Charles Bukowski (3 page)

B
ukowski claimed the majority of what he wrote was literally what had happened in his life. Essentially that is what his books are all about – an honest representation of himself and his experiences at the bottom of American society. He even went so far as to put a figure on it: ninety-three per cent of his work was autobiography, he said, and the remaining seven per cent was ‘improved upon’. Yet while he could be extraordinarily honest as a writer, a close examination of the facts of Bukowski’s life leads one to question whether, to make himself more picaresque for the reader, he didn’t ‘improve upon’ a great deal more of his life story than he said.

The blurring of fact and fiction starts with the circumstances of Bukowski’s birth.

‘I was born a bastard – that is, out of wedlock,’ he wrote in 1971, and he repeated this story many times both in interviews and in his writing.

His parents met in Andernach, Germany, after World War One. His father, Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski, was serving with the US army of occupation and Bukowski’s mother, Katharina Fett, was a local seamstress. She didn’t like Henry at first, ignoring him when he called to her in the street, but he ingratiated himself with her parents by bringing food to their apartment and by speaking with them in German. He explained that his parents had emigrated to America from Germany so, by ancestry, he was German too.
Henry and Katharina started dating and Henry soon made her pregnant.

There was a delay before they got married because Henry had to get demobbed from the army first. But Andernach city records show that they did marry, on 15 July, 1920, before their child was born.

They rented an apartment at the corner of Aktienstrasse, near the railway station, and it was here Katharina gave birth to a boy at 10 p.m. on 16 August. A few days later the child was baptized at the Roman Catholic cathedral, at a font decorated with a bird very much like a black sparrow. The priest named the child Heinrich Karl Bukowski, like his dad.

They stayed in Andernach for two years while Henry worked as a building contractor, and then moved to nearby Coblenz where they lodged for a while with a family named Gehrhardt on Sclostrasse. Gehrhardt family letters reveal that Katharina shocked them by telling sexy jokes, and that Henry kept postcards of nude girls hidden in the wash stand in his room.

Henry and his bride probably would have settled in the town if it hadn’t been for the collapse of the German economy in 1923. Everyday life became so difficult after the crash that Henry had little choice but to return to the United States, and so they set sail from Bremerhaven, on the SS
President Fillmore
, on 18 April, 1923.

When they arrived in Baltimore, Bukowski’s mother started calling herself Kate, so she sounded more American, and little Heinrich became little Henry. They also changed the pronunciation of their surname to
Buk-
cow-
ski
, as opposed to the harder European pronunciation which is
Buk-
ov
-
ski
. Henry worked hard and they soon saved enough to move out to California where he had been born and raised.

His father, Leonard, had done well in the construction boom but had turned to drink and was separated from Henry’s mother, Emilie, a strict Baptist. She lived alone in Pasadena, matriarch of a quarrelsome, bad-natured tribe described as ‘the battling Bukowskis’ by cousin Katherine Wood ‘because none of them got along’. The siblings, in particular, couldn’t stand each other. Henry had no time for his brother, John, who drank and was often
out of work. He also disliked his brother, Ben, who was confined to a sanatorium. Neither was he keen on his sister, Eleanor, being jealous of the little money she and her husband had saved. Emilie Bukowski made things more difficult by showing favoritism to Henry and his wife. ‘My grandmother thought Kate was really something,’ says Katherine Wood. ‘She thought she was kind of above us. It was a snob thing.’

They moved to nearby Los Angeles in 1924, first to a small house on Trinity Street, not far from downtown, and three years later to a two-bedroom bungalow on Virginia Road in the Jefferson Park area. Apart from his travels around America in the 1940s and early ’50s, Bukowski lived his whole life in and around LA and the city became an integral part of his writing. Indeed, few writers of literature have been so closely associated with, or so lovingly described the city, a place often dismissed as ugly, dangerous and culturally desolate.

LA was quite beautiful in 1924, almost a paradise; the sky was unclouded by smog, and there were still orange groves between the boulevards. The neighborhoods were safe enough for Angelenos to leave their doors unlocked, and for children to ride bicycles to the beach after school. It was a city of just over a million people, a fraction of what it became, and there was a heady boom town atmosphere, partly because of the film studios in Hollywood. Henry wanted his share of the good life. But the best job he could find was with the LA Creamery Company, delivering milk by horse and cart.

Henry and Kate dressed their son in velvet trousers and shirts with frilly collars, in the German style. ‘Isn’t he sweet?’ Kate wrote home on the back of a photograph. ‘When you ask him who he likes the best, he says, “I like mother as much as father and father as much as mother”.’

Kate called her husband ‘my biggest treasure’ in her letters, but dropped hints he was not an easy man to get on with. One set of photographs she sent home to Germany was from a day at Santa Monica beach. Kate wrote that Henry wanted her to send these pictures to
prove
they were having fun in America. Included was a snap of Bukowski, sitting on the sand with a Stars and Stripes flag. He looked thoroughly miserable.

In his autobiographical writing, in interviews and letters to friends, Bukowski made it plain that his childhood was joyless and frightening and, about this part of his life, at least, he seems to have told the unvarnished truth. ‘A twisted childhood has fucked me up,’ he wrote. ‘But that’s the way I am, so I’ll go with it.’ He said he was forbidden to mix with other children because, in their snobbery, his parents considered themselves better than the neighborhood where they lived. They didn’t even like him playing on his own in case he spoilt his clothes. Not surprisingly, the local children jeered at the prissy boy, calling him ‘Heinie’, and they sniggered at his mother’s ‘Kraut’ accent.

Bukowski was also set apart from other children by dyslexia. As he later described in his poem, ‘education’, his mother wept when she was summoned to school to be told about the problem, chiefly because she was scared of what his father would say.

It was while he was attending Virginia Road Elementary that his father beat him for the first time, because he had been sent home with a note for fighting. Many punishments followed. ‘My ass and the backs of my legs were a continual mass of welts and bruises,’ Bukowski wrote. ‘I had to sleep on my belly at night because of the pain.’ Henry also beat Kate. He had affairs and once abandoned the family, taking a room on West Adams Boulevard where he entertained his mistress.

Worse was to come when they moved to 2122 Longwood Avenue, what Bukowski later called, ‘the house of agony, the house where I was almost done in’. It was an unremarkable bungalow, one of thousands being thrown-up in the mid-city suburbs – built in the Spanish style, covered in stucco and painted white. There was a yard at the back, car porch at the side, and a small front lawn. The house was a step up for Kate and Henry, slightly bigger and nicer than their previous homes, and each weekend they cleaned it from top to bottom. Their son was excused chores at first and seized this rare opportunity to mix with other children, kicking a football about in the street. The boys awarded him a proper American nickname: Hank, the name his friends would use the rest of his life.

Then one Saturday his father called for him and Bukowski turned to see him standing in front of the house in that peculiar way of his, with one foot in front of the other. He seemed almost excited. He wanted Bukowski to cut the grass, which normally would have been the work of no more than an hour because the lawns were not large. But his father made a sadistic game of it. He wanted the lawns manicured, front and back, so he would not find ‘one hair’ sticking up.

Bukowski toiled all through the afternoon as his friends played football, knowing he would never get to the game. Finally his father came to check.

‘I found a hair!’ he shouted triumphantly.

The house smelt of polish and detergent. It was cool inside after
working in the garden. Into the bathroom, his father ordered. It was a small room with white tiles, like a torture chamber. He was told to take his pants and shorts down. He bent over next to the tub with his head under the window. His father took the leather strop, which hung beside the mirror, and belted him three times. Next Saturday he would do it right.

The weekend manicuring of the lawn, and the inevitable punishments that followed for his failure to do the job properly, and for many other reasons too, became part of the routine of childhood. It was one of the reasons Bukowski came to talk so slowly – he learned to think before speaking in case he upset his father. He claimed to have been punished almost daily, receiving up to fourteen lashes while his mother stood impassively in the doorway. Her failure to stop the beatings, or show compassion afterwards (she didn’t even hug him) made Bukowski lose all respect and affection for her. He did not trust or like her. His mother became nothing to him.

‘You can’t help screaming especially when you are six years old, seven years old,’ he said. But after a couple of years of this brutal treatment he decided not to give his father the satisfaction, and remained silent while he was being thrashed. ‘The last beating I got I didn’t scream at all. I didn’t make a sound and I guess that terrorized him because that was the last one.’

If the cruelty of his father was the primary influence on Bukowski’s character, the second was the disfiguring acne which erupted when he was thirteen. The acne was not simply spots, but a pestilence of boils ‘the size of apples’ he said. They erupted on every surface, and in every crevice, of his head and upper body: they were on his eyelids, on his nose, behind his ears and in the hair follicles on his head. They were even inside his mouth. ‘The poisoned life had finally exploded out of me. There they were – all the withheld screams – spouting out in another form.’

He was taken downtown to the gleaming new Los Angeles County Hospital where his condition was diagnosed as
acne
vulgaris
, the worst the doctors had seen. Almost a freak case. The boils were to be lanced with an electric needle and drained of pus and blood. Bukowski endured the treatment without complaint, although it was painful. A nurse squeezed the pustules dry
afterwards, and put him under an ultra-violet lamp before dressing the wounds. He developed a crush on the kindly girl who was so much more sympathetic than his parents. ‘They were ashamed of him. They were repulsed,’ says Katherine Wood. ‘It was a horrible thing they did to him, and that’s probably what shaped him into what he became.’

The only time he felt safe was when he was alone in his bedroom, lying on the counterpane, following the patterns of sunlight on the ceiling. Bukowski, who had already demonstrated a talent for creative writing at school where one of his essays had been read to the class, listened to airplanes droning overhead on their way to Los Angeles airport and was inspired to invent stories about fliers, writing them up in a yellow notebook for his own amusement. One of his first stories was about the daring adventures of a World War One German air ace.

In January, 1936, Bukowski graduated from Mount Vernon Junior High with a mention in the student magazine, the
Minute
Man
. In its look forward to what the alumni of ’36 would be doing in twenty years, the editors predicted he would be a doughnut baker ‘trying to make more profit by putting bigger holes in the doughnuts’. The flip humor was in keeping with the cheerful faces of the boys and girls who lined up for their graduation photograph. They radiated confidence. Bukowski, in contrast, squatted in front, unsmiling, his arms wrapped tightly about himself.

At first the Depression was something Henry and Kate saw at the movies on the news reel, before Henry’s favorite Wallace Beery pictures – footage of Okies and Arkies with their belongings heaped on the back of ancient Fords. Then people they knew started to lose their jobs. Henry’s elder brother, John, was out of work for many months, and, in January, 1936, Henry lost his job, too.