The Book Depository Ham On Rye by Charles Bukowski

Author: Ted Curtis

Rating: 5

Review: Ham on Rye has been one of my two favourite novels for almost thirty years. The other has varied over time – first Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, then Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, then Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, alternating between them, back and forth – but always side by side with Ham on Rye. When I ran away to the big city in 1991, not quite a proper reader or anywhere near a writer yet, one of my co-op housemates, a student at the Polytechnic of East London (as it was then), had in his room a copy of Bukowski’s Women. Something about the name Bukowski suggested to me American and academic, and I thought it the sort of thing I ought to be reading. But no, he told me, Women was the opposite of all that, it was the one thing that brought him relief after long hours spent in the college library, swotting away alongside those feminist bitches. Intrigued, I borrowed it from him immediately he’d finished it, and my eyes were opened. I had no idea you were allowed to write about the things described within its pages: drinking for days on end, wanking, avoiding work wherever possible. One of my other housemates had a copy of his short story collection, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, a gift from someone known to us as Junkie Bob, and the things my eyes had been opened to came into sharper focus. And then I was away, I was a writer too. As the man himself might have said, it was like magic. Now Women seems to me a little repulsive, a bit boring; it’s essentially the weakest of his first three novels, following on from Post Office and Factotum : essentially self-indulgent, misogynist, its subliminal message seeming to be, I’m a poet now and all the women love me, but secretly I hate them, hee hee. But Ham on Rye stands alone. Before I came across it, I was given a collection of Bukowski’s poems and short stories, Septuagenarian Stew. Many of the poems are set in the desperate world of Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s depression-era childhood, and the clarity and the innocence that goes into his descriptions of universal boyhood activities, repugnant and artless but always unpretentious, are what stick with you. It’s worth stating here that, although he wrote a series of novels, the last couple of them of even more middling quality than Women, Bukowski was first and foremost a poet, and this is evident in the short paragraphs and chapters here, the one-off killer lines and the not-quite-inane profundities. Like a really good poem, it all comes at you in a rush, and there’s no filter: indeed, the story goes that when Bukowski’s original publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press (which he started by selling his collection of rare first editions in order to publish Bukowski and other underground writers), asked if he’d ever considered writing a novel, Bukowski had said I’ll knock one out for you, and a month later he had Post Office. Ham on Rye begins with the toddler Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s exaggerated alter-ego throughout his work) lying under a dining table and commenting on the legs of the people and the furniture – he prefers the legs of the tables and chairs to those of the people, projecting backward the world-weary cynicism of his youth and adulthood, from an anal-retentive stage in grade school to his macho posturing in high school, through the brutal beatings administered by his father for the slightest infraction, real or imagined, to his mother’s abject failure to come to his aid, to his final escape from the house of his parents as the novel draws to a close : I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor… I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. Was a man born just to endure [these] things and then die? Although I didn’t suffer anything like the level of routine physical violence Chinaski did, I do identify strongly with this childhood, the poverty and the casual verbal deprecation: look at him, he’s bloody useless, what an idiot; so perhaps Ham on Rye isn’t for everybody; and yet, it is, it really is. Because this is the human condition, as they say. This is my fourth or fifth reading of Ham on Rye, and it really hasn’t lost any of its power over the years, despite its occasional lapses into an almost infantile arrogance and naiveté. I remember from my last reading of Ham on Rye thinking that it was about thirty pages too long, that the section after Chinaski leaves home to go live alone and drink himself to death was unnecessarily unpleasant and really ought to have been cut. Curiously, it doesn’t seem so bad now, although the way he tries to beat up anyone who visits him does get a little boring. But more than anything else, it’s Chinaski’s identification of literature as a redemptive force, a saving grace when all else seems so hopeless that does it for me. As he says in The Burning of the Dream in Septuagenarian Stew, this library was there when I was young and looking to hold onto something when there seemed very little about. Still a favourite, Five stars.

Author: brenda squires

Rating: 3

Review: Growing up in a tough, rough family in Depression-ridden America. Acne, fights, sexuality, drunkenness and desperation are all there. This book is for those who’d like to know what those circumstances actually felt like to a kid who felt an outsider and had to struggle to find an identity that matched his soul. By the end of the book he hasn’t quite succeeded. But you think he might.