Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life Part 4

FrancEyE was a moderate drinker, nothing like Jane had been, but this didn't stop Bukowski from boozing. She remembers he kept his drinking more or less under control during the week, when he had to get to his job, but 'drank non-stop' at the weekends, benders which often ended with some accident, or with him spending the night in jail followed by a court appearance. He had a newspaper clipping about Alcoholics Anonymous stuck to the wall and would occasionally talk about whether he fitted the profile of an alcoholic. On balance he decided he didn't because he could stop drinking if he wanted, if only for a day or so, and because he carried on writing however much he drank. This remained his opinion throughout his life.

Despite the indifference he later showed FrancEyE, she says the relations.h.i.+p began as a love affair. 'We both had such a need for love and we both received love from each other,' she says. Bukowski did not write very much about FrancEyE, and there are no love poems comparable to those he wrote about Jane. Indeed, the closest he ever came to admitting love was in the poem, 'one for old snaggle-tooth', written years after they'd split, in which he acknowledges they 'were once great lovers'. However, in a letter to Corrington, he described FrancEyE as a grey-haired old woman (she was forty-one when they met) who loved him, but whom he did not love.

FrancEyE explains this by saying Bukowski had difficulty expressing love. 'He wrote about the negative emotions more,' she says. 'He used to be really embarra.s.sed by positive feeling.' This was not limited to feelings for her, but extended to all human relations.h.i.+ps. As an example, she recalls Bukowski confessing he admired some people who had recently been to visit him. He thought they were wonderful, but he said these feelings of admiration for other human beings made him feel sick.

The visitors were probably photographer Sam Cherry and his teenage son, Neeli. Bukowski was becoming close to the family, whom he had met through Jory Sherman, admiring Sam Cherry for the hard life he'd led during the depression: riding the box cars as a hobo, working as a longsh.o.r.eman and living on San Francisco's Skid Row.

When Sam Cherry visited North Mariposa, Bukowski tried to establish his own tough guy credentials, by boasting that he'd killed five men.

'Come on, don't give me that s.h.i.+t, Bukowski,' Cherry replied. 'How many men did you really kill?'

Bukowski took a drink, looked at the crack in the wall, and said he had killed four men. Cherry guffawed and there was another pause before Bukowski revised this to three men.

'After about twenty or thirty minutes it got down to zero,' says Cherry. 'He was full of bulls.h.i.+t.'

Apart from the love and support of FrancEyE, and the friends.h.i.+p of people like Sam Cherry, it was Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb who lifted Bukowski out of his long period of depression by writing to him that they liked his work so much they had decided to make him their first Outsider of the Year. He would get an inscribed plaque to hang on his wall and, more importantly, they would publish an anthology of his best poems. Bukowski was overwhelmed by the Webbs' generosity of spirit, people he still had not met. He knew it would be a crippling task for them financially, with no money other than what they could raise through friends like book dealer, Ed Blair, and sympathetic writers like Henry Miller, as well as being a ma.s.sive time commitment.

The proposed book was to be an infinitely more substantial publication than the chapbooks previously brought out. It would be a beautifully produced hard-cover volume, properly bound, and sold commercially through stores. The Webbs selected Bukowski's best work since 1955 poems like 'the tragedy of the leaves', 'conversation in a cheap room' and 'old man, dead in a room' and then set about making the design so remarkable that anyone walking into a store would feel compelled to pick the book up, even if they'd never heard of Bukowski. The poems were printed on expensive deckle-edged paper in a range of colours and bound in an elaborate cork cover. Jon Webb wanted to sell autographed copies so he mailed unbound pages to Bukowski to sign with a silver deco-write pen, giving precise instructions on how hard he must press, how long the ink took to dry, which side of the paper to work on and how many inches in from the margin he should write. A bemused Bukowski reflected it was a wonder the book didn't walk and talk the amount of trouble they were taking with it.

In the colophon, Webb described the arcane conditions in which the book was produced, writing that he and Gypsy Lou hand-fed the pages into an ancient Chandler & Price letterpress, working through the humid summer of 1963 in a workshop behind a sagging mansion in the French Quarter of New Orleans. 'The workshop's windows gaping out into a delightful walled-in courtyard dense to its broken-bottled brims with rotting banana trees, stinkweed and vine.' Rats ran about in the roof sending showers of plaster over completed pages and they had to share the workshop with 'c.o.c.kroaches big as mice'. There were myriad hitches to contend with, including bugs in the ink, blown fuses and wiring that twice caught fire. The press broke down three times, and the Louisiana humidity burst the composition rollers, but finally the job was done.

John William Corrington wrote the introduction identifying one of Bukowski's main achievements as his use of 'a language devoid of the affections, devices and mannerisms that have taken over academic verse'. This style, he wrote, was 'the spoken voice nailed to paper'.

The t.i.tle of the book, It Catches My Heart in Its Hands, was taken from a line in a poem by Robinson Jeffers, Bukowski's favorite poet at the time. 'Jeffers, I suppose, is my G.o.d,' he wrote to Jory Sherman, 'the only man since Shakey to write the long narrative poem that does not put one to sleep.' He also liked Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound, 'but Jeffers is stronger, darker, more exploratatively [sic] modern and mad.'

The finished book, which was published in October, 1963, was a work of art and, although only 777 copies were made, the extraordinary craftsmans.h.i.+p could not fail to draw attention to Bukowski and his poetry. The arrival of the first copy at North Mariposa was THE DAY. 'My G.o.d, you've done it, you've done it!' Bukowski wrote to the Webbs in high excitement. 'Never such a book!' The years of misery, the depression, the feelings of loss had been worth enduring to see something so wonderful.

'That made him,' says Gypsy Lou. 'Of course he made a lot of money later in life, but we helped him get going.'

* Sanford is the name of the postal district of LA that Bukowski had learned by rote.

5.

FAMILY LIFE AT DE LONGPRE AVENUE.

When FrancEyE became pregnant she didn't tell Bukowski straight away, but considered having a termination because her circ.u.mstances were not ideal for having a child. She had little money. She was living in a rooming house, and Bukowski had made it very clear he didn't want a family. The only reason they hadn't used contraception was that he hated condoms and, at forty-one, FrancEyE believed she was too old to get pregnant. Yet despite all the problems, she decided to have the baby. 'I thought, well, I'll go to Bukowski and, if he doesn't want to help, I'll go to my mother. Somewhere I'll get help.'

When she did tell him, Bukowski unexpectedly asked FrancEyE to marry him, not because he particularly wanted to repeat an experience that had ended so unhappily with Barbara Frye, but because he wanted to do the right thing. FrancEyE thanked him, but said she never wanted to marry anyone again and they compromised by agreeing to live together as a family with Bukowski paying the bills. They found a suitable home on De Longpre Avenue, where Bukowski would stay for the next nine years and where he wrote some of his best work.

The 5000 block of De Longpre Avenue runs parallel with Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood, still within walking distance of Ned's liquor store. There is a Ukrainian church, a scattering of modest family homes and a few low-rent apartment courts, one of which was owned by a middle-aged couple named Crotty who worked as extras at the nearby film studios. Theirs was not exactly 'the last Skid Row court in Hollywood' as Bukowski was fond of describing it, but it had seen better days. It consisted of four bungalows built on one side of a driveway that led from the sidewalk to a five-room boarding house. FrancEyE remembers it was 'half a court' because there was no facing row of bungalows, just a vacant lot, as if the builders had run out of money.

Francis Crotty was a short, pugnacious mid-Westerner with sparkling eyes, slightly bulbous nose and a moustache, a busy and resourceful landlord who was adept at fixing things. His wife, Grace, was a thick-set woman with red hair. Because they owned the court outright, and didn't have to worry about every cent, the Crottys charged reasonable rents and made sure their tenants got enough to eat by going on 'dent runs' to stores which sold damaged cans of food and day-old bread at a discount. 'They would buy a whole bunch of it and give it to people who were poorer than they were,' remembers former neighbor, Sina Taylor. There were also communal dinners at Thanksgiving and the Crottys would host 'drinking days' when they handed around whiskey and Eastside beer until everybody in the court was pleasantly smashed. The Crottys were tolerant of eccentricity in others and didn't care that Bukowski and FrancEyE weren't married, even though many landlords wouldn't have rented to them. Bukowski decided they were the best landlords he'd ever had.

He and FrancEyE moved into the one-bedroom end bungalow, next to the sidewalk. The lounge had an old couch, a rickety coffee table and book shelves constructed from building blocks. At the back of the room was a desk and over the desk Bukowski kept what he called his 'cheeseboard', a set of post office pigeon holes which he used for scheme test practice because, although he was a regular mail clerk, he still had to pa.s.s tests to hold his post office job. The rest of the time he used it to file papers. The typewriter and typing table his parents had given him were by the window so he could watch people while he wrote, as he described in 'the new place': as I type people go by mostly women and I sit in my shorts (without top) and going by they can't be sure I am not entirely naked. so I get these faces which pretend they don't see anything but I think they do: they see me as I sweat the poem like beating an ugly hog to death as the sun begins to fail over Sunset Blvd.

over the motel sign where hot sweaty people from Arkansas and Iowa pay too much to sleep while dreaming of movie stars.

Although Bukowski and FrancEyE liked the new place, they were not suited to living together. She involved herself in causes and with groups which Bukowski, the outsider, considered a waste of time. He wrote to the Webbs that FrancEyE was fighting 'to save and understand all mankind' and it was not a battle he thought she had much chance of winning. He was also contemptuous of her poetry workshop friends, people like Stanley Kurnik who sometimes came over to talk about literature. 'Hank did not like my workshop friends,' she says. 'My workshop friends were cardboard. They were an intrusion on him. They were Hollywood People. They were phonies. But they were my only friends!'

The fact he was about to become a father didn't make him at all happy and, when Jory Sherman visited, Bukowski suggested the baby might not even be his. 'I was furious,' says FrancEyE. 'But at the same time I knew he was drunk, so I didn't make a thing out of it. He was doing that as part of his posturing in front of Jory.' Bukowski moaned about FrancEyE in letters to friends, making fun of the books she read, even complaining that she was getting fat. His dissatisfaction also came out in poems, like 'the new place', where the poet is interrupted in his work by 'the woman' calling him to dinner: the food is getting cold and I've got to go (she doesn't understand that I've got to finish this thing) 'The new place' was published later that year in The Wormwood Review, a small literary magazine edited in Connecticut by Marvin Malone, who became a great supporter of Bukowski. Another poem in the issue, 'poetess', which Bukowski dedicated to FrancEyE, showed a more affectionate side to their relations.h.i.+p. Bukowski describes how she looks after him when he has been drinking, and praises her own poetry by saying 'she wrote like a man'. FrancEyE was not entirely comfortable with the idea that writing like a man should be a compliment, but she knew he meant well.

Jon and Gypsy Lou Webb arrived in LA in August, 1964, to talk to Bukowski about a second book, because the first had been such a success. Bukowski met them at the Crown Hill Hotel, introducing FrancEyE, pompously, as 'my woman'. Jon Webb told him that no man owned a woman, he just borrowed her. After a few drinks they went back to the bungalow on De Longpre where Gypsy Lou noticed the Outsider of the Year plaque they had sent from New Orleans was hanging prominently on the wall, next to a pyramid of empty beer cans. Bukowski sat staring at the plaque when he was drinking. 'He would look at it and almost cry and say he didn't understand how anybody could ever have done anything so beautiful for him,' says FrancEyE. 'He didn't think he would live to have such a wonderful thing happen.'

Jon Webb made Bukowski promise he would write new material for their next book, because they'd already used the best of his old stuff, and they spent four days working out the details. When Bukowski took the Webbs to Union Station to catch their train back to New Orleans, the bond of friends.h.i.+p had been forged strongly. From the Webbs' point of view, Bukowski had shown himself to be worthy of their hard work, a man who 'said it like it was', also some one rather different from the image he presented in his writing. He was not tough at all, decided Gypsy Lou. 'He was a gentle giant, really a sweetheart.'

Bukowski had grown so fond of the couple he told Gypsy Lou they would name their baby after her, if it was a girl, and when they had gone he wrote them a letter saying they were the sort of people he always hoped to meet but rarely had and, if they could work the miracle of It Catches My Heart in Its Hands again, his life would be complete.

As the expected date of the birth approached, Bukowski remembered Barbara's miscarriage and became anxious that his years of drinking might cause the baby to be born damaged. He also worried the pregnancy might be rough on FrancEyE, who was now forty-two, becoming quite angry that she had allowed herself to get into this condition, as if it were nothing to do with him. But on 7 September, 1964, she gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl. She chose Marina as the first name, after a courtesan she had been reading about, and Bukowski chose Louise as the middle name in honor of Gypsy Lou.

Marina would be Bukowski's only child and he was a devoted father from the beginning. 'He would change her, take care of her. He loved to watch her when she was finding her toes and fingers,' says FrancEyE. 'I was so grateful for having her when I saw what a wonderful father he was.'

He began to include news of the baby's progress in letters to friends, praising her beauty, good nature and intelligence. In a letter to Corrington, he wrote: 'The girl-child is Marina Louise Bukowski and I am a sucker for it. Very large mouth and eyes and when that mouth opens and spreads into the big grin laugh, all sunflowers and sun, and I break in half, she has me.' Now, when the suicide complex came upon him, there was one good reason to resist.

The arrival of the baby did not make his relations.h.i.+p with FrancEyE any happier, however. Bukowski's night work made it almost impossible to organize a domestic routine that gave them all enough sleep. FrancEyE mostly stayed up until Bukowski came home from the post office, in the early hours, before going to bed. Then they were woken by Marina at dawn, and again at 8 a.m. by construction work on the vacant lot next door. Bukowski liked to sleep until noon, so FrancEyE tried to take Marina out in the mornings, but when she came back he wanted to write. He wouldn't say she had to be quiet because he was working, but if something bothered him he would come and yell, so she crept around with Marina, frightened even to turn the radio on.

Jon Webb was concerned Bukowski was not writing the poems they needed for the completion of the new book, the early pages of which he and Gypsy Lou were already in the process of printing, so in March, 1965, he invited Bukowski to New Orleans for a break.

The Webbs were renting a bug-infested room on the ground floor of a building on Royal Street, in the French Quarter. It was more workshop than home with a printing press taking up most of the floor s.p.a.ce, art materials on the shelves, and reams of paper everywhere, paper the manufacturers guaranteed would last eight hundred years. Webb had built the bed on stilts so they could store paper underneath, and Bukowski was amazed to see pages of his book stacked on wooden slats over the bath tub. 'It was a terrible place,' says Gypsy Lou, who was becoming increasingly irked with the conditions. 'There wasn't room for anything.' Bukowski drew a cartoon in which she tosses the pages in the air, yelling: 'Bukowski! Bukowski! I can't stand it anymore!'

The Webbs were utterly dedicated to the book and regularly worked twelve-hour days, leaving Bukowski to his own devices. He drank with the artist, Noel Rockmore, whose etchings would be used on the cover, and spent evenings flirting with Minnie Segate, a friend of the Webbs who was putting him up during his two-week stay. He was having such a high old time that Jon Webb told him sharply to stop larking about and get down to writing the poems they needed.

'Got any poems, Bukowski?' he would ask, when he saw the poet at his door. If he had none, Webb told him to go away and write.

Bukowski feared working under pressure would turn his writing 'into journalism'. He was also uneasy about the book's proposed t.i.tle, Crucifix in a Deathhand, which Webb chose from a line in one of the new poems, even though Bukowski thought there were many better t.i.tles. He had begun to outlive his welcome at Minnie's, coming home drunk at all hours and generally making a fool of himself, and wrote to his friend, Al Purdy, that he felt he was just getting in the way.

Towards the end of the vacation, John William Corrington drove over from Baton Rouge to meet Bukowski. Corrington was flushed with success having recently returned from England where he had taken a doctorate at the University of Suss.e.x. He had also recently had his first novel published. Neither achievement impressed Bukowski who made his feelings clear in letters. When they began corresponding, in 1961, Bukowski addressed him with the utmost courtesy as 'Mr Corrington', impressed that an academic was interested in his work, but the relations.h.i.+p had degenerated to the extent that he had started a recent letter, 'f.u.c.ker'. Despite this, Corrington was excited about meeting Bukowski. 'He believed they would immediately become fast friends,' says the poet Miller Williams, who came along for the ride.

Bukowski was sitting on the loft bed drinking beer when they came in the room. Also present were Jon Webb and two of his young friends, Ed Blair and Ben C. Toledano. There was an uneasy atmosphere from the start. According to Blair, Corrington was very gregarious, very confident in himself, and thought everybody loved him, 'the kind of person Bukowski wasn't going to go for'. Corrington and Williams talked about literature and university life, and Toledano chipped in about being a lawyer. Bukowski felt at a disadvantage in such company and said nothing.

When Corrington started telling Bukowski what his English Dean had said on the subject of James Joyce, he couldn't stand any more. 'f.u.c.k your Dean,' he said.

Corrington was deeply offended, but Bukowski was not about to apologize and began sneering at everything Corrington said, especially when he tried to talk about Republican politician Barry Goldwater, saying he was a good man. They were at loggerheads now, too stubborn to back off and decided to pout at each other throughout the rest of the evening. Miller Williams believes Bukowski was chiefly at fault. 'It was the kind of self-destructive defensiveness that an early adolescent will engage in,' he says. 'Corrington was very hurt that he had been rejected by someone whose work was important to him and whose approval he very much wanted.' It was the end of their friends.h.i.+p.

With a relatively large print run and New York publisher, Lyle Stuart, handling distribution, Crucifix in a Deathhand was the biggest book of Bukowski's career to date, and the Webbs did another beautiful design job. Printed in a large format, and ill.u.s.trated with nightmarish etchings by Noel Rockmore, it looked like an alb.u.m of Gothic fairy tales. But with the benefit of hindsight, Bukowski was correct to fear his poetry would be compromised by writing under pressure.

In his more honest moments, he admitted he had slipped. He knew Webb wanted better, but he could not produce poems to match the standard of the first book. Jon Webb reported that Henry Miller was enthusiastic, but when Bukowski wrote to Miller, whom he admired and whose book Tropic of Cancer has much in common with his own later novels, suggesting they get together, Miller declined and scolded Bukowski for drinking too much. He said it was a sure way to kill inspiration.

There were notable poems in the book, however, few better than 'something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you ...'. This was virtually a polemic against capitalism, although Bukowski maintained he was not a political writer. 'I am not a man who looks for solutions in G.o.d or politics,' he said. He did not align himself with the Left although FrancEyE remembers him expressing admiration for Communist Dorothy Healey any more than his college flirtation with n.a.z.ism had matured into a sympathy with the Right. At the same time some of the poems in Crucifix in a Deathhand, and later work like Factotum, show an interest in the problems of the urban under cla.s.s. 'What I've tried to do, if you'll pardon me, is bring in the factory-workers aspect of life,' he said. 'The screaming wife when he comes home from work. The basic realities of the everyman existence ... something seldom mentioned in the poetry of the centuries. Just put me down as saying that the poetry of the centuries is s.h.i.+t. It's shameful.' He achieved his goal in 'something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you ...' without political posturing.

... the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like 60 acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent, men who'd kill you because they're crazy and justify it because it's the law, men who stand in front of windows 30 feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good ...

and nothing. getting your last paycheck at a harbor, at a factory, at a hospital, at an aircraft plant, at a penny arcade, at a barbershop, at a job you didn't want anyway.

income tax, sickness, servility, broken arms, broken heads all the stuffing come out like an old pillow.

By this stage in his career, his work was familiar to the readers of practically every small literary magazine in America, and a good many in Europe. Well-produced if obscure books like those made by the Webbs enhanced his reputation and many young poets began to look to him as a leader. One of these was Douglas Blazek, a Chicago poet and foundry worker who produced his own little magazine, Ole, on a $100 Sears & Roebuck mimeograph machine. This sort of primitive technology was responsible for the sloppy appearance of most little magazines, but in Blazek's case it was in keeping with the gritty nature of the work.

When Blazek discovered Bukowski had written short stories, back in the '40s, he asked for some prose for Ole and Bukowski responded with a breakthrough piece, A Rambling Essay On Poetics And The Bleeding Life Written While Drinking A Six Pack (Tall). It was meant as an essay, more than a short story, a statement of his literary beliefs, but what came across most strongly was that he was writing about himself.

He wrote that his father was a 'monster who b.a.s.t.a.r.dized me upon this sad earth', thus fostering the abiding myth he was illegitimate; and he invited his readers to call him 'uncultured, drunken, whatever' as if he were a Philistine. The message was that Bukowski had 'crawled drunken in alleys from coast to coast' and the poetry that came from these experiences was all the more powerful for it.

'Being the age that I was, I had my mouth wide open and I was swallowing it all,' says Blazek. Many of those who read the essay in Ole also took it as a true account of Bukowski's life and wanted to know more about the poet who said he had shouldered carca.s.ses in a slaughter house (in fact, he worked half a day in a slaughter house on one occasion during his supposed ten-year drunk).

When he got back to De Longpre, after visiting the Webbs, Bukowski found he had fan mail and wrote Blazek on 17 April, 1965: 'I get these letters on the essay I wrote for Ole 2 and they seem to think I said something; I am a f.u.c.king oracle (oriol?) for the LOST or something, is what they tell me. that's nice. but I AM THE LOST.'

Blazek went on to publish a Bukowski chapbook of a single prose piece, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, a portmanteau of nine short stories based on his childhood, adolescence and youth. It further promoted Bukowski as the hero of his own work, even though he used the device of a fictional first-person narrator. The name, Henry Chinaski, was noticeably similar to his own.

'Confessions became a dry run for his first novel, Post Office, and from then on I think he duplicated himself,' says Blazek. 'Ham FAMILY HISTORY.

Bukowski's maternal grandparents Nanatte and Wilhelm Fett (seated) celebrate their golden wedding anniversary with family and friends in Andernach, Germany, in 1943. (courtesy of Karl Fett) Charles Bukowski's paternal grandparents Emilie and Leonard Bukowski at their home in Pasadena, California. (courtesy of Katherine Wood) Bukowski's parents lived in an apartment in this building in Andernach, Germany, when they were fi rst married and Bukowski was born here on 16 Aug, 1920. The window on the second fl oor under the cross is the room in which he was born. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) COMIGN TO AMERICA.

This is the postcard Bukowski's mother sent to her parents from the docks at Bremerhaven, Germany, on 18 April, 1923, just before she and Henry Bukowski and their son sailed for America. It shows the SS President Fillmore, the s.h.i.+p which took them to Baltimore. (courtesy of Karl Fett) In 1924 Bukowski's mother sent this photograph of herself, her husband and their son from her mother-in law's house in Pasadena, California, to her parents in Andernach, writing that Henry had won an argument about who should hold their son for the picture. (courtesy of Karl Fett) The infant Bukowski looks thoroughly glum on a day out with his parents at Santa Monica beach, California. Kate Bukowski wrote to her parents in Germany that Henry wanted her to send photographs of them at the beach to prove he was showing them a good time in America. (courtesy of Karl Fett) Henry and Kate's goldschatz, their golden boy, in his new home town of Los Angeles in the mid-1920s. (courtesy of Karl Fett) GROWING UP IN LA.

The bungalow at 2122 Longwood Avenue, Los Angeles, as it was when the Bukowski family lived there in the 1930s. Bukowski was made to manicure the front lawn every Sat.u.r.day and beaten if he missed a single blade. (courtesy of Karl Fett) Bukowski and his father pose in the family model-T Ford in which they took trips out of Los Angeles into the orange groves of the surrounding countryside. (courtesy of Karl Fett) When he was 16, suffering from terrible acne and attending Mount Vernon Junior High School, Bukowski posed for a cla.s.s photograph. He is in the front row, fi fth from the left with his arms crossed. The fi rst boy in the front row, wearing an open-neck white s.h.i.+rt and grey trousers, is Bukowski's friend William 'Baldy' Mullinax. (courtesy of Mount Vernon Junior High School) Bukowski (centre) looks older than 18 in his Los Angeles High School year book photograph for the graduating cla.s.s of summer, 1939. (courtesy of Los Angeles High School) Sgt Henry Charles Bukowski Jnr in his ROTC uniform along with school friends; from left to right; Bloomer, Cavanaugh and Corbeil (courtesy of Los Angeles High School) Jane c.o.o.ney Baker, the great love of Bukowski's life who inspired so much of his best work. This is the fi rst photograph of Jane ever published. It was taken for her High School year book in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1927 when she was 17 years old. (courtesy of Roswell High School) Taken at his parents' Longwood Avenue home in July, 1947, this photograph shows a remarkably well-groomed Charles Bukowski, aged 27, at a time in his life when he later claimed to have been living as a b.u.m. (courtesy of Karl Fett) LOST YEARS.

A rare glimpse of Bukowski, relaxing with his 'magic dog', taken in the early 1950s when he was living with Jane c.o.o.ney Baker. On the back of the picture Bukowski wrote this caption: '... long ago on a deserted beach with a fi ne and beautiful dog.' Note: the marks on the picture are from the pressure of Bukowski's handwriting on the back. (courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Arizona Library) This building at 603 N. 17th Street, Philadelphia, was a rooming house where Bukowski lived when he was in the city during his ten year drunk. (picture taken by Brenda Galloway for Howard Sounes) Bukowski lived with Jane at this apartment court at 268 S. Coronado Street in downtown Los Angeles. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) Barbara Frye's physical deformity is clear in this photograph taken at the Frye Ranch in Wheeler, Texas, in 1954 - the year before she met and married Bukowski. She was born with two vertebra missing from her neck giving the impression she was permanently hunching her shoulders. (courtesy of Leah Belle Wilson) Bukowski and his fi rst wife, Barbara Frye, pose together in December, 1956, just over a year after they married. This is the fi rst picture of the couple ever to be published. (courtesy of Leah Belle Wilson) EAST HOLYWOOD.

The former premises of The Phillips Hotel in Hollywood. Jane c.o.o.ney Baker lived in one of the rooms facing onto Vermont Avenue and died a couple of days after suffering a hemorrhage here in 1962. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) Bukowski at the N. Mariposa rooming house in the early 1960s. Note the acne scars on his face and the way the wallpaper behind his left elbow is held together with sticky tape. (courtesy of Special Collections, The University of Arizona Library) The rooming house at 1623 N. Mariposa Avenue, Los Angeles, where Bukowski moved in 1958 after he split with his fi rst wife and where he wrote some of his best early work. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) Working in his room at N. Mariposa on the typing table his parents bought for him when he was a teenager. Copies of the Webbs' Outsider magazine are on the table beside the typewriter. (courtesy of 'Gypsy Lou' Webb) The bungalow on De Longpre Avenue in East Hollywood where Bukowski moved in 1964 with FrancEyE, 'the mother of my child'. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) Bukowski's landlords at De Longpre Avenue: Francis Crotty (left with hat) and Grace Crotty (middle with cat). On the right holding the pumpkin is neighbor and friend, Sina Taylor. (courtesy of Sina Taylor) Bukowski in his crummy bungalow on De Longpre Avenue, East Hollywood. (courtesy of Liza Williams) FrancEyE and Bukowski were man and wife in all but name and she was the mother of his only child. Here FrancEyE is seen with their daughter, Marina, who was born in 1964. They all lived together at De Longpre Avenue. (courtesy of FrancEyE) The Terminal Annex building in downtown LA where Bukowski worked for many years as a mail clerk and which he described so vividly in his seminal novel, Post Offi ce. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) FRIENDS.

Writer and small press publisher Douglas Blazek who published early breakthrough prose work by Bukowski in Ole magazine. (courtesy of Douglas Blazek) Writer Jory Sherman, a friend of Bukowski's when he lived at N. Mariposa Avenue. (courtesy of Jory Sherman/photo credit: J. Jones) Poet Steve Richmond, a close friend for many years who thought Bukowski's att.i.tude to drugs hypocritical. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) John Bennett, small press publisher and friend of Bukowski's. (courtesy of John Bennett/photo credit: Jane Orleman) The writer and academic John William Corrington (far right) who had a long and warm correspondence with Bukowski until they met at the home of Jon and 'Gypsy Lou' Webb in New Orleans and fell out. On the left is Miller Williams who was also at the meeting. (courtesy of Joyce Corrington) Beat poet and gay writer Harold Norse who controversially claims Bukowski fl ashed his p.e.n.i.s at him and asked to see Norse's p.e.n.i.s in return. (picture taken by Howard Sounes) German-born photographer Michael Montfort who accompanied Linda Lee and Bukowski on their fi rst trip to Europe in 1978. (taken by Howard Sounes) Bukowski with his publisher and friend Jon Webb. (courtesy of 'Gypsy Lou' Webb) Bukowski and 'Gypsy Lou' Webb at Bukowski's bungalow in Hollywood in August, 1964, when the Webbs came to check him out. (courtesy of 'Gypsy Lou' Webb) Bukowski wanted to be photographed in a tough guy pose for his 1969 book, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, so photographer friend Sam Cherry took this picture of Bukowski clinging onto a boxcar in downtown LA. Bukowski was so fat and lacking in agility he almost fell off. (courtesy of Sam Cherry) on Rye, all of that, was regurgitated. All his previous stuff was just a dry run for the more substantial works that John Martin published at Black Sparrow Press.'

It is true that many of the stories that later became significant parts of his novels first appeared in these short stories. For example, Bukowski first wrote about Jane c.o.o.ney Baker in Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts. He introduced her as K: K. was an ex-showgirl and she used to show me the clippings and photos. She'd almost won a Miss America contest. I met her in an Alvarado St. bar, which is about as close to getting to Skid Row as you can get. She had put on weight and age but there was still some sign of a figure, some cla.s.s, but just a hint and little more. We'd both had it. Neither of us worked and how we made it I'll never know ...

Ten years later he wrote about her in his novel, Factotum, but it was essentially the same thing: I found myself on Alvarado Street. I walked along until I came to an inviting bar and went in. It was crowded. There was only one seat left at the bar. I sat in it. I ordered a scotch and water. To my right sat a rather dark blonde, gone a bit to fat, neck and cheeks now flabby, obviously a drunk; but there was a certain lingering beauty to her features, and her body still looked firm and young and well-shaped. In fact, her legs were long and lovely.

Both versions show how much he manipulated the facts of Jane's life to make a story.

Even though FrancEyE wanted him to do things with her and Marina, Bukowski's weekends were still mostly taken up with drinking. He stumbled around the bars, getting into fights and sometimes getting himself locked up. When he stayed home, he emptied beer bottles by the half dozen, clanging empties into the garbage until neighbors yelled for him to shut up, or singing songs from Oklahoma! with Francis and Grace Crotty at the back of the court. Alcohol was so much a part of daily life that the first word Marina learned to read was 'liquor' and she came to know Ned's liquor store as 'Hank's Store' because her father spent so much time there.

One night around Thanksgiving, 1965, Bukowski came home from the post office, got a beer from the refrigerator, and told FrancEyE it wasn't working.

'You have to get out of here,' he said.

He promised to help her find a place where she could live with Marina, and said he would continue to support them. 'He hated having an unhappy woman around, and he knew how unhappy I was,' says FrancEyE, who had been thinking of moving out anyway.

Marina believes she is lucky the split came before she knew any other life. 'I didn't have any unhappy memories of that and, obviously, if it had been a year or two later I would have been at least initially miserable,' she says. 'How my father raised me and how my mother raised me was pretty unconventional, just the fact that they weren't together was one piece of the puzzle, but I always felt a really strong connection to him. He let me know both by his actions and his words that he loved me more than anything, so I always took that for granted as a child. It is something that is so basic and so important and it just made everything in the world OK.'

Despite his many problems, and his drinking, FrancEyE found she could rely on Bukowski even after they split. 'I could never handle money,' she says. 'My money would run out and we would be out of food. Whenever I called Hank, and said, "Can we come over and eat?" Or, we need this or that, he was always right there.'

But when she had time to reflect on their relations.h.i.+p as a couple, FrancEyE did not come to an entirely positive conclusion. She was especially hurt when some of Bukowski's letters were published in the early 1990s, revealing how little he had understood her, and how he often belittled her in correspondence with his friends.

In response, FrancEyE wrote the poem, 'Christ I feel s.h.i.+tty': At least it's clear now He hated me for being somebody I never was.

Maybe I loved him for the same reason.

I thought he would want to hear amazing stories when all he wanted was somebody to clean up the kitchen, just like he said all along.

6.

BLACK SPARROW, AND THE SIXTIES.

It is one of the ironies of Bukowski's career that his eventual success was largely due to the hard work of a Christian Scientist who drinks nothing stronger than iced tea. John Martin was the manager of an office supply company when he first read Bukowski's poetry, and it literally changed his life. He decided Bukowski was a great genius, 'the Walt Whitman of our day', and set out to become his publisher.

First he read all the books that were available. He bought It Catches my Heart in Its Hands and, through Jon Webb, got an inscribed copy of Crucifix in a Deathhand. Then, in October, 1965, he wrote to Bukowski asking to buy signed copies of the early chapbooks, adding that he thought Bukowski was 'a most important and marvellous poet'. Bukowski sent him a copy of Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, and Martin wrote again ten days later, saying he wanted to invite him to lunch, adding: 'I've never had the pleasure of talking to a really fine poet.' Bukowski postponed the meeting while he found a place for FrancEyE and Marina to live, but invited Martin over to De Longpre after he wrote again in January saying he'd been given bottles of liquor for Christmas, but didn't drink, and wondered if Bukowski wanted them.

Bukowski was drinking beer when he looked up and saw a smartly dressed gentleman on his porch. His visitor had wisps of reddish hair around a mostly bald head, although he was still young, and was grinning broadly.

'I've always been a great admirer of your work,' said John Martin, introducing himself. 'I'd like to come in.'

'Oh well, come on in. Want a beer?'

Martin declined, reminding Bukowski that he didn't drink. 'That kind of put me off right there: this guy's inhuman, he doesn't drink beer!' said Bukowski, recalling the meeting.

For his part, Martin was taken aback by Bukowski's scruffy appearance and the filthy conditions he was living in, now FrancEyE had left. 'He had this absolutely destroyed room,' he says. There were rusty razor blades round the sink, the toilet didn't flush properly and the work surfaces were covered dust and bits of food.

Martin asked if he had any writing he could look at, and Bukowski told him to look in the closet.

'What's this?' asked Martin, looking at a stack of paper that reached up almost to his waist.

'Writing,' replied Bukowski.