Charles Bukowski

by Howard Sounes

  Reunited with his cousin Katherine Wood (left) and her sister Eleanor (right) at his San Pedro home in August, 1988, just as his health was beginning to fail. (courtesy of Katherine Wood).

  DEATH IS NOT THE END

  Bukowski’s grave at the Green Hills Memorial Park, south of Los Angeles. (taken by Howard Sounes)

  In July, 1997, three years after Bukowski’s death, Marina gave birth to her fi rst child, Bukowski’s grandson. He was named Nikhil Henry Bukowski Sahoo and is seen here with Marina at her home in Northern California. (courtesy of FrancEyE)

  He consulted some of the best doctors in Beverly Hills, telling them his symptoms: he had no appetite and had lost weight; he was dizzy; he could not sleep; he was anemic and had a hacking dry cough. He felt so weak in the mornings, he had trouble walking to the toilet. The doctors told him he had a low hemoglobin count and an iron deficiency, for which he could take pills, but they couldn’t say exactly what was wrong with him.

  The mystery was solved when Bukowski took one of his cats to the vet, and the vet suggested he get checked for TB. ‘He had gone to all these Beverly Hills doctors who were unable to diagnose what was wrong,’ says John Martin. ‘They said he was just run down, and they gave him pills and told him to take it easy, and not to drink. He had tuberculosis! But none of these highly paid practitioners had seen a case of tuberculosis in their lives because the rich don’t get tuberculosis very often.’ Bukowski probably contracted the disease as a child from Uncle John, who died of consumption in 1933. It had been dormant and surfaced because he was run-down. A six-month course of antibiotics was prescribed and a complete recovery expected.

  One thing the illness taught him, although the lesson came somewhat late in life, was that he could live perfectly well without alcohol. He had been sober on and off since the illness began and became practically teetotal by necessity during the course of antibiotics. ‘I didn’t even feel like lifting a bottle,’ he told a German interviewer who came to the house. ‘I had no feeling for drinking. It was no great sacrifice.’ Apart from the occasional lapse, his hard-drinking days were behind him.

  The illness left him looking very much older: he had lost a lot of weight, making his face gaunt; his nose seemed more prominent; there were unsightly growths around his eyes; his silver hair now receded right back to the crown of his head; and his beard grew white around a ruination of yellow teeth. He moved differently, too, walking cautiously as if scared of falling. As official confirmation that he had entered an irreversible state of decrepitude, the government informed him, in August, 1990, that he was now eligible for his old age pension.

  The reviews for Hollywood were good and John Martin was able to sell foreign rights around the world. Writing in the Toronto Star, Jim Christy described it as a great book about the making of a mediocre movie. The critic from the Los Angeles Times liked it, too. Even The Times in Britain, where Bukowski had never enjoyed the same success he had in continental Europe, gave grudging praise to his account of the vanities of movie stars, saying the prose displayed ‘a mean clarity of description’.

  His next book also enjoyed a warm reception. Septuagenarian Stew was published in 1990 to coincide with Bukowski’s seventieth birthday, a collection of poetry and prose which showed him still raging at the world. The short stories were the particular strength, and The Life of a Bum is one of his best ever, demonstrating a mastery over the form he had been practicing since adolescence. He drew from a lifetime of experience to create a vivid and sympathetic character in Harry, the bum who rejects the 8 to 5 routine, preferring to drink and sleep in the park.

  Bukowski’s critique of society had special resonance as America entered the recession of the early 1990s, with workers being laid off to face credit card debts and repayments on over-valued homes. He even anticipated the ‘slacker’ culture that emerged in college society as a reaction to the decade of greed, using the term in The Life of a Bum when a troop of soldiers yell at Harry:

  The convoy moved slowly. The soldiers saw Harry sitting on the park bench. Then it began. It was a mixture of hissing, booing and cursing. They were screaming at him.

  ‘HEY, YOU SON OF A BITCH!’

  ‘SLACKER!’

  As each truck of the convoy passed, the next truck picked it up:

  ‘GET YOUR ASS OFF THAT BENCH!’

  ‘COWARD!’

  ‘FUCKING FAGGOT!’

  ‘YELLOW BELLY!’

  It was a very long and a very slow convoy.

  ‘COME ON AND JOIN US!’

  ‘WE’LL TEACH YOU TO FIGHT, FREAK!’

  The faces were white and brown and black, flowers of hatred.

  In the story, Harry knows something the soldiers do not, or chooses to face a reality they would rather not think about: that they are marching towards death, and for no good reason, so they might as well get off the truck and join him on the bench. It is a philosophy of non-participation that runs through Bukowski’s work and is one of the reasons he appeals to the young and disaffected.

  Attendances were down at the race track and Bukowski noticed the punters did not spend money drinking like the old days, when everybody was out to have fun. The change in the times was brought home to Bukowski when Marina and her husband, Jeffrey Stone, whom she had married the previous fall, both of them college-educated, intelligent people working as engineers in the aerospace industry, lost their jobs on the same day. It seemed like the depression all over again with jobless men, ‘failures in a failing time’ and now jobless women, too.

  When Marina visited San Pedro for Christmas, Linda Lee told her she was thinking of giving Bukowski a computer. He had changed from a manual to an electric typewriter, finding it easier and quicker, and without telling him her plans she’d ascertained he would be willing to try a word processor. Marina knew something about the technology and convinced Linda Lee she should buy an Apple Macintosh, because it was designed for people who knew little or nothing about computers. ‘I had a feeling that, whatever it was, it had to be something he could mostly teach himself,’ says Marina. Linda Lee was disconcerted by how bulky the box, screen, keyboard and printer were after the simplicity of a typewriter, and the price was a not inconsiderable $5,000 for what they wanted, but they bought it.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Bukowski, when he opened his gift on Christmas Day. ‘I’m going to lose my soul.’

  They took the computer up to his room and Marina began explaining how it worked. ‘Just as I expected, he would listen to me, but it was really obvious he wanted to play with it and try it out and learn how things worked himself,’ she says. He experimented most of the day, reluctant to go downstairs to eat.

  ‘Oh this is a miracle!’ he said. ‘Look, it’s correcting my mistakes. I don’t know how to spell. I know what the words are, but I don’t know how to spell them, and look what it’s doing!’

  The Apple Mac reinvigorated Bukowski as a writer. He liked the way his words appeared on the screen – on a throne, as he put it – and enjoyed printing in different fonts and sizes of type. But the greatest benefit was that he could write more. His routine had been to type at night, when he was drinking and listening to the radio, and go back the following evening to correct by hand, discarding poems he didn’t like and laboriously re-typing those he did. Errors of spelling, syntax and fact still crept into the typescripts, mistakes which always embarrassed him. Now he could correct his work on screen and the poems slid from the printer exactly as he wanted.

  He had always been prolific, unusually so with more than forty books to his name, most published within the past twenty years, but after getting the computer he more than doubled his output, work he mailed to John Martin’s new office in Santa Rosa, Northern California.

  At Martin’s suggestion, Bukowski also began a journal on the Apple Mac, posthumously published, in 1997, with illustrations by R. Crumb, as The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship. In the entry of 22 November, 1991, Bukowski explains how the computer aided
his work:

  Well, my 71st year has been a hell of a productive year. I have probably written more words this year than any year of my life … This computer that I started using on Jan. 18 has had much to do with it. It’s simply easier to get the word down, it transfers more quickly from the brain (or wherever this comes from) to the fingers and from the fingers to the screen where it is immediately visible – crisp and clear. It’s not a matter of speed per se, it’s a matter of flow, a river of words and if the words are good then let them run with ease.

  There were problems, of course: nights when he had not correctly saved what he had written and lost everything, although he reflected this was a petty thing compared with knocking over a good bottle of wine; and one of the cats sprayed the disk drive, necessitating the return of the computer to the shop for repairs. In future he would put a beach towel over it when he went to bed. Despite these set-backs, the work piled up, masses of poems for John Martin to make into books.

  Approximately half the material Bukowski mailed to Santa Rosa was set to one side as unpublishable. John Martin describes the rejected work as not poems, but ‘just some words on a page’ and a good proportion of Bukowski’s unpublished poetry is bad. Sometimes it is gratuitously offensive, without the saving grace of being funny, like a poem he wrote stating that Greek people stink. Leafing through what soon amounted to a sizable stack of rejected poems, Martin was forced to conclude that many were simply gibberish. Bukowski realized this, too. In ‘as the poems go’ he observed that the best writers have said little and the worst far too much, but he knew he became blocked if he tried to be perfect so it was better for him to keep writing and leave the editing to others.

  Despite the uneven quality, much of this late outpouring of work was among the best poetry Bukowski ever wrote. And the first book he wrote using the Apple Mac, the 1992 anthology The Last Night of the Earth Poems, is one of his finest collections. Partly because he was turning out so much work, The Last Night of the Earth Poems is the longest Bukowski book published by Black Sparrow Press. He liked his poetry anthologies to be large and John Martin agreed, believing the poems worked better when they were gathered together in a substantial volume. War All the Time (1984) and You Get so Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense (1986) had both been long books. But The Last Night of the Earth Poems was over four hundred pages, 159 new poems, more than the collected works of some poets.

  The method of editing The Last Night of the Earth Poems was the same as with all the other Bukowski books published by Black Sparrow. He gave John Martin carte blanche to choose what he wanted to publish. ‘He didn’t even know what I was going to put in, and then he never went back to look at his early work so he didn’t know what I left out. He didn’t care,’ says John Martin, who usually arranged the poems in chronological order so the later anthologies start with poems about Bukowski’s childhood, a subject he never tired of writing about, and end with him contemplating death. The Last Night of the Earth Poems is divided into four roughly chronological sections, each introduced with a phrase taken from one of the poems or from a poem Martin rejected as substandard but which had one striking stanza.

  The book includes many wonderful poems, like ‘we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain’, a supremely effective recreation of childhood containing a wealth of striking images, like the passage describing the downpours Bukowski remembered from when he was young, and the sounds after the rain stopped:

  and then, at once, it would

  stop.

  and it always seemed to

  stop

  around 5 or 6 a.m.,

  peaceful then,

  but not an exact silence

  because things continued to

  drip

  drip

  drip

  and there was no smog then

  and by 8 a.m.

  there was a

  blazing yellow sunlight,

  Van Gogh yellow –

  crazy, blinding!

  and then

  the roof drains

  relieved of the rush of

  water

  began to expand in

  the warmth:

  PANG! PANG! PANG!

  The style he had been working at for years, writing one simple line after another with as little ornamentation as possible, was perfectly achieved.

  There were poems that consisted of words arranged one, two or three to a line, like a list, but Bukowski chose the line breaks carefully and managed to convey interesting images and ideas. They were often funny as well. In ‘pulled down shade’ for example, a woman reflects upon the failings of her partner:

  … I’ve

  known you for

  6 months

  but I have

  no idea

  who you are.

  you’re like

  some

  pulled down shade

  …

  a woman can

  drop

  out of your

  life and

  forget you

  real fast.

  a woman

  can’t go anywhere

  but UP

  after

  leaving you,

  honey.

  There is also an apocalyptic feeling pervading The Last Night of the Earth Poems. It is signalled by the title, which Bukowski feared might be mistaken for having a wholly ecological meaning, and is present in all the vignettes of Los Angeles life, whether writing about the Depression era with nightmare visions of his uncle ‘running down the street with a knife in his back’; about his father, saying for the first time that he must have been insane; or modern Los Angeles: crime-ridden, divided by racial conflict and economic inequality, choked with pollution, its citizens ‘slapped silly’ by heat waves, frustrated to the point of violence by traffic congestion, and all to pay taxes to a government drowning in debt. When Angelenos rioted that year following the acquittal of four white policemen for attacking a black man, Rodney King, Bukowski’s vision became terribly real. In ‘Dinosauria, we’, he wrote that, ‘there will be open and unpunished murder in the streets.’ In real life, fifty-eight people were killed, many beaten to death in broad daylight.

  In the poem, ‘transport’, he allowed himself a rare late use of (mixed) metaphor, reviewing his life in terms of successive modes of travel: the railway journeys of his youth, the junk-yard cars he drove when he lived at De Longpre Avenue, and the foreign automobiles of his later success, like the Acura he bought for cash after the BMW. The poem ends with a vision of the future when people will be able to fly like birds. Another poet, especially one of Bukowski’s mature years, might have used this image to sentimental effect, as an ascension to heaven perhaps, but Bukowski liked to subvert expectations:

  one night not so long

  ago

  I had a dream that I

  could fly.

  I mean, just by working

  my arms and my legs

  I could fly through the

  air

  and I did.

  there were all these people

  on the ground,

  they were reaching up their

  arms and trying to pull me

  down

  but

  they couldn’t do

  it.

  I felt like pissing on

  them.

  they were so

  jealous.

  all they had to do was

  to work their way

  slowly up to it

  as I had

  done.

  such people think

  success grows on

  trees.

  you and I,

  we know

  better.

  The San Pedro house had been further improved with expensive furniture, an elaborate security system in case they were burglarized, even a lap pool to go with the jacuzzi. Bukowski found a swim and a plunge in the tub was relaxing when he came home from the track, and he had no compunction about enjoying his wealt
h in this way. ‘I have nothing against money; give me all the money you want. I will not refuse it,’ he said. ‘Because I’ve been dead broke so many times, I’ve been so dead broke, starved so long, I realize the value of money. It’s tremendous. Money is magic. I’ll take all I can get. I hope I never miss a meal again.’

  He enjoyed picking up the check when he went out for dinner with friends, paying with one of his various gold cards, although he was disgruntled about paying for one particularly expensive evening with Sean Penn and Madonna considering they were a ‘couple of millionaires’.

  After the divorce of his celebrity friends, Bukowski’s sympathies remained with Sean Penn and he turned Madonna down when her agent asked if he would pose with the star for her book, Sex. He told friends she behaved like she’d discovered the subject.

  He refused other offers of work that would bring in big money, but which would inconvenience him in some way, including $25,000 to make a television programme with PBS and $10,000 to give two readings in Holland. He said he didn’t want to travel, and was now rich enough not to.

  A producer wrote to Bukowski, asking to talk to him about a television series. He attached two $100 bills to the first page of the letter and a third $100 bill to the second page, to hold his interest. Bukowski took the $300 to the track and, when he returned home, he called the producer’s number. The idea was to make a sit-com based on the life of a disreputable old writer, someone like Bukowski, with Harry Dean Stanton starring. Bukowski knew the actor, so he called and asked what he thought. Stanton said he didn’t know anything about the project, but would like to see Bukowski anyway so it was arranged that they would meet the producer for a drink at the house in San Pedro.