To live in a world populated by personal destitution, where the ingredients of a day are drunken debauchery, incessant vomiting, sleazy sex and endless hours spent tapping crude narratives on a dusty typewriter, would, one presumes, not be the most enviable. But for Charles Bukowski, celebrated novelist and poet laureate of bar-fly writing, dirt and grime and cheap booze were to him what cobble-stone, smoky streets and chaps in odd hats were to a young writer called Dickens in the  mid 1800′s.

Born to an American Father and German mother in the Andernach region of Germany, Charles moved to the United states at the tender age of three following the economic collapse borne out of World War 1. However, moving to a new country had its social drawbacks on the young Bukowski;  at various times in his later career -both through his writing and during interviews – he described the alienation and deep shyness from which he suffered from throughout his teen-years. Such ailments would, however, later fade, with what the man himself later described as “an epiphany”: the introduction, realisation and, in turn, the steady and almighty intake of alcohol. It was a relationship that would prove unbreakable, and would serve as his writing’s most important influence.

Following his graduation from Los Angeles High School, where he studied the arts of journalism and literature, Bukowski began penning short stories, submitting his semi-fictional accounts of debauchery and musings on life  to various literature publications. Despite having a few of his early works printed, Bukowski, furious with his inability to cement a satisfactory place within the literary world, grew disillusioned with the craft of writing, and subsequently went on a ten-year leave from it, instead chiefly focusing his attentions on incessant drinking and his exuberant fondness for womanising.

However, after a decade away from writing, he began penning poetry in 1956 after being hospitalised with a life-threatening bleeding ulcer. After having a collection of his poems printed by Outsider Literary Magazine, Bukowski began writing a weekly column entitled “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” for the Los Angeles’ underground publication, Open City. After crawling along the bowels of endless mundane jobs for a large proportion of his early adult-hood, Bukoswki quit his role as a post-office clerk in 1969 to take up the chance to become a full-time writer for book publisher, Black Sparrow Press. Upon making the decision, Bukowski, infectiously witty as ever, proclaimed ” “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.”

A month later, he had written, perhaps, his most well-know novel, Post Office; a semi-autobiographical account of life’s drudgery, bit-part, degrading jobs, and gambling, the novel was the literary world’s first introduction to the infamous protagonist of all Bukowski’s fictional workings, Henry Chinaski. Written as an account of Bukowski’s life between the years of 1952 to 1969, the book cemented Bukowski’s celebrated free-flowing, simplistic stylistics; the sentences are short, snappy and straight-forward, yet flow with darkly humour and are penetrated by a unique wit stoked by sleaziness and vulgar imagery.

Four years after Post Office’s release in 1971, Bukowski released his second novel, Factotum; a bizarre concoction of flowing alcoholism and shifting between various menial jobs, Chinaski finds himself rejected from World War II drafting, and instead finds himself wandering around the the grimy streets of the lower east-side of Los Angeles, fleeting between ram-shackle apartment blocks and seedy sex-sessions with fellow bar-flys. The tales, though often bleak, read hilariously, and are married beautifully by the writing’s simplicity and droll humour. Since its release, the novel has proven to be a major commercial success.

The writing should, of course, be noted for its parallels with the works of other ground-breaking novelists that came before Bukowski; he himself has noted that ground-breaking American novelist John Fante was a key stylistic influence on an impressionable young budding novelist when starting out his writing career, whilst Bukoswki has also acknowledged writers such as Hemingway, Kafka and Dostoevsky as inspirations to his down-and-out, almost destitute, approach to story-telling. His writings were summed up by one critic as a “detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free,” and its this approach, this social commentary on the bedraggled, lustful male, that has permeated all his works with a razor-sharp edge and a clinical, celbratory air of dirtiness.

Outside of writing, as Bukowski’s name became wide-spread in literary circles, the writer, now in his 50s, embarked on copious love-affairs and one-night-stands, all of which would be, in some way or another, detailed in his most lurid novel of all: Women. Written in 1978, the novel, deeply satirical, was also noted for its poignant narration on helplessness, the cruel world of the addict, and almost claustrophobic trappings of the sexual deviant. It has come to be regarded as perhaps his most telling of all literary works; the insights are devilishly crude, yet cruelly addictive. The tones are, as always, snappy, and punctuated with many enriching undertones, such as brutal honesty in the eyes of despair.

Despite the years of writing, reminiscing and narrating on one’s life, it wasn’t until 1982 that Bukowski, now at the age of sixty-two, decided to pen a fantastically astute ode to his days of youth. Ham on Rye, perhaps the writers most accessible fictional working, tells the tale of a young Chinaski, and the many encounters he has with the obscure characters that populated Los Angeles at the time of writing. Chiefly focused on the childhood and teen years of his thinly-veiled alter-ego, the novel is permeated by alienation and the ritualistic oddities of the young loner.

Two more novels followed: Hollywood, a fictional account of his experiences in film-script writing was published in 1989, and was later followed by Pulp, which proved not only to be a hilarious satire on private investigations, but also to be the last completed novel by Bukowski. A month after it’s release, Bukowski, at the age of seventy-three, died as a result of advanced Leukemia in San Pedro, California.

Even in death, Bukowski continues to inspire; his gravestone reads “Don’t Try,” a phrase the writer once used in one of his many poems when answering the call of: how does one write? His answer, aptly enough, was: “‘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.” And that was Henry Charles Bukowski – a man of unadulterated humour, precision, and, moreover, sheer wisdom. But also a man flawed – from savage alcoholism and obsessive sexual tendencies, to beastly violence and down-and-out desperation, Bukowski lived most of his life a man broken, but with a fixed genius in clarity of expression; in his later days he noted: “some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.” Bukoswki lived on the edge, and crossed many times over, the thresholds of this aforementioned craziness. Needless to say, he had very few regrets. A spokesman for a jilted generation, he lived as a man of infinite creation, despite his many flaws, and continues to live on through his many poetic works, his absurdities, his ideas, and, of course, his wisdom

Mark Kelleher