![]() ![]() This was how I first came to read him, when a fellow student at the University of Oregon told me about his newspaper column, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, in an L.A. His verse began to find a home in the little magazines that proliferated around the county during the ’50s many were simple mimeographed & stapled affairs, often sloppily edited.īy the late ’60s Bukowski had garnered a growing renown in underground circles. His poems had a direct, street quality, hyperbolic narratives of drunkenness and harlotry told in a language that often transcended its subject. Failure continued but, believing in himself, so did he.īecause they came more easily, he turned from stories to poetry. ![]() He and his characters inhabit the dilapidated, seedy districts that Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe knew: old stucco rooming houses, dive bars, and the broken-down denizens they attract. Ultimately, he returned to Los Angeles, and it was there that he staked the literary turf that would be his for the next forty-plus years.īukowski’s L.A. Louis, and Philadelphia, working at odd jobs to pay rent, and all the while writing, collecting piles of rejection slips. He left his unhappy homelife, traveling around the U.S., living on the cheap in New Orleans, St. It was a long quest, full of deprivation but once embarked upon, although he often feared Skid Row would his final destination, he went at it with determination. It roared and leaped.” There he discovered writers like John Fante, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway, who showed how one could use words to make order of life’s pain, prompting him to undertake his own nascent efforts at writing. “The library was another world,” Bukowski said, “another people. His discovery of the local library is probably what saved him. Decades later he chronicled these pained, cruel years in his novel Ham on Rye. He became defiant, a scrapper, very much the rebel. He had few friends and, as with many a sensitive kid, rebellion ensued. As an adolescent he was afflicted with severe acne, which ravaged his face and upper torso with boils these scars, both inner and outer, never left him. His father, a strict perfectionist, beat him for minor childhood failings. A sullen and lonely child, Bukowski was teased in grammar school for the slight German accent he hadn’t lost yet. When he was three, the family returned to live in Los Angeles. Henry Charles Bukowski was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany to a German mother and American G.I. “Fear made me a writer,” he said, “fear and a lack of confidence.” This year marks the centennial of Bukowski’s birth and, along with a new documentary film ( Arts Fuse review) and reissues of some of his numerous books, comes this illuminating biography. When Ernest Hemingway was once asked to describe the best preparation for being a writer, he cracked, “an unhappy childhood.” Charles Bukowski stands as a testament to that truism. Black Sparrow Press, 376 pages, $18.95 (softcover). Some of the most insightful and moving parts of the biography are Neeli Cherkovski’s personal recounting of his on-again off again relationship with Charles Bukowski.īukowski, A Life: The Centennial Edition by Neeli Cherkovski. ![]()
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