Charles Bukowski: Walking Through the Fire

CHARLES BUKOWSKI, the poet, was born in Germany in 1920, as Heinrich Karl Bukowski, to a German mother and a Polish-American father. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems in his lifetime, hundreds of short stories and six novels. Many of them are troubling to read but the best of them are marvelous.

His parents emigrated to America, brought young Charles to Baltimore in 1923, and then, in 1926, to Los Angeles. Charles’s father violently abused his son at times, while his mother couldn’t or wouldn’t intervene. Charles attended Los Angeles High, had a severe case of acne, and with dorky clothes, bad skin and a strange German accent, was a pariah to the other kids. They called him “Heinie.”

Sometimes he fought his tormentors and for decades, he thought of fighting as something ugly but essential. He admired fighting because it stripped away the veneer of social niceties and laid bare how people really felt about each other and what they were capable of.

A friend named Baldy Mullinax introduced Charles to alcohol — a fateful introduction. On the subject of booze, Charles jotted down: “This is going to help me for a very long time.”

Leaving school, he held a series of dead-end jobs. He lived in various rooming houses, worked in a pickle factory. Sometimes hungry for food or confrontation, he took things which didn’t belong to him. He later admitted “I wasn’t much of a petty thief. I wanted the whole world, or nothing.”

While he was working as a packer for a light fixtures company, one of his fellow packers complained aloud, “I’ll never be free!” A supervisor named Morrie was walking by, heard those words and cackled. Bukowski was appalled and angry that Morrie — and all of the Morries of the world — could enjoy the slavery of another man.

For several years in the early 1950’s, Bukowski worked for the Los Angeles Post Office as a mailman. In later years he noticed how many creative people assumed that work as a mailman, walking the same streets, approaching the same houses day after day, would be deadening. He disagreed; he felt the sameness of a great city soothed the spirit, gave an observer confidence and helped his work. What could be more real than streets and houses? What would be disheartening, he thought, would be to be a stranger somewhere. He once said: “You live in a town all your life, and you get to know every street corner. You’ve got the layout of the whole land… I can’t see any other place than L.A.”

But bad luck and heavy drinking led to physical problems and he had tuberculosis, bleeding ulcers and cataracts. With his physical maladies, it became harder and harder to carry the mailbag and walk the route. He stayed with the Post Office but worked as a filing clerk. Sometimes, it was drudgery.

Bukowski also had mental health issues. As a young man he found himself judging each day by the extent to which he had suffered. As an older man, he decided he’d been measuring the wrong thing. Suffering or not suffering was not the important thing — “What matters is how well you walk through the fire.”

He realized he had feelings he couldn’t express through his work for the Post Office, and he turned to the idea of writing. Writing poetry felt like an appealing challenge. He knew his poems would have to be “poetic” but he was determined not to surrender the real, that feeling of streets and houses. He wondered, if poems should be uplifting to read and very personal, why published poets so often fell back on the same tropes. It was as if the poet was saying ‘Look, I’ve written a poem.’

He vowed not to do that; he would never write a poems that sounded like someone saying ‘Look, I’ve written a poem.’ And he didn’t. He wrote blunt poems about booze, race horses and prostitutes. He wrote about the seedy side of L.A. and people in the poetry world started to notice his poems because they were so different.

He knew how to dramatize himself, how to make himself a hero of a big, brawling life. At least once, he went to a poetry reading, put down his poems and asked if anyone in the audience wanted to arm wrestle. He found a taker and relished forcing their arm down on the table.

At the same time, there was an intimacy and intellect in the poems.

In Tucson, Arizona, where he lived for a short time, Bukowski met Jon Webb and Gypsy Lou Webb, who published some of his poetry in their literary magazine The Outsider.

Many editors of poetry journals wanted to believe that poetry was not just something loved by intellectuals, and that many of the menial jobs in America were performed by intelligent, keenly observant people with original voices. Here was such a voice and they were proud to promote Bukowski’s work.

Bukowski looked out at his professional competition, at the poets and writers who:

“lecture at universities

in tie and suit

the little boys soberly studious

the little girls with glazed eyes.”

There was something false in the way he glorified drinking, and something pathetic about his mistrust of life and of women. He liked to imply that he drank for the sake of art, for the way it tilted his consciousness and made the words fresh. He glossed over the pain his drinking caused others. He drove his car drunk and wrote blithe poetry about it.

Some people were skeptical that he roamed and drank and brawled as much as he said he did. They noted that people who do such things rarely have time to publish six novels and write a thousand poems.

Bukowski said in a 1971 letter: “Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist. “ He felt that men could be loyal but that women played men against each other. When he saw a man with a wife or girlfriend who had a great body or a large soul, Bukowski would say: “Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.”

Later there was a much more hopeful Bukowski poem “Let It Enfold You” in which he described earlier years (“I was living a hell in small rooms, I broke things, smashed things, walked through glass…) but later in the poem “cautiously, I allowed myself to feel good.” At the end of the poem he drives to work, greeting the mailman.

He also wrote: “Ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”

In 1987, Hollywood released a movie about Bukowski (“Barfly”) and he became wealthy. He began writing on a MacIntosh computer, driving a BMW, and carrying an American Express Gold Card. But he wasn’t worried that fame and fortune would ruin him, or even change his life much.

He once wrote: “…trouble will always

Arrive, never worry about

That.”