Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes Read Free Book Online Page B

submitted successfully to magazines.
    His most notable success came in the spring of 1946 when he received a letter from the socialite, and patron of the arts, Caresse Crosby, who together with her husband had founded the Black Sun Press, publishing many of the greatest names in modern literature including James Joyce and Henry Miller. Bukowski had submitted a short story, 20 Tanks from Kasseldown , to Crosby’s Portfolio magazine. It was about a man in prison awaiting execution and Crosby was sufficiently intrigued to write asking who Bukowski was. He claimed to have replied, enigmatically:
    Dear Mrs Crosby,
    I don’t know who I am.
    Yours sincerely, Charles Bukowski
    The story was accepted for publication in the third issue of Portfolio which appeared in the spring of 1946. The contributors, who included Jean Genet, Garcia Lorca, Henry Miller andJean-Paul Sartre, were given space for a biographical note and Bukowski emphasized his blue collar credentials by writing: ‘I am employed sandpapering, puttying and packing picture frames in a warehouse. This is not as bizarre as it sounds, but it almost is.’
    Influenced by reading the work of poets including Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, he decided that ‘poetry is the shortest, sweetest, bangingest way’ to express what he wanted to say. Two of his earliest efforts were accepted by Matrix , a Philadelphia mimeographed magazine, and published in the summer of 1946 along with a short story. The poems are interesting in that they deal with the subject matter which became his stock-in-trade: rooming house life, bar life and unfaithful women. They also have the distinction of being his first published poetry, appearing a full nine years before he generally said he started writing poems.
    Rex was a two-fisted man
    Who drank like a fish
    And looked like a purple gargoyle.
    He married three
    Before he found one.
    And they hollered over cheap gin,
    Were friendless
    And satisfied.
    and frightened the landlord.
    She hollered plenty
    And he would listen dully,
    Then leap up red with choice words.
    And then she began again.
    It was a good life.
    Soft and fat like summer roses.
       
    (‘Soft and Fat Like Summer Roses’)
    The short story, The Reason Behind Reason , features a principal character named Chelaski, similar to the name Henry Chinaski which Bukowski used for the hero of most of his later prose. Matrix readers were promised another ‘slightly wacky sketch by Charles Bukowski’ in the next issue and, sure enough, he appeared thatwinter with a short story and two more poems. The story dealt with a mean-spirited father who bills his son for living at home, charging him for laundry, room and board. It was told simply with short paragraphs, plenty of dialogue and what can be seen in retrospect as a classic Bukowski title, Love, Love, Love . Matrix readers were unimpressed, however, one writing in to complain about Bukowski’s ‘puzzling’ style.
    Returning to LA, Bukowski lodged with his parents and, for the best part of the next two years, he worked at the Merry Company, downtown. Apart from a brief return trip to Philadelphia, he stayed home all this time and seems to have been trying to get back to a conventional way of life. A remarkable set of photographs taken at Longwood Avenue in July, 1947, bear this out. Two years into his supposed ten-year drunk, Bukowski is seen smartly dressed in a suit and tie, with hair neatly cut, and shoes shined, posing happily with his parents in their back garden. He looks like he is going for a job interview.
    When Henry saw Portfolio III , with his son’s name alongside Sartre and Lorca, even he could not fail to be impressed. He took it into the LA County Museum, where he was working as a guard, to show his work mates. A father might be excused for boasting about the achievements of his son, but Henry Bukowski must have had a devious mind indeed because he pretended to be the author of the article (a simple deception as they had