Ham on Rye (1982, this
edition 2000) is set in Los Angeles from 1922 to 1941. The narrator is Henry
Chinaski – the fictional character in Bukowski’s novels Post Office (1971) and
Factotum (1975). Although this is the third book about Chinaski, it starts at
the beginning – in his youth, from the age of two to 21 years. It is also
autobiographical, using an alter-ego to describe Bukowski’s rather unpleasant
childhood.
Henry Chinaski Junior
writes of his parents, Henry and Katherine, his grandmother Emily and his
ostracised grandfather Leonard. Born in Germany, Henry Jr, moved to America
when he was two years old.
Henry began to dislike
his father at an early age: ‘he was always angry about something.’ Henry was
not allowed to play with other children and did not make friends easily. Henry’s
childhood and schooling were a series of fights and beatings, but mostly of
loneliness and a horrific bout of boils and acne.
After school his first
job at the Mears-Starbuck department store did not last long. He decided to
enroll at the Los Angeles City College in ‘the easiest thing to take’ –
journalism. He wrote about 10-12 short stories and hid them in a drawer in his
bedroom. His father found them and was outraged, saying that no son of his
could write stories like that and live under the same roof as him. Consequently
Henry left home.
He turns to writing and
reading, especially the books of DH Lawrence, Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway:
‘these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They
were the only voice that spoke to me.’
Bukowski finishes the
novel in December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbour, bringing America into
World War II. The life of Henry continues in the novels Post Office and
Factotum.
Bukowski writes in the
child-like way of Henry, but Henry is an angry insolent, crude, rude, brash,
and vulgar child and teenager. The style is easy to read with short punchy
sentences, sometimes revealing a cocky unlikeable boy, but sometimes showing
his vulnerabilities as a awkward lonely child.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid
and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of
Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet
(2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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