Happy Birthday Henry Chinaski! Bukowski’s Literary Twin Turns 60

Chinaski made his debut in 1965’s Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts, Bukowski’s first book of prose

Although Charles Bukowski’s first two published works were short stories, by the late 1950s he had largely given up on prose and dove headfirst into poetry. If Bukowski’s goal was getting published, the changeup was a fastball with his poems appearing in over 150 publications between 1957 and 1965.

Bukowski did sprinkle seven pieces of what could be considered prose into magazines during those years, but the first piece that seemed to resonate with readers appeared in Ole No. 2 in 1965. “A Rambling Essay On Poetics And The Bleeding Life Written While Drinking A Six-Pack (Tall)” was framed as an essay, but the piece was autobiographical, rebellious, and touched on women, drinking and being down and out – themes that would be hallmarks of his future short stories, novels and screenplays.

A significant portion of the essay focused on his shift from short stories to poetry and his hesitation to undertake a literary form that was largely associated with “sissies.” By today’s standards, some of the lines could be considered homophobic, but his beef was really about the flowery nature of poems and the resulting image it created in modern society.

“I wrote short stories and printed them out in longhand because I had no typewriter and often no address, and I imagine many fat warm editor had his laugh and threw them away, except Whit Burnett of the old STORY magazine who seemed interested in a kind of amused off-hand fashion, and I threw them away too when they came back – and he finally took one. Yet I had been thinking of poetry for some time. It was back there in my skull somewhere… But, hell, you know America. They tell you, essentially, that the poet is a sissy. Somewhere along the line, somewhere from the schoolyard on up they get to you. They tell you, essentially, that the poet is a sissy. And they are not always wrong. One time, in my madness, I happened to take a course in Creative Writing at L.A. City College. They were sissies, baby! Simpering, pretty, gutless wonders. Writing about the lovely spiders and flowers and stars, and family picnics.”

Ole publisher Doug Blazek was thrilled with the piece and encouraged Bukowski to write more prose – even suggesting a novel. Bukowski was skeptical, but he too was taken back by the response he received.

“I get these letters on the essay I wrote for Ole #2 and they seem to think I said something,” he wrote Blazek on April, 17, 1965. “I am a fucking oracle (oriol?) for the LOST or something, is what they tell me. that’s nice. But I AM THE LOST.”

It took a bit more coaxing, but when Blazek told Bukowski he would publish a book of his prose, Bukowski got on board. The book would be titled, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts.

“On Confessions, of course, I’m glad you accept,” Bukowski wrote Blazek at the end of April. “actually, it’s going to destroy a lot of IMAGE that has been built up and it’s going to make me freer to move around. yes, I know that any section could be extended, and there were more acts to add, I think of them now: the gang of facists who carried guns, screamed heil Hitler!, drank wine; hanging posters in New York City subways; coconut man in a cake factory; the colored maid with big legs who fucked me in a St. Louis hotel; a Fort Worth redhead; myself insane in Dallas and more more more, the things that happen to almosy everybody while they are waiting for the executioner.”

In a mimeograph flyer sometime after that point, Blazek announced he would be publishing two books, one by Bukowski and the other by William Wantling, a writer who influenced Bukowski and with whom he corresponded with frequently.

In describing the books, Blazek wrote:

these bks will be long enough
so as to have cohesion & get
the reader involved, yet short
enough so as to not grow tedious.

In regard to Bukowski’s book, Blazek wrote:

CHARLES BUKOWSKI WILL BE THE AUTHOR OF THE SECOND BK – a long rambling essay of the type which appears in OLE # 2.

Each book would sell for $1 with Wantling’s book coming out in April and Bukowski’s “about two months later.”

Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts was eventually published August, which was still very impressive considering Blazek held down a full-time factory job. The short delay must have been refreshing for Bukowski since his earlier books usually took over a year to publish.

Although this was Bukowski’s first book of prose, Confessions is a portal into the future of Bukowski’s short stories, novels and screenplays. It also introduces us to Henry Chinaski, the main character in those stories.

Confessions is broken up into 9 parts, each offering a vignette on Bukowski’s life up to that point. The writing itself is unconventional, reflecting Bukowski’s long-poem style with its fast-paced rhythm.

Part 1 starts off with his childhood, which would later be immortalized in the novel Ham on Rye:

“I remember jacking-off in the closet after putting on my mother’s high-heels and looking at my legs in the mirror, slowly drawing a cloth up over my legs, higher and higher as if peeking up the legs of a woman…”

In Part 2 we are introduced to K, a fictional Jane Cooney Baker who was Bukowski’s first love. Already the subject of many poems, Baker’s character would later be a primary character in the novel Factotum and the screenplay Barfly:

“1.was an ex-showgirl and she used to show me her 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.”

In Part 3, Bukowski describes his teenage medical procedures for treating boils on his face, a major part of the plot in Ham on Rye and other writings:

“It was like a wood drill, it may have been a wood drill, I could smell the oil burning, and they’d stick that thing into my head into my flesh and it would drill and bring up blood and puss, and I’d sit there the monkey of my soul-string dangling over the edge of a cliff.”

Part 4 centers on the time Bukowski almost died in an L.A. charity ward from blood loss due to massive ulcers from drinking. This scene was the basis for Bukowski’s short story, Life and Death in the Charity Ward, published in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness.

“I got up one night and couldn’t make it to the can. I heaved blood all over the middle of the floor. I fell down and was too weak to get up. I called for a nurse but the doors to the ward were covered with tin and three to six inches thick and they couldn’t hear. A nurse came by about once every two hours to check for corpses. They rolled a lot of the dead out at night. I couldn’t sleep and used to watch them. Slip a guy off the bed and pull him onto the roller and pull the sheet over his head. Those rollers were well oiled.”

In Part 5, Chinaski finds himself working in a slaughterhouse, wrangling with fresh steer carcasses that come at him in a dizzying pace. His job is to hang the dead steers onto hooks inside of a truck, which is hampered by the dullness of the hooks and the toughness of the meat.

I ran towards the truck. The shame of defeat taught me in American schoolyards as a boy told me that I must not drop the steer to the ground because this would prove that I was a coward and not a man and that I didn’t therefore deserve much, just sneers and laughs, you had to be a winner in America, there wasn’t any way out, you had to learn to fight for nothing, don’t question, and besides if I dropped the steer I might have to pick it up, and I knew I could never pick it up.

This scene would later be used by Bukowski in Kid Stardust On The Porterhouse, a short story in Notes of a Dirty Old Man.

Parts 6, 7 and 8 consist of a single plot line, beginning with scenes that would later be included in Barfly before transitioning to scenes that would become parts in Factotum.

The beginning of Part 6 is the basis of the scene where Chinaski meets Wanda in Barfly. As in the screenplay, they meet at a bar and Henry buys Wanda drinks until he’s out of money.

I had been in there for about three hours and buying drinks for the one without a rag on her head. She didn’t look bad: expensive shoes, good legs and tail; just on the edge of falling apart, but then that’s when they look the sexiest – to me.

“That’s it,’ I told her, ‘I’m broke.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“You got a place to stay?”

“Two more days on the rent.”

“You working?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing.”

The woman (who is later identified as Pepper) takes Henry to a store where they load up on essentials. Wanda charges it to Willie Hansen and (in a twist from the film) they head to his place.

In an abrupt transition, we find Chinaski (suitcase in hand) and his new girl showing up at Willie Hansen’s home, which he shares with several down and out women. Henry stands out of sight while Willie greets Pepper. After some pleasantries, she motions Henry inside the house. Willie pours some drinks while Pepper introduces Henry as The Kid, a former boxer.

“I like you,” said Willie, “you look like you’ve been around, you look like you’ve got class. Most people don’t have class. You’ve got class.”

“I don’t know anything about class,” I said, “but I’ve been around.”

We had some more drinks and went into the front room. Willie put on a sailing cap and sat down at an organ and he began playing the organ with his one arm. It was a very loud organ.

Part 7 and 8 take place on Willie’s yacht as later described in Factotum. Willie doesn’t drink while sailing the vessel, so he doesn’t allow the others to drink, although it doesn’t stop them. When one of the girls begins having a mental episode, Willie returns to the dock and leaves for several days, marooning them on the boat with an adequate supply of food and liquor.

“I found I had my green dice on me and we got down on the floor and started a crap game. Everybody was drunk and the girls had all the money, I didn’t have any money, but soon I had quite a bit of money. They didn’t quite understand the game and I explained it to them as we went along and I changed the game as we went along to suit the circumstances.

That’s how Willie found us when he got back – shooting craps and drunk.”

In Part 9, the closing portion of the story, Bukowski reminisces on his marriage to Barbara Frye. These passages cover their first encounter up to their time in Texas, scenes that would later play out in Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office.

“And it’s good to end it right there instead of telling you how I lost it, although it’s something about a Turk who wore a purple stickpin in his tie and had fine manners and culture. I didn’t have a chance. But the Turk wore off too and the last I heard she was in Alaska married to an Eskimo. She sent me a picture of her baby, and she said she was still writing and truly happy. I told her, “Hang tight baby, it’s a crazy world.”

And that, as they say, was that.”

Note: If you can’t obtain the chapbook, Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts can be found in South of No North.

The post Happy Birthday Henry Chinaski! Bukowski’s Literary Twin Turns 60 appeared first on CounterPunch.org.