Sorting Out the Good and Bad of Bukowski

The man wrote more than 45 books. That’s the thing to remember about Charles Bukowski, and it isn’t always easy. He wrote six novels: “Post Office,” “Factotum,” “Women,” “Ham on Rye,” “Hollywood” and “Pulp”; dozens of short stories; a long-running column for the L.A. Free Press, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”; and reams of poetry, some of it good. But Bukowski is one of those writers people remember more for the legend than for the work.

Bum. Wino. Barroom brawler. Jailbird. Lecher. Radical nonparticipant in respectable society. Foul-mouthed bard of places Southern California sun never quite touched: seedy taverns, apartment courts, SRO hotels, breeding grounds for cockroaches literal and metaphorical. It was a legend that Bukowski, who died in 1994 in San Pedro at 73, didn’t mind hyping himself. But, as Howard Sounes shows in this exhaustively researched biography, it wasn’t the whole story.

The man wrote . . .

Disfigured by acne, “twisted” by his upbringing--this much of the legend seems to have been true: Bukowski’s sadistic father beat him with a razor strop for leaving a single blade of grass in the lawn unmown--he dropped out of school and wandered the country, drinking and doing odd jobs. He hit bottom in 1942, Sounes says, “in Atlanta . . . in a tar-paper shack lit by a single bulb. . . . He considered suicide by touching a live electric wire. Then he noticed the blank margins on his newspaper and began writing in them. . . . He said this was the moment that proved he was a writer. Although nobody would ever read what he had written, he felt compelled to scribble something.”

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Any piece of writing is a self-affirmation. Where did the impetus for Bukowski’s come from? Skid Row is full of men like him, but without that saving spark. Like most literary biographers, Sounes can only shrug when the question of creativity’s origins is raised. He does what he can, interviewing almost everyone who knew Bukowski and his family--his widow, ex-lovers, friends and enemies, celebrities such as Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn and Harry Dean Stanton--digging up unpublished photos and letters and poems, constructing a kind of counter-Bukowski within the frame of the “crazy life” the public knows about.

Unable to live for long with the mother of his only child, Bukowski was nonetheless close to his daughter, Marina. A compulsive racetrack gambler, he kept the stakes manageably small. Boorish and quarrelsome when drunk, he was polite and shy when sober. Poverty taught him to be careful with money. After leaving his job as an L.A. postal clerk at age 49--he didn’t quit, as legend has it, but was forced out because of his drinking, Sounes says--Bukowski received a stipend from his publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. The handshake deal lasted 23 years and benefited both. Thanks to sales in Europe, where Bukowski’s work was a bigger hit than in America, the former derelict came to own a mortgage-free home and drive a BMW.

“At one time or another,” Sounes observes, “Bukowski managed to upset almost everybody who was close to him.” He made friends and drove them away, bedded women and wrote about them dismissively. In 1974, William Wantling, a writer Bukowski had ridiculed in his newspaper column, committed suicide, and Bukowski tried to seduce Wantling’s widow, Ruth, an act she recalled years later as a “psychic rape.” Sounes spares us none of the nastiness. Yet the counter-Bukowski was capable of generosity. One of his literary models was Los Angeles’ own John Fante (“Ask the Dust”). Discovering in 1978 that Fante was blind and a double amputee, Bukowski was instrumental in getting the older writer back into print.

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Sounes tells his story in 240 pages, then devotes 80 to source notes, bibliography and index. It’s a nice way to organize a biography: We can take the documentation or leave it. None of it, though, addresses a second mystery: Why was Sounes, an Englishman born in 1965 who never met Bukowski, so drawn to him in the first place? No psychic link is apparent between Sounes’ rather awkward prose, littered with British idiom, and Bukowski’s stories and poetry, praised for their frank acceptance “that human lives are often wretched and that people are frequently cruel to one another, but that life can also be beautiful, sexy and funny.” Yet the writing--”simple . . . honest . . . alone in modern American literature”--seems to be what he cares about, once the legend-mending is done. Almost by default, Sounes’ work turns us back to Bukowski’s own.

. . . more than 45 books.