Ham On Rye: A Novel by Charles Bukowski (PDF)

Description

“Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.” –Los Angeles Times Book ReviewIn what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast’s coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐He puts his words together so well, and his writing is so readable, but I’ve never in my life read a book with so much outright filthy language. I mean, out of the ordinary filthy language. Sad.

⭐This is like reading Faulkner, without all of the fuss, with more fun, and perhaps without the same levels of philosophy and psychology. It’s arty without being hoity-toity about it all. A simple language is used, and bombs go off without much fanfare. It’s astounding in the way that it mixes observations with inner thoughts from the main character.From the very first paragraph:

The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under there, I liked being under there. It must have been in Germany. I must have been between one and two years old. It was 1922. I felt good under the table. Nobody seemed to know that I was there. There was sunlight upon the rug and on the legs of the people. I liked the sunlight. The legs of the people were not interesting, not like the tablecloth which hung down, not like the table leg, not like the sunlight.

The book is strewn with subtle and horrendously beautiful writings about the patriarchal, capitalistic stuff that happen:

There were continual fights. The teachers didn’t seem to know anything about them. And there was always trouble when it rained. Any boy who brought an umbrella to school or wore a raincoat was singled out. Most of our parents were too poor to buy us such things. And when they did, we hid them in the bushes. Anybody seen carrying an umbrella or wearing a raincoat was considered a sissy. They were beaten after school. David’s mother had him carry an umbrella whenever it was the least bit cloudy.

The above shows how this book, published in 1982, hasn’t really changed much over most of Western “society” when considering nowaday literature like Édouard Louis‘s “The End of Eddy“, which was published in 2014.I love the way that things are written about, in a quite stoic and existentialistic fashion:

He walked over and slapped me on the ear, knocking me to the floor. The woman got up and ran out of the house and my father went after her. The woman leaped into my father’s car, started it and drove off down the street. It happened very quickly. My father ran down the street after her and the car. “EDNA! EDNA, COME BACK!”My father actually caught up with the car, reached into the front seat and grabbed Edna’s purse. Then the car speeded up and my father was left with the purse. “I knew something was going on,” my mother told me. “So I hid in the car trunk and I caught them together. Your father drove me back here with that horrible woman. Now she’s got his car.” My father walked back with Edna’s purse. “Everybody into the house!”We went inside and my father locked me in the bedroom and my mother and father began arguing. It was loud and very ugly. Then my father began beating my mother. She screamed and he kept beating her. I climbed out a window and tried to get in the front door. It was locked. I tried the rear door, the windows. Everything was locked. I stood in the backyard and listened to the screaming and the beating. Then the beating and the screaming stopped and all I could hear was my mother sobbing. She sobbed a long time. It gradually grew less and less and then she stopped.

There are some funny, and a lot of tragic sides to all of this. While reading the book, I often wondered whether the character caused his problems, or was just affected by them, unable to avoid it all; naturally, it all depends on from where you’re standing. The book reminded me a lot of Camus’s “The Stranger”, but that may be due to the existentialistic nature of that book, which I love.All in all, this book makes me want to read more of Bukowski’s books. This book will linger in the back of my head for quite some time, I think.

⭐Henry “Hank” Chinaski, the protagonist of Ham on Rye, is the alter ego of the author Charles Bukowski. Both were born in Germany and grew up in depression era Los Angeles. Both suffered learning difficulties (Bukowski was dyslexic) and were outcasts, prohibited and disinterested in playing with other kids. Both suffered at the hands of an abusive and philandering father, who had always been quick with the strop. Both too suffered the pain and public revulsion of the ugliness of acne vulgaris, enduring excruciating treatments with the same stoic detachment as he came to endure his father’s beatings (usually in the bathroom). “I didn’t hate him. He was just unbelievable, I just wanted to get away from him. I couldn’t cry. I was too sick to cry, too confused. The strop landed once again… I heard him walk out of the bathroom. He closed the bathroom door. The walls were beautiful, the bathtub was beautiful, the wash basin and shower curtain were beautiful, even the toilet was beautiful. My father was gone.” (HC)Theses life experiences would surely have come off as whiny and depressing in the hands of most authors. But the economy in Charles Bukowski’s style resists that, even disdains it. A style described of simple sentences, short bursts of clarity, of emotion and action darkly comic, without extended prose forcing the reader into a tedious reduction to extract the important points. There is no waxing on as escapism. There is no whining, just a scowl and shrug of acceptance. Actually there is sometimes joy, a joy in the appreciation of simpler things forced from the bleak backdrop of his life; a homerun hit in a pickup baseball game (he was always chosen last as a kid, if at all) or the warmth of that first draw of whiskey, the latter being a life-long obsession.Hank Chinaski, like Charles Bukowski, reviled middle class social values, the belief that there was any inherent fairness in the system. “All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was always controlling who got a chance and who didn’t.” (HC) “I am still here, leaning toward this machine.” (CB) Hank, like Bukowski, found no answers in religion, or faith in general. “Her smell was mixed with the smell of the church, which smelled like piss. Every Sunday people came to church and smelled that piss-smell and nobody said anything. I was going to tell the priest, but I couldn’t.” (HC) “Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.” (CB) Bukowski did live to the fullest, and Death surely trembled when it took him in 1994.Charles Bukowski isn’t for everyone. Those of rigid and certain values will shout against him. But I shout for him, Hooray for Charles Bukowski! I miss you.

⭐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.

⭐`Ham on Rye’ – the ham is America, in practice LA, and the rye(bread) is Germany, his country of origin – is generally considered Bukowski’s finest novel. It is an account of the childhood and early manhood of one Hank Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter ego. Hank is raised in a small town in the depth of the 1930’s depression. His father is out of work for most of the time, but desperate to keep up appearances, and his mother is a characterless soul who just supports her husband. The latter is also a sadist, who regularly viciously beats Hank for trivial `errors’. But the novel is only semi-autobiographical, because in fact Bukowski’s parents had a normal marriage and his father was not the monster portrayed in the book. What is factual is the serious disfiguring skin condition that Bukowski suffered and is mirrored in the acne suffered by Hank Chinaski. This isolates Chinaski from his classmates, and he is also bullied because of his Germanic origins. He takes refuge in reading in the local library and dreaming of becoming a writer, but he realizes that his alienation is deeper, not just with his family and school, but with America in general and its values. He has no desire to have a steady job, marry and have children, or any of the other things that most American’s hold dear. He even flirts in a minor way with fascism and shows no inclination to enlist even when, at the end of the book, Pearl Harbour is bombed and one of his few school friends, now a marine, rushes back to his base. Eventually he pays the price, seemingly willingly, and descends to drink, and frequent personal violence.The story overall is sad and depressing, but there are many small pen sketches of people and incidents, often humorous, sometimes moving, that makes one see that Chinaski is a complex character and not simply a nihilist. The writing is direct, sometimes raw, and often coarse, but is just right for the situations described. In his late 50s, after some years `in the wilderness’, Bukowski became famous and rich from his writings, and although still consuming copious amounts of alcohol and changing partners regularly, achieved a more settled life, always believing that he had not `sold out’. One would like to think that Hank Chinaski eventually also found a haven via his chosen route, and similarly not `selling out’.

⭐The early days of America’s greatest are chronicled here in the guise of his alter ego, one Henry Chinaski. Be prepared to hear about what really happens every day at the wrong end of the dirtiest stick you can find.If any society, in any country, wants to know where its loners, outcasts, estranged misfits and other social deviants come from, then some of the answers are in this book. Alienated, demonised, bullied, excluded, annulled to finally become a mere observer of life rather a fully functional participant in it…. our Mr Chinaski here – did he jump or was he pushed? Probably a bit of both.Whether you identify with the main character or not. This is a hilarious but insightful, head around the door that will never fully open, look into the early life of one disturbed character and how he survived each day with the worst case of acne the doctor has ever seen.Many fathers beat their kids. I know mine did. Wether I deserved it or not, is not the point of discussion in this book, because that’s just one tiny corrosive thing that happens on a regular basis. Bukowski becomes a man, when he finally learns to ‘detach’ himself from the beatings his old man gave him – but is that when he really does become ‘a man’? Or are those parental beatings something else that adds to his later detachment?The essence of this humourous, graphic and sometimes painful to read, book takes us through that whole detachment process, bit by bit, punch by punch, beer by beer, breath by breath, day by day. Life by life. So when we leave him in the final scene, what has be become? A hardened drinker ready to face the world? An incorrigable reprobate with deep-seated misanthropic unremovable tendencies? A true poet, able to describe and refer to many of lifes worse moments like no other man could? A womaniser, an alcoholic, a gambler, a bum, a loser, an outcast, a struggling writer (like they all were)? He was all those things. But what we also see in this book how that man is made, how his later complexities are nutured and the die cast. What a life.As with ‘Pleasure of the Damned’ poetry collection discussed elsewhere, the technical aspects of the work are not the strong points. What needs further referal is the sense of isolation, and how he, over the course of the book, creates that air of chronic detachment. I’ve read ‘The outsider’ by Camus, and that writing is streets ahead of this, but this is a much more fullfiling read.On the downside I found: There are some glaring exaggerations however that render the plausibility of what is being said a bit too self pitying. When he has all those beers waiting for his friends mother to come home, only after ‘many’ beers does he want to look up the skirt of his friends mother. The other exaggeration is of loneliness itself. Throughout the book, he mingles with various people, goes round their houses, meets others, exchanges lots of competative verbals; would a real loner want or have that much contact – with anyone? But you could counter that those exaggerations are part of the alter ego building process. Thet necessity of them is to realise that the rest even exists to begin with. Writers create alter egos in the first place for what reason?There’s nothing hamy about this semi-autobiographical book, a disturbing insight into the early life and times of a man that later became one of America’s most (in)famous writers. He was 73 when he died. This book is about survival – not opting out.

⭐This is the latest Charles Bukowski piece I’ve read and again it gets full marks from me. I am running out of ways, however, to say just how much I like his work. Just so open and direct. Another masterpiece.

⭐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.

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