Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work.
The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column Notes of a Dirty Old Man in the LA underground newspaper Open City.
Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career, including his Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. His poems and stories were republished by John Martin's Black Sparrow Press as collected volumes of his work. As a reviewer noted, "Bukowski continued to be, thanks to his antics and deliberate clownish performances, the king of the underground... stressing his loyalty to those small press editors who had first championed his work."
Time called Bukowski a "laureate of American lowlife". Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, "the secret of Bukowski's appeal he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero."
During his lifetime, Bukowski received little attention from academic critics in the United States, but was better received in Western Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, and especially Germany, where he was born. Since his death in March 1994, Bukowski's life and writings have been the subject of a number of articles and books.
Life and career
Family and early years
Charles Bukowski was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Prussia, Weimar Germany. His father was Heinrich Bukowski, an American of German descent who had served in the U.S. army of occupation after World War I and had remained in Germany after his army service. His mother was Katharina. His paternal grandfather, Leonard Bukowski, had moved to the United States from Imperial Germany in the 1880s. In Cleveland, Ohio, Leonard met Emilie Krause, an ethnic German who had emigrated from Danzig. They married and settled in Pasadena, California, where Leonard worked as a successful carpenter. The couple had four children, including Heinrich, Charles Bukowski's father. His mother, Katharina Bukowski, was the daughter of Wilhelm Fett and Nannette Israel. The name Israel is widespread among Catholics in the Eifel region. Bukowski assumed his paternal ancestor had moved from Poland to Germany around 1780, as "Bukowski" is a Polish last name. As far back as Bukowski could trace, his whole family was German.Bukowski's parents met in Andernach following World War I. His father was German-American and a sergeant in the United States Army serving in Germany after the empire's defeat in 1918. He had an affair with Katharina, a German friend's sister, and she subsequently became pregnant. Bukowski repeatedly claimed to be born out of wedlock, but Andernach marital records indicate that his parents married one month before his birth.
Afterwards, Bukowski's father became a building contractor, set to make great financial gains in the aftermath of the war, and after two years moved the family to Pfaffendorf. However, given the crippling postwar reparations being required of Germany, which led to a stagnant economy and high levels of inflation, he was unable to make a living and decided to move the family to the U.S. On April 18, 1923, they sailed from Bremerhaven to Baltimore, Maryland, where they settled.
His family moved to Mid-City, Los Angeles, in 1930. Bukowski's father was often unemployed. In the autobiographical Ham on Rye, Bukowski says that, with his mother's acquiescence, his father was frequently abusive, both physically and mentally, beating his son for the smallest imagined offense. He later told an interviewer that his father beat him with a razor strop three times a week from the ages of six to 11 years. He says that it helped his writing, as he came to understand undeserved pain.
Young Bukowski spoke English with a strong German accent and was taunted by his childhood playmates with the epithet "Heini," German diminutive of Heinrich, in his early youth. He was shy and socially withdrawn, a condition exacerbated during his teen years by an extreme case of acne. Neighborhood children ridiculed his accent and the clothing his parents made him wear. The Great Depression bolstered his rage as he grew, and gave him much of his voice and material for his writings.
In his early teen years, Bukowski had an epiphany when he was introduced to alcohol by his friend William "Baldy" Mullinax, depicted as "Eli LaCrosse" in Ham on Rye, son of an alcoholic surgeon. "This is going to help me for a very long time," he later wrote, describing a method he could use to come to more amicable terms with his own life. Bukowski attended Susan Miller Dorsey High School for one year before transferring to Los Angeles High School. After graduating from high school in 1939, Bukowski attended Los Angeles City College for two years, taking courses in art, journalism, and literature, before quitting at the start of World War II. He then moved to New York City to begin a career as a financially pinched blue-collar worker with hopes of becoming a writer.
On July 22, 1944, with the war ongoing, Bukowski was arrested by FBI agents in Philadelphia, where he lived at the time, on suspicion of draft evasion. At a time when the U.S. was at war with Nazi Germany, and many Germans and German-Americans on the home front were suspected of disloyalty, Bukowski's German birth troubled the authorities. He was held for seventeen days in Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison. Sixteen days later, he failed a psychological examination that was part of his mandatory military entrance physical test and was given a Selective Service Classification of 4-F.
Early writing
When Bukowski was aged 23, his short story "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip" was published in Story magazine. Two years later, another short story, "20 Tanks from Kasseldown", was published by the Black Sun Press in Issue III of Portfolio: An Intercontinental Quarterly, a limited-run, loose-leaf broadside collection printed in 1946 and edited by Caresse Crosby. Failing to break into the literary world, Bukowski grew disillusioned with the publication process and quit writing for almost a decade, a time that he referred to as a "ten-year drunk". These "lost years" formed the basis for his later semiautobiographical chronicles, and there are fictionalized versions of Bukowski's life through his highly stylized alter-ego, Henry Chinaski.During part of this period he continued living in Los Angeles, working at a pickle factory for a short time but also spending some time roaming about the U.S., working sporadically and staying in cheap rooming houses. In the early 1950s, he took a job as a fill-in letter carrier with the United States Post Office Department in Los Angeles, but resigned just before he reached three years' service.
In the spring of 1954, Bukowski was treated for a near-fatal bleeding ulcer. After leaving the hospital he began to write poetry. The next year he agreed to marry small-town Texas poet Barbara Frye, but they divorced in 1958. Following his divorce, Bukowski resumed drinking and continued writing poetry.
Several of Bukowski's poems were published in the late 1950s in Gallows, a small poetry magazine published briefly by Jon Griffith. The small avant-garde literary magazine Nomad, published by Anthony Linick and Donald Factor, offered a home to Bukowski's early work. Nomads inaugural issue in 1959 featured two of his poems. A year later, Nomad published one of Bukowski's best-known essays, Manifesto: A Call for Our Own Critics.
1960s
By 1960, Bukowski had returned to the post office in Los Angeles and began work as a letter filing clerk, a position he held for more than a decade. In 1962, he was distraught over the death of Jane Cooney Baker, his first serious girlfriend. Bukowski turned his inner devastation into a series of poems and stories lamenting her death.E.V. Griffith, editor of Hearse Press, published Bukowski's first separately printed publication, a broadside titled "His Wife, the Painter," in June 1960. This event was followed by Hearse Press's publication of "Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail," Bukowski's first chapbook of poems, in October 1960. "His Wife, the Painter" and three other broadsides formed the centerpiece of Hearse Press's "Coffin 1", an innovative small-poetry publication consisting of a pocketed folder containing forty-two broadsides and lithographs which was published in 1964. Hearse Press continued to publish poems by Bukowski through the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.
Jon and Louise Webb, publishers of the literary magazine The Outsider, featured some of Bukowski's poetry in its pages. Under the Loujon Press imprint, the Webbs published Bukowski's It Catches My Heart in Its Hands in 1963 and Crucifix in a Deathhand in 1965.
In 1964 a daughter, Marina Louise Bukowski, was born to Bukowski and his live-in girlfriend Frances Smith. She would be his only child.
Bukowski was published by the independent British poetry magazine Iconolatre in 1966. The editor, artist John Wilson McCracken, sent a copy of the magazine to Carl Weissner who would later become Bukowski’s longtime West German translator.
Beginning in 1967, Bukowski wrote the column Notes of a Dirty Old Man for Los Angeles' Open City, an underground newspaper. When Open City was shut down in 1969, the column was picked up by the Los Angeles Free Press as well as the hippie underground paper NOLA Express in New Orleans. In 1969, Bukowski and Neeli Cherkovski launched their own short-lived mimeographed literary magazine, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns. They produced three issues over the next two years.