Exploring Themes of Sex and Employment in Bukowski’s Factotum
Themes in Factotum
Sex
Factotum is filled with sex. Henry Chinaski is introduced eying a prostitute and then demonstrating an immature personality by masturbating and drawing obscene pictures in his parents’ house.
A fellow boarder turns out to be a whore who pounces on him, repulsing him with the thought of the sperm of four hundred men in her mouth, eats him alive, and forces him to ejaculate against his will.
Henry meets a few other prostitutes, including Helen in a Philadelphia bar, who disappears with men for five minutes at a time (an old guy who rides with Teddy Roosevelt requires ten).
On a train home from Louisiana, a whore sells herself for $2 to every man and one woman aboard, and calls Henry a fag for declining. Several times in the novel, Henry objects to being called a fag, but seems not to object to homosexuality in others.
Jerry has extorted $50 a month for life for letting Willie “pump” her. Alone on a yacht, Henry quietly has sex with Jerry while girlfriend Laura warns them not to go too far, and Grace, who afterwards whispers he has raped her.
Several times, Henry endangers his employment by dallying with beautiful secretaries.
Employment
Factotum bounces around America, following Henry Chinaski getting and losing jobs. He first turns down a job shucking clams in New Orleans, remembering how his father’s job dominates his childhood home. Henry is repulsed by the idea of working so employers can enjoy good cigars, clothes, steaks, beautiful homes, ease, vacations, and women, and realizes only the desire to accumulate money sets them apart from him. He vows to save his pennies, get an idea, and become a class oppressor.
Henry knows the end is inevitable every time he takes a job.
The only job Henry has hated to lose is driving Red Cross nurses around San Francisco collecting blood during the war.
He loses it by taking the wrong bridge out of town, getting lost in skid row, and nearly getting them all raped.
He does well and enjoys his first day at the Yellow Cab Company, but is disqualified because of his criminal record. Few places bother to check references, bond, or fingerprint.
He is dutiful only about keeping toilet paper supplied because he identifies with the human need to wipe well after one relieves oneself.
He works briefly as a janitor in the Times Building.
He does well at the classy Hotel Sans, managing the employment office on Sundays, lording it over temporary dishwashers, but gets drunk and assaults the Assistant Manager, lecturing him on how to run the hotel.
Style and Point of View
In Factotum, Charles Bukowski tells a vaguely autobiographical story in the first-person past tense through narrator Henry Chinaski. Henry knows that little of what he does is considered noble by society and makes no excuses for his actions. He drinks because it relieves the pain of consciousness. He avoids people because he dislikes, if not hates, them. Henry talks matter-of-factly about masturbating in his parents’ house and accepts whatever heterosexual activity he can find. When seducing a girlfriend’s two female companions, he finds plays on words that allow him to have his cake and eat it too.
When he wants to move on to another city, Henry packs his cardboard suitcase with his few possessions and enough whiskey to enable him to endure chatty companions. Traveling leaves him sleep-deprived and constipated, but he travels when he must. When he settles, Henry knows his way around the interviewing and unemployment processes, answering questions as expected, embellishing creatively however he feels will work best, and omitting his college experience when it seems to get in the way. He sees no virtue in taking part in the rat race of regular employment just to make someone else rich—and appear to be thankful for the opportunity to work one’s ass off. Henry does the minimum (or less) and accepts firing gracefully. Bosses, he says, are not hard to fathom. It seems little is hard to fathom for this intelligent, perceptive wanderer.
The only thing Henry appears to care about is his writing career. He is sincerely impressed when he receives his first acceptance notice. He believes it false that anyone can be a writer. He also believes it the myth of the starving artist. Experience has taught Henry that food and whiskey in the stomach make for creativity.
Setting
Factotum is set during the closing months of World War II, chiefly in Los Angeles, California. It opens in New Orleans, as drifter Henry Chinaski steps off a bus with a cardboard suitcase in hand, depressed and hoping a new city will make a difference. It does not, as he gets and loses two jobs in New Orleans, catches a westbound train as part of a section gang, stopping for a curious night in an El Paso, Texas, park, and off in his hometown, Los Angeles. Life with his straight-laced parents sends him quickly to New York City, which he hates intensely, so then proceeds to Philadelphia. There, in a crowded bar, Henry unexpectedly makes friends, but without explanation continues to St. Louis, where he arrives in the dead of winter, feeling depressed. There he finds relative happiness among friendly people and achieves his first literary triumph, selling a short story to a prestigious magazine.
The endnote about the author points out that Charles Bukowski is raised in Los Angeles and lives there for fifty years. He publishes his first short story in 1944 at age forty-four.
This parallels fictional Henry Chinaski who, after getting his first acceptance notice, heads to Los Angeles, hoping to be a writer. He hooks up briefly with an eccentric millionaire and his three alcohol- and sex-addicted female companions. When the benefactor suddenly dies, Henry moves in with another woman who resembles his lost girlfriend, but is far more volatile. Various locales on the edges of the Los Angeles skid row are depicted, as are the Los Alamitos and Hollywood Park racetracks. Henry and Jan break up, sending Henry briefly to Miami, FL, before they reconcile and fight until, evicted and destitute, they part. The novel ends with Henry sitting in the Roxie Theater, watching a stripper.
Language and Meaning
The narrator of Charles Bukowski’s novel, Factotum, an alcoholic, psychologically depressed, unambitious drifter, Henry Chinaski, who every week writes short stories, which he hand-prints (having pawned a number of typewriters), and sends to magazine editors, knowing they think he is a nut. Perceptive and blunt, Henry works when he must to support himself, but sees little value in making someone else wealthy—and having to appear thankful for the opportunity. Henry is out to impress no one, himself included, as he reminisces about his life on the road to a hearer or audience that cannot be readily characterized.
Henry talks frankly about sex and excrement. Both fascinate him. Despite the remembered pain, he seems to relish the story of how an overweight prostitute nearly bites off his penis, and in a tongue-in-cheek manner, talks about having sex with his girlfriend’s two roommates, finding clever ways of telling the truth about what he is doing without admitting it. He seduces a few secretaries, admitting he is not good at sweet talk and realizing that the locales in which he gets sex are often not romantic. He turns down one female prostitute who labels him a fag, and two males’ offers of sex, claiming rather indignantly that he is straight. Henry has a fetish for slightly stained underwear, the smell of excrement, and, while working as a janitor, excels only in keeping the bathrooms well stocked with toilet paper. He declares human beings deserve the right to wipe properly after a good bowel movement.
When demanding his severance check at the Times Building, Henry admits he will drink the money away and acknowledges that few people will find that noble. Most of Henry’s language is shocking (certain in 1975, when the novel is written, and more so in 1945, when the action occurs), but Henry does not seem to intend to shock. He simply tells what he sees and remembers. The one exception is when he is seducing Grace; delighting in her reaction to the dirty word, Henry repeats and repeats that he is only fucking her.
Structure
Charles Bukowski’s novel, Factotum, consists of eighty-seven chapters, ranging in length from one page to half a dozen pages. In some, the action flows directly from chapter to chapter, while in others there is a distinct break, as when anti-hero Henry Chinaski moves from one city to another.
The novel begins with Henry arriving in New Orleans, Louisiana, depressed and hoping a new city will make a difference. He has obviously been wandering a long time, rather aimlessly. The New Orleans sojourn is brief, serving to establish that Henry is an alcoholic drifter, lackadaisical about employment and unemployment. After he gets and loses two jobs in New Orleans, Henry catches a westbound train and gets off in his hometown, Los Angeles, California. Conflict with his parents sends him quickly to New York City, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, where he finds relative happiness and achieves his first literary triumph. That this sends him back to Los Angeles is not stated but can be implied.
Except for a brief flight to Miami, Florida, to escape a disintegrating relationship with Jan, the rest of the book is set in Los Angeles, and shows Henry getting and losing menial jobs, drinking, getting jailed on misdemeanors, and twice almost finding a way out: as part of millionaire Willie’s entourage and as Manny’s partner in handicapping horses.
The story moves forward linearly without flashback or foreshadowing, except that twice Henry recalls situations that remind him of his present relativity. He turns down one job because he remembers how work is the center of his childhood home, and when he tells Jan that he hates his parents—as though the physical fight when he is brought home drunk was not proof enough—she suggests this has warped him.