Bukowski Review Special: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life and The Pleasures of the Damned

Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
Author: Howard Sounes
Published by: Canongate/Text

The Pleasures of the Damned: Poems, 1951-1993
Author: Charles Bukowski, John Martin (ed.)
Published by: Canongate/Text

By the time I heard of Charles Bukowski, circa 1995, he was: a) dead; and b) gaining such counter-cultural cachet that Bono was pretending to enjoy his work and he was getting name-checked by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I remember watching Barfly, the Barbet Schroeder film Bukowski had written, starring Mickey Rourke as Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry Chinaski, and being gripped and disturbed by the film’s down-and-out milieu. Later somebody lent me a copy of Bukowski’s second novel, Factotum. I was hooked. Here was a man who had lived. Not only that, he also had the balls to write about his experiences sparely and honestly, in prose as unadorned as the hovels and motel rooms it was written in.

There’s an old saying to the effect that the golden age of science fiction is 12. In the same mildly condescending spirit I would like to suggest that the golden age of Bukowski is 17. At that age the notion of a rebel against society who is also a writer is almost irresistible, or at least it was to me. The arithmetic is simple: intelligence plus independence plus a fuck-the-world attitude equals heroism. Naturally, said writer’s rebellion reflects one’s own jejune ambitions: to live a life at odds with polite society, unfettered by middle-class morality or – a big part of the appeal – sobriety.

Now that I am older and (arguably) more sensible, I can see that Bukowski represents a 20th-century iteration of a longstanding Romantic trope. Bukowski had all the nonconformist and uncompromising attitude of a rock star, but unlike most rock stars he actually walked the walk. Rebellion was essential to his being: he was engaged in a protracted and personal war against society’s mores, with his art serving as propaganda. Think of him as a latter-day Byron, only poorer, uglier and with a preference for cheap red wine and beer over “hock and soda water”.

Bukowski’s appeal to the young and pimply derives also from his subject matter: himself. Bukowski habitually mined his experiences, and those of his friends and lovers, for stories and poems. He was, in other words, a self-indulgent narcissist, but unlike the average teenager he managed to transmute this trait into art. The creative writing maxim “write what you know” has never been more applicable: Bukowski wrote what he knew, and what he knew was poverty and booze and women.

Howard Sounes’s short, well-researched Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life gives as good an overview of the facts of Bukowski’s life as one could want. Whether anybody outside of Bukowski’s hardcore fan base will consider such a project worthwhile seems almost beside the point. Bukowski is a significant figure and so, inevitably, a biography must be attempted.

There is here great potential for redundancy. Sounes himself wonders if a biography is necessary “when Bukowski wrote his own biography in more than fifty books of poetry and prose”. Yet Bukowski wrote fiction, however thinly veiled, and was actively involved in perpetuating his own myth: his version of events is not to be trusted. Sounes’s mission is therefore to temporarily revoke Bukowski’s artistic licence and give us the story straight with the names left unchanged and all the warts on display. A worthy aim, perhaps, but one I found numbing as I paged through the resulting book.

Given the reams of prose and poetry it inspired, Bukowski’s real life makes for a remarkably tedious read. Halfway through Charles Bukowski I began to despair as Buk lurched from one alcohol-fuelled disgrace to another. Bukowski behaving badly ought to be dramatic gold, but Sounes is so bland and artless a writer that it all just feels like grist for the mill. The irony is that the more one is bored by Sounes, the more one is impressed by Bukowski, who took the same source material – admittedly experienced first-hand – and from it created literature that is sometimes brilliant, sometimes shockingly poor, but rarely dull.

As expected, Bukowski comes across as a total prick: arrogant, childish, vain and violent. Sounes makes a valiant attempt to redeem his subject, but it’s all a bit vague. Bukowski’s various lovers speak of his sensitivity and warmth, but there is precious little documentary evidence. When there is evidence of a positive side to Bukowski’s character it tends to be shadowed by counter-evidence of his innate seediness. For instance, Sounes suggests that Bukowski was a doting father, yet he also claims that the first word Bukowski’s daughter learned to read was “liquor”.

Sounes gives little sense of Bukowski’s artistic impetus, and offers almost no critical appraisal. I couldn’t help comparing Charles Bukowski to a recent biography of another literary outsider, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. That book too was stuffed with facts and quotations, but it also engaged its subject, his work and his legacy. Charles Bukowski lacks this depth: it is short and punchy, contains the appropriate facts and figures, but the insights it grasps at are journalistic and empty.

A better introduction to Bukowski is The Pleasures of the Damned, the latest in a long line of posthumous volumes of Buk’s poetry. Edited by John Martin, founder of Black Sparrow Books and the man essentially responsible for Bukowski’s status as a major figure, the book collects both published and unpublished material, presumably with a view to attracting seasoned Buk collectors as well as curious newbies.

Sounes quotes Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the origins of Bukowski’s minimalist style: “Bukowski’s poetry was essentially stories, just like his prose… 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.” Sounes counters that the style probably had more to do with the influence of Hemingway and John Fante.

Whatever the case, Bukowski’s poetry is certainly easy to read. Five hundred pages of just about anybody else’s poetry would be a tough slog; Bukowski’s is as smooth and approachable as his cleanest prose. The subject matter is typically unrefined – alcoholism, sex, alienation, work – but even in the minor pieces one can glimpse facets of Bukowski’s character that Sounes fails to adequately depict. Bukowski can be warm, sensitive, funny; he can also be crude, misogynist, small-minded.

Pleasures of the Damned is diminished by some strange editorial decisions. The poems are sequenced in non-chronological order, depriving the reader of the opportunity to observe Bukowski’s development. There is no editor’s introduction and Martin’s notes are minimal, so the selection process remains a mystery. Nevertheless, Pleasures of the Damned is a worthwhile addition to the Bukowski corpus and is highly recommended to pimply narcissists everywhere.

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