Tales of Ordinary Madness
This month, the papers of the late Charles Bukowski, L.A.’s most famous poet, go on view for the first time, at The Huntington Library.
By Kirk Silsbee 10/01/2010
In certain circles, 1970s Los Angeles was as famous for occasional poetry readings by an oily-haired codger with a scarred face as it was for Five Easy Pieces and other New Wave films coming out of Hollywood. In a Thorazine voice, Charles Bukowski would drink beer and recite hard-boiled poems of depravity and grace. With vituperative rejoinders, he gave his audiences what Pasadena-bred poet Michael C Ford calls “a dose of reality we can all live with.”
Bukowski chronicled life on the margins of society with pathos and humor, sparing no one, least of all himself. His alcohol-soaked poetry and prose depicted lives of despair, menial jobs, loose women, horse racing and what he called “tales of ordinary madness,” all viewed with a savage eye. Praised by both Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, Bukowski remains, for better or worse, Los Angeles’ most famous poet.
The first exhibition of his papers opens at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens on Oct. 9. Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge brings together hand-typed poems and short stories, publications that carried his work, the screenplay of his 1987 biopic, Barfly, drawings, photographs and memorabilia loaned by his widow, Linda Bukowski, who donated his archive to the Huntington in 2006.
By the time he died of leukemia at age 73 in 1994, he’d published six novels, hundreds of short stories and countless poems. Bukowski’s work –– and doubtless, his alcoholism –– was fueled by a horrific childhood of paternal abuse (his semi-autobiographical novel Ham on Rye describes a father using a power drill to lance a boil on his son’s face) and a misspent adulthood that included what he called a “10-year drunk” and a hospitalization for a bleeding ulcer. Although he submitted short stories to literary magazines to no avail in his 20s, it wasn’t until 1957, when Bukowski was in his late 30s, that he wrote his first poems.
The choice of the stately Huntington as a resting place for the work of the so-called Poet Laureate of Skid Row has more than a little irony attached to it. His relationship to Pasadena was bittersweet. His father, Heinrich, grew up there, and Santa Anita Park was a favorite destination for the adult Bukowski. He’d drop off his wife, Linda, at The Huntington before the races and join her for drinks in the botanical gardens afterward. (She appears as “Sara” in his novels Women and Hollywood.)
“People think of [The Huntington] as staid and proper, definitely not the place for a writer who used the ‘seven words’ [George Carlin’s list of dirty ‘words you can never say on television’] the way Bukowski did,” says Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts. “They should know that we have some manuscripts of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Walt Whitman that are pretty raw and earthy.”
Not surprisingly, the colorful Bukowski left behind a trail of stories among his fellow travelers and poets in Los Angeles. One of them is record producer Denny Bruce, who reissued his Poems and Insults album for Takoma and recorded a 1980 performance, released as Hostage by Rhino Records in 1985. Though Bukowski had been paid before the show, Bruce recalls, he appeared in the club’s office afterward, roaring drunk. “Buk pulled a knife out and screamed at the manager that he wanted his money,” Bruce says. “He drove the knife into the poor guy’s desk and broke the blade off. The next day, he asked, ‘How did the reading go last night? Was I paid?’”
While Bukowski may be L.A.’s best-known –– perhaps most notorious –– poet, his peers don’t necessarily consider him the most accomplished. Consider actor and poet Harry Northop, who lives with his wife, poet Holly Prado, near the East Hollywood apartment Bukowski lived in from 1963 to 1972. Was Bukowski the best of his kind? “No,” Northop says without rancor, “far from it. Thomas McGrath, Ann Stanford, Jack Hirschman, Leland Hickman and Holly are better poets. Bukowski had his head in the gutter with no ability to lift the form of poetry up, no sense of aesthetic form. But he was commercial — the one poet in L.A. who made a living off of his writing. He was and is the one poet people think of when they think of Los Angeles, because the ordinary guy could understand him. No one else exists.”
The dark side of Bukowski’s work is inextricable from his misogyny. As evidence, rocker Dave Alvin, a Bukowski aficionado since age 14, says, “I lived with a woman 20 years ago who demanded that I burn all of my Bukowski books. I didn’t do it, of course. He was a great writer, but I’m not going to vote for him for president.”
Yet there are plenty of tender moments in his work too. In his poem “Style,” Bukowski writes, addressing his lover: “Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done: six herons standing quietly in a pool. Or you walking naked out of the bathroom without seeing me.”
“A lot of people can’t get past the salacious things in his writing,” Hodson says. “But as a woman, I’m drawn to the sweeter things.”
By 1966, Bukowski was highly enough regarded that John Martin created Black Sparrow Press in Santa Rosa to publish his work. Martin provided Bukowski with a monthly stipend that enabled him to quit his day job working in the post office. He was 49 at the time. Holed up in his tiny apartment, Bukowski drank beer, listened to classical music on the radio and cranked out tales of the urban underbelly. His novel Post Office became an underground classic among civil servants and manual laborers for its sharp observations and portrait of desperation. “One of the fan letters he got that he was particularly proud of came from an Australian fan in prison,” Hodson says. “He said that Bukowski’s were the only books that were passed from cell to cell.”
Bukowski gained a measure of fame, success and even security in the 1970s. His German book sales alone paid for a tract house in San Pedro. Then as now, debate stirred about whether he could write authentically about life on Skid Row with two cars in the garage. “I think he worried he might lose his edge by moving to suburban San Pedro,” Hodson says.
But Michael C Ford, who published Bukowski’s work in the Sunset Palms Hotel literary journal in 1974, believes he was in no such danger. “I think the house in Pedro and the fame just gave him a comfort zone to crank out his work in,” he says. “I think his best work is Rooming House Madrigals, the poems he wrote for little magazines in the early ’60s. I love the fire and the brilliance of those early poems, even though his engine ran rough. As the years passed, he just fine-tuned that engine.”
Bukowski comically addressed the issue in his poem “The Secret of My Endurance.” After describing the relative opulence of his autumnal life, he “confessed” that he used “a young boy to write my stuff now. I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a typewriter, feed him whisky and raw whores, belt him pretty good three or four times a week. I’m 60 years old now and the critics say my stuff is getting better than ever.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that the life of L.A.’s most famous poet would end up on the big screen; in 1987, Mickey Rourke played the bohemian bard in the Barbet Shroeder biopic Barfly, and in 2004, he appeared posthumously as himself in the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, which also featured appearances by friends and fans Sean Penn and Bono. The next year, Matt Dillon played his drinking, gambling, womanizing alter ego, Hank Chinaski, in the film Factotum, based on his second novel.
But Bukowski wore his late-in-life fame uneasily. “When he became popular, he resented that people like Madonna, Sean Penn and Tom Waits wanted to hang with him,” Bruce says. “He said, ‘Fame came too late.’ Linda convinced him that it wouldn’t hurt him to let these people meet their idol. She said, ‘You’re from the pop world and you know they really love his work and want to meet him. I want him to have that.’”
Hodson contends that despite finding his comfort zone on society’s fringe, Bukowski’s work has universal appeal. “We all see what we want to see in him,” she says. “More people have come forward to tell me how he’s given them something they needed at a particularly low point in their lives. If you can see past those scars, he’s got something you might be able to use. As he wrote, ‘What matters most is how you walk through the fire.’”
Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge runs from Oct. 9 through Feb. 2 in the Huntington Library’s West Hall. The Huntington is open from noon to 4:30 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday; and from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. Saturday, Sunday and Monday holidays. It’s closed Tuesday. Admission costs $15 for adults on weekdays ($20 on weekends and Monday holidays); $12 for seniors ($15); and $10 for students and $6 for youth ages 6 to 11 every day. Members and children under 5 are admitted free. The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens is located at 1151 Oxford Rd., San Marino. Call (626) 405-2100 or visit Huntington.org.
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Dear Mr. Silsbee,
Loved your article on Buk. It was very balanced. You did an extensive listing of Bukowski in print, on audiorecording and on screen, but didn't mention the DVDs of his last two poetry readings, one of which, The Last Straw, is the video recording of the Redondo Beach reading that the vinyl/CD, Hostage, mentioned in your article, is taken from. It's also, incidentally, a video of Buk's last poetry reading.