Charles Bukowski, the laureate of LA low-life, would have enjoyed lockdown

Charles Bukowski would’ve loved the lockdown. He was incredibly anti-social. The man was also an atheist – but he didn’t think much of humanity either. He was contemptuous of the majority of the human race: “I dislike real people…I hate them,” he writes in Factotum. The type of people that interested Bukowski were the downtrodden and the poor, or in his words “…the desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways…They are full of surprises and explosions.”

In his first published novel Post Office, he adopts this misanthropic world view through a first person narrative via the books chief protagonist, Henry Chinaski – Bukowski’s alter-ego. Chinaski leads a meaningless hand-to-mouth existence as a mail man. The book documents the repetition of the daily grind in a world where all humanity appears lost. In Ham on Rye, we get to see the world through Chinaski’s eyes once again. The semi-autobiographical novel details his often harrowing and violent relationship with his father as he slowly finds solace in alcohol, masturbation and girls. These are recurring themes that would ultimately come to dominate the rest of his work.

The adoration heaped upon our health staff would’ve deeply troubled the man. He wouldn’t have been seen on the doorstep praising the NHS. He would’ve been more likely to have thrown an empty wine bottle off his balcony, muttering scornful remarks to himself, than bang saucepans and cheer in adulation. Bukowski was not interested in writing about heroes, stating defiantly: “Most of our heroes have been wrong.”

He wrote about the low-life, the junkies, the prostitutes and the dazzling array of colourful crazy characters that frequented the early hours of downtown Los Angeles. In today’s world he would be the miserable cantankerous old man on the park bench worrying passers-by, who would no doubt circumvent with alacrity.

For him, writing came easy. “The wine does most of my writing,” he once remarked. “I just open a bottle and turn on the radio, and it just comes pouring out.” Shut away in his cheap run-down apartment he would type incessantly into the early hours – cigarette ash constantly falling onto the keys of his old Underwood typewriter. He would only pause long enough to take a swig of Boilermaker, his favourite drink, which consisted of a tall glass of beer with a shot of bourbon dropped in. Hangovers rarely bothered him. Yet, in spite of the heavy drinking, Bukowski was a prolific writer of poetry – some 35 books have since been published, and there are a dozen books of collected short stories and a half dozen novels.

Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920, to Katharina and Heinrich. Due to rampant inflation caused by post-war reparations, the family left for the US in 1923 and settled in Los Angeles. As a child he was socially withdrawn and shy, due to acne. Later in life the writer Paul Ciotti described him as having a “sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks as if it was assembled in a junkyard.”

In today’s world of enforced social distancing measures, staying away from people has suddenly become de rigueur. This is something Bukowski would revel in. Most of his time was spent indoors and alone. When he did venture outside if it wasn’t to a bar, it was to Hollywood Park – the racetrack in his adopted Los Angeles. Besides his indefatigable dedication to wine and women, his other love was gambling. “I have wasted a lifetime at the racetrack…” he mentions in The Horse Players.

Howard Soune’s Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life is seen by many as the definitive biography of the man, In documenting Bukowski’s refusal to follow a conventional working life, Sounes views him as a radical writer. Describing a scene from his second novel Factotum, Sounes describes in detail his attitude towards employment. Whilst working in an auto-parts warehouse Bukowski’s boss berates him for his laziness and sacks him. He fires back telling his employee “I’ve given you my time. It’s all I’ve got to give – it’s all any man has.”

No other writer since Hunter S Thompson commented so scathingly on the death of the American dream as Charles Bukowski.

Bukowski’s work would surely find a new home in our Covid world. The economic devastation unleashed upon the planet due to the virus has pushed thousands of people towards financial ruin. According to research from the Legatum Institute, a quarter of a million people in the UK are now in extreme poverty. The millions of jobs lost forever would no doubt provide unlimited inspiration for the “Laureate of LA low-life”.

Although he didn’t believe in God, the closest he came to idolatry was the veneration he felt for John Fante – a writer he discovered while perusing the LA Public Library. Fante’s novel,  Ask the Dust, influenced him immensely. The humour and pain of Fante’s words were, according to Bukowski “written from the heart and the gut”. Over the decades, he documented the world from the darker side of the street. A writer of the American low-life, the bars, the brothels and the mad-houses. But one thing that is often overlooked about him is during the drunken violence and chaos that marked his life – he occasionally let out moments of clarity and beauty. Hopeful and inspiring:

“Your life is your life

Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

be on the watch.

there are ways out.

there is light somewhere.

it may not be much light but

It beats the darkness.

be on the watch.

the gods will offer you chances.

know them.

take them.

you can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

and the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

your life is your life.

know it while you have it.

you are marvellous 

the gods wait to delight

In you.”

The laureate of LA low-life would’ve welcomed Covid with nonchalance: “…when death finally comes, you say right away, ‘hey buddy, glad to see ya!’”

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