A special
Hollywood Investigator report ... appearing for
the first time anywhere:
WHEN BUKOWSKI WAS A NAZI,
Part 1
by Ben Pleasants, guest contributor.
[April 8, 2003]
[HollywoodInvestigator.com] The subject of Nazism came up first at Canter's, a famous Jewish restaurant
on Fairfax. Bukowski and I were both working at the LA Free Press
in Hollywood, and we were preparing a symposium on LA Poets including Gerald
Locklin, Steve Richmond, Ron Koertge, and Bukowski, all Wormwood poets. I was to conduct the interview.
"Symposium means with drinks," Bukowski barked at the editor, Penny Grenoble. "Beer in bottles. Pabst Blue Ribbon."
Penny, who had graduated with a PhD. from RPI, agreed. "We'll have
lots of beer in bottles, I promise. And don't worry about your column. You'll get your regular pay. The Symposium will fill the space of Notes
of a Dirty Old Man next week. You'll get paid and you won't have
to
write a thing. Okay, Mr. Bukowski?”
They had a playful relationship, the slender and beautiful editor dressed
in high fashion and still in her twenties, and the fiftyish satyr in down
at
the heel shoes and khaki pants.
Bukowski gave her a mock grimace: "You're not trying to edge me out
now, are you?"
The editor of the Free Press laughed. "You're the mainstay of our
adult pages. How could I do that? And we'll require the usual
Bukowski drawings."
We agreed to conduct the interview on tape. Bukowski suggested the
two of us meet a few days before to go over the ground rules. At
that time he was living on Carlton Way in East Hollywood and I was in Beverly
Hills on South Doheny Drive. When he suggested Canter's, somewhere
in the middle, I told him I didn't much like Jewish food. He said
he found the place entertaining, especially the hefty waitresses in gravy-stained
uniforms marching around with huge trays of roast beef and whipped potatoes.
"They have good pastrami," he said. "And besides, they have a bakery."
He knew I had a weakness for pastry.
We showed up at noon a few days later, both ordering pastrami on rye with
whipped
potatoes and beer. One of the hefty waitresses took our order. It was a hot L.A. day and she was sweating in the heat.
While we were waiting for our food to arrive, Bukowski gawked at the predominantly
Jewish diners, and swigging down a brew, yelled loud enough so all could
hear: "TURN ON THE GAS."
No one looked up. I shook my head and refused to laugh.
On heavy drinking nights at his place in Hollywood, he had often howled
at
the Hollywood Jews and how they had ruined one writer after another, from
Fante to Saroyan to William Faulkner. I agreed with him it was not
a nice business.
The sandwiches on the menus were all named after Hollywood Jews: moguls,
directors, actors, and comedians. One was the Buck Benny. That
was a hot dog, the cheapest meal. I tried to change the subject by
mentioning
the time I saw Jack Benny on Spaulding Drive floating along with that delightful
walk he had.
"Never
mind," said Bukowski, dismissing the subject. He didn't want to talk about
Jack Benny. "If those guys [Hollywood Moguls] did a film about the
garment industry, the bad guys would be Eskimos."
That did make me laugh and spit up my beer. I didn't disagree, but
pointed out that Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer didn't justify Hitler.
"What do you have against Hitler?" he asked. "Ever read him?"
I told him no, then confessed a little secret: "I'm a quarter Jewish on
my father's side. My grandmother's family come from a little town
east of Frankfurt on the Main River."
Bukowski laughed. "Being a quarter Jewish is like being a quarter crazy;
it only matters if you take it seriously. My parents were both German
Catholics
and I could give a flying fuck about what they believed. It means
nothing. The important thing is who you are. The Beverly Hills
Anarchist."
He always called me that, even after I'd moved from Beverly Hills. We ate
our pastrami on rye, drank our beer and went on planning the symposium.
It came off as planned on October 14, 1975, with bottled beer spiced with
great humor and vulgarity, decorated with Bukowski's delightful illustrations
and a few amusing photographs.
A few weeks later I suggested to Bukowski that I might want to write his
biography. That was probably the biggest mistake I ever made in my
life:
Getting the facts from a writer of fiction is about as easy as curing herpes,
but as time went by, Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. began to open up the Pandora's
box of his life, Nazis and all.
This is what he told me.
* Young Outcast
From the
time
he was a small boy, Bukowski was super-conscious of being German. He was
an only child whose parents spoke German late into the night as
he slept
in his room next door. At the dinner table, when they didn't want him to
know what they were saying, his parents would "turn on the Deutsch." It was all around him. His grandfather, Leonard Bukowski, and his
grandmother Emile (they were divorced and lived separately), both spoke
German when they came to the house for Christmas.
Leonard, who was from Prussia and had fought in the Franco-Prussian War,
was also a heavy drinker. "When he got drunk," his grandson recalled, "he
would sing old German war songs and put on his war medals."
Then there was Bukowski's mother. He described her as "the prettiest
girl in Andernach." When she received letters from her parents and
brother back home, she would read them over and over, missing her family. This would occasionally annoy her husband, who would shout at his wife:
"You think you're so great because your brother is the Burgermiester of
Andernach." (That proved false, as Heinrich Fett told me himself
when I met him in 1977).
When he
was little, Charles Bukowski was a momma's boy, coddled by his mother;
what irked him most was the intimate conversations his parents had late
at night in a language he could not understand. Henry Sr. was fluent
in German while Henry Jr. could not speak a word of it.
Sometimes, when Katherine was especially lonely and craved German company,
Henry Sr. would take her to the local German meeting place, the Deutsche
Haus,
located at 634 15th Street, close to their home. Here, when he had
a little money, he would treat his wife to a meal, buy her a German magazine,
listen to a German band, or watch a travelogue on what was going
on in Berlin. If they came for lunch on a Sunday after church, Henry
was dragged along, but the long hours of watching people speaking a language
he did not understand, bored him.
Bukowski was always very touchy when people asked him why he had not learned
German. He said his parents discouraged it; they wanted him to speak
perfect English.
He said that after World War One, German was not taught in most public
schools; but both L.A. High School and Los Angeles Community College offered
German.
Bukowski always resented the fact that his father could read and write
German, and when I asked if that's why they kept him on in Coblenz after
the war, he got angry and said, "No. He was only a typist."
Whatever attitude his parents had toward their son learning German, they
did expose him to the Deutsche Haus, a little island of German culture
in a sea of American white bread. There Bukowski discovered German
music,
German films, German food, and German books and magazines, some written
in English. It was there he first observed the German-American Bund
in full uniform. His parents even took him on an outing to Hindenburg
Park in La Crescenta where he celebrated Hitler's birthday with a torchlight
parade. It was the year of the 1936 Olympics.
At his most forgiving, he would say of his parents, "Living in that house
I never learned German except for the songs."
What brought
Bukowski around to the Nazi viewpoint, and more particularly to the ideas
of Adolph Hitler, is hard to say. It began in the depth of his solipsism,
at the time of puberty when his skin erupted and in the eyes of many he
became a monster. Though he says over and over that he was some kind
of leader among the friends he had, their own words betray him as an outcast
and a loner. Girls feared him; teachers taunted him, his fellow students
would talk about him behind his back.
This taught him the lesson of the gifted misanthrope: writing can be the
avenging sword. All the bitterness that welled up in him as he broke
out in boils and huge, exploding pimples, became the fuel that drove his
writing. He looked for writers with similar views and found Celine,
Ezra Pound, Jeffers, Hamsun, and Adolph Hitler.
Nazis loved outcasts. Nazis loved vengeance. Nazis always blamed
their problems on someone else! This pattern repeats itself through
Bukowski's whole life. Here's an example from Mount Vernon High School.
Bukowski told me he had a gym teacher named Wagner who had it in for him:
"My friend Mullinax and I were always in trouble over little things. We were put on the garbage can crew. I forget where we were carrying
them. I guess where they got loaded. There was a place where
the trucks would pick them up. We had to go around carrying these
garbage cans to the loading area. And pick up little pieces of paper
with a sharp stick. It was small things, but we were always on the
outs.
"Especially
with this guy Wagner, the gym guy. He was always on us and we would
have to stay after school. We did nothing, really. We were
just outcasts. We felt it. We didn't have it; they landed on
us. I remember one time I had to stay after school and rake out the
sawdust pit. You get stuff that's fallen in. I made all kinds
of money. I got dimes and nickels. The money looked good. It always did. I remember that was interesting getting all that free
money from raking up the sawdust pit.
"Then,
on Graduation Day, I was standing on line with my friend Baldy and this
guy Arnold Woodchurch and his buddy, who had the longest cock in school. I forget his name. He was always in trouble because the girls were
after him. Anyway, Wagner came up to us in the graduation line and
he walked over to me and said: 'Listen, you guys are graduating. You think you can get away from me, but I'm gonna get you! You can't
get away from me.' This guy was crazy."
When I played back the tape for William "Baldy" Mullinax, he replied: "One
or two times it happened. That's what he remembers from Mount Vernon?" Mullinax recalled the first dance he ever attended, his first girlfriend,
his growing interest in science, while Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. could
only recall his humiliations, his battles against authority, his struggles:
In Hitler's phrase, Mein
Kampf.
Bukowski's one triumph of childhood was his essay on President Hoover and
the L.A. Olympics, though Bukowski had to admit to his teacher, it was
a fiction; he hadn't attended. And then there was the walk he took
from home all the way to the beach with Eugene Fife, who would later become
a Commander in the US Navy.
School for Bukowski was always torture. Later, speaking of poetry,
he told me his one great mission was to "get the bullshit out of it; the
stuff about learning." To Bukowski teaching was a dishonest profession
and those who were scholars were phonies!
Life on the page was about three things: the battle for position, money,
and sex. Out there in the arena of life those were the three things
that mattered.
When I came back with Baldy's corrections, Bukowski got angry and curt
and commanding: "Go find Arnold Woodchurch," he said. "Woodchurch
was laying all the girls. He was doing a lot of fucking and the guy
with the big cock was doing a lot of fucking. I wasn't and Baldy
wasn't. Baldy's pathetic."
Much of Bukowski's high school career in his words and others have been
carefully altered to conceal his humiliations, failures, and loneliness.
The myth that his father forced him to attend Los Angeles High School is
just that: a myth. Bukowski lived walking distance from campus and
was assigned to L.A. High along with his companions, Jim Haddox, Bob Stoner,
Ray Shuwarge, Bill Cobun, Hal Ortner, and Bill Mullinax.
On paper Bukowski was a bright student. He tested well, especially
in language and mathematics, and his father had high hopes that his son
would find his way in the one of the professions. Henry Sr. felt
his son's abilities lay in technology, science, and engineering.
He thought that if he applied himself and kept up with his homework, Henry
Jr. might make it into a good college and become the "success" he was not.
But his son had other ideas.
"My course," Bukowski told me "was mixed up. My father wanted me
to be an engineer. I was taking drafting and Spanish and all.
I ended up in a vocational program because I couldn't pass Spanish and
I didn't like drafting. My father just gave up and said, 'Okay, give
it up.' So I took whatever was easiest. My mother just went
along."
Oddly, when I read Hitler's Mein
Kampf upon Bukowski's request, I came to the following passage:
"My father forbade me to entertain any hope of ever becoming a painter. I went one step farther by declaring that under those circumstances I no
longer wished to study. Naturally, as the result of such declarations,
I got the worst of it and now the old man relentlessly began to enforce
his authority. I remained silent and turned my threats into action. I was certain that, as soon as my father saw my lack of progress in school,
he would let me seek the happiness of which I was dreaming. I do
not know if this reasoning was sound. One thing was certain: my apparent
failure
in school. I learned what I liked, but above all I learned what in
my opinion might be necessary to me in my future career as a painter. In this connection, I sabotaged all that which seemed unimportant or that
which no longer attracted me."
[p.14
of the 1940 Reynal & Hitchcock edition]
I pointed the passage out to Bukowski. "Yeah, I know," he said.
With little homework and no interest in team sports, no job, no clubs,
few friends, and only his chores--which included taking out the garbage,
going to the store, and mowing the lawn once a week--Bukowski had his afternoons
free. These he spent alone at the library at La Brea and Adams, or
as a hanger-on with Baldy, Ray Shumarge, and Jim
Haddox.
Bill Mullinax, who he describes as pathetic in all his poems, stories and
in Ham
on Rye, his childhood novel, was really the popular one. Both
Mullinax and Haddox were in the ROTC Officer's Club by their Junior Year.
Mullinax had various girlfriends including Marla Morton, who wrote him:
"To more and better astounding stories." Lonetha Davidis congratulated
him on his skills in chemistry. Hal Ortner called him his "bosom
pal," while Bob Stoner congratulated him on his success in ROTC and Elaine
Lettice consoled him as a "fellow-sufferer in Geometry." A girl named
Betty wrote: "To a boy who tried to change me and did." She left
her telephone number. Ray Shuwarge wrote: "Be sure and don't join
the navy as you have a good future in the medical field, and I wouldn't
like to see our trio (Lobdell, Ray, Bill) broken up."
There's no mention
of Henry Bukowski, who did not take chemistry or geometry, did not join
Buildings and Grounds along with Mullinax, Haddox, and Shuwarge, and ran
away from girls.
Bukowski did nose around the newspaper, The Blue and White Daily, but disliked
the editors: Matthew Rapf, editor; Morton Cahn, managing editor; sports
editor Melvin Durslag; and news editor Robert Weil.
He told me he read the Examiner at the time because William Randolph Hearst
published Hitler and Mussolini, though he fired Hitler because he missed
his deadlines!
One student he did single out, but not as a friend, was Harold Mortenson,
treasurer of the Senior Class. "I knew an honor student," he told
me. "He got straight A's. His name was Mortenson. I forget
his first name. He was a straight A student and he was an idiot.
I mean he was just dumb. All he did was study the books for tests.
He'd spit on his hands and wipe it in his hair. He didn't have women
either."
In Ham
on Rye he's Abe Mortenson to make him Jewish. He's the one Bukowski
runs into in a baseball game and his mother fears he'll sue them.
"She'll get a Jewish lawyer. They'll take everything we have." (Chapter
42, p. 185)
He had even more fun with Jim
Haddox, who is Jim Hatcher. Haddox lived at 1782 W. 22nd Street
with his mother, Nina Ruth Haddox, who Bukowski described as "café
society." She becomes the grotesque sex object in chapter 38, Claire,
the barmaid, whose husband had committed suicide. The real story,
the one Bukowski held back, is far more interesting, more tragic and ironic.
It appears in the course of this narrative.
When Bukowski reached his eighteenth birthday on August 16, 1938, he was
heading into his senior year with serious problems. Publicly he showed
interest in military service and wrote in Baldy's yearbook: "Best wishes
to a good army man. I hope you will be a Nevins' sergeant next term.
NAVY. Hank Bukowski. 1st Class Seaman."
John Nevis was the Captain of Company B, Mullinax's company, while Jim
Haddox was in Company C, serving under Captain Maynard R. Chance, and Bukowski
was in Company A under the command of Captain Harcourt Hervey Jr. Privately, as Germany gobbled up the Sudetenland and moved into Austria,
Henry Jr. cheered Germany on to war in Europe.
All this came to a head in the summer of 1938, when he had to prove his
citizenship. Was he German or American? On August 1, 1938,
he wrote to the U.S. State Department requesting a record of his birth
in Andernach through the offices of the US military. On August 9,
the division chief of the Foreign Service Administration wrote back:
My Dear Mr. Bukowski:
In accordance
with the request contained in your letter of August 1, 1938, I am pleased
to enclose a certified copy of the Report of Birth of Henry Charles Bukowski,
who was born August 16, 1920, at Andernach, Germany.
His
final year in school was not memorable to him, though he did give me some
insights into his mindset in June of 1939.
"L.A. High School was a rich man's school at the time. They all had
sports cars. We walked or rode bicycles. They came from huge
distances just to attend this special school. The women wouldn't
pay any attention to you. The other guys got the girls. We
were the outcasts. I didn't allow myself to like girls. The
report cards were very important to my parents. They were always
disappointed. It was not so bad. I had mostly C's and a couple
D's."
But
in typical Bukowski fashion, he did recall one bit of zaniness:
"This
one time there was a teacher in high school. I was making good grades
and I was passing her tests. It was the next to the last day before
report cards.
"She
said, 'Henry, I'm going to flunk you.'
"I said,
'Why?'
"'I'm
going to, that's all.'
"Strange,
I thought. She must be in love with me. She wanted me to stay
in high school. See me another term. She was an old thing. That was my only thought. I felt the hate, like she didn't want me
to go, but I also felt the love. That was the first time I felt somebody
really cared about me."
I
looked for that wrinkled smile of his when he was being ironic, but I could
see he was dead serious. I asked for the teacher's name. He
couldn't recall it. It all seemed so pathetic: MACHO BUKOWSKI, the
Hemingway warrior, and here he was telling me this old lady was the first
person who ever loved him.
I asked if she carried out her threat and flunked him.
"No," he said. "My mother found out. She went over there and
cried and cried for hours. So she gave in. It was so strange. I was getting passing grades and she wanted me to stay."
I had to laugh. "So you were saved by your mother!"
He nodded. "It wasn't the last time, either," he said.
Though he remembered in detail this crazy, deranged event, he could hardly
recall his graduation from high school. "They played Wagner," he
said. "I went up and got my diploma. This gets sadder and sadder. I'm about to weep. I should have been traveling with Stravinsky's
grandson
and going to operas."
In Ham
on Rye, Bukowski mourns the state of his lonely life as he watches
through the windows as the senior class enjoys their prom. He neglects
to mention that Bill Mullinax, Jim Haddox, Bob Stoner, and most of the
friends he knew in ROTC were all at the dance, and that all of them would
be in the military before Pearl Harbor.
After describing Jimmy Hatcher (Jim Haddox) as "soft and standard" in Ham
on Rye (p. 160), and telling him to his face "I don't like anything
about you," he lines up the rest of his acquaintances for fictional assassination
as they dance at the prom:
"I hated them. I hated their beauty and their uncontrolled youth…"
While Jim Haddox went directly into the Army Air Corps, Bill Mullinax was
preparing himself for a career in engineering at LACC, while Henry Charles
Bukowski Jr. remained in the same bedroom he'd been since childhood, drinking,
nursing
his anger, without a job, afraid to be seen with women, waiting for that
blinding light that would propel him forward into greatness.
His epiphany came on September 1, 1939, as the armies of Adolph Hitler
marched into Poland, dividing it up with their new partners in crime, the
USSR.
This is the end of Part One. Go to Part
Two, Part Three.
Copyright 2003 by Ben Pleasants.
|
