|
When Bukowski met
Bukowski
By
N Quentin Woolf
As I turned the pages of the review copy of Locked In The
Arms Of A Crazy Life, Howard Sounes’ biography of Charles
Bukowski, I started to get uncomfortable. This was not
merely the effect of that insubordinate spring in the seat
of my armchair (I’d have gotten it seen to ages ago were it
not so effective at keeping me awake during a dull book),
but mainly a discomfort with what I was reading, and mostly
with the growing suspicion that I was meant to be admiring
the biography’s subject. With Bukowski, this isn’t an easy
position to take, but in any case the unusual relationship
between biographer and biographee here made it seem not just
inappropriate to admire Buk, but positively wrong. In some
places, I felt I was being hoodwinked. In others, I felt a
stabbing pain in my left buttock, but that was the spring
again.
Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. I enjoyed this
book. The story it tells is half Chaplinesque struggle for
survival and half drink-addled near-disaster. It made me
turn its pages and it stopped me from putting it down unless
I had very good, extra-bibliographic reason for doing so.
Even the spring didn’t distract. The characterisation of the
figures within it was vivid and tangible. Even despite of
the merging of layers of reality that seems to have been the
trademark of Bukowski’s life, as well as the superabundance
of people called Linda, thanks to Sounes’ clarity of
depiction it was easy enough, for the most part, to follow
who was who among the tangled cast of dramatis personae and
relevance of each to the Bukowski story.
The figure of Bukowski – author of six novels, one
screenplay, many short stories and crate after crate full of
poetry – came across as an unreconstructed, macho male whose
honesty was brutal and who needed booze like he needed air.
‘Hemingway with a sense of humour’, would have been a
description that would not have displeased old Hank. So far
so good.
Of course, we readers are warned off judging books by their
covers; and, fittingly, the manner in which books should be
bound and presented is a concern that repeatedly surfaces
throughout the text, including in the prologue.
Mr Sounes is at pains to point out that the predominance of
yellow in the jacket design is no accident: it was
Bukowski’s favourite colour. The cover photo of Buk,
ill-favoured and startling (more mafia don than poet), shows
him wearing a yellow shirt, and the sleeve is yellow too.
The ungainly title of the book is meant to be the sort of
title Bukowski (or, more accurately, his publisher John
Martin), might have bestowed upon the volume.
Already, there’s the suspicion that we’ve drifted from
impartial account to tribute. Sounes goes on to say that,
despite being an Englander, he’s adopted American spelling
and phrasing and uses idiomatic terms that Bukowski would
have employed, in order that the subject’s voice shouldn’t
jar against that of the biographer, and ‘like Bukowski’,
Sounes uses short, simple sentences and brief chapters.
It would be easy enough, as reader, to acquiesce and plough
on, but wait a minute – what’s that, Howard? You’re aping
the style of the person you’re writing about? Isn’t there
something rather embarrassing about that? Aside from the
argument that by contrasting the narrator’s style with the
voice of the biographical subject one can accentuate both,
since when did I need the writer’s voice to mimic his
subject? If, say, Peter Ackroyd, writing about the East End
of London, were suddenly to come over all gor’-blimey-guvnor,
I’d surely wince. Would this be a technique you’d ever dream
of employing were there a racial divide between subject and
biographer?
Moreover, Sounes bans source notes until the end of the
book, so as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative, and
he says ‘one of the most pleasing reviews came when a critic
in the magazine Deluxe wrote that Lost In The Arms Of A
Crazy Life reads like a great lost Bukowski novel’.’ All a
bit rum, no? To what extent is this book biography, and to
what extent pastiche? Sounes admits that he became obsessed
with Bukowski, regarding his day job with the same dreary
eye Buk did, and tossing it in with a flourish in much the
same way, several chapters later, as Buk is described as
having done. On his way to meet Buk’s ex, to whom Sounes is
clearly drawn personally, as well as professionally, he eats
‘a Bukowskian meal of a steak dinner, washed down with many
drinks (curiously, I had started to copy Bukowski’s personal
habits)’. All put together, this modus operandi seems
cuckooish. I began to conceive of Sounes as a stalker,
rather than a personal historian, the sort who might change
his name to Charles Bukowski and bid for his hero’s bed if
it came up at auction. The thoroughness of the excellent
selection of photographs in the book, many taken by Sounes
himself, now seemed like evidence of something sinister.
See, the trouble with using this approach to biography
(making a biography look like a novel) in relation to this
particular writer is that Bukowski himself spent his whole
life churning out literature that was right on the line
between fact and falsehood, stretching the definition of
fiction in the manner of a juvenile creative writing student
who fails to disguise the fact that they’re finessing
reality rather than imagining anything new.
Writing a biography of Charles Bukowski must be an
unrewarding task – Bukowski has done it all already.
Consider the broad strokes: Henry Charles Bukowski is a
charismatic, hard-drinking, boorish womaniser with a blue
collar and a literary bent. When he writes, he writes the
character of a hard-drinking, boorish womaniser with a blue
collar and a literary bent, but in a fiendish masterstroke
of concealment he changes the name of the protagonist to
Henry Chinaski. As this book shows, the population of his
six novels is real people in scanty camouflage, doing things
they did in real life, more-or-less, in the same places, and
renamed in such a way that it doesn’t take a literary Holmes
to discover who’s who. Girlfriend Linda, for example,
becomes, in the text, girlfriend Lydia. Physical
characteristics and personal circumstances are imported
wholesale. The situations Bukowski writes – from instances
of love-making to all-details-great-and-small of menial jobs
– are close facsimiles of what really happened. Sounes says
that one of the reasons that he felt compelled to write this
book is precisely because of this closeness between fact and
fiction – he felt readers wanted to know the truth of what
had happened. But his approach is to start behaving like
Bukowski and writing like Bukowski, resulting in a book
about Bukowski’s experiences that, despite being
biographical, gains accolades for seeming to be a novel,
which is surely what Buk himself was doing. Is this normal?
One cannot quite picture Lytton Strachey dragging up as
Florence Nightingale and wandering around Scutari with a
lamp in order to write Eminent Victorians, and, to my
knowledge, Bill Bryson attempted to compose Shakespeare in
neither fourteen line stanzas nor dramatic verse. Imitation
is flattery writ large – of course it is. Sounes isn’t
merely recording Bukowski’s life: he’s celebrating it.
Top |
1/3 |
Next Page>
|
