American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (12 page)

Panna wore the short skirts of the time, but they were country
quality, not Carnaby Street. Her elegant eyebrows were raised. She sat – Tom Clark says ‘like a model’ – making beautiful shapes with an arm across a bare knee. ‘Astonish me. If you can.’ Camera crews disfigure the garden. Cleaners in the kitchen. Men, looking after the shrubs and herbaceous borders, don’t smoke until they leave the property.

Wieners surprised her. And she astonished him. He was a gay, Olson-approved poet who voiced, with the directness of a man on a communal telephone in the lobby of a cheap hotel, his version of the lower depths. He noticed, and logged, the fragrant divas of the city, visiting movie stars. He could customize action from Hesiod with headlines from the
Hollywood Reporter
: Kenneth Anger plus narcotics plus suicide attempts plus the secret rose.

Panna fell pregnant. She left Gloucester to obtain an abortion. The Olson scholar Ralph Maud drove her to Long Island. He reports her remark: ‘Would you want John Wieners’s child?’ Maud challenges Tom Clark, on points of fact; he privileges his own accidental acts of witness. But Clark is not composing a biography. He’s attempting a fiction of history, large poet in small times: an amnesiac culture that has no use for him. ‘The image of approach to godhead in his writings now metamorphosed from an ascent to an inward spiral, a furling of being into the sunlike vortex of the soul.’

Shipping out from Montreal to Liverpool on 28 October 1966, on the
Empress of Canada
, Olson and Panna Grady, with the imagined shrieks of the abandoned Wieners fading in their wake, laid down a Hollywood take on that classic equation; two men, one woman. It was
Casablanca
with an ocean liner for a prop-driven aircraft. Real rain on the Atlantic, not hosepipes spraying a slick studio shimmer. This was a propulsive act: scandalous and ordinary. A headlong flight in postponement of larger problems: the work, the poem. Clark has Olson, taking on the momentum of a Malcolm Lowry, rounding up reluctant disciples in Barnet, sticking Hilton breakfasts for all the boys on Panna’s tab, entraining for the Dorn household in Colchester; fisting uppers, lying prone on benches in stations, labouring uphill, arms filled with cheeses. All-night sessions disturbing
domestic tranquillity. Cold sweats and cartons of duty-free Camels.

There is an epic riff for Tom Raworth’s wife, Val, on an early Welsh voyage across the Atlantic, contact with the Mandan Indians. The story of how Prince Madoc reached the Mississippi, leaving behind a Celtic imprint that is felt to this day, came to Olson by way of Ralph Maud, who was in Aberystwyth. I like to think of the
Maximus
poet carrying around a clipping from the Cardiff daily, the
Western Mail.
But the anecdote only points up Olson’s concern with detail, etymology, origin, who did what, and when. In all the shuttling between beds and cities, he never let go of the poem and his hunger for information.

I saw and spoke to Olson for the first and only time at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank on 12 July 1967. The Gloucester poet was due to read among his peers: Auden, Spender, Ginsberg, Ungaretti. They programmed him to close before the interval. Such events no longer happen. The gathered poets, some of them world-class bedwetters, private patients in sabbatical asylums, tolerated gropers from Midwestern campuses, debonair dudes from Mexican embassies, could never again be assembled in one place. The trade has gone out of favour. The beard and tremble of John Berryman referenced both Lears, Edward and the peevish Shakespearean king. Cheerleaders from McDaids, across the water from Dublin, as for the Cheltenham Gold Cup (with fewer priests), gave loud and liquid vocal support to Patrick Kavanagh. Sanctioned outlaws anguished over status before a well-behaved English crowd.

Olson put himself in with the people. He sprawled across the aisle, wearing a dirty white suit like a character from John Huston waiting for his barbershop walk-on in
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
, his turn around the harbour in
Beat the Devil.
He was right alongside the place where we were settled. ‘Give him your seat,’ my companion said. And I made the offer. Olson preferred the space on the floor, not paying any attention to incomers who were forced to negotiate a passage around his notable bulk.

An attendant, after several attempts, and a tug or two at the sleeve, persuaded Charles Olson, author of
The Maximus Poems
, to take his seat on the stage. He read. He struggled to get the phrasing he wanted. It was another of his Christmas poems, ‘An Ode to Nativity’. He summoned ‘the boat of the moon’ and his own seventh year. Seven was a special number.

‘It was an excitement, heart in mouth, to listen,’ I said, when I wrote an account of the event, while still in the heat of it. Olson beat time with the ball of his fist. With the other hand, he massaged his throat. There was no opportunity for the sort of open-ended, free-associating performance – more talk (his metier) than reading (his penance) – that he delivered to a packed audience of fellow poets, enthused or aggrieved, at Berkeley. No messianic delirium. The world did not tilt on its axis. Applause was muted.

Now England has been squeezed dry. The affair with Panna Grady is played out. His friends have seen him, listened to him talk, and are not altogether sorry to have him re-migrate, back to the ground where the poem of his life is not yet resolved. If it ever can be. The matter of the founding of the settlement at Gloucester, Massachusetts – the motive for this trip to England – was still to be explored: out west in Thomas Hardy’s Dorchester. Ed Dorn, who was always smart on trains, riding towards Oxford, Bath or Bristol, spoke of what this trajectory meant in an English context. ‘You get on a train in Paddington and there’s the thrill of heading west. And the country does have a broad base and it does go all the way to Land’s End. Things get a bit louder out here. You can feel it in the people. There’s a kind of pride in being further west than whatever is east.’

Dorchester has a fine museum, with rusting iron bolts in segments of spine, broken pots, a facsimile of Hardy’s study (lacking the titular ghost in residence) – and a substantial archive of papers concerning John Smith and the mercantile imperatives behind that Atlantic voyage, the failed Cape Ann venture of 1624. And, later, the achieved settlement of 20,000, largely Puritan, colonists in the 1630s.

Olson, according to R. N. R. Peers, the assistant curator at the time, was a diligent and energetic researcher. He knew his way around records. He knew how to find what he required, documentation to be lifted into a private mythology. He was a large man, an alien, in a particular provincial town, that had already been possessed by Hardy and John Cowper Powys. The Antelope Hotel was a sobering hideaway. Olson went to ground, heartsore, incommunicado from friends – until he responded to an advertisement placed in
The
Times
, soliciting information on his whereabouts. He played the slot machine and drowsed through long English afternoons in brown-panelled bars. He found the time to scan the small print of our newspaper of record.

Mr Peers drove him out into the country. Picture Charles Olson on the earth ramparts – where we all go, as we pass through – of Maiden Castle. They stood, collars up, pipes in mouths, to catch the teasing song of a lark. Powys saw this landscape as a receptacle for the mysteries of that great underworld sea into which human consciousness must sink, independent of the fretful dreams and demons that oppress it.

We were at the kerb –
WALK DON’T WALK
– sauntering from a basement restaurant on Broadway, where we had dined early, and not very well, on BBC expenses, when she came up alongside me. ‘Want a blue jay?’ A black woman, a little taller than my six feet, in a heady clout of perfume. Cured leather with fur collar, the elegance of the city. Heels like crampons, allowing her to sway but not tumble. She wasn’t looking at me and was not, perhaps, addressing the question to myself in particular. I’m used to being challenged for directions. Which is a problem, coming out of reverie, bringing ordinary names and street details into focus. I have to remind myself that not all pedestrians have a special interest in the point where the torso of some butchered TV soap star was found floating. Every route, as I pitched it, was an excursion into the past.

She didn’t require information. This was her town. She was offering a service. I wasn’t used to such courtesy. It came with the territory. The encounter was an extension of the hotel where we were staying, just off Times Square. If not myself, she implied, then another. Another stranger.

‘Wanna blow job?’

13 November 1995. New York, after all these years, a reality. A terrain, constructed from film clips, books, reports of fortunate visitors (including my parents, who brought back, as requested, US editions, by luck first printings, of
The Dharma Bums
and
The Subterraneans
), was now a yellow cab ride from Newark, New Jersey. Which was more like the A13, downwind of Dagenham, than the credit sequence of
The Sopranos
– until those Moloch towers, on the far side of the Hudson River, threatened in the window, solid smears of second-hand smoke. Out of the tunnel, a shudder in the bones, we are confronted by the certainty that we are worse dressed than the
doormen, those stalking pavement artists of the Paramount Hotel. It is not an option to be unstyled in arbitrary colours with too short a coat. We were shamed by our failure to equip ourselves with ribbed paramilitary black wool caps. The lean young actors are not there to
carry
your bags; they are evaluating them, to see if you are cool enough to be let in. The kiosk in the lobby, along with hip deathsticks and fancy cigars, offers slim confections by William Burroughs.
Ghost of Chance.
The author signed my copy in Lawrence, Kansas, five days later. ‘There were taboos,’ he wrote, ‘against the killing of ghosts.’

The dissolving of the dream, that land to the west, was an obligation placed on me by a radio producer, Pavel Coen. I met Pavel down the line, cans on head, in a solitary Eichmann booth in Broadcasting House, as he interrogated me, from Cardiff, on the subject of Thomas Pynchon, who was just then making one of his sporadic returns from the shadows. Coen identified in my writing an enthusiasm he shared for submerged American literature (even when that submersion was the part of the pitch that guaranteed future attention). I was older and easier now with the knowledge that my tastes were out of fashion and favour. Elective redundancy was, I had to admit, part of the charm. It takes a healthy dose of ego to flirt so consistently with erasure. I was interested in the cunning ways Malcolm Lowry found to lose, burn, scatter his manuscripts, before he had to face the horrors of making a submission, or, worse still, publication.

Our favoured checklists were complementary but distinct. Beyond the prose of Robert Creeley (especially
The Gold Diggers
) and Ed Dorn (
The Rites of Passage
), I held to the conviction that Douglas Woolf was the finest, surest, most sinewy and subtle craftsman on the planet. He was also a magus of the bad journey, yomping through snow, jogging into the desert (as in
John-Juan
), or even re-presenting the road novel, in
The Timing Chain
, as an ironic farewell to an honourable career. When your publisher doesn’t know who (or why) you are, it’s time for Arizona or the mountains. Woolf recognized the gravitational field that pulled Kerouac back, time and again, to
Mexico City: where unwritten books are waiting. Sleeve notes set the scene: ‘
John-Juan begins innocently enough when a friendly amnesiac finds himself in a busy Mexican border town with only his pyjamas and watch
.’ ‘If there were only one reader left in the world,’ Woolf said, ‘I would write to that one as lovingly as I do now.’

Pavel Coen, who, as I feared, harboured secret ambitions to compose an epic novel of his own, adapting
Meisterwerk
US techniques to the south-west London suburbs, paid his dues to Pynchon, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, DeLillo, Burroughs, while confessing to a special affinity with William T. Vollmann. He found, in my novel
Radon Daughters
, themes and threads in sympathy with Vollmann’s clotted cycle, his overreach. Both projects were doomed and he liked that, it spoke of integrity. I was happy to play along. I travelled back to Cardiff, city of my birth, where Coen was waiting with a hired car and driver. We took to the hills and recorded, on the move and off the cuff, a programme about a book that had not yet been written. Meanwhile, Vollmann travelled with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. He slept in offices and lived on chocolate bars. He wrote about the settlement of North America. His wife – and this was a link Coen made with
Radon Daughters
– worked as a radiation oncologist. My crazed narrator, actually inspired by Céline, found that the only access to the fading narrative of the city was through seances of illegal X-rays from a decommissioned machine in the Royal London Hospital. Vollmann, in my judgement, was closer to Lowry. In his elaborate and hallucinated mythology – the voyage that never ends – Lowry wallows in the guilt for a dead brother or, sometimes, a Cambridge friend: an accident for which he holds himself responsible. The burden of authorship, malfate, is a karmic consequence. While still a young boy, Vollmann witnessed the drowning of his six-year-old sister while she was under his supervision. William Burroughs said that the shooting of his wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City, made him a writer. He was cursed to labour with words, taking the dictation of a hungry Remington portable, almost to the last breath. To a red clapboard house in Kansas. Suburb without urb. Mid-continental inertia. Nowhere.

My interest in the Beats, simmering since my first experience of their work, as a schoolboy in 1960, was put to the test by Pavel Coen. I would accompany him on a journey across the United States, interviewing survivors for a radio documentary, using the ‘Beat Culture and the New America 1950–1965’ show at the Whitney Museum in New York as our now-or-never pitch. After all these years, I would collide with the actuality of the place, and risk inevitable disillusion: with setting, characters – and, most of all, myself. My failure to take the trip at the right time, before or after Ireland.

Being here, the reality quota dissipated. Rooms in the Paramount, shallow steel basins with taps too high-concept to operate, were pre-traumatic, low lit in preparation for performance-art episodes of self-surgery. The city growled. My bed was far from the street. We worked long days, cabbing from the Whitney to the cinema where Jonas Mekas hung out, a spectre from an earlier time, heroically unlaved, a steady-stare bohemian in his wide-brimmed black hat. The Mekas diary films, in 8mm or 16mm, casually recording the happenings of his life in America, were inspirational. The method could be applied to prose as well as celluloid. It was impossible, under these circumstances, the duty of bringing back a coherent account of the Beats and counterculturalists in their twilight, to break through from the futile attempt to conduct an interview with one of the myths of my own past.

Ed Sanders, down in the East Village, was rehearsing for a performance in St Mark’s Church. He had stuck with, and grown into, that leonine aureole of freak hair, the Tombstone sheriff’s soup-strainer moustache. But what was once a confident and chaotic badge of subversion was now a silvery afterthought. Spring growth on an old rock. This barely tolerated interview with the man from London was time lost. I had fed on the playful scholarship of Ed’s adaptation of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
to songs of beatnik glory. I burrowed in and out of the Charles Manson dune-buggy saga,
The Family.
Sanders was a fire-source, as I worked as a gardener in Limehouse, or laboured in the ullage cellar of the
Brick Lane brewery. He was a conduit to Olson and he carried that lineage forward. I admired the way he made sapient music of Matthew Arnold and William Blake. You could position, to advantage,
The Family
, Ed’s forensic excavation of Manson’s desert cult madness, against Tom Wolfe’s hitch on the Ken Kesey bus for
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Both these voyages were endgames in an established American tradition: the wagon train through badlands, under assault, sustained by weird belief systems and a hunger for novelty or status (notoriety as fame). Sanders locates, at the back of the Satanist-nudist-messianic-assassin cult something called
The Hole.
A negative space, beyond cinema, beyond easy riders and Zabriskie pointmen, in the brutal, eyeball-frying glare of Death Valley. He realizes that his research – and, after training with the Greeks, Egyptians, Black Mountaineers, he is a master at sifting documents – requires a degree of role play. He poses as a New York porn dealer with a tranche of Andy Warhol offcuts to trade against rumoured orgy-snuff underground movies involving Manson and the family with Hollywood notables (and pondlife). ‘I posed as a Satanist, drooling maniac and dope-tranced psychopath,’ Sanders said.

It would have been better to limit my encounters with the former Fug to the acquisition of books, as they appeared, from Compendium in Camden Town. That way, the client does half of the work and the New York scene is commodified, reduced to a finite number of objects in a private museum. Some of those Hackney shelves were now thick with dust.

Anna’s vision of the USA was more extreme, even lunar. She couldn’t convince herself that it existed; certainly not as a landscape where she could walk with the same estrangement as a morning shuffle down Kingsland Road. Our older daughter, travelling through the south as part of a crew shooting autopsies for the Discovery Channel, brought back a packet of seeds, Texas Blue Bonnets, which were kept in the kitchen as proof, as for Noah in his Ark, that ground, on which trees and flowers could grow again, must have risen above the formless waters.

The chance finally came – Anna was getting her hair done in
Islington, I was scouring the City for Marmite and Frank Cooper’s Oxford English Marmalade to carry as gifts to Austin, Texas – to board a plane at Heathrow, to fly the Atlantic; to tour the States, giving readings, seeing friends. It had taken years to set this itinerary up; bookshops in Los Angeles, Seattle and Portland were taking me on blind trust. But something was out of kilter in London. I noticed bankers swarming into the street. The hairdressers were whispering, weepy, as wild rumours were confirmed. From what I overheard they anticipated an attack on Canary Wharf. What was new about that? But on 11 September 2001, the horror was elsewhere. Before I got home, silent loops of the unthinkable were running on screens in pubs and offices. Anna put her half-packed suitcase aside. It remained in the bedroom for a month or so. The packet of seeds vanished into an underwear drawer.

Six years later, our daughter now in Washington with her three-month-old baby, Anna made it. I stayed at home, pushing to finish a book, a memoir of Hackney, before the old territory vanished for ever in the outwash of Olympic development. And there they are, coming out of Penn Station, after the train ride from the capital, up into the light and noise of Manhattan, in the belly of that stolen island. One of them has to give way: place or pedestrian. Sensory overload is critical. The dream image and the actuality are so close in this moment of superimposition that Anna sets everything on the ground. She freezes, trembles in shock. The episode is
precisely
what she projected and therefore her former self is annulled; entelechy, childhood, marriage, the lot. Manhattan is true, she is not. What’s left? Start again.

I was never as sensitive to atmosphere, but I understood, and experienced in advance, that ontological crisis, as Anna described it to me. Because the city never stopped: ambulances, honking cars, collisions, meat and metal. Because of the thermometer shape of overloaded ground between rivers, the heat from bars and subways, the brash democracy of smells – sizzling chicken, candyfloss, whisky, leather – there was never a fixed interlude in which to sleep. And
walking, as we did, Pavel with his recorder slung over his shoulder, myself with a bag of books, from Times Square to the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, required new skills.
WALK DON’T WALK
. The stop-start stutter of the grid. I don’t doubt that it can be done. I read Nik Cohn’s
The Heart of the World
, a stroll down the length of Broadway, making discoveries, chatting to natives. But it would take years to pick up those rhythms. And we had so many names to track down in the few days available before we flew to Kansas City.

Herbert Huncke – Huncke the Junky – was settled as the titular spirit of the Chelsea Hotel, a chirpy day-of-the-dead cricket; a sugar-skull hipster in a tropical hutch, with temperature levels cranked to the hothouse mansion of the bloodless General Sternwood in
The Big Sleep.
Windows nailed shut. The last keeper of the Times Square cafeteria culture of the 1940s toked on bottles of lurid glucose drinks, like a vampire tubed to sachets of vintage plasma. The room was so
smoked
that, despite spidery arrangements of dead grasses and rows of little scented bottles, any draw of breath was a slap of recycled nicotine. With cooked-resin chasers. Decades of genteel infamy had left a slack mask of skin over Huncke’s formerly delicate and handsome armature of bone. The retreating ring of hair, real but disconnected from the man, a revenger’s wig in a Jacobean drama, was inky black. The mouth, lips painted, snarled and pouted, as the old familiar stories were dusted down. For delivery to the cash-only squares.