American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (13 page)

Bill was Bill. Allen was Allen. Nice university boys introduced to the lower depths. ‘I thought Burroughs was
heat.
’ Burroughs repaid the compliment. He remembered Huncke in a pay toilet in Times Square, notebook on knees, ‘furtively composing the latest tale from underground’.

The myths of place are overwhelming. It’s hard not to break out laughing. Adobe-brown corridors. An overheated check-in mortuary for all the boho legends: Brendan Behan, Janis Joplin (who once went on a disastrous date with Charles Olson), Sid and Nancy. And most potent of all, as I flashed, looking at Huncke, to the film clip of that operatically painted, cabaret marionette in the open coffin,
packaged for return to Laugharne: my fellow countryman Dylan Thomas. Of all the transatlantic voyages, the four expeditions made by the Welsh poet, and recounted by John Malcolm Brinnin in his 1956 book,
Dylan Thomas in America
, were the ultimate provocation; a warning and a lingering seduction. When, as a schoolboy, I began to interview some of those who had known Dylan – his friend Vernon Watkins, Aneirin Talfan Davies (the man responsible for many of his broadcasts), Laugharne publicans, Morriston theatricals – the prevailing distaste for Brinnin’s undeceived account was much like the attitude in Gloucester towards Tom Clark’s Olson biography.

Thomas was living in the Chelsea Hotel when he collapsed for the last time: ‘insult to the brain’. Brinnin notes, with somewhat mystified indulgence, the enthusiasm the feted lyric poet demonstrated for the disposable products of pure Americana: pulp novels (routinely assigned to the generic term:
Mickey Spillane
), Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, burlesque, pin tables, jukebox bars, Howard Johnson restaurants in the neon twilight. Dollars leaked from his pockets. Jewish physicians were on tap with cortisone shots. There were workmen’s blue shirts to take home. A consumerist cornucopia against the pinched meanness of rationing-book Britain. Cheap cigars instead of Woodbines.

Dylan (his name soon to be purloined by a young Jewish folk singer from Minnesota) was at the tipping point between high seriousness, the rhetoric of apocalypse, black on black, and permission to regress to the sweetest of bites: primary colours, monster hoardings, comic books, Hershey bars, cantilevered breasts, three-cow milkshakes. German expressionism converted into rain-slicked Hollywood melodrama. This crumpled, swollen-bellied man with the stained nicotine teeth was the original post-war performance poet, playing to packed crowds, and losing, in the sweats and fears of hypnotic projection, all sense of self. The preacherly mannerisms of his Methodist ancestors, and the seductive rumble and thunder of voice from the abused instrument of his body, mesmerized the uptown poetry mob. Why had he crossed the Atlantic? The questions never stopped. ‘To continue my lifelong search for naked women in wet
mackintoshes,’ he said. And said again. Until Brinnin flinched and flustered, as he tried to head off the interrogators, tried to keep the exhausted poet on the road. A hundred and fifty readings, up and down the country; death flights, claustrophobic trains, cars bear-squeezed with host-institution academics and faculty wives.

Brinnin has Thomas, newly arrived, posed against the window of his high room in the Beekman Tower Hotel, looking out on the East River. Trembling, groaning at the mid-Manhattan panorama: too much light. Too much confirmation of distance from heartland. From estuary and tide and the quiet, resolved hills and neat white farms. Between the splatter patterns of the hypnagogic show of Manhattan electricity there is so much darkness, negative gravity sucking pools of infolding energies as yet unnamed. ‘I am an extinct volcano.’

John Berryman sets off for St Vincent’s Hospital as soon as word reaches Princeton: for the final deathwatch. Berryman was the nerve-tuned laureate of obituaries, a suicide long rehearsed. He jumped from a bridge in Minneapolis in 1972. But trauma-ward witness was required, the imprinting of the vision of the dying man: ‘lest he freeze our blood with terrible returns’. Thomas is not extinguished, he flies through Berryman’s
Dream Songs
like a wisecracking owl. Now there is no hurry. All eternity, time and space, is on the head of a nail driven through his tongue.

No terrible returns. But four times to America was one too many. Allen Ginsberg, hanging out at the San Remo, seated alone at the bar, makes a journal entry for April 1952. He has resolved to seize the day. There is a chance encounter, a failed connection, with Dylan Thomas, who is drinking with a ‘thin mediocre type’, an American with a big bruise on his forehead. Dylan has already brushed against William Faulkner, whose work he admires very much; intimacy was impossible under the circumstances, as they swerve on fated trajectories, with unregistered female companions, through restaurants and celebrity cocktail lounges.

Thomas treats Ginsberg like a pimp. He says that in his last bar a girl asked him if he’d like to watch her turn a trick with a friend. She wanted fifty dollars. Ginsberg knows a pretty girl who might open
her door. She keeps a bottle of beer for emergencies. Phone calls are made. The bartender asks Ginsberg to leave. The troubled young poet hangs around outside. Thomas is tired. He climbs into a cab. Ginsberg runs to the other side, sticks his tongue through the open window. ‘I meant it as a friendly gesture.’

In terminal wards and drying-out clinics, brain-burning madhouses and Bellevue towers, voyaging poets overlap or make their solitary penances in Manhattan. Malcolm Lowry, who drank with Dylan Thomas in Soho, Fitzrovia, and the Sylvia Hotel, Vancouver, forged a fiction,
Lunar Caustic
, of his breakdown, saying that he had fallen in love with America. He was pursuing the succubus of the city, not a woman. He wanted to see where Melville lived. He wanted to cast himself adrift in Rimbaud’s drunken boat.

Among the reported figures, the premature wake of poets, actors, agents and nuns, come to catch Dylan’s last breath, was an unknown woman. She was slender, dark, elegantly dressed; a figure, as Brinnin directs her, from Cocteau’s
Orphée.
She does not approach the bed, where the poet lies in high fever with tubes from nose and throat. She stands in the doorway, unmoving, for half an hour. There is no connection, beyond the one I’m now making, but my own attempt to trace part of this story ended in Laugharne with a similar, overcontrived theatrical moment.

West Wales, wet and green, with high hedges and twisty lanes, was mapped in my genetic code to a quantum flattered by expeditions to whitewashed chapels and burial grounds with weathered inscriptions. My mother’s family, Welsh-speaking, aboriginally established in Cardigan and Carmarthen, spread across the areas Dylan Thomas emerged from and later occupied. We took family holidays in New Quay, where the poet lived for a time, and where he was assaulted, when a battle-traumatized commando, back from Greece, fired a Sten gun into Thomas’s rented bungalow. And followed up by producing a hand grenade. My maternal grandparents spent their honeymoon in Ferryside, across the bay from Laugharne. An aunt, hardy and eccentric, was known to swim, in full black, from Ferryside to Llansteffan.

Those questing days, driven out by an Oxford student, a poet and geographer with cultivated contacts, were an attempt not only to pick up authentic traces of Dylan Thomas, to take photographs for a thesis, but also to sniff around my own family connections. And without the dreadful obligation to actually meet any of them and sit through a Welsh tea.

Laugharne came at the end of the journey. Burial ground. Boat House. Brown’s Hotel. Damp shed with postcards of Whitman, Hardy, Lawrence. Back to the pub. More beer and then a kitchen with an oak table and oil lamps. As the conversation ebbs and flows, with loops of reminiscence and Celtic invention, and I begin to nod, having abandoned all attempts to make bullet-point reminders of significant facts (there aren’t any), I notice the face of the woman standing at the window, staring in at us. It was raining hard. Her collar was turned up, the stiff ridge disappearing into wild, abundant hair. I point her out to my companion, who is about to give a reading from a booklet recently produced by the Fantasy Press in Oxford. The others, deep in their cups, their anecdotage, do not notice the intruder. The poet, annoyed, impatient to begin, goes to the door. The woman in the white coat has vanished.

My prime target, Gregory Corso, was no longer in the Chelsea Hotel. He shared a patron with Huncke, a bookdealer. Corso, more than any of the other major players, stayed true to the essential aspects of the Beat ethos: poet as seeker, the sentient world as sustainer of that grand illusion. Therefore: derangement, criminality, bad behaviour as a lifestyle choice. The oldest of the youngest, the street boy. Who exploits everything and everybody within range, except his basic belief in Shelley and the integrity of inspiration.

By way of the bookshop, that great display of Corso’s trophies, a blizzard of signatures and inscriptions, we track the patron down and make an appointment, just before we have to check out, to see the mercurial poet. He’ll be at his grace-and-favour apartment mid-afternoon. Perhaps. If all goes well. If the horses are running in favour of today’s occult system. Letters of names
assigned numbers. Numbers graphed into code in Enochian tables. Coins laid out with mysterious men on street corners, with cigar smokers in newspaper kiosks, with chipped blondes in bars.

It happened. I think it happened. But all my tapes of the Corso recordings, the Burroughs recordings, the fuzzy evening of conversation with Kathy Acker in San Francisco, her days in the New York sex industry, had disappeared. All the photographs. The diaries. The plane tickets, hotel receipts. The big black box marked ‘Generating the Beats’. Pavel, who was nothing if not an obsessive archivist, would have duplicates, originals. There was a particular shot I remembered, in the cutting November wind, by the East River, Pavel looking like a shaven-headed Russian mafia hood, in his zipper jacket and black boots, outside a breeze-block sex club. The only piece of ephemera I could lay my hands on from that New York trip fluttered out of a copy of Corso’s
Hitting The Big 5-0
that I bought at the Village bookshop. It was an ‘out of series’ copy, signed and numbered, ‘written in long hand as well’.
Imbalances of joy and sorrow.
The loose card said.
PRIVATE EYES SPORTS CABARET.
100
TOPLESS DANCERS. PRIVATE ROOM. NOV
13–20
STACEY STAXXX
.

The problem was that Pavel had also disappeared. He left the BBC. He wasn’t working at any of the usual freelance operations that infested Silicon Roundabout and Old Street. The patron, another former radio producer, who tolerated Pavel beyond the point of reasonable human benevolence, in a tumbledown property in Shepherd’s Bush, had finally kicked him out. Rent was unpaid; the room, the bathroom, the hallway were stacked with cardboard boxes. Old recordings, annotated scripts. And the mountain ranges of research documents required for the definitive Croydon novel.

Pavel invested everything in this project, months ran into years. Nobody saw a line. Nobody saw Pavel. He had become the book. I imagined some impossibly complex, infolding structure, autobiographical (deserted mother, council estate, exams), linguistically innovative, psychotropically charged. Unreadable. Unfinished. A London edgeland epic that absorbed and expanded the pioneering
works of Michael Moorcock, Will Self (late-modernist slip-streaming), and the deep-topography of Nick Papadimitriou on the north-west fringes, among sewage farms, motorway slip roads, gravel pits, reservoirs.

I would begin my search for Pavel in Croydon. By way of Croydon, I might recapture that afternoon with Corso.

I STOLE SEX TOY BECAUSE I WAS BROKE
:
Croydon Advertiser.
Headline on sandwich board outside the (in)convenience store as I emerge from the Overground terminal:
SEWAGE PLANT FIRE BURNT FOR
10
HOURS
.

I was chasing flickers from corpse candles down the irrational curve of the new railway linking Dalston Junction and Croydon West; old suburbs devastated by dubiously funded blitz development, twinned in dereliction and statement regeneration. Statement being: take it or fuck off. Post-architectural reefs made from recycled sunglasses, blank walls of cloud quotations, with no obvious point of access beyond scimitar beaches of trampled cigarette butts. Dust siroccos wrapped free newspapers around confused pedestrians and bent lamp posts. I saw a blind man lay down his white stick to piss in gouts and spurts against the sharp V at the prow of a building where roads divided. One wall was brick-windowed, the other multilayered in advertisements for discontinued bands with ridiculous names. The yellow ammoniac stream blew back against dirty white jeans and naked, swollen ankles. 75
FIREFIGHTERS TACKLE BLAZE
.

The nightmare for Malcolm Lowry, a misadept at a spread hand of magical systems (Swedenborgian, Haitian voodoo, Canadian cabbala, Mexican tarot, Crowleyite Golden Dawn), was of being sucked into the swamp of a book already written: by way of wild coincidences, echoes of Joyce, Conrad Aiken, Melville, Poe, Nordahl Grieg. The lobster-complexioned, pipe-chewing Englishman, in the baggy flannels unsecured with golf-club tie, convinced himself that he was essentially a plagiarist: of himself and others. It was his fate to make journeys at the back of the bus, on tramp steamers; to wade through volcanic ash, across railway lines; to wobble along
the lip of sewage ditches. His novels were pre-written and their author condemned: beaten, castrated, crucified. Mexican buses were filled with messenger spirits, Chinamen from suppressed short stories, witches with dead babies in wicker baskets. He interpreted his life-in-progress as a book of signs: names of bars, booze advertisements, house numbers, terrifying posters for Peter Lorre (exile and addict) in
Las Manos de Orlac.

To confess his flaws, his blatant thefts from Grieg (which were all of his own imagining), Lowry determined to go to Oslo, to track down the author of
The Ship Sails On
(a parallel project to
Ultramarine
). He invented the technique I was about to employ in the wilderness of Croydon. No maps, no phone calls. Landfall, strike out. Grieg – as might be the case with Pavel Coen – was living under an assumed name. Lowry takes a cab, pays it off. Follows a man. The man leads him to Grieg’s door. ‘All his life Lowry relied on the long shot, the amazing coincidence, for his most important contacts with the world that existed so improbably outside himself,’ wrote the biographer Douglas Day.

I turned right out of the station: wrong move. My compass was shot by the lightning of urban novelty. I detoured down a strip of ribbon development that was Poland. And Asia. And pound-stretching. I was seduced by a pub called the Ship of Fools. The merciless concertina of phone-boosting, money-transferring, price-slashing enterprises had its minor attractions in windows of gilded bling, bright saris, statuettes of the elephant-headed Lord Ganesh. London Road was not Broadway. But I felt the pull of Pavel Coen and his unwritten novel. How could he extract structure from this mess of street life? The cards in the newsagent’s shop flipped the messages I used to read, back in 1962, when I trawled Brixton, Streatham, West Norwood, for somewhere to live. 1
DOUBLE BEDROOM, NEAR WEST CROYDON STATION (
10
MINT WALK). PRIORITY TO PAKISTANI & INDIAN.

D. H. Lawrence lodged here in his schoolmastering days. That might be worth a line to Pavel. But I wearied, my heart wasn’t in it. The loud spectre of Gregory Corso was obliterating whispers of the
lost radio producer. I appreciated, after taking photographs of lifeless avenues of pollarded trees, distant factory chimneys, pre-demolition walls with fading trade signs for
THE SMOKER’S MATCH
, that my quest was futile. I retreated to a pub.

The positive-discrimination barman in the roadhouse barn on the Norbury roundabout:
was it Pavel
? In my Lowry trance, I had to believe in the tarot of coincidence. Black T-shirt, blue arms, a refusal to meet my eye – and a total inability to tap the keys to order chicken wings (a gross at a time). The wasted operative managed the business of hosing cider – the least worst possibility – with the same lack of interest he brought to our interrogations of Beat luminaries in their hothouse American retirements.

It was too dark to read a map. The only other customer, a depressed black man, elbows on table, contemplating an empty pot, nodded his approval of the spicy chicken carnage on my plate. It would be staying there. I was heading straight back to the station. A huge TV screen blasted inarticulate hysteria from the visually impaired judo at the ExCeL Centre.

‘The Algerian has put his foot in the British boy’s stomach and thrown him over. This really has been a contest of two halves. Remarkable. He won’t give up.’

As I head for the door, I can hear them promoting doggie dentures. Neither the barman, nor the man who is poking at my chicken wings, will pay any attention to the screen.

What frustrated me in the sprawl of the Croydon diaspora, where everything appeared to be on the way to other destinations, better places, was the absence of sites in which I might hope to make contact with Pavel: modest all-day breakfast cafés, second-hand bookshops, charity pits. London Road offered no points of entrance. Like most of the pedestrians, I was the wrong demographic. High fences around captured ground boasted of a better future and solicited public collaboration for regeneration through upbeat signage. I was clumping uphill towards the Overground station when I found my first Pavel-possible enclave, a Scope shop dedicated to people
with cerebral palsy. The only book that had a whiff of him was
Tales, 1812: And Other Selected Poems
by George Crabbe. A decent volume in dustwrapper, it had been officially discarded by Enfield Libraries. ‘Had crimes less weighty on the spirit press’d,/This troubled Conscience might have sunk to rest.’

No signature. No bookplate. No annotations. But I was encouraged to sift the small stack of DVDs, and to come away with
BEAT
(This is a True Story … As True as Any Story Can Be …). New York, 1944. Several students gather at the apartment of Joan Vollmer (Courtney Love) to smoke, drink and experiment with drugs. Among them, William S. Burroughs (Kiefer Sutherland), Lucian
[sic]
Carr (Norman Reedus) and Alan
[sic]
Ginsberg (Ron Livingstone).

Promising. Certainly one to take home. And quite possibly a silver disk with Pavel’s fingerprints.

Coming to the crossroads, and pushing on down a pedestrianized precinct, flagshipped by the Ann Summers sex shop from which the impoverished citizen had stolen the pink dildo, I began to feel the pulse of the place. There was an identifiable civic centre, beyond the strumming of the goth band, the mid-morning crush and rush of on-the-hoof diners. Croydon gusted with diesel whirlwinds from new towers: company headquarters, supercity blocks of fiscal inanition. George Street was carved by retro-trams offering painless amputation, whistling through ranks of confused or decrepit humans who were window-shopping discounted comics and plastic space monsters. A plaque on the Hospital of the Holy Trinity made a political promise: ‘Sustenance and relief of certain maymed, poore, needie or impotent people, to have continuance for ever.’

All the ancient twisting ways led to an island cleared by fire. This sunken zone was under the protection of a locked Minster church, a set of almshouses blessed with a magnificent apple tree. Here was another terminal point: for the London riots of 2011. The furniture store and former auction house of the Reeves dynasty was torched by a flashmob tuned to the theatre of flame by BlackBerries and excited messages racing down the line from Dalston. Now the abandoned
site has become a memory-show; blind walls dressed with vast images of bearded entrepreneurs, hierarchies of shopworkers. Did Lawrence select a chair for his bedroom? The Davidson Road Elementary School, where he taught, was close at hand. He lodged at 12 Colworth Road from 1908 to 1912. In the summer of 1909, Jessie Chambers sent a number of his poems to Ford Madox Hueffer, who published them in the
English Review.
Lawrence was tapping Helen Corke, a teacher at another school, for details of her affair with a married man, who later killed himself. This sad story becomes fiction.
The Trespasser.

I am trespassing. This is not my territory. I’m in New York, in Corso’s loft, but I don’t belong there either. He’s pacing, he won’t sit down. We conduct the conversation on our feet, circling, freezing. He challenges. He gestures.
Right! You got it.
Most of his late interviews involve arguments about the way the clip-mike spoils the look of a leather waistcoat. He talks, when he does, sitting down; nodding, teeth gone, hair flopping over his eyes, winking at the person you don’t see: the lover, dealer, friend. He has his categories of achievement:
Talent, genius, divine.
With Shelley, alone and unchallenged, the shooting star.
Pour secrecy upon the dying page.
Tourism yielded poems: Corso in London fog, in Berlin zoo, in Paris Beat hotel. On trains, in galleries, in borrowed beds. In Mexico.

Michael Moorcock, London’s greatest fabulist of recent times, was sent to Pitman’s College in Croydon to learn how to type. He failed the entrance to Whitgift Grammar School. But he came upon the legendary bookshop of our dreams, a time-warp enterprise with all the pristine items from Victorian and Edwardian eras still nestling on the shelves. Novels of the 1920s and 1930s, mysteries and speculative romances, in intact wrappers. And for sale, as he whispered, ‘at half their original prices’. In the first flush he told a dealer who scooped the lot. Back to the shorthand. But typewriting skills, over the years, have stood him in good stead. He could fill a dozen of these shops from his backlist.

I understood why the blind man micturated with such urgency
against the wall. And why telephone kiosks, stripped of directories in which I might search for the address of Pavel Coen, were sticky-floored and foul-smelling. The new Croydon didn’t cater for ageing prostates, fidgeting kids, doubly burdened pregnant shoppers. Before I reversed my journey on the Overground, I needed a comfort break in one of the department stores: four warehouse floors thinly dressed with goods for a closing sale. Twenty minutes of stairs, failed escalators, misdirections, brought me to a remote basement with an out-of-order door
: LADIES.
Another eternity, walking faster now, swerving around mothers who have ground to a halt, reluctant partners, vagrants with numerous empty bags, led to a unisex cupboard under the roof.

Near the street door – cosmetics, shoes, handbags – there is some hope of a sale. Assistants switch from disdain to lapel-grabbing intimacy. They are saturated in product, feline musk, and painted until they crack; mask faces slashed with serial-killer red. Deeper inside this retail colony, for which no chart has ever been produced, we understand that the weird boxy clothes, outdated electronic gizmos, off-white goods, mouse pads with portraits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, are Croydon’s mistranslation of the USA. No passport, no oath of allegiance. Available, without prejudice, to every free man, woman and child.

Floorwalkers don’t walk. They lurk. They double as security. They mop out the toilets. They wear black shirts and waistcoats. They are pale as death. The man suppressing a silent scream, allocated a position on the top floor (where only the incontinent come), is Pavel Coen. He is the custodian of a library of VHS tapes dressed to look like books. I notice
Niagara
,
Vanishing Point
and
Boxcar Bertha.
I don’t say a word. I rush through men’s pyjamas to the lift. It isn’t working. Rather than coming close for a second time, confirming Pavel’s identity, I make a massive detour to the stairs. And then the street. If he deserves anything, my former colleague has earned the right to obscurity. If he retains a Beat archive from our 1995 US trip, Croydon is the perfect place to bury it.