Charles Bukowski's Last 'Muse' Lives With US Author's Ghost

Romain Raynaldy writes for AFP:

The last muse of Charles "Hank" Bukowski, the alcoholic and womanizing US author who used blunt prose to write about society's downtrodden, still lives in the home she shared with her late husband and hopes to turn it into a museum.

"That's exactly like living with a ghost," Linda Lee Bukowski told AFP. "His room is exactly the same. Clothes hanging around, you know, things like that."

Linda Lee is as shy as her late famous husband, but made an effort to speak to strangers at the Huntington Museum in the town of San Marino, just north of Los Angeles, which is holding an exhibit titled, "Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge," through February 2011.

Bukowski (1920-1994) was an important figure in 20th-century US literature. "In his poetry and prose, Bukowski used experience, emotion, and imagination, along with violent and sexual imagery, to capture life at its most raw and elemental," reads a description of his work on the museum website.

Bukowski "spoke for the social outcasts -- the drunks, prostitutes, addicts, lay-abouts, and petty criminals -- as well as those who are simply worn down by life."

The Museum bills the exhibit as the "most comprehensive exhibition on the writer ever undertaken" and includes typed scripts of Bukowski?s poems, periodicals with his poetry, and pictures loaned by his widow.

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"He was a shy man, he was an individual who was more reclusive than outgoing and that's why he would tend to drink and overdrink, because it was so much for him to handle the enormous social life. It was wasted time for him.

"He would rather be either at his typewriter or having dinner at Musso and Frank," a landmark eatery billed as the "oldest restaurant in Hollywood."

Bukowski, who grew up and spent most of his life in Los Angeles, rose to fame after a difficult childhood and 14 years working in anonymity at the post office.

He had written poems and short stories all his life, but did not write for a living until age 46, when the editor of Black Sparrow Press offered to pay him 100 dollars a month to focus on writing.

"He never talked with me about his work," his widow said. "He thought it was a bad luck. Once in a while, he would come down at night with a poem, and he would have a drink and he would read it. It was once in a year.

"But in general, he would never show anybody because he thought it would bring bad luck. He would send it immediately to the publisher."

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