

  … The Best At Murder Are Those

  Who Preach Against It

  AND The Best At Hate Are Those

  Who Preach LOVE

  AND THE BEST AT WAR

  FINALLY ARE THOSE WHO PREACH

  PEACE

  Richmond was inspired to publish a selection of poems by Bukowski, and himself, in a radical new magazine which he called The Earth Rose. The page one headline read:

  FUCK

  HATE

  This was followed by a sub-heading:

  Whereby, on this day we able minded creators do hereby tell you, the Establishment: FUCK YOU IN THE MOUTH. WE’VE HEARD ENOUGH OF YOUR BULLSHIT.

  The cops arrested Richmond for obscenity, and seized his stock, including many of Bukowski’s books.

  After taking his first acid trip in 1962, John Bryan quit his job with the Hearst Corporation in San Francisco and moved to LA to spread the good news about LSD. ‘We were into acid evangelism. We thought we could save the world by getting everybody high on psychedelics,’ he says. ‘For a while we almost did it.’ He rented a house in Hollywood and started printing a magazine called Notes from Underground which provided formulas for making LSD.

  Bukowski contributed poems to Bryan’s magazine and, through this association, met other poets and publishers who were deeply into drugs, like the writer John Thomas.* Bukowski got into the habit of dropping by Thomas’ house after finishing his graveyard shift and would sit up half the night talking about his problems at the post office, and his hassles with FrancEyE, while Thomas guzzled amphetamines which he was addicted to.

  Bukowski said FrancEyE had become swept up in the idealism of the hippies and was dragging Marina along to peace marches and other protest events which he believed she was far too young for. He worried Marina might get hurt. He was also exasperated by FrancEyE’s inability to manage her money, finding her so irritating he could no longer bring himself to use her name, referring to her laconically as ‘the mother of my child’. He also complained at length about not getting laid.

  In interviews he gave later in life, Bukowski denounced drugs in general, and marijuana in particular, but John Thomas and Steve Richmond remember Bukowski taking a variety of drugs in the late 1960s, including a lot of marijuana. John Thomas gave Bukowski handfuls of uppers and downers from the bowl of pills he kept on his coffee table, when Bukowski came over after work. He also gave Bukowski yage and his only LSD trip.

  ‘What is this stuff?’ asked Bukowski after taking the acid.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Thomas.

  ‘I’ve got a lump of ice in my stomach the size of a bowling ball, and it’s sort of jiggling around down there,’ Bukowski replied. ‘But the man who can rule his stomach can rule the world!’

  John Bryan’s magazine, Notes from Underground, was short-lived and, after working for a while as managing editor of the LA Free Press, he decided to launch a newspaper. Open City would feature radical writing and politics in the tradition of the little magazines, but by selling through vending machines and news stands he hoped to reach many more readers. He asked Bukowski to write a weekly column.

  ‘Let’s call it “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”,’ he said. ‘You are a dirty old man, aren’t you?’

  Bukowski liked to ridicule Bryan and the other journalists who worked on the paper as a bunch of ‘scummy Commie hippy shits’, but the column ran for almost two years and made him more famous than anything he had done so far, even if many of his friends felt the moniker ‘dirty old man’ did him an injustice. Open City contributor Jack Micheline wrote in his prose poem, ‘Long After Midnight’: ‘He is not a DIRTY OLD MAN; he has never been a DIRTY OLD MAN. He is an American postage stamp.’

  The newspaper was a quintessential hippy production, actually sold by hippies on Sunset Strip, and featured articles about new music and psychedelic drugs. Bukowski attended staff meetings where the editorial content and agitprop were earnestly discussed, but he was unimpressed by what he heard. ‘The crew did not seem very fiery. Strangely calm and dead and well-fed for their ages. Sitting around making little flip anti-war jokes, or jokes about pot. Everybody understood the jokes but me. Run a pig for president. What the fuck was that? It excited them. It bored me.’ His world view was shaped by the problems of everyday life, as a postal clerk trying to make the rent; he was not at all interested in Vietnam, or pop music, or tie-dyed T-shirts, or the Civil Rights movement. If he said anything about politics, likely as not it was a provocative remark about what a fine fellow Adolf Hitler had been. ‘If he had any politics, he was a fucking fascist,’ says Bryan, who took the bait.

  Bukowski wrote his column using slap-dash syntax and irregular spelling. He rarely bothered to capitalize letters or use conventional punctuation. But the apparent sloppiness was a stylistic experiment and, despite appearances, he was fairly serious about what he was doing. He wrote in the first person using his real name and, initially, he used his past life as subject matter: the death and funeral of his father, the Philadelphia barfly years, starving for his art in the shack in Atlanta, and marriage to ‘the Texan heiress’. By the summer of 1967, he’d exhausted his stock of anecdotes and began inventing sex stories, which he delighted in reading to an elderly woman who lived next door before handing in his copy.

  It was exciting seeing his stuff in print every week. ‘Think of it yourself: absolute freedom to write anything you please,’ he wrote of the experience, ‘sit down with a beer and hit the typer on a Friday or a Saturday or a Sunday and by Wednesday the thing is all over the city.’

  There was a constant need for new story ideas, and Bukowski wasn’t choosy about where he got his material from, even when it meant upsetting friends. That summer he went to visit Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb at their new home in Tucson, Arizona, with a vague idea they would record some of his poems. The Webbs had arranged for Bukowski to stay rent-free in a cottage on the nearby university campus, but he was in a cantankerous mood and bitched about the searing desert heat, reluctant to leave the cottage at all during the day. The real reason for his bad humor was probably jealousy. The Webbs were engrossed in printing a Henry Miller book, Order and Chaos Chez Hans Reichel, rather than another Bukowski project. When Jon Webb suggested Bukowski write a piece for the next issue of The Outsider, attacking the drug culture, he whimsically decided to defend the hippies and refused. The recording project came to nothing and, when he got back to LA, Bukowski wrote a spiteful column about his friends, referring to Jon Webb sarcastically as ‘the great editor’. Mischievously, he mailed a copy to a reporter at the Tucson Daily Citizen.

  At one time or another, Bukowski managed to upset almost everybody who was close to him. Another victim was Douglas Blazek, whom he had been corresponding with since 1964. Blazek worshipped Bukowski and was not shy of expressing his devotion. ‘I looked up to Bukowski as something of a god,’ he says. Passing through LA in the fall of 1967, he telephoned asking if it would be convenient to visit, and Bukowski called in sick to the post office so they would have plenty of time together.

  But when they met, it seemed to Blazek that the friendship built up over the years was being sloughed off by Bukowski. ‘He saw me as, I would think, an ordinary person, nothing special, nothing distinguished,’ says Blazek, ‘nobody who was going to do anything great in this world, or help make him great.’

  Blazek formulated a theory about why Bukowski the correspondent was so different from Bukowski in the flesh. When he wrote his wonderful letters with the jokes, poems and funny drawings he often included, so intimate and revealing, he could allow himself to be vulnerable because he was at a safe distance. His antagonism and aggression came to the fore when he met people face to face. ‘As much as he wanted a camaraderie, he wanted to be friends, he wanted to be
open, he wanted to share love, he couldn’t allow himself that luxury having been hurt so much in the past,’ says Blazek. ‘This made him rather mean-spirited as an individual.’

  John Martin managed to stay friends with Bukowski, when so many failed, partly because he didn’t drink with him and therefore wasn’t around when Bukowski became boorish, but mostly because he was constantly thinking of new ways to earn money for Bukowski on what were essentially marginal publications.

  He knew Bukowski liked to draw and was shrewd enough to realize original artwork could make their little books more valuable so he bought Bukowski art materials and got him to make simple abstract illustrations – he could do one every ten minutes – which were pasted into limited editions of the chapbooks, or sold separately. They proved popular with collectors and Martin kept Bukowski happy by paying a ten per cent royalty in advance for everything they did. Bukowski had nothing but praise for his new publisher. He even bragged that Martin let him pinch his beautiful wife, Barbara.

  In fact, Barbara Martin remembers how reticent the dirty old man was when she met him. ‘When we would talk on the phone he would be flirtatious, in a very nice way, but when we first met he didn’t really talk to me much.’

  The first Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press was At Terror Street and Agony Way. Although little more than a glorified chapbook, it included good new work like ‘traffic ticket’ which describes Bukowski’s hatred of his job. In this, and other work, he subverts the popular perception of Los Angeles as a place of endless sunshine, just as he subverted the image of Hollywood as being glamorous, choosing to describe wintry days when LA is dull and cold:

  I walked off the job again

  and the police stopped me

  for running a red light at Serrano Ave.