Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes

saying a family could get rich if the sons of each generation bought property and willed it to their heirs. It had seemed a stupid idea and he felt vindicated in his disdain for his father’s lifestyle when the attorney informed him that Henry had less than $300 in savings and still owed $6,613 to the Bank of America on his mortgage. Apart from the equity in the house, the only real assets were a pension fund, a painting by Erich Heckal and a four-year-old Plymouth. Still, when everything was settled, Bukowski received a little more than $15,000. After he became famous, he claimed to have drunk and gambled away the inheritance, but he never revealed he had inherited $15,000, a substantial amount in 1959, and it’s unlikely he frittered it all away. Friends remember him having thousands of dollars in savings within a few years of his father’s death, and the truth is that, from this point on, he became careful with money.
       
    As Bukowski produced and submitted a greater volume of work – never bothering to keep carbons so he had no copies unless the poems were published or returned – his poems appeared more frequently in the little magazines. This was partly because he was writing darker, more realistic poems reflecting his recent experiences of loss and death. In 1959, he had poems accepted by magazines including Nomad, Coastlines, Quicksilver and Epos . Success fired up his ambition, as Jory Sherman recalls: ‘He said, “I want to beat them all, beat every one of them.” He wanted fame, he really did.’
    His first chapbook was published in October, 1960, two months after his fortieth birthday. E. V. Griffith, a small press editor from Eureka, California, who had already published broadsides of two Bukowski poems, spent two years sweating over Flower , Fist and Bestial Wail . ‘There were numerous delays in getting the book into print and the correspondence that ensued between poet and publisher was often testy,’ says Griffith. ‘But any ill-will dissipated quickly when copies were at last in Bukowski’s hands.’
    Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail is little more than a pamphlet, twenty-eight pages long and only two hundred copies printed, a good proportion of which went to friends of the publisher and author, yet it had a special significance for Bukowski being his first book.
    Many of the poems, like ‘soire´e’, were dark and introspective:
    in the cupboard sits my bottle
    like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers.
    I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony,
    sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere,
    the phone rings gamboling its sounds
    against the odds of the crooked sea;
    I drink deeply and evenly now,
    I drink to paradise
    and death
    and the lie of love.
    Also in his fortieth year, Bukowski was show-cased in Targets , a New Mexico quarterly whose editors turned over an entire section of the magazine to ‘A Charles Bukowski Signature’. This included a number of his most accomplished early poems, like ‘The Tragedy of the Leaves’ which again is a gloomy, claustrophobic poem. It concludes with a confrontation between the poet and an angry landlady in a rooming house not unlike the place Bukowski was living:
    and I walked into the dark hall
    where the landlady stood
    execrating and final,
    sending me to hell,
    waving her fat, sweaty arms
    and screaming
    screaming for rent
    because the world had failed us
    both.
    A further step towards what Judson Crews calls the ‘Hank persona’ came with the chapbook, Longshot Pomes (sic) for Broke Players , published in New York. There were poems about prostitutes, the race track and classical music, not the best work Bukowski ever wrote on these subjects, but getting closer to what he would become famous for. The change of direction was indicated by the cover art of a man playing cards at a table while a woman waits in bed. Inside was a brief biography giving the salient points of the emerging Bukowski mythology: his unhappy childhood; the years