American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (17 page)

‘Shoot the bitch and write a book. That’s what I did.’

The Burroughs sentence from a vodka session in Lawrence,
posted on a local website, was soon notorious. It had the kind of subterranean afterburn I found when, searching for traces of Pavel Coen, I played the
Beat
DVD I found in the Croydon charity pit.

The replay of a double-death memoir was hypnotic. Much truer to source than Cronenberg’s respectfully overimagined account of
Naked Lunch
or any of the implausible translations from Kerouac into Hollywood. A palpable lack of budget pared Gary Walkow’s film down into rigorous close-ups, brown rooms with low ceilings, a script made from quotations. And postcards from Mexico: an empty road, a river, the distant volcano.

Walkow’s
Beat
was my passport to the Land of the Dead. A slim plastic wallet with a pixilated portrait of a man in a hat, who looked about as much like Burroughs as I do.

The actors, none of whom resemble their originals, sleepwalk with listless conviction, repeating lines they appear to have received under a general anaesthetic. Keifer Sutherland makes a pass at that cryogenic Burroughs voice of world-weary cynicism, hot ash in the throat: a man who has come back from the abyss with grumbling haemorrhoids. The tapeworm of raw-meat sex stays at the bottom of the mescal bottle, untasted. Too much human flesh at the end of the fork.

Here is a narrative framed between the formal austerity of Bresson and the rum psychosis of Jim Thompson. Lucien Carr, the blond boy of New York, stabs and kills his stalking predator, Dave Kammerer. A paradox frames my sense of America: impossible spaces, claustrophobic cabins. Kammerer is actively on Carr’s tail (rubbing him with cashmoney, booze), while Burroughs, implicated in every action, plays witness and confessor. I’m back again in Gloucester, staring at Leon Kroll’s painting of the two women and the sun-drowned man. A configuration in which the rape or betrayal or act of liberating violence has not yet happened.

Two deaths. Kammerer as he tries to mount Carr. And Joan Vollmer, the glass on her head, challenging Burroughs to accept his fate and become a writer.

‘Do they have ruins in Guatemala?’

‘It’s all ruins.’

Sutherland’s pastiched Burroughs likes a drink, but he’s not Malcolm Lowry. He suffers the same tick, the compulsion to find the right word. ‘Did you see the
flock
of vultures?’ But is ‘flock’ the best collective noun? Bevy, covey, flight, gaggle, brood, hatch, litter, shoal, swarm? Like Lowry, he is on the Mexican bus with the chickens and the
people.

Burroughs, his boyfriend (a version of Lewis Marker, with whom he visited Ecuador in search of the hallucinogenic drug yage), Joan Vollmer: eternal triangle. Vollmer, Carr, Burroughs: ‘Too bad you’re not a man.’ Ginsberg, Burroughs, Vollmer: dry hump. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Neal Cassady: poetry. Cassady, Kerouac, Carolyn Cassady: confession. And on. And on. Until one of them strikes out for Mexico. Walkow’s budget version has the mathematics of catastrophe absolutely pat. Maya plus Los Alamos. The pyramid of black smoke.

‘No Mexican really knew any other Mexican, and when a Mexican kills someone (which happened often), it was usually his best friend.’

The miracle of
Beat
is Courtney Love, who is nothing like the febrile Joan (who had two small children and was too smart to write). Love is embedded in her performance, emboldened by sofa lips, harvest of hair, the supreme physicality. At moments she looks like a shire horse in scarlet lipstick and a wig. She’s better than Kim Novak in
Vertigo
– where awkwardness of performance reaps dividends. She should be painted by Kroll.

‘Lucien can write a song about anything.’

‘Why don’t you write us a volcano song?’

Walkow references everything from Malcolm Lowry to Billy Wilder: ‘nobody’s perfect’. Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, visited Burroughs in Lawrence. There were rumours that he spent his last seventy-two hours staring into the flicker and strobe of a Burroughs/Gysin dream machine. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Seattle.

Beyond the dust of the Mexican road, as the Ginsberg actor and
the Carr actor carry Courtney Love towards the cone of the distant volcano, is the shadiest, coolest river. They strip, plunge, drift. Love vanishes. She is sitting in her damp underwear in a wood. All the good westerns have a version of this scene. Peckinpah liked nothing more than crossing the border; a respite in a green place, before red death.

That was it, I thought. Walkow had summarized it for me, broken the complexities down. I couldn’t imagine where this DVD came from or why it could be found in Croydon for £1.50. And then the name rang a muffled bell. Alongside the director/performer Andrew Kötting (who had the look of Lowry and a major swimming habit), I was invited to talk about our project of taking a swan pedalo from Hastings to Hackney. We were in Trinity Buoy Wharf at the mouth of the River Lea, the precise point at which, months later, when a budget had been secured, I would come ashore, quitting the swan before she completed her voyage by disappearing into the tunnel in Islington. The swan reminded me of somebody: Courtney Love. White lady of destruction, shredder of myths.

After the event, a man approached. He knew my work and said that, if I were willing, he’d like to present me with a DVD. It was a film he made in 1995, a version of Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground.
I remember sending this person a few words of thanks and I tracked the email down.

At first I found the shift from 19th-century Russia to
21st-century California disorientating, but all that soon settles. Sometimes limited means (budget) does create a useful tension. It was good to meet at the river’s edge.

The man’s name was Gary Walkow.

She had just returned from a book tour in Canada. In Canada? I didn’t know they were interested in Mexican writers.

– Walter Abish

O come to me again as once in May.

We were spending more time, as much as possible, on the south coast, a flat in St Leonards-on-Sea. Attempting to evaluate boxes and files of hopelessly disconnected research material from journeys made in the wake of other journeys, I felt the need to put a brake on this headlong momentum and to strike out afresh from where I was: swimming or walking from the shingle beach on the far side of a busy road. The self-consciously quaint hill town of Rye – cobbles, teashops, silted harbour – had its overloud cultural associations, from Henry James and the early modernists to E. F. Benson and the two Pauls, Nash and McCartney. The young Malcolm Lowry was rusticated to Sussex, to be dried out and tutored by the fleshy American poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, who lived close to Lamb House on Mermaid Street and the garden where James paced out his leisured paragraphs.

I knew all that, but I’d forgotten or didn’t arrive at the one fact that mattered until I returned from Los Angeles, having shadowed Lowry down the Pacific Rim from Vancouver: the author of
Under the Volcano
was boxed and earthed, on my doorstep, in the village of Ripe. The thing you are searching for is within touching distance, but you are obliged to cross oceans, witness forest fires, take open-top bus tours around the Hollywood Hills, before you are allowed to contemplate the names and dates on a local headstone.

Dark as the Grave wherein My Friend is Laid
is culled from diaries, multiple drafts, cancelled starts, by Margerie Lowry and Douglas Day. It is, on one level, a remix of
Under the Volcano
; an author’s cut made without the author. Lowry comes back to the nightmare of
Mexico with his second wife – who is seeing the significant locations of the troublesome book for the first time, in order to absorb and exorcize the pain. Along with scented traces of Jan Gabrial, the model for Lowry’s bolter, the faithless (with good reason) Yvonne. A return is the most volatile of bad journeys, black spots of mescal-induced dementia flaring into new life. ‘Perhaps the sensation of writing was related to a half memory that seemed now to come to the surface, as if indeed he were writing this down or as though somebody else were writing it down, or writing through him.’

It is madness to revisit actual bars, imagined towers, butterfly-crusted swimming holes, crowded buses, once they have been tainted and transformed by the act of fiction. You are undoing the spell. Words, and the order of words, obey the laws of magic. Everything is risked. And lost. Lowry invokes Emanuel Swedenborg, a traveller who made little distinction between the realms of the living and the deceased of vanished centuries. The terrain of Swedenborg’s undead is as sober, industrious, hygienically free-loving (and dull) as Lowry’s is carnivalesque, firecracklingly loud, peopled with blind old women putting dead dogs to the dried-out teat. Swedenborg, in austere black velvet, having breakfasted, envisioned ‘a gymnasium where young men are initiated into various matters pertaining to wisdom’. Lowry took his seat among the
borrachos
in an Oaxaca dive called the Farolito, and tried to talk Spanish to dedicated drunks who, if they were in a good humour, might mangle a few phrases of cinema English.

‘Nobody has written an adequate book about drinking,’ Lowry said. He scorned that chart-topper, Charles Jackson’s
The Lost Weekend.
Barometer set for a spell of riot.

Under the Volcano
begins as an image: a dying man, an Indian, at the roadside, seen from a bus on the way to a bull-throwing. A fellow passenger steals money from the victim’s hat. The incident provokes a short story. But there are so many aspects to this, so many details of what led up to the desperate excursion. ‘There used to be a waterfall.’

As he discourses with a black magician in a white suit, a doctor
who is not a doctor (but who would have been, given time, a major character in the novel), and a Mexican called Eddie (policeman and bar-owner with pistol), Lowry boasts: ‘I am all the characters. They are all me.’

The crazy expedition pivots, Lowry says, on the search for his great amigo, a swordsman and horse-runner. A bank messenger who also acted in Eisenstein’s staged documentary,
Thunder over Mexico.
We understand that Fernando, Lowry’s Dr Vigil, is long dead. Even though the author has been sending unanswered letters from Vancouver for years. Those letters are trial runs for the book. The Eisenstein film is abandoned, aborted. I will play what’s left of it, over and over, to locate Lowry’s phantom drinking partner. Without success.

The other doctor, the Haitian from the new fiction, chuckles: ‘Once, in Port-au-Prince, I saw a headless woman dancing outside the Hotel Oloffson.’

Ripe is the setting for a classic English murder mystery: a somnolent hamlet, an accident of crossroads, farms, railway tracks, more violent, repressive, suicidal – by implication – than anything Lowry squeezed out of the lemon-and-salt poisons of Cuernavaca. His Sussex arrival, none too fresh from his latest cure, bearded, raw, a stopped writer of mislaid reputation visited by an aristocrat (Lord Peter Churchill), and married to a former Hollywood actress, is the standard pre-credit sequence – it scripts itself – for orthodox mayhem from
Miss Marple
or
Midsomer Murders.

Ripe is Margerie’s copyright as much as Malcolm’s: she outlives him, outdies him. Rewrites him. She is fresh from the saddle as a performer in B-movie westerns. She tried to teach him the geometry of the stars (celestial and Beverly Hills). Their meeting at the intersection of Western and Hollywood Boulevard has the force of fable: he arrives by bus, she comes by car (being with Lowry will end all that). She waits at the bus stop, he steps down. They embrace. They hold each other. They stay, motionless, frozen, until Jack King, Margerie’s former lover, who has been detained by business, arrives.

Flying back to Mexico from Vancouver in 1945, drowsy with booze and pills, Lowry dips into Yeats: ‘The living can assist the imagination of the dead.’ He senses, Arizona beneath him, ‘an organic turning of oneself inside out, the setting to work of all the headlong down-driving machinery of a colossal lethiferous debauch’. Reality comes close: Malcolm’s crack-up. Outside animals are revealed in the absence of drink. In-flight coffee, untouched, tastes like mescal. Antabuse. Flash forward to the hideous therapies of suburban London asylums. Denied water, Lowry is doped, fed salt. Rage of Death Valley thirst. Until he sucks and swallows with bleeding gums from his chamber pot. Until the complacent, fat-whiskered medical man brings a bottle of whisky up to his pursed mouth: a telescope filled with urine. Until he agrees that they can cut a fistula from his brain; carve the bolus, the vegetal core. He can’t put pen to the surgical contract. He’s shaking too much. He writes standing up; blue veins harden in his legs. Margerie holds the trembling bone hand, guides his wrist. A Sussex culmination of that Hollywood embrace: she authors his books. She digs a novel out from the grave. He has written his Mexican friend, drinking buddy of the bad places, back from death.

All their bad journeys are reduced to the dregs of the last bottle: Margerie Bonner transports Lowry (after Vulcano, the Lake District, the Farne Islands) to Ripe. To choke and die. He can no longer lift a glass without support. Books that appeared under his name, having been mangled and scribbled over until they were almost erased, are edited and improved by the brave survivor, his wife.

‘Conniption’ is the word Lowry repeats, a chant to keep the plane in the air, as he heads to another border and all the waiting ghosts and policemen. ‘Consulates. Customs. Conniption all over again. Double conniption. Bribery and conniption. Treble conniption. It is going into hell.’ Conniption is hysterical excitement or anger.

Readjusting after our Canadian excursion, we spent a few days on the south coast. Our eyes had been peeled and polished by travel. I thought that a visit to Monk’s House at Rodmell, with a walk down
to the river where Virginia Woolf went in, would combine nicely with a first pass at Ripe, paying our respects to the graves of Mr and Mrs Lowry.

Anna, in her short white coat, on the chalk path between the Woolfs’ garden and the River Ouse, framed against telegraph poles, the shoulder of the Downs, a high-cloud sky, looked American. The river was low, the sludgy banks sheer and lacking in handholds. We carried away an impression of beehives, droopy tendrils of wisteria, lichen-crusted statuary, lawns yellowed at season’s end. Virginia Woolf was a torso on a pedestal, a votive presence in bosky shadows. Without literary suicides, drownings, gin and sodium amytal binges, Lewes and its sylvan satellites would be intolerable.
¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!
It is difficult to wander permitted paths along the borders of corrugated fields, through tumbled graves of yew-shaded churches, without picturing combine harvesters ploughing into picnicking toffs at Glyndebourne, or squadrons of Hell’s Angels on invalid-carriages roaring among the outside tables of heritage pubs declining to serve a sandwich after 2 p.m.

Ripe sits on the wrong side of the frantic A27, the humble cousin of that Bloomsbury outstation, Charleston. Charleston has its pond for naked frolics, its easy access to the Downs (Virginia bumping along on her bicycle). Its craftily defaced plates and chairs. Its book-bound importance. Its gift shop and festivals. Ripe has a couple of buried ghosts, a suspicious death, and a healthy resistance to outsiders.

This was the story of the Lowrys’ last voyage, as I understood it: the road to Ripe. Malcolm on the island of Vulcano in an American shirt and heavy sunglasses. Clean-shaven, hair managed. He stands at the extreme left edge of the surviving photograph, shoulder sliced away. A thin but assertive tree spoils the effect; a modest flat-roofed building, a dormant volcano edging into mist. The photograph says: ‘I’m dead. You can’t see my eyes. Nothing to report.’ A foolish Mediterranean detour to humour Margerie’s late whim for tourism. And Lowry’s sentiment for volcanoes.

It’s a movie. But they don’t make it. Nobody does. Antonioni
could: Jack Nicholson and Monica Vitti. Dubbed by Dirk Bogarde and Shelley Duval. Booed at Cannes.

Next slide: Lake District. Grasmere? Lowry’s hands clasped in lap. Seated on wet rock in implausible Mediterranean outfit. His clothes are always one journey, one continent, too late. Behind him, if you print without cropping (as Feltrinelli does for the Italian translation of
Under the Volcano
): a canvas rucksack, a box of matches. Ruffled lake and backdrop hills tease memories of Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet. ‘My trouser bottoms are scuffed and shredded like a Mexican beggar. Is this the right place to leave my ashes?’

Then London, the inferno. Hospitals. A living corpse, pipe wedged between tight lips, transported to Ripe. Where it all unravels like an orthodox English mystery.

SHE BROKE GIN BOTTLE. FOUND HUSBAND DEAD. MEDICAL EVIDENCE SHOWED THAT MR LOWRY DIED FROM ACUTE BARBITURIC POISONING ASSOCIATED WITH A STATE OF CHRONIC ALCOHOLISM
.

The White Cottage. Writing impossible. Barred from the pub at the end of the lane, the Lamb. They walk out in the early evening of 26 June 1957, beyond the village, to the Yew Tree in Chalvington; a mile or so from their rented home. The soused Lowrys sit head to head at the public bar. Margerie, it is reported later, when such details are magnified, and a summer cold becomes a premonition of disaster, weeps for her lost Dollarton shack. She knows the world of stars and creatures in ways her husband never will. Beaks tapping at the window. A bear coming to the beach for berries. A swimming deer. Margerie’s mystery novel,
The Shapes That Creep
, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1946, is as telling an account of life in the squatter community on the Burrard Inlet as Lowry’s more celebrated tale ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’. Margerie is no supporting artist in the Lowry legend. She encodes her stories and her scripts, produced to keep this shaky couple afloat, with lunar caustics of her own, crossword puzzles and references to Shakespeare’s little performed play
Timon of Athens.
Her blotched, red-faced husband, a grouchy and hibernating bear of the woods, is the misanthrope. A foolishly fond dispenser of largesse in bars and Vancouver hotels
where women are not permitted. Timon’s death and his unvisited memorial will be a footnote to the last act.

A woman (not unlike the author) is the mystery solver in Bonner’s fiction. She finds the first body and the book beside the corpse. Lowry’s memories, like those of a drowning man, are nets: he speaks of coming on deck, mid-ocean, to find a flock of owls caught in the rigging.

A bottle of gin is purchased. To calm Margerie, Lowry claims. In their weatherboarded Ripe retirement, she keeps him company, glass for glass. They argue, as before. And worse. Margerie sets off down the darkened lane with its high hedges, the shrine-like alcoves in which farmers leave eggs and murdered crows. Lowry stumbles in her wake, touching trees, bottle wedged precariously under his tweedy arm.

Back at White Cottage, he staggers upstairs to catch a Stravinsky concert on the radio. A cold collation is prepared. Lowry is crouched in his corner, head on knees, gin half drunk, and Russian music sawing out of the crackling flesh radio. Margerie turns the volume down. Who narrates these events? The principal suspect. Margerie has good reasons for culling Malcolm. He is a serial suicide: threatened, attempted, now achieved by other means. Throw the dead dog, after him, in the ravine.
Le Sacre du printemps.
That much is true. Check the alibi with the
Radio Times.
Too much detail. The man is faithful to his flaws.

Mrs Lowry said her husband had been treated in a hospital for alcoholism, but was discharged as incurable.

‘When he hit me,’ she said, ‘he was under the influence and in a bad temper.’

They wrestle. Over Bakelite knobs. Stravinsky’s savage rite swelling and fading. Over the gin bottle. She smashes it against the wall. He curses, chases her down the narrow stairs. She retreats to the house of her landlady, Mrs Mason. Where she spends the night. On her return, next morning, Lowry is gone: dead. Supper all over the room. Beside him on the floor, the final insult, a bottle of lurid orange squash.