American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (10 page)

The Paseo Marítimo is exactly as Bolaño describes it, a place to saunter, watch, kill time. It’s early evening, the waiters in black trousers and white shirts are changing shift. Some of them stop to
play football. One crosses the road to a beach bar where he meets a Nordic woman, bronzed and draped, if such a thing is possible, with ropes of discreet bling. Gold on gold: lizard neck offset by investment glitter. A trophy wife approaching her trade-in date. I can take photographs of the ten addresses I’m given for the apartment of Bolaño’s widow, the seven statues in anonymous squares that mark the supposed studio where he worked, so feverishly, in the final years. I can walk through elements of
Antwerp
and
The Third Reich.
But I can’t find the beach barricade, the off-duty pedalos. Blanes, I recognize, is a good place in which to write. It has something of the spirit of our English Hastings: discounted, mythologized, less than itself.

The following day, in the pinewoods, close to the campsite where Bolaño operated as a security guard, an off-season caretaker, I accept the futility of my expedition. Did I expect to find the hunchback from
Antwerp
? Or that mysterious foreigner? ‘The English writer talks to the hunchback in the woods.’ But there is no hunchback. There are a few Englishmen, in tight shorts, on the cycle trail. But the voices are German, Russian, cross-border French.

Under a blue-striped awning in a breeze-block bar, where sand gets in everything, I zoom in on my prime suspect, the only man in a black jacket. He is scribbling. He has a pile of cards arranged beside his cigarettes and the cheap plastic lighter, his beer. It feels as if a single, lengthy letter is being composed, at speed, on a number of picture postcards. ‘He writes postcards because breathing prevents him from writing the poems he’d like to write.’ Bolaño’s invented English hack struggles to keep his tenses consistent. I sympathize. I jumped, after my second cup of perfectly bitter coffee, to the melancholy owl, Oscar X, in Highgate, his boneless back to the rain and the green park.

What if I were the rapidly sketched Englishman who talks to the hunchback in the woods? What if – and this is the biggest fiction of them all –
Bolaño was not actually dead
. That made sense. The books kept rolling out:
Between Parentheses
,
The Secret of Evil
,
Woes of the True Policeman.
The posthumous bibliography would put an
Ackroyd or a Moorcock to shame; two, three, four titles a year. The horrible illness and reported end had been so bravely organized around huge works, to be divided into serial segments for the benefit of his family. Extinction would affirm the legend and underwrite claims of wayward genius, by laying down a large black period. Susan Sontag. Patti Smith. Colm Tóibín (who knew Spain). They lined up to pay their respects. To eulogize the oeuvre. In this beachside shack, it didn’t fit. The Patricia Highsmith version was more convincing. The Chilean author, who is working the market like a disciple of Ripley, disappears. Perhaps he stayed where he was in Blanes, like Flann O’Brien’s James Joyce in Dalkey. I don’t think he went back to managing a bar. He liked movement: Mexico City, Paris, Barcelona, Blanes. Why not Vulcano? He often spoke about eruptions.

One postcard was left on the floor, under the table, when the man in black walked out. I picked it up. It was a quote from Georges Perec,
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
. ‘Rule 36: Get drunk with Malcolm Lowry.’

The film of our swan pedalo voyage, from Hastings to Hackney and the Olympic site, opened at the Curzon Soho to the usual mob of well-wishers and peer-group friends hoping for the worst. And meanwhile slopping down overpriced drinks. Kissing and shouting and waving. But the Homeric voyage, mesmerizingly slow and absurdist, came at the right moment, playing against the noise of grand events, and coinciding with the summer’s super-hyped blockbuster,
The Dark Knight Rises.
The
Financial Times
led with
Swandown.
A headline, jumped on by the PR people, said:
GIANT SWAN ATTACKS GIANT BAT – AND WINS!

English pastoral unravelled as riverbank dwellers crept from the woods to show off their tattoos. The refuseniks of the urban fringe, hiding out on a ghost fleet at the mouth of the Medway, welcomed us aboard their rusting hulks, to gesture at onboard swimming pools, refurbished bars, snooker tables and giant plasma-screen TV sets driven by generators.

Trying to make my way to daylight from the warm dark of the cinema basement, I was caught up in a series of those exchanges where random faces with no names attached move in to reignite aborted conversations from previous gatherings in Bristol, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes. One woman, advancing with intent on a sure-footed diagonal, had, in her own stylishly bohemian fashion, the eye. Black leather jacket, dark hair and a bright, challenging look. She began to talk about an English painter in Rome. It threw me. I didn’t expect to see her on the north side of the river: Muriel Walker of Denmark Hill. In her eighties, brisk enough, interested enough, to be turning out, with all the verve and momentum I found in her diaries, Muriel was prepared to view another film, another doomed project.

Up and out by
8.30
and off to Fregene for the day. Spent a very pleasant morning on the beach. It seemed that everybody in the film industry was here. Rossano Brazzi and his wife, Orson Welles.

September 1949.

And now, still worrying at the past, still trying to get the faces fixed, the story straight, Muriel has bought a ticket to the Curzon. July 2012. Shaftesbury Avenue.

Off to eat in pizzeria, then to station. Transported Joyce back home and we sat chattering till
2.00 a.m.

The entry in the diary that she wanted to check was for 27 August 1949.

Projection all morning. Saw all the underwater stuff that had just arrived. On my way back was stopped by a car – a boy I used to work with (an artist), name of Lucian, and his friend, Flavio, film architect. So spent a pleasant evening. Drove to the quarter Savoia. Stopped at a little open-air café for a while, then drove to Pincio and various other points in Rome. Back home about midnight.

Could this have been Lucian Freud? Unlikely. Muriel remembered the Italian adventure as a flight, an escape from greyness and ration cards. Her friend Beryl had lost her job with the Civil Service. They had no money, few contacts. They were so young. Now it was a question of cataloguing the archive, pencilling in the surnames. Shaping the story.

To come at Muriel’s journal from another direction, and to acclimatize myself through geographic immersion in available DVDs, I started with that classic bad journey (for all concerned), Antonioni’s
Il grido.
Here was a bleak romance fitted to a muddy track between highway and swollen river. The original script, pared down but as
complex as a philosophical novel, a displaced
nouveau roman
, was undone by weather, the icy mists of winter in the Po Valley.

Steve Cochran, a black-Irish Hollywood B-feature import, sump-oil hair flat-handed into place, trudges the wilderness of the world, tugging his pigtailed and fabulously self-contained daughter, Rosina. (Early models, I thought, for my
Swandown
colleague Andrew Kötting and his round-Britain
Gallivant
companion, the bird-voiced Eden. Cochran’s trousers, like those of Kötting after a month in and out of the river, are stiff with discriminations of mud and splash.) It is Cochran’s jacket, collar turned up, that carries the burden of narrative, a peculiar untailored morality. The camera shifts, without hesitation, between road and river. The drama is road-bound: if anything happens elsewhere, beyond hoardings, refineries, petrol stations, it doesn’t signify.
It doesn’t really happen.
What we see is what there is: Cochran. Who is not large, but solid in the shoulder. Rescued from westerns and black-hosed studio streets, brassy blondes and fake whisky. Searching for cigarettes in musty drawers. He doesn’t relish, any more than Richard Harris in
Il deserto rosso
, being directed as an attribute of architecture, a moving object in the landscape. He wants words, justification. Post-Freudian permission to frown or ball a fist in his jacket pocket. He strikes disobedient women. He fucks in ditches. He broods in empty bars. He walks to the open door of a hall in which two silent boxers are clubbing each other before a howling audience. Then, after rousing his sleeping daughter, he marches away into the night, beyond electricity.

Antonioni later charged Cochran with stupidity. The American detested his director, having European ambitions of his own, beyond the range of studio-tolerated psychological realism. Hollywood’s recipe for action was based on gestures as formalized as kabuki. The stupidity denounced by the Italian aesthete was the stupidity of difference, disobedience, an infantile need to have every twitch explained and approved. ‘Slap her.’ Mist thickened into sleet. Steve tramped alongside a plantation of dwarf willows, a line of Lombardy poplars. The production stills were breathtaking. It is not Cochran’s voice coming out of his tight mouth. Women smell
smoke and sediment in his wet tweed. They smell California, Cadillacs. The trigger reek of a dumb male in transit.

‘Cochran came to Italy expecting a job as a director, which was absurd,’ Antonioni said. But that is what he achieved. Sullen, bottled up, hurting, betrayed, dragging his daughter by the hand down a bad road, Cochran directs himself. Against instruction. While standing where he is supposed to stand, refusing food, refusing attachment.

Muriel Walker came to Italy with few expectations, and it was all there, waiting for her: companionship, employment, love. A significant footnote in the history of cinema.

Muriel is in Rome. It is not, for her, the city of monuments. Nor a newsreel city of ruins: Rossellini’s
Roma, città aperta
, featuring his mistress, spirit of place, Anna Magnani. There are orphans, plenty of them, orphans of war; but they are not the boarding-school Jewish girls of West Norwood. Solemn black crocodiles of pinched starvelings, shepherded by nuns, chant their status as abandoned waifs, as they process to church. The same ones who made such an impression on my child self, a couple of years later, in Rapallo. I didn’t know then, or for years to come, that Rapallo was the resort of Ezra Pound, who made wartime broadcasts comparing Mussolini with Thomas Jefferson. Rapallo is where Pound, and his helper Basil Bunting, along with Yeats and Eliot, contributed to a detective novel being written by the modernist composer George Antheil, under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop. The book was published, in a striking pictorial jacket, by Eliot’s firm, Faber, in 1930. I heard the tale from the legendary collector Alan Clodd, who then of course produced a pristine copy for my inspection.
Death in the Dark.
Mystery novels conceal collateral mysteries, darkness within the dark. Diaries are smokescreens.

Muriel falls into the nocturnal life, late meals, cinemas, groups of friends, secretarial gigs there for the taking.

When we had finished our meal we left Bob and Eileen at a cinema, as they wanted to see an Italian film. The three of us were to meet
Felice at the stage door at midnight. It was the premiere of Oreste, and when we arrived we found the courtyard filled with every type of luxurious car. Anna Magnani passed us and went into the restaurant next door to the theatre. I was completely disillusioned, having seen her and acclaimed her in such films as Open City, and now to see her emerging from a luxurious car, draped in rich furs, looking very unlike the Anna Magnani of the screen.

A city of pizzerias, boys, writers pitching scripts. There is always someone whistling at the window.

Thursday 26th May, 1949. Today marks the passing of an epoch; my life undergoes a violent change, and I am forced physically out of my present mode of living. At about 11.30, a phone call from Dorothy Bigliani. She calmly asked whether I would like to pack up and go to some island near Sicily tomorrow as secretary to the company who are making a film there with Anna Magnani. I had to give her the answer in about 10 minutes. I wasn’t meeting Felice for another hour. I don’t know what the deciding factor was – perhaps intuition – but I agreed to go. Since Beryl and I were down to our last 100 lire I decided there and then that I must take whatever comes along. The film is being directed by Hollywood’s William Dieterle.

I met Felice for lunch and told him the news. We were both upset to think that we would be separated for that time, but as I said it was not for long. And more important, when I returned, we would have enough money for an apartment.

I went off to the Bernini. I met the girl whose place I was taking. She had just returned from the island, and she gave me a briefing on what to expect. Apparently we are shooting on the island of Vulcano in the Aeolian Islands. The film stars Anna Magnani and a Hollywood actress, Geraldine Brooks.

When we arrive in Vulcano, we all stay in one big villa together – artists, directors, executives – with everything provided for; I don’t have to spend as much as a lire, and on top of that, to have a salary
of 35,000 per week (= £17.10.0d). Victor Stoloff came in during the afternoon with Piero Tellini, who is writing the script. (He wrote
Open City, Four Steps in the Clouds.) I started to work and took over immediately from the other girl.

Magnani is the mistress of Roberto Rossellini. Ingrid Bergman, fresh from her triumphant studio performance against Cary Grant and Claude Rains in Hitchcock’s
Notorious
, and the Freudian shallows with Gregory Peck (the future Ahab) in
Spellbound
, is first spellbound and then notorious, a tabloid witch from the frozen north. In Hollywood she catches up with neo-realism, street shot, snatched from history, subtitled:
Roma, città aperta
. The only flaw in Rossellini’s docu-fiction is the wrong diva, Bergman wants to offer up her art to this new master. The film is
magnifico
but is it a fake? A screening of
Paisà
in New York, with the director present, convinces her. Enough of America. The final movement of
Paisà
is set in Antonioni’s Po Valley. With cloudless Los Angeles under the eclipse of McCarthy’s Communist purges, emotionally immature, infantilized – as Bergman sees it – a mature European director and a return to the older civilization is a requirement.

Roberto leaves Magnani in bed, replete and breakfasting, in the room they share at the Hotel Savoy in Rome. He goes out to walk her dogs and he doesn’t come back. The dogs are with the concierge. Rossellini has taken a taxi to the airport. He flies to New York. He has a script stolen from his cousin Renzo Avanza and four Sicilian friends. They are developing new techniques for underwater filming. Roberto has viewed the rushes. Stromboli is a safe distance from Anna.

On glistening, wet-black celluloid, newsreel immortals descend from a heavy-bellied aircraft to mortal ground, fresh from another noisy propeller-driven interlude across oceans and continents. Cameras flash. A cicada-frenzy of shutters. Bergman tosses back girlish (serious) hair, smiles, and wrestles the big cellophane cone of sweating roses into submission, before passing them to a helper (another Muriel). Roberto in beret and dark glasses, open white shirt, is a
magician. He’s more formal, on show. Welcome.
Benvenuto
. These are the rites of passages we are allowed to witness. After public rituals, indoor privacy; crowded solitude, pills, quacks, breakdown. The business, stepping down from the plane, is a form of theatre as formalized as a tomb scene painted by Poussin.

Bergman secures Rossellini, who is denounced by the Church. He decides to make
Stromboli
into an act of heretical piety. Fallen woman, martyr. Miracles of nature: deep seas, burning shores, volcanoes. Metaphors running wild. Northern sophisticates reinvade barren rocks.

Young, free-spirited Muriel Walker from the Jewish Orphanage in West Norwood is an accidental witness. The Magnani she spurns, for her furs and black motors, is now her champion, her employer. William Dieterle, the imported Hollywood-German director, in his white gloves, calls Anna ‘the last of the great shameless emotionalists’. She’s a proper size, an Italian woman; she smoulders. She kisses her dogs. Magnani played an overbearing stage mother in Visconti’s
Bellissima
. Her flashy attendance at the premiere of his play paid dividends. Visconti, the Marxist aristocrat, had been the first to come south, in 1948, to Aci Trezza in Sicily, for
La terra trema.
No performers required, native fishermen only, speaking in dialect. Magnani determines to have her revenge on Bergman. The dignity of the human face, the cubist geometry of block houses in a barren landscape.

And here is the spoiler
: Magnani and Dieterle on Vulcano, a neighbouring Aeolian island, making a version of the Rossellini story at the same time. Dieterle combines Hollywood industrial process (elaborate tracking shots) with the standard neo-realist grammar of non-professional actors, undressed locations and agitprop morality. A form that, in the hands of Visconti, could be dignified, awkward and heroic, becomes, in
Stromboli
, a slightly deranged love letter combining all these elements with sexualized pietistic masochism. And a growling, grumbling volcano.

Muriel drives south to Naples with the scriptwriter Piero Tellini. I think about another film Bergman made with Rossellini; a failing
relationship, the road to Naples. The calcified bodies of lovers excavated from volcanic ash.
Viaggio in Italia.
The Rossellini masterpiece beloved of the
Cahiers du Cinéma
critics Godard and Truffaut. Another bad journey with great scenery. The car breaks down. They sit at the roadside, in the shade, while Tellini dictates and Muriel transcribes in her rapid shorthand.