The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounces
Ben Donnelly

Howard Sounces. Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. Grove, 1998. 310 pp. $26.00.

While an author can’t dig up dirt on a self-professed dirty old man, Howard Sounces’s biography of Charles Bukowski, like the old man himself, has an objectivity that makes squalidness fascinating. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life does justice to a life that was miserable for fifty years, then had a second act of rising contentedness.
The blunt self-image Bukowski created doesn’t leave much room for biographical analysis. What Sounces adds is the depiction of the whole career, the sense that “this bum is going to make it.” We see the teen with debilitating acne, the suicidal wanderer, the enslaved post office clerk, the race-form scouring ladies man, and the semi-reluctant celebrity. All familiar Bukowski characters, but here they grow one from the other. That continuity is absent from the author’s own work.
Like cigarettes, Bukowski hooks most of his victims at a young age, and often gets dismissed as a bad habit. He is the father of transgressive fiction, the gross-out trend in which incestuous circus freaks provide first-person narrative. But who can out-freak a man whose first wife lacked a neck? And who got a rejection slip from Hustler magazine for being too harsh? Although Bukowski’s work appears shameless, the baldest attempts to shock are never poseurish. His stamina in the face of (often self-imposed) grotesquery is spectacular, though best not admired.
A revelation: Bukowski was probably not an alcoholic. Abstinence came in easy stretches throughout his life. He was a respectable father, too. Still, on the occasion of making crude, day-long passes at a woman by defaming her recently dead husband, he was capable of all the savagery his image suggested. Deeply anti-intellectual, he was never anti-aesthetic: he knew about art and he knew what he liked. [Ben Donnelly]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life by Howard Sounces Ben Donnelly Howard Sounces. Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life. Grove, 1998. 310 pp. $26.00. While an author can’t dig up dirt on a self-professed dirty old man, Howard Sounces’s biography of Charles Bukowski, like the old man himself, has an objectivity that makes squalidness fascinating. Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life does justice to a life that was miserable for fifty years, then had a second act of rising contentedness. The blunt self-image Bukowski created doesn’t leave much room for biographical analysis. What Sounces adds is the depiction of the whole career, the sense that “this bum is going to make it.” We see the teen with debilitating acne, the suicidal wanderer, the enslaved post office clerk, the race-form scouring ladies man, and the semi-reluctant celebrity. All familiar Bukowski characters, but here they grow one from the other. That continuity is absent from the author’s own work. Like cigarettes, Bukowski hooks most of his victims at a young age, and often gets dismissed as a bad habit. He is the father of transgressive fiction, the gross-out trend in which incestuous circus freaks provide first-person narrative. But who can out-freak a man whose first wife lacked a neck? And who got a rejection slip from Hustler magazine for being too harsh? Although Bukowski’s work appears shameless, the baldest attempts to shock are never poseurish. His stamina in the face of (often self-imposed) grotesquery is spectacular, though best not admired. A revelation: Bukowski was probably not an alcoholic. Abstinence came in easy stretches throughout his life. He was a respectable father, too. Still, on the occasion of making crude, day-long passes at a woman by defaming her recently dead husband, he was capable of all the savagery his image suggested. Deeply anti-intellectual, he was never anti-aesthetic: he knew about art and he knew what he liked. [Ben Donnelly]

Search the full text of our books: