Soundings: Howard Sounes on the Myth Versus the Reality of Charles Bukowski
- Jul 1
- 3 min read
Howard Sounes had a good job at a major British newspaper when he decided to write a biography of Charles Bukowski. Then one weekend his editor asked him to cover a murder. Sounes said no, he was writing his book. The editor insisted. Sounes quit.
"It was a crazy thing to do," says Sounes, in the latest episode of my new podcast, Soundings.
Sounes had read Bukowski's novels and loved them. But he'd noticed how Bukowski embellished his own life in interviews, turning biography into mythology. So he decided to find out what was actually true.
He tracked down ex-girlfriends in California, flew to Germany to examine birth certificates, and interviewed postal workers and famous actors—anyone who might tell him the truth about a man who'd spent fifty years constructing a persona so convincing the boundary between the real Bukowski and his fictional alter ego had nearly disappeared.
The first fiction Sounes uncovered was foundational. Bukowski often wrote "I was born a bastard"—four words that turned his birth into an origin myth. Except it wasn't true. Sounes went to Germany and found the marriage certificate. Mr. and Mrs. Bukowski, married in 1919. Charles was born in 1920. In that order.
Why the fiction? Because "I was born a bastard" is a better story, and Bukowski was a storyteller.
The childhood that followed was brutal: beatings from his father, adolescent years scarred by acne. Sounes argues Bukowski was genuinely sensitive but wrapped that sensitivity in crude bravado. That tension is what makes his books work.
The other revelation: Bukowski wasn't all chaos. He was discipline.
For eleven years he worked at the post office. After he quit in 1969, funded by publisher John Martin, he wrote thousands of poems, six novels, countless stories.
By the time Bukowski moved to San Pedro in the late 1970s, he was experiencing something he'd never had: financial security. He bought a house on the hill with a view of the harbor, married Linda Lee Beighle, and had money in the bank. Every night he'd go upstairs to his writing room overlooking the port, drink wine, listen to classical music, and write. Famous visitors came: Harry Dean Stanton, Sean Penn, Madonna. For the first time in his life, Bukowski lived comfortably. "To some extent," Sounes says, "it's a really happy ending to his life."
The disciplined writer and the belligerent drunk: both were real, Sounes suggests, different sides of a complicated man.
Writers like Hemingway and Thompson created personas that threatened to swallow them whole. Bukowski was no different. He gave readings where he showed up drunk and picked fights. He kicked his girlfriend on live television. Sometimes, Sounes believes, Bukowski was performing his life—or at least, a caricature of it—as much as he was living it.
The book became an obsession. Sounes quit his newspaper job and tracked down sources across California and Germany. "I realized I had to make this book a success," he says.
Nearly thirty years later, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life remains the definitive biography, the work Sounes is proudest of.
Sounes thinks "Don't Try"—the epitaph on Bukowski's headstone at Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes—was a boxing quote about going with the flow. But the words ring hollow. They're a strange final statement from a man who tried harder than almost anyone. He worked eleven years at a job he hated. He devoted himself to his craft. He built a literary career from nothing. Bukowski tried.
He also spent his life building walls to protect himself from childhood trauma. Those walls became a persona. That persona became a brand. And that brand became a kind of prison.
The people closest to Bukowski—his widow Linda Lee Beighle, his friends, the famous actors who visited—saw the real man. Readers who loved his books saw something true: the sensitivity and awareness that made his writing compelling.
But here's what the public myth concealed: the man who spent a lifetime pushing people away, telling the world he didn't need anyone, was as hungry for love and acceptance as the rest of us. The bravado was armor, and underneath it was a wound that never fully healed.
That contradiction—between the persona Bukowski performed and the vulnerability he hid—is what drew Sounes to spend years uncovering the truth. The book he wrote gets closer than anyone else has to answering who Bukowski really was.
Listen to the full Soundings interview with Howard Sounes wherever you get your podcasts.
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