Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life

by Howard Sounes

Overview

A former postman and long-term alcoholic who did not become a full-time writer until middle age, Charles Bukowski was the author of autobiographical novels that captured the low life—including Post Office, Factotum, and Women—and made him a literary celebrity, with a major Hollywood film (Barfly) based on his life. Drawing on new interviews with virtually all of Bukowski's friends, family, and many lovers; unprecedented access to his private letters and unpublished writing; and commentary from Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, R. Crumb, and Harry Dean Stanton, Howard Sounes has uncovered the extraordinary true story of the Dirty Old Man of American literature. Illustrated with drawings by Bukowski and over sixty photographs, Charles Bukowski is a must for Bukowski devotees and new readers alike. As the Los Angeles Times noted, "Bukowski is one of those writers people remember more for the legend than for the work....but, as Howard Sounes shows in this exhaustively researched biography, it wasn't the whole story."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802136978
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	05/02/2000
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

What People are Saying About This

John Martin

Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life is a generous tribute to Bukowski's genius and it clearly and truthfully captures the essence of Bukowski both as writer and man.
— (John Martin, Bukowski's lifelong editor-publisher and literary executor)

Editorial Reviews

Exhilarating, hilarious and often emotionally draining, this superb biography of the maverick, hard-bitten bard of the Los Angeles demimonde uncorks a potent brew of wild, antiheroic anecdotes. Sounes (Fred & Rose) often corrects Bukowskis version of events, without deflating the writer or losing sympathy for his often depressing life, from his sad, twisted childhood (complete with regular beatings) in Los Angeles to his discovery of both alcohol and literature as a teen. Dropping out of L.A. City College in 1940, Bukowski was classified 4-F, went on the road and worked odd jobs, all the while mailing poems and stories to little magazines. At age 27, Bukowski (1920-1994) had his first relationship with a woman, the alcoholic and routinely unfaithful Jane Cooney Baker, who became a prototype for his female characters. He wrote his first novel, Post Office (1971), in only three weeks, and his autobiographical screenplay for Barbet Schroeders film Barfly (1987) brought him, improbably, into the Hollywood circle. Sounes spent two years interviewing more than 100 people, including women in Bukowskis tangled love life, who provide intimate details. Peering nonjudgmentally down every avenue of grief and despair, Sounes improves on previous books on Bukowski by Neeli Cherkovski, Steve Richmond and Russell Harrison. After reading Souness account, it is difficult to agree with his subjects self-assessment that, despite a prolific output of over a thousand poems, six novels and several collections of stories, I wont be leaving much. Something to read, maybe. A wild onion in the gutted road. Paris in the dark. More than 70 illustrations, including R. Crumb art and several previously unpublished photos of key people in the poets life. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Bukowski has always had a cult following, but he is probably best known from Mickey Rourke's portrayal of him in the Hollywood movie Barfly. Sounes, a British journalist, relies on interviews and correspondence with friends and lovers as well as material from Bukowski's highly autobiographical works to create a lively portrait of American literature's "Dirty Old Man." Sounes documents Bukowski's joyless childhood (the result of an abusive father and a severe case of acne), his struggle to support himself at low-paying jobs (including a stultifying stretch at the Post Office), his lifelong battle with alcoholism, and his belated rise to celebrity. Much of the book reads like a history of sexual conquests as Bukowski makes a startling transformation from Quasimoto to Casanova along the road to fame and prosperity. Fans who enjoyed Neeli Cherkovski's Hank (LJ 1/91) will welcome this fresh look at Bukowski's life.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal

...[E]ngaging....Sounes...[reveals] a more sensitive and vulnerable artist than the virile, down-and-out he-man persona Bukowski so dilegently created.
— The New York Times Book Review

John D. Thomas

A soberly investigated picaresque life of the barfly author of Notes of a Dirty Old Man. For those critics who felt that Bukowski buddy Neeli Cherkovski's colorful but less than rigorous Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (1991) lacked objective distance, London journalist Sounes has enough to offset his hero-worship of the womanizing, dipsomaniacal, down-and-out poet-novelist. Bukowski is probably best known from his self-portrait of an alcoholic in the movie Barfly, but his almost lifelong problems with alcohol, money, women, an abusive father, and a menial job at the post office never slowed a prolific output of poems, short stories, and novels. With such a disreputably mythic author, whose works are both transparently autobiographical and scabrously candid, this book's task is not to dig up dirt on the subject, but to find out which dirt is the real dirt. Sounes, whose previous book, the true crime Fred & Rose (not reviewed), detailed a respectable married couple's mass killings, steadies stories of Bukowski's outrageous antics (getting beer cans thrown at him during a boozy poetry reading, for instance) with the dogged journalistic work of tracing paper trails, from public records to Bukowski's correspondence and unpublished writing, and interviewing his surviving family, friends, colleagues, and ex-girlfriends. Some (self-perpetuated) myths are brought down quickly, such as Bukowski's illegtimacy. Other revelations give more substance to the Bukowski legend, such as how careful he was in fact with his money even when playing the horses, how dedicated he was to his writing even when he couldn't hold down a steady job during the "barfly" years, and how close he really was tobeing fired when he finally quit the post office to write full-time. Despite its often fannish tone, a biography that listens to Bukowski's all-night barroom anecdotes and then checks the facts the morning after. (b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)

Kirkus Reviews