Free Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes

wouldn’t do at all and got it into her head he might become a commercial artist. He had a modest talent for drawing and, with some schooling, maybe he could get himself a job in an advertising agency, or with a newspaper. She persuaded him to enroll in classes at Los Angeles City College, and started taking him out to galleries.
    The college work involved designing Christmas advertisementsfor Texaco gas stations and Bukowski’s idea, which he thought a good one, was to have a Christmas tree with the Texaco star at the top. The teacher told him he didn’t want designs featuring Christmas trees because Christmas trees were passé. Although he had been doing reasonably well until then, scoring a B average, he lost interest after this and eventually dropped out of the course. But when Christmas rolled around, he was amused to see Texaco stations had posters with a star on a tree.
    ‘Look, baby, my drawing,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you proud of me?’
    ‘You’re always laughing at yourself,’ Barbara replied, exasperated with his lack of ambition.
    She was unable to understand how a man who had been published in a magazine with Jean-Paul Sartre could laze round the house drinking beer and reading the racing form, and was less than impressed when Bukowski went back to work for the post office as a trainee distribution clerk for $1.82 an hour.
    ‘You didn’t turn out the way I thought you would,’ she told him when they were several months into the marriage. ‘I expected you to be more fiery, more explosive.’
    For his part, Bukowski was becoming irritated by what he perceived as Barbara’s phoniness. He noticed she affected a fake English accent to answer the telephone. She never knew when he was being funny. Conversely, she thought he was joking when he was serious. In fact, the more he thought about her personality, the less he liked it. She was a ‘cold, vindictive, unkind, snob bitch’.
    ‘He was a screwball,’ says Barbara’s aunt, Leah Belle Wilson, who received a visit from the couple in San Bernardino. Bukowski was surly and uncommunicative and, when she tried to engage him in conversation about his work, just chit chat – did he like his job? – he grunted that he didn’t want to talk about it and began reading a comic book instead. Barbara attempted to excuse her husband saying he was a writer, a dreamer, ‘a child who has never grown up’. But Aunt Leah Belle thought him plain rude. It certainly wasn’t the way folks carried on back in Texas. ‘He wasn’t very friendly,’ she says. ‘He was like an outsider.’
    When they had first got married, sex was so good Bukowski decided Barbara was a nymphomaniac. Then she frightened him by saying they should be thinking about having children. He wasset against the idea and began to withdraw before ejaculation, the only form of contraception he was willing to try. It wasn’t easy to get the timing right and he worried Barbara would trick him into coming inside her. When she did become pregnant, she miscarried their baby. Bukowski blamed himself, believing the amount of alcohol he had drunk over the years had damaged his sperm in some way. Barbara blamed him, too. She took a lover and began divorce proceedings, accusing Bukowski of subjecting her to mental cruelty, a charge which upset him because, whatever his shortcomings, he didn’t feel he’d mistreated her.
    The divorce was finalized on 18 March, 1958, two years and four months after their wedding. It seemed he wouldn’t be getting his hands on those Texas millions after all, as he wrote in one of his most sardonic poems, ‘The Day I Kicked Away a Bankroll’:
    … you can take your rich aunts and uncles
    and grandfathers and fathers
    and all their lousy oil
    and their seven lakes
    and their wild turkey
    and buffalo
    and the whole state of Texas,
    meaning, your crow-blasts
    and your Saturday night boardwalks,
    and your 2-bit library
    and your crooked councilmen
    and your pansy artists –
    you