The hunchback of East Hollywood

As we saw in my review of The Lennon Prophecy last week (which book postulates that John’s murder in 1980 was the end result of a pact with Satan), the bare facts of any celebrity’s life are open to drastic reinterpretation after they die.

Charles Bukowski is notable, among other reasons, for the almost entirely autobiographical nature of his writing. He wrote about his life and wrote about his life, every single part of his life. So far I have always been disappointed with myself for one reason or another whenever I buy a book claiming to be his “biography.”

I’ve done it three times so far, beginning with Howard Sounes’ Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, which was disappointing because it retold all the stories from Bukowski’s prose and poetry in a factual, clinical kind of way, and made me feel foolish for paying to hear them again. Moving on then to Steve Richmond’s Spinning Off Bukowski, which I read and sort of liked, then ended up selling to a used bookstore and now I’m considering buying it back again, and most recently to Aubrey Malone’s The Hunchback of East Hollywood. What a title!

Hunchback is replete with eccentric syntactical behavior—like these two examples from page 67—“He also had mixed feelings about Norse himself, with whom he had so much.” (?!?) or “particularly when hank had drink taken”—that might cause the reader to question Malone’s worthiness of Bukowski’s raw details to write about, besides which he continually slanders Italian journalist Fernanda Pivano, with repeated mock-knowing references to a Fernando Pivano.  Stuff like that was disappointing, and I’ll admit it took me a while to enjoy this book (having been put off by an early assertion about Bukowski’s childhood—that he went by the nickname “Heinie” for a time), but I kept at it, and after a couple of days, I was about halfway through and it felt all right.

Pontificating knowingly about the dead—in particular, somebody dead whose greatest act in life had to do with his chosen method of telling you all about himself, who was supremely his own best biographer in that sense—has a hollow sort of ring (Malone did that sometimes too). But if I accept that bit about our details being up for grabs post-mortem, if I recognize the natural relativity of history, then I have to admit that The Hunchback of East Hollywood is at least as good as Spinning Off Bukowski (which wasn’t that bad, but not great either). I asked Gerald Locklin about Bukowski in our interview.  They were friends for a long time.  I’m barely a drinker myself, and I’ve never been to a race-track (Bukowski loved to play the horses), so I have to pick and choose my favorite bits, but he published more than forty books during his lifetime, and the posthumous poetry keeps on coming.

CLICK HERE TO READ AN INTERVIEW WITH BUKOWSKI FRIEND AND FREQUENT CHIRON REVIEW POETRY EDITOR GERALD LOCKLIN