> This article is so filled with naive melodrama.Well, of course it has to be full of complexities and life melodrama; this is Bukowski after all. It is his trademark.
But his life story has a beautiful twist, which unfortunately is not covered in OP's piece. From the interview[1] with John Martin, his longtime friend and editor, and the guy who paid the $100 per month:
"We sat down with a little piece of paper. I sat there with a pen, and he listed out all of his monthly expenses—and you've got to remember, this was 1965, when his rent was $35 a month. He had $15 in child support, $3 for cigarettes, $10 for liquor, and another $15 for food. And yet, even though that sounds pitifully small, at the time he was feeding himself and had nice clothes, drove a very old car, and lived in this completely or partially destroyed unit in East Hollywood. He could get along on $100 a month. I was only earning $400 a month, so I was giving him 25 percent of my income. But as soon as the thing took off we did much better.
At the very end, I paid him a retainer so I wouldn't owe him some horrible amount of money. Eventually I paid him $10,000 every two weeks. So he went from $100 every month to $10,000 every two weeks, and then, at the end of the year, I'd make up whatever I still owed him. Later, the really big money came in when we started to sell his books for movies and stuff like that."
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bukowskis-longtime-publis...
Well, of course it has to be full of complexities and life melodrama; this is Bukowski after all. It is his trademark.
But his life story has a beautiful twist, which unfortunately is not covered in OP's piece. From the interview[1] with John Martin, his longtime friend and editor, and the guy who paid the $100 per month:
"We sat down with a little piece of paper. I sat there with a pen, and he listed out all of his monthly expenses—and you've got to remember, this was 1965, when his rent was $35 a month. He had $15 in child support, $3 for cigarettes, $10 for liquor, and another $15 for food. And yet, even though that sounds pitifully small, at the time he was feeding himself and had nice clothes, drove a very old car, and lived in this completely or partially destroyed unit in East Hollywood. He could get along on $100 a month. I was only earning $400 a month, so I was giving him 25 percent of my income. But as soon as the thing took off we did much better.
At the very end, I paid him a retainer so I wouldn't owe him some horrible amount of money. Eventually I paid him $10,000 every two weeks. So he went from $100 every month to $10,000 every two weeks, and then, at the end of the year, I'd make up whatever I still owed him. Later, the really big money came in when we started to sell his books for movies and stuff like that."
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bukowskis-longtime-publis...