Bukowski's Crazy Life

Locked in the Arms of A Crazy Life

Howard Sounes

In the mid-60s, such was his status as a public figure, poet Robert Lowell's open letter to Lyndon Johnson bemoaning American involvement in Vietnam made the front page of the New York Times. It's hard to imagine that happening now – though a missive from Bono might make some room in the middle pages. Even occasional stately pronouncements from Nobel Laureates such as Heaney are met with a nudge and smirk – the poet as public figure is gone.

Some of this is no doubt down to the more prevalent stereotype of poet as drunkard, firebrand, maverick clown. The Lord Byron model, the Dylan Thomas model. Yet Byron and Thomas were surefire talents. In the 60s and 70s, revolution chic was the model and Lowell seemed something of an elitist old square, hanging out with the peaceniks. By the time of his letter, the stance was becoming as important as the stanzas, trips and crapulence lauded over craft. Ginsberg and the Beats, sparky and fresh at first, soon went down, repeating themselves, in a haze of rich kids' pot-smoke.

Buk, Chinaski, Hank. Charles Bukowski was putting out his early books at this time – small press things, cranked out by friends and fans. He was only three years younger than Lowell, but the years that Lowell ('looking like a matinee idol') had given to preppy colleges and high Catholicism, brilliant wives and the Library of Congress, the paunchy and pock-marked Bukowski had given to menial jobs, the races and cheap bars. Bukowski's poetry was penny plain, stripped of sonics, metre, allusion. Later in life, one of his lady friends (one of the few who wasn't drawn to the poet persona) would pastiche his style:

Cruel but fair? Maybe – it's true that Bukowski wrote around 500 poems a year - far too much was trash, and way too much was published. He typed his poems and barely redrafted. His subject matter was limited and repetitive. His worldview was blinkered and cynical. And yet he had something beyond the times on his side. When his work is condensed into more judicious selections such as Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame, a 'best of' his early work - and all you need unless you are a fan - you can see where the appeal lies.

I used to like Bukowski in my tyro days, and young men are certainly his staple constituency. My favourite poem was 'something for the nuns, the touts, the grocery clerks and you', a long piece written before notoriety rendered him lazy. Listening to an MP3 of it now (in Bukowski's oddly fey delivery), it's flabby but has a quiet power, with something of the cadenced verse of Whitman, something of a calmed down Howl. But poems like that came far and few between paltry anecdotes about horse tracks, zaftig molls and six-packs.

Howard Sounes' biography of Bukowski, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (now available in a new edition from Canongate), is a fine book, yet it lacks context. What made 100,000 Germans buy Bukowski's novels (much of his later wealth came from European royalties)? What made teenage girls travel thousands of miles to sleep with a famously ugly and degenerate old man? Why does the bibliography list three pages of books about this man whose critical acclaim is minimal?

I guess we all love a sleaze, and root for someone who puts the finger up to the status quo. Perhaps, for many, Hank was our inner lowlife? He was certainly applauded for his boozy high jinks. He was treated with respect by the policemen who arrested him after sprees, because they loved his sex-story columns. After drunkenly abusing a TV chat show host in Paris, he found people bowing to him for the rest of his trip. But Bukowski was a sleaze, and any grudging respect I had for him has disappeared after reading Sounes' book.

It's not as if Sounes is speculatively muckraking either. Much of the nasty stuff is from documentary film (Bukowski bullying and hitting his wife), interviews (telling Hustler a story about child rape drew on his own experience of masturbating while watching a little girl) or former friends (hitting on the grieving widows of old pals was a hobby). Was his persona real; did he really live it? There are plenty of charlatans in poetry, and Buk let loose a thousand and one imitators whose hard-boiled, skinny verse grew from soft-boiled, soft-seat lives, but yes, it seems Bukowski was the real deal, for what its worth.

Which brings us to the reason we should remember him – the novels. Not all of them. Hollywood is self-celebratory scuttlebutt, Ham on Rye a dreary childhood memoir. But the first two of his 'Henry Chinaski' trilogy of autobiographical novels, Post Office and Factotum hold up well: economical, pacey, very funny. The third, Women, was entertaining but shameful and its provenance takes up a large section in Sounes' book.

After a few dysfunctional relationships, aged around 50, Bukowski found himself a very unlikely sex symbol and played the field, with messy, farcical results. Most of the women he bedded in these years (and it was often more bed than sex, given the drink involved) found themselves coarsened and denigrated under pseudonyms in the novel. That they should have seen it coming, and that he doesn't spare himself, hardly saves him.

Sounes, a former journalist, gave up his career to write this book and he made a good job of it. He is thorough, largely impartial and, in not outstaying its welcome, the tale remains fascinating. A critical biography might have done more to contextualise Bukowski's times and texts. Most reading this dispiriting Hollywood life, which often feels more like true crime than lit biog, will peer through fingers at a downbeat life of low celebrity, but which produced little of lasting merit.

A vision of Hank in his 60s, after years of low work and scraping by, lying beneath the fruit trees in the San Pedro house he bought with his royalties, with a bottle of white wine (which had largely replaced his whiskey with beer chasers diet, on demand of his second wife) will bring a smile to even those who find him distasteful. It soon gives way to diminishing artistic returns, TB (caught from one of the many cats he adopted) and ultimately leukemia. Bukowski's image is that of a hard man, but he was mostly just difficult.