American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (2 page)

Hearing Olson talk, years later, in archive film sampled by Henry Ferrini for his portrait
Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place
, you got the excitement of the expanding moment; a rumbling voice thick with smoke, sweat dripping, black eyebrows emphatic as that other alpha male, Robert Maxwell (press baron, litigant, whale-corpse found floating). The suffering blackboard, a negative window, slashed by chalk prompts, a blizzard of names and dates. Wild, punching semaphore. And the gleaming melon dome of that glistening skull. To surf all those lines of energy and catch it up, almost, in feverish talk, struggling for breath, dark patches on white shirt. A fresh cigarette, a Camel, fired from the stub of the last. ‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.’

The Sicilian quarter, the tight community on Fort Square, where Charles Olson found a safe branch on which to perch, with Betty, in August 1957, was still very much present when I walked there from my roadside hut in October 2011. First floor, balcony on the side, new names on mailboxes:
Frontiero
,
Sova
,
Borichevsky
. And a harbour view that hits home, both directions in time and space: the workaday shacks, rust running from metal fence into stone wall, fishing boats putting out, seasonal pleasure boats at anchor. In the last years, when the task went sour on him, and Olson was alone, it was an exile interrupted by visitors, New York poets or Warhol’s acolyte Gerard Malanga with a thirsty camera.

Olson’s son, another Charles, a Gloucester carpenter who shunned literary events and tributes, was proud to put his hand to the simple memorial plaque, pressing it into wet cement:
CHARLES OLSON POET
1910–1970. He said a few words to the gathering of enthusiasts.

Below the apartments, in their brightly painted nonconformity, up against the fence, on the edge of the sea, was an abandoned blockhouse, a whitewashed post-industrial Alamo. The former packing plant of Clarence Birdseye, pioneer of the global frozen-food operation. So Olson becomes an alternative Captain Birdseye, commander of a ghost fleet, wacky admiral on the hill. Or Captain Iglo, neighbourhood eccentric, pipe and flapped Russian cap, sliding down steep steps in the snow, a foot and more taller than the men of the interlinked Sicilian families. Cold cartons of fish fingers no longer thump from the assembly line. There is talk of converting Clarence Birdseye’s plant into a smart hotel. Even Gorton’s, the big Gloucester employer, are cutting back. The paying product these days is cat food. Canned mush for America’s kept-at-home pets. The pampered muses of writers.

At the end of the curve of the gracious marine boulevard, after crossing the bridge over Annisquam River, I arrive at Stage Fort Park. It is no difficult matter to identify the gap in the trees at Half Moon Beach, the bench where the young Olson stood listening to
the two old men, as they smoked and talked. This is the pivotal point where, feeling the immense weight of the land behind you, the overriding impulse is to turn and face the sea. The boy, whose wrists were already too much for the sleeves of his tight jacket, said that he was spellbound by what he heard: that male need to talk the day down. He knew their names, Lou Douglas and Frank Miles. A lazy, companionable exchange, in the face of lengthening shadows, as they draw on pipe or cigarette. For Charles Olson, this is where it all begins. Unnoticed, he listens. Then he turns back, up through the deserted park, where earlier he had played baseball with his friends, and across Hough Avenue to the holiday cottage. To his family, the summer community.

The force of Olson as a personality was so potent, back then, because our estrangement from the local product was absolute. We didn’t buy English anger, which seemed to be nothing more than a media-friendly staging post on the way to peevish rural retirement, empty bottles on the porch, second wives in red fur nursing black eyes. We didn’t buy class envy or class entitlement as a thesis. We didn’t buy the campus (or any other form of convenient bureaucracy) as a setting, a vehicle for satire, or comforting murder mysteries. Which is to say, we were denim-and-corduroy puritans with Diggerish aspirations, overread, underused. Wide open to the enticement of the Other, emanations of prairie Spirit; charisma, vision, prophetic pronouncements. Peyote shamanism. Territorial adventures. Peru. New Mexico. The genealogy, laid out with intricate lines and boxes, ran from Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis to Olson and Ed Dorn. Which is why, with no inhibiting sense of contradiction, we sat on a train with cold, greasy windows, travelling the slow way, past reservoirs, pylons, waste-burning chimneys, reed beds, frosted fields and humps, from Liverpool Street to Cambridge.

1971. And the 1960s were hitting their straps, doing the hard graft, after those earlier Kodak-colour excesses, the not-so-free festivals and stalled revolutions. Chris Bamford, a little tighter, more sandpapered, nail-chewing over wide cups of black coffee in the upstairs kitchen, was back from New England on a flying visit. There was content here still to be unpacked, he said. Family to acknowledge. But there was also distance, now he had lived in those fictional places. There had been films with Ginsberg and Ed Sanders. Uncertainties were racked up, mystics and philosophers sampled, along with aspects of sacred geometry and architecture: Blake, Kathleen Raine, Gregory Bateson. The realization, so Chris asserted, of a
new planetary culture. The man on these islands with whom he needed to make contact was a certain Mr Prynne, a poet.
The
poet. The bridge, as he insisted, with brisk cutting gestures, rattling the plates, printing a sticky line of burnt crumbs across the taut ridge of his hand, between the two countries, our soon-to-be-conjoined cultures. He projected some form of eighteenth-century correspondence, actual letters, between himself in Massachusetts and this unknown scholar in Cambridge.

Irregular bulletins from the Lindisfarne Association of West Stockbridge arrived in Hackney; packages were passed around the kitchen table. In the photograph of a conference ritual, whitefolk in loose shirts and tight jeans holding hands in a frowning circle around a Hopi Indian man wearing beads and a bandana, Chris is clearly visible, a head taller than Janet McCloud, a member of the Seattle tribes. For the consecration of ground, before a grail chapel could be constructed, the rind of Celtic spiritual traditions must demonstrate its affinity with Native American practice. ‘I am the hill where poets walk. I am the tomb of every hope.’ There were no known photographs of Mr Prynne. His books were text, pure. With, perhaps, a red-ink diagram. He avoided, as we discovered at the entrance to his stairs, in the labyrinth of his Cambridge college, extraneous academic distinctions. Like a surgeon, he was listed on the wall as a plain mister among congeries of black-lettered doctors and professors.

It had happened again, just like Dublin. Chris acquired a copy of
The White Stones
, ordered from the English publishers and shipped out, at the very moment when I, stopping to browse on a walk across London, picked up a copy in the bookshop on Primrose Hill, where, two years before, I had filmed an Allen Ginsberg signing session. I stood by the enticingly stocked poetry shelves reading those opening lines: ‘The century roar is a desert carrying/too much away; the plane skids off/with an easy hopeless departure.’ I was sold, instantly. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I loved the idea of it. White stones, like the ones the military used to paint as borders around huts, confirming this transatlantic causeway, but in a
powerful new European register. The landmasses had once been attached. The cover of Olson’s
Maximus Poems
IV, V, VI
, published by Jonathan Cape in London, celebrates Earth before she started to come apart at the seams, some 125 million years ago. The time of Gondwanaland, before the great divorce and migration of continents. ‘A while back,’ as the introductory note puts it. When Ireland kissed Greenland. And Brazil’s shoulder dug into future slaving grounds. ‘The war of Africa against Eurasia has just begun again,’ Olson said.

One of the miracles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the old railway zone of Camden Town, before the strangling evolution of the leather-and-vinyl market, was the independent bookshop called Compendium. The success of this operation was remarkable. It grew, seemingly overnight, from a tall, sallow man hunched, in a wretched, holed-at-the-elbow, down-to-the-knees sweater, at a foldout table with a dozen paperbacks, to an interconnected series of caves, one of them given over entirely to poetry. I bought Ed Dorn’s
Gunslinger 1 & 2
, date inscribed: 17/2/70. This was a giant leap in the mental health of the metropolis; the confirmation of that unitary vision expressed at the 1967 conference, up the road at the Roundhouse, the old engine-turning shed. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we had an operation equal to Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road – but where the salesfolk actually
knew
about books – parachuted into a convenient halt on a loop of the North London Line.

Anything was possible now. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Dorn’s
Gunslinger
, a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of the mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be sequestered in the penthouse, to present him with a copy of the poem in which Dorn shaped the pencil-moustached ghost’s non-existence into a divine comedy of cocaine and virtual travel through high sierras and white deserts running to the horizon like the bad craziness of a Monte Hellman western. It was that craziness we used to call
the
possible
: that an invisible London publisher could
provoke a reaction from the richest hermit on the planet, an unbarbered Texan tool-bit weirdo guarded by Mormon goons; that Howard Hughes, a fabulous entity capable of impersonation by Leonardo DiCaprio, would sue a poet and a doctor with unsold paperbacks stacked in his North London garage. Oh yes, those were the days. The bibliographic cornucopia of Camden Town, with its US imports, its French theorists, its New Age primers, was a classic small-business model. Money-laundering to a purpose. The whole pre-Thatcherite, wild-dog enterprise was underwritten by the area’s other growth industry: drugs. Arrest, incarceration, downsizing followed, with the shop taken over by a management committee of the workers.

Navigating the shelves, I pulled out
The Kitchen Poems
, on the strength of the publisher’s name, Cape Goliard, and in irritation, because this was the title I had chosen, and now had to revise, for my own first book. J. H. Prynne’s slimly elegant package invoked Olson; the cover design was an oil-exploration chart of the North Sea, produced, so it seemed, by Esso. I got, all at once, the common ground, but not how smartly and acerbically this English don bit down on economics, consumption and profit in the body of who and where we were. The tender address. ‘The ground on which we pass,/moving our feet, less excited by travel.’

Mr Prynne had travelled, so he told us when we settled into our big chairs in his Cambridge rooms. He was at home, we were not. But he made us welcome, by staying within the gracious formality of the place where we found ourselves. The sort of unnerving geography we had both experienced in earlier interviews of rejection. He was a tall man, uniformed in pressed grey flannels, with polished black shoes, black cord jacket and white shirt heretically enlivened by an orange tie. The look was not accidental, like our own, nor was it subject to the fads and revisions of fashion. He spoke of a voyage to the ice fringe, the Northwest Passage. That haunting blankness, pictures with no frames. And Boston, he’d done a year there. Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard. Prynne investigated the university bookshop by starting at the left-hand corner of the top
shelf, and ploughing on, with the occasional wince and whinny, until he reached Olson. So that connection was confirmed. We felt comfortable enough now, to make our risky suggestion: that Mr Prynne should become the rector, or guiding light, of a British version of Black Mountain College. How this might be funded, who else would be involved, where the premises were to be found, we did not explain. We knew, the three of us, that the proposition was entirely metaphorical.

We also knew that Charles Olson was much more than an outlaw enthusiasm, picked up in Ireland, supported by renegades in Bristol and communes along the Welsh borders; there was a deep engagement within the folds of Cambridge academia. And, more than that, Mr Prynne was a key supplier for
Maximus
research, a tireless raider of libraries. His relationship with Olson was personal, direct, acknowledged in interviews. Yes, he had heard the century’s roar and visited Gloucester. ‘I read that piece of Jeremy Prynne’s,’ Olson told the interviewer sent to bother him by the
Paris Review
, ‘and he says everything right, accurately.’

The heaped rooms overlooking the harbour at Fort Square. The large poet has crawled from his bed, sick again, sick of winter, kitchen in chaos, and he gestures his interrogator to a hard chair. He threw a rug from the window, that morning, to signal that he was at home and receiving. America was asleep, he reckoned. The deadest sleep there ever was. Jeremy Prynne, in England, was the energy source.

While Chris, hot, raw, twisted in the depths of the collegiate furniture, teasing out the moral complexities of the questions he needed to frame (so much depended on this), I scanned the bookshelves, encouraged by a long line of Patrick White novels. Here, vividly, and in terms I understood, was a demonstration of Prynne’s doctrine of value. These items were, I felt confident, all first editions (the bonus of originality, first touch), but, in the fashion followed by collectors in the 1930s, the dustwrappers had been removed. Prynne, clearly, had no truck with the recent fetish for book as object, for pretty embellishments by Roy de Maistre or
Sidney Nolan. The words spoke for themselves and the rest was some debased form of public relations. Knowing the premium on intact copies, basically those that have never been read, I was a little shocked. And impressed. I was also impressed, and alarmed, by the casual vehemence with which Prynne wrote off certain poets honoured in the alternative canon, legendary names that were supposed to be on our side. He sliced through the looseness of language of some unfortunate who wrote to him asking for a sample of his thought. ‘Like a lump of basalt!’

The afternoon closed down around our conversation, it had run for several hours. Cambridge was wreathed in low-lying fenland mist, bands of frozen air. Every rasped breath a cancelled speech balloon. Anna, who had come along for the trip, the journey from Hackney, was out there, wandering the unwelcoming streets. I excused myself, to find her and bring her back. The novelty of this town soon exhausted itself, she said. After a cup of tea, she even ventured into a bookshop. Prynne was effortlessly courteous, brandy in hand, the chair closest to the fire. He must have wondered what this young woman, my wife, a glamorously chilled figure in a long suede coat with fur collar, was doing, keeping company with vagrant poets of absurd ambition and minimal resources.

I drove Chris to the airport, filming his departure (still scribbling into a black notebook), and he vanished once again, not to reappear for many years. The letters dried up. The correspondence with Prynne never began. Too much to say very easily becomes nothing, silence. From what I picked up as others who knew him passed through London, Chris was importing English artists and seekers. Keith Critchlow, a metaphysical geometer from the Research into Lost Knowledge Organization, delivered a series of lectures on the Platonic Tradition and the Nature of Proportion. And while the esoteric lessons of European cathedral builders were seeded in Massachusetts, Mr Prynne helped to secure passage for the Black Mountaineer, Ed Dorn, into Essex University at Colchester. Where an active American presence was being established under the
patronage of Donald Davie, Prynne’s early sponsor. There was a good deal of neurotic shuttling across the Atlantic, often, like Chris, on cargo boats out of Liverpool; the longer the voyage, the better the chance of adjustment. Poets traded in difference, exiling themselves for a season to Buffalo or Berkeley. Dorn repaid the favour, with interest, by publishing
The North Atlantic Turbine
, mirroring the cover of Prynne’s
The White Stones
with an Olsonian map of the ocean and its voyagers. Dorn saw himself clearing his debt to geography and opening the way to ‘spiritual address’. ‘Off shore I have missed my country for the first time,’ he said. Colchester offered mornings walking to the Roman wall as the most casual of excursions. If he checked out
The Magnificent Seven
at the local fleapit, his territory, the Old West, was somehow exotic. And peculiar. A place where Mexicans were played by Germans. Hearing orange gas hiss in the fire at night, he burnt for home.

Mr Prynne stopped once when he was driving home through Hackney, and I returned a couple of times, on book-delivering expeditions, to Cambridge. The fungal abundance of late Olson was being cleaned and shaped under Prynne’s direction, prepared for publication. He understood the rhythms of the work better than anybody else. ‘The poem is simple,’ Prynne stressed, ‘but the life it came out of, and the preoccupations that surround it, immeasurably dense and confused and packed with a kind of fertile obscurity.’ We look for the point of stress where story crystallizes into legend.

The young Chicago-born postgraduate Tom Clark moved from Prynne’s college to Essex. He was friend, editor, amanuensis to Dorn, witness to all the shifts and small secrets of the era. He was onboard when Olson arrived in Colchester, to hibernate like a bear, to deliver all-night, rasping monologues. Clark was a very shrewd and sharp-eyed babysitter. He was one of the first and best to write about Dorn. Years later, Dorn recalled the London taxi in which Olson’s wealthy lover came to collect him, gather him up, setting off for London, books and effects piled on the roof like a gypsy caravan, a train in India.