Charles Bukowski: Biography Of The ‘last Cursed Writer’
Until he was fifty, Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) was “nobody.” He had published some stories in his youth, which had gone more or less unnoticed and which had made the aspiring writer give up his efforts. He thus began a labor “vagabond” that led him to accept precarious jobs, from whose experience probably arises his famous phrase in which he affirms that slavery had not been abolished, but had extended to all. colors. From one of these works (in which he spent the longest time), he drew inspiration for what would be his first book, The postman (1971).
Who was Charles Bukowski? What is unique about his work? Why is he included in the list of “cursed” writers, and even considered the last of them? We tell you the life of the “last cursed writer”, the great master of the so-called dirty realism:Charles Bukowski.
Brief biography of Charles Bukowski, the last “damned”
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to receive the title “damned.” After him came others, such as Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Already in the middle of the XX century, the Beat Generation It was a real forge of “damned”with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs in the lead. And, following the aesthetic beat (based on feverish wandering, drug and alcohol consumption, sex addiction and inspiration in the underworld of big cities), in 1994 the “last of the damned”, Charles Bukowski, died.
As is often the case with demonized writers, Bukowski has as many friends as enemies. While many readers elevate him to the altars of genius and exalt his stark ability to portray reality without sugarcoating, his detractors consider him obscene and opportunistic, a simple drunk addicted to prostitution who wrote down the storms of his mind, but without any aesthetic or literary value. The same thing happened with his predecessors, by the way.
On one occasion, Bukowski assured that the brutal beatings given to him by his father, an American officer of Polish descent, had been an excellent lesson in pain, essential for his later literature. Born in a small German town in August 1920, Heinrich Karl Bukowski (for this was his real name) soon tasted the bitter taste of his father’s abuse. Apparently, his father beat him daily, which ended when the young man turned sixteen and confronted him. With one blow, he knocked him unconscious. His father never touched him again.
Despite his supposed liberation, the violence and suffering had caused an unfathomable and unhealable wound, which, at first, the future writer did not know how to channel. Added to the beatings by his father was the continuous contempt of his schoolmates, since little Hank (as they called him in confidence) spoke English with a noticeable German accent, the language of his mother. They would later change his name to Henry Charles, much more Anglo-Saxon, to erase any relationship with his Germanic past.
On the Beat path
He began studying Journalism, Art and Literature at the University of Los Angeles, the second city in the United States to which the family had moved (the first was Baltimore, in a curious connection with Poe), but he did not go beyond the second course.
Abandoned studies, The young Bukowski began a chaotic existence, characterized by wandering, addiction to alcohol and sex, and junk jobs.. Destroyed by the trauma of violence in his childhood and without a specific direction to follow, the man who would become the master of “dirty realism” crawled through the suburbs of his muse city, Los Angeles, from which he would take the sordid settings and the dark plots (very often autobiographical) of his stories.
And his passion for literature began to consolidate at this time. Between wanderings and miserable jobs, Bukoswki wrote. At the age of twenty-four he managed to publish his first story, Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slipin a magazine. The second publication arrived two years later, in 1946. The slowness of the process and his desire for success deeply frustrated him, to the point that he stopped writing for ten long years, during which he continued working in precarious conditions and living in the dark. United States pensions. Quite a beat path, parallel to that followed by his contemporaries Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, the “canonical” members of the rebellious and disillusioned Beat Generation.
For many years, Charles Bukowski was working at the Post Office. From his experiences in this position he drew inspiration to compose what would be his first novel, post office (The Postman in its Spanish translation), which was published in 1971, when the writer was already fifty years old. It is in this novel where the character of Henry Chinaski appears for the first time, who will no longer abandon his literary work and who is nothing other than the alter ego of the author.
Apparently, In 1960, Bukowski had received an offer of $100 a month from the publisher’s director. Black Sparrow Press. It was then that the still postman decided to risk everything and abandon his stable and comfortable job to live off what he had always dreamed of; literature. In his own words, he had had to choose between staying on the job and going crazy and being a writer and succumbing to hunger.
The master of “dirty realism”
From then on, Bukowski’s career became unstoppable. Other novels follow Post Office: Factotum (1975), Women (1978) and the famous Ham on Rye (The Path of the Loser), published in 1982. In all his creations, Bukowski displays a very hard, cold and absolutely stark style, full of obscene and often violent language that divides critics. Ultimately, however, the author is only putting in writing what he has seen throughout his entire existence: pain, abuse, suffering, alcohol, prostitution. The unvarnished American reality, that “dirty realism” of which he is the undisputed master.
Bukowski does not at any time attempt to hide his literary “obscenity”, quite the contrary. Works like Notes of a Dirty Old Man (Writings of an indecent old man), Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (Erections, ejaculations and general displays of ordinary insanity) or Hot Water Music (Pipe Music) are reliable examples in this sense.
Write like breathe
In 1957, Charles had married fellow poet Barbara Frye, whom he divorced two years later. Despite his well-known role as a novelist and short story writer, Bukowski also published poetry, also characterized by a visceral realism very close to others. cursed like Whitman or Baudelaire. In 1964, her only daughter, Marina Louise, was born, the result of her relationship with Frances Smith.
Bukowski was hooked on alcohol and sex, but also on writing. He couldn’t conceive his life without writing. That is why he preferred to be “hungry” rather than continue working at the Post Office, and that is why that famous sentence is engraved on his tombstone: Don’t trydon’t try it. The phrase is taken from one of his most famous poems, So you want to be a writer…, in which the author tells us that, if it doesn’t come to us in spurts (the desire to write, of course), we shouldn’t try. In other words; Bukowski wrote because literature pulsed inside him, and, for him, the writer is nothing other than that fire transformed into paper.
Leukemia finally took him in 1994, at the age of seventy-three. To remember him, there was the image of him as a vagabond, with dirty and disheveled hair and his almost threadbare clothes. But, above all, his great literary work, which continues to be an object of worship today.
