Charles Bukowski was devoted to “graphic fiction” from the beginning of his career: one of his earliest works, “The Reason Behind Reason,” published in 1946 in Matrix, is adorned with a lively drawing depicting the anti-hero Chelaski with legs flying, arms outstretched comically attempting to catch a flying baseball.¹ During his years crisscrossing America between 1942 and 1947—a period in which he sometimes had to pawn his typewriter due to lack of funds—Bukowski also submitted to Whit Burnett, editor of the celebrated Story magazine, a series of hand-printed, illustrated short stories, including “A Kind, Understanding Face,” demonstrating that he often conceptualized text and image together in a complementary relationship. He wrote Burnett from Los Angeles in November 1948: “I thought the drawings came out especially well in this one and I hope you do not lose it.”² Burnett urged Bukowski to collect his drawings in book form and also repeatedly asked him to consider writing a novel. On October 9, 1946, from Philadelphia, Bukowski also composed an illustrated letter to Caresse Crosby, publisher of Portfolio. Already he had developed the clean line style of his charming, minimalist, Thurberesque drawings which could not but ingratiate him to prospective famous editors such as Crosby and Burnett. Here a stunned man with a bottle and lines for eyes drinks, smokes, and lies in bed with bare lightbulb, curtain with a drawstring, bottles on the floor. Later he would add sun, flying birds, companionable dogs. Psychologically, it is clear that these gently humorous drawings were one of the ways he had developed to deal with his considerable childhood wounds: his physical abuse by his father, the eruption of acne vulgaris, his status as misfit German-American. Here was a medium in which he could play and entertain, qualities he also strove for in his writing.

The autobiographical “A Kind, Understanding Face” (1948) begins with an epigraph describing a crippled spider being dismembered alive by ants and sets the theme for many later stories: Nature red in tooth and claw. The protagonist, Ralph, like the young Bukowski, avoids the draft, has journalistic ambitions, and wanders the country from Miami to New York to Atlanta. Though Ralph is in some respects a stand-in for the author, in the story his father and then his mother are deceased, while Bukowski’s mother Katherine died in 1956 and his father Henry in 1958. The tale presents a series of odd, disjunctive events, concluding with three mysterious quotations, appended without citations: one from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Book Five, Chapter 30, “Our Visit to Satinland”; another from George Santayana’s “Ultimate Religion” (1933); and finally a reference to René Warcollier (1881–1962), the French chemical engineer who developed a method of making precious stones synthetically and who also published Experiments in Telepathy (1938).³ Given that there is a reference to copulating and defecating in public, it’s possible that Bukowski by this time had also encountered the writings of Diogenes the Cynic (ca. 412 CE–323 CE). Just as the narrative itself is weirdly dissociative, these three allusions left in the suicide note of young Ralph seem a kind of fragmentary riddle or hidden message which the reader is meant to assemble and decode: What, if any, is the connection between Diogenes, that odd manticore, the lofty language of Santayana, and the making of jewels from fish scales? One recalls Vladimir Nabokov: “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.” The range of these rather recherché allusions indicates the depth of Bukowski’s reading, and placing them one after another may suggest the absurdity of the quest for meaning as well as the indecipherability of an obscure unfinished life.

From the beginning of his career, Bukowski depicted the terrible human encounter with the Other: insects (here spiders and ants) in particular pullulate through many of his early poems and stories. His work also shows the influence of Robinson Jeffers’s hawks and herons as well as D.H. Lawrence, whose Birds, Beasts and Flowers can be heard echoing in the title of Bukowski’s

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