Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (113 page)

Asimov was married twice and is recorded as being a ‘claustrophile’, phobic about flying (he took to the air only twice in his life), agnostic (‘Humanist’ was his term), an admirer of P. G. Wodehouse, and grotesquely malcoordinated physically. Michael White’s ‘unauthorised’ biography (1994) sprinkles some blackwash on the Asimov image. He was promiscuously unfaithful in his first marriage, although uxorious in the second. He underwent bloody tenure and promotion battles at Boston
University – who never, in his view, fully ‘respected’ his genius. He tried to dodge the draft in 1941 – and, finally, his ‘Three Laws’ may not have been his original idea. None the less, Asimov’s greatness survives the odd black spot on it.

He died of Aids acquired from a bad blood transfusion during a heart bypass operation in 1983. The fact was revealed only ten years after his death, to protect the reputation of his doctors – and, one suspects,
his
posthumous reputation. His collected papers, donated to his Boston University alma mater, occupy 71 metres of shelf-space. Elsewhere in the Library there are printed volumes by him in nine out of the ten Dewey Decimal classification categories: a record.

The Louis Armstrong of SF.
Kingsley Amis

Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois (the Green Town of his fiction), where his father worked as a telephone lineman. The family, uprooted by the Depression, moved nomadically during Ray’s childhood, mainly between Illinois and Arizona, a state whose desert landscapes influenced the author’s later depictions of Mars. Bradbury claimed to have picked up his impressive learning from ‘Carnegies’ (public libraries) and his lifelong dedication to science fiction from coming across copies of Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
at the age of six. Equally precociously, he was writing his own stories in the genre at eleven. As a child Ray was fascinated by magic and, like others of his generation, was entranced by the ‘Century of Progress’ exhibit at World’s Fair in Chicago, 1933.

Eventually the family settled in southern California in 1934. This was to be Bradbury’s home and literary base for the rest of his life. He left school at thirteen; there was no question of college. He haunted public libraries and sold newspapers on street corners. His first SF story was published in 1938 and in 1941 he attended a writing class run by Robert A. Heinlein, already a star of the genre. He would be, however, the least formulaic of writers in an overwhelmingly formulaic genre. Bradbury’s philosophy was: ‘When writing, just jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.’ Forrest J. Ackerman was helpful at this stage of Bradbury’s career,
promoting him on the fanzine and word-of-mouth networks which ‘SF’s number one fan’ (as Ackerman was called) had mobilised in the Los Angeles area – along with the world’s greatest collection of genre memorabilia. Bradbury was rejected for military service in the Second World War on grounds of poor eyesight. Literature was the gainer. At the same period – 1942 – he took up writing full-time, turning out a string of short stories for the pulps and slicks which were booming during the war. A favourite outlet was
Weird Tales
, whose title neatly defines the Bradbury style.

He married in 1947, having met his future wife, Marguerite (‘Maggie’) McClure (1922–2003) in a bookshop where, initially, she mistook him for a shoplifter – shabbily trench-coated as he was in the burning Californian sun. After marriage, Maggie helped support her husband, working in an advertising agency, while he stayed at home to write. ‘Had she not,’ as one obituary wittily put it, ‘the proverbial butterfly would have been squashed and the future of high-imaginative literature would have been altered for all time.’ They would eventually have four daughters together and, at their most populous, twenty-two cats – Mrs Bradbury loved the beasts. Judging by the eight-legged, robotically venomous Mechanical Hound in
Fahrenheit 451
, Ray seems to have shared a feline dislike of all things canine. Bradbury admitted infidelities to his biographer, but the marriage, which lasted fifty-six years, manifestly survived them.

Recognition of his talent came early – as it often does in SF, with its highly developed critical and word-of-mouth circuits. He won an O. Henry Award in 1948 and a ‘best author’ award from the National Fantasy Fan Federation a year later. In 1950 Bradbury broke through into international fame with
The Martian Chronicles
, a collection which was ‘made’ by an influential review from Christopher Isherwood. The stories in the volume compose a haunting panorama of pioneer life on a Mars which is alternately Edenic and horrific. Bradbury’s most famous novel,
Fahrenheit 451
(1953), a fable of book-burning in the future, targeted the current McCarthyite witch-hunting in the United States and satirised the intellectually numbing spread of television, and its destruction, as Bradbury saw it, of print culture. ‘I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it,’ he said. He could also misunderstand it.

At this period Bradbury was recruited to work in film. Among other assignments, he wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s
Moby Dick
(1956). When he confessed to the director that he’d never read Melville’s novel, he was assured it was OK: the studio paid people to do that kind of thing for you. His own work was also successfully filmed, notably
Fahrenheit 451
, directed by François Truffaut, in 1966. In later life, Bradbury’s knees buckled with the honours with which SF loves to load its most admired practitioners. His great achievement, particularly in the shorter fiction was to raise the quality of writing in the genre, opening the way to
the literary experimentations of New Wave writers in the 1970s and 1980s. Bradbury liberated SF from the accusation made by Kurt Vonnegut (in the person of his SF hack ‘Kilgore Trout’) that its writers had great ideas, but couldn’t write worth a damn.

In a genre preoccupied with technology and hardware, Bradbury was unusual in never having a driving licence and not flying (and then very reluctantly) on an aeroplane until he was sixty-two. Arthur C. Clarke, an enthusiast for gadgetry, gave him a laptop computer, only to discover, as Bradbury’s biographer records, that ‘he used it as a drink coaster’. Bradbury suffered a devastating stroke in 1999, which left him able only to communicate by pen and pad. He none the less contrived to write fiction, even in this terminal condition. All he had ever needed was pen, paper, imagination and a mental cliff to fall off.

I can’t see any other place than L.A.

James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
actually opens with the portrait of the artist as a baby. Little Stephen sits alongside the family feet as they argue – passionately – about Ireland and the Parnell scandal. Charles Bukowski’s portrait of himself as a young man in
Ham on Rye
(1982), opens, allusively, with much the same scene:

The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there. I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany … I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there.

Say ‘Hank Bukowski’ and most readers will think ‘Barfly, Bum, Bohemian’ – not a lover of Joyce.
Ham on Rye
, dedicated to the author’s early years, is so-called because he’s Los Angeles through and through, but German (rye bread) by origin. Bukowski had many gifts, not least for resonant titles such as this: for example,
Crucifix in a Deathhand; At Terror Street and Agony Way; All the Assholes in the World and Mine; Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness
.
But, many will think, the title which sums up his life work best is that of the column which he wrote for many years in a semi-underground newspaper, ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’.

The DOM was born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, the son of a German mother and a German-American serviceman serving in Europe after the First World War. He claimed – frequently – to have been ‘bastardised’ by his ‘monster father’ but his Catholic parents were in fact decently married and considerably less monstrous than he paints them. The Bukowskis moved to Maryland in 1923, where Heinrich Karl became Henry (‘Hank’) Charles, although his parents’ habit of dressing him as a ‘German’ led to bullying and a solitary early childhood. It was not helped by disfiguring acne – a lifelong affliction: he was ‘so ugly’, he said, ‘that girls spit on my shadow’. His pimples were the ‘size of apples’ and left volcanic craters still visible on photographs of his face sixty years later. In 1930 the Bukowskis moved on to Los Angeles. An early chapter in
Ham on Rye
describes his father being humiliated stealing oranges, by a gun-wielding farmer, who did not take kindly to citrus poaching. He claims thereafter to have despised his parent and to have suffered beatings from him – ‘a cruel shiny bastard with bad breath’, and not that much of a provider. Aged sixteen, as he proudly recalls, he knocked the shiny bastard out and the beatings stopped. At the same time, he discovered his love of alcohol. Like LA, it would be his friend for life.

Dyslexia, a dysfunctional family, and disrespect for all authority made him an awkward child. He recalls bullying and furtive investigations of little schoolmates’ panties. Bukowski left Los Angeles High School to study journalism at community college, but he soon dropped out and picked up menial work where he could. These drop-out years are commemorated in Bukoswski’s 1975 novel,
Factotum
. Although in free fall socially, he was reading widely and intelligently and it was in the LA Public Library that he came across the author who would be most influential on his mature writing, John Fante – specifically Fante’s novel
Ask the Dust
(1939). Fante cultivated a style of fragmented immediacy, with low-life LA settings and a high autobiographical element (there was 93 per cent autobiography in his own fiction, Bukowski later calculated).

Bukowski did not quite dodge the draft, but he more or less evaded it, letting others fight for America. He occasionally voiced a liking for Hitler. ‘If he had any politics he was a fucking fascist,’ observed one friend. Psychiatrists judged him, eventually, unfit to serve. ‘Extreme sensitivity’ was the odd reason recorded on the report. Sex may have come into it. He did not, as he liked to confess, get laid until he was twenty-three. His early attempts at writing were everywhere rejected and over the next decade he went into a long debauch – his ‘barfly’ years, as he called them. He
had by now dropped ‘Henry’ in favour of ‘Charles’ in his pen name. Henry reminded him too much of his father, he said. He nevertheless kept the family first name in his fictional alter ego (and hero of five of his six novels), ‘Henry Chinaski’. Over these years he kept body and soul together with short-term ‘shit jobs’. He roomed in crummy lodging houses, bummed around America, and was regularly in and out of the drunk tank. When he had money, he drank it or lost it at the race track – his other addiction.

In these early vagrant years Bukowski came across another work which would contribute to his own distinct style, Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
. His experiences in the lower depths of Los Angeles furnished him with the store of material he would recycle, and lavishly exaggerate, in his later writing. It was during this period that he fell in with his first long-time partner, Jane Cooney Baker. Like Bukowski, she was alcoholic, morally dissolute and considerably less of a catch than Faye Dunaway, who plays her in the 1987 film
Barfly
. He regarded her as his muse and used her as his bed-warming room-mate for five years. But Baker lacked Bukowski’s canny survival instincts and their dissipation
à deux
broke up and she drank herself to death a couple of years later.

Bukowski lavished Baker’s memory with elegies and then went on to marry the poet Barbara Frye in 1957. Physically deformed, acutely shy, Frye had never even had a boyfriend before Bukowski. The marriage lasted two years. In the early 1950s Bukowski had entered the employment of the US Mail, as a postal sorter and carrier. He would toss parcels around by night, and write furiously by day, honing the image of himself as hell-raising, bohemian, barfly
maudit
. This ten-year stint is commemorated in his first novel,
Post Office
(1971). The rise of the Beats (to whom Bukowski owed no literary allegiance, or respect, whatsoever) created a cultural environment favourable to Bukowski’s idiosyncratic West Coast bohemianism. Wild men were in. The difference between him and Kerouac was that he was really wild, not a mama’s boy.

His poems were at last being picked up by the small magazines which were thriving at the time. His first chapbook,
Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail
, was published in 1959. At around the same time, the death of his father brought him a handsome $15,000 nest egg, which he prudently squirrelled away for a rainy day. Making up for lost time, Bukowski consoled himself with a string of partners by one of whom, Frances Smith, he had a daughter. According to Howard Sounes, the first word the little girl learned to read was ‘liquor’. Smith was herself a well-regarded hippy poet and was instrumental in getting the bearishly anti-social Bukowski talked about where it mattered. At this period, encouraged by one of his small-press patrons, he began writing short pieces of autobiographical fiction around the character ‘Henry
Chinaski’. They were collected as
Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with Beasts
(1965). His growing profile in avant-garde West Coast circles led to what would go on to be a career-long association with the most distinguished of the 1960s small presses, Black Sparrow. Guaranteed payment allowed Bukowski, at the age of fifty, to leave the Post Office and, at last, write full time.