PROFILE - Charles Bukowski: Author of depression, depravity, downtrodden

By Merve Berker and Dilan Pamuk

ANKARA (AA) – One hundred and one years since the birth of 20th-century American author Charles Bukowski, he is still seen as a cult hero who used his literary skills to depict depression, the depravity of urban life, and the downtrodden in American society.

Born on Aug. 16, 1920 in Andernach, Germany, Heinrich Karl (Henry Charles) Bukowski was the son of a US soldier and a German woman.

He was brought to the US West Coast, the city Los Angeles, California when he was just 2.

As a young, shy, and socially withdrawn boy, Bukowski was bullied by other boys and often rejected by girls due to his skin (he was plagued by acne), German accent, and the clothes he wore.

His father, who lost his job during the Great Depression like millions of other Americans, was a man who believed in firm discipline, and frequently beat his son at the slightest pretext.

Bukowski detailed this abuse in his semi-autobiographical Ham on Rye (1982), one of a series of novels telling the life story of “Henry Chinaski,” Bukowski’s scarcely disguised alter ego.

In this work, he said his father regularly beat him with a razor strop until his teen years, adding that this made him understand what “undeserved pain” was and gave him the skills to write about it.

The novel also tells how Chinaski/Bukowski first encountered alcohol in his teen years – the start of a lifelong habit for the self-described “barfly.”

"This is going to help me for a very long time," he wrote, describing alcohol as “magic” and drinking as a method he could use to come to more amicable terms with his own life.

Feeling indifference and contempt to the expectations of both his father and society, he began to turn into a “listless underachiever” as a way of rising up against all the norms he had been forced to internalize.

- Alcohol, women, short stories, travel

During his school years, he read as much as he could, and wrote short stories, which drove his father crazy when he read some of them, and led him to destroy his son’s writings.

In the face of this, “Chinaski” left his home and college, and moved to New York City to become a writer.

He spent the following years writing, travelling, and collecting rejection slips from the magazines he submitted his stories to.

He then decided to travel as much as he could, and continued to do so until 1946.

(Bukowski dodged the wartime draft until 1944 until his arrest, when a psychological evaluation found him unfit for service.)

At age 24, his short piece Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip was published in Story magazine.

Two years later, another short story, 20 Tanks from Kasseldown, was published.

Disillusioned with scattershot literary career, Bukowski then stopped writing for almost 10 years.

He spent this part of his life touring the US, often working in various short-term jobs and staying in cheap hostels.

Bukowski also struggled with hunger and spent time with women at a more intense pace than in other parts of his life, and later described these years in his “Chinaski” book Factotum.

When he nearly died in an incident in Los Angeles in 1955, he returned to writing, although he also continued to drink heavily, becoming known to others as a hard-living poet.

- 1960s, writing

He started his career as a professional author at the age of 35, before which he mainly wrote for “underground” newspapers like Open City and the L.A. Free Press.

By 1960, Bukowski returned to the post office in Los Angeles and began working as a letter-filing clerk, a position he held for more than a decade.

In 1962, he was traumatized by the death of Jane Cooney Baker, his first serious romantic bond, considered the love of his life.

Bukowski turned his inner destruction into a series of poems and stories, expressing his pain and sorrow about Baker’s death.

In the coming years, he continued to send stories to the newspapers he wrote for such as the column Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

When he was 49, he got an offer from John Martin, the publisher of Black Sparrow Press, to quit his current job and to devote himself to writing.

"I have one of two choices – stay in the post office and go crazy ... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve," said Bukowski.

At the same time he continued to live as a heavy drinker carrying on with a series of one-night love stands, which gave him much material for his stories and poems.

- Personal life

Alongside his short-term trysts, Bukowski was also married twice.

He had a daughter, Marina Louise Bukowski, from Frances Smith, one of his live-in girlfriends.

He was a heavy drinker, a member of society who never cared for any norms, a man who never tried to fulfill others’ expectations of him, and a “cult hero” in the eyes of many.

He wrote many short stories, poems and books, mostly about depression, the depravity of urban life, and the downtrodden of American society.

Some of his best-known works were adapted to the silver screen.

Barfly was turned into a film in 1979, Tales of Ordinary Madness in 1981, both Hollywood and Crazy Love in 1987, and Factotum in 2005.

He died of leukemia on March 9, 1994 in San Pedro, California at age 73 shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

His gravestone reads “Don’t Try” as the motto of his whole life.

In a 1963 letter to John William Corrington, an American film and television writer, novelist, poet and lawyer, he explained the phrase like so: "Somebody at one of these places ... asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality.

“You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”