American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (25 page)

But there is another Jack’s Peak in Monterey County, south-west (by south) of Kitkitdizze. It was the ocean for Lew, the far horizon where the sun sets. The dream he sent echoed something he told Frank Dieterich: ‘Up in the Sierras there’s these sheer granite crevasses hundreds of feet deep. You could balance on the edge of one, blow your brains out, topple right in; you’d never be found.’ Bones too tough for buzzards to crack. Maps pored over, expeditions launched. Places that are not
those
kinds of places. As Kerouac said in
Mexico City Blues
: ‘You just numbly don’t get there.’

Snyder wrote a poem. He called it ‘For/From Lew’.

Lew Welch just turned up one day,

live as you and me. ‘Damn, Lew’ I said,

‘you didn’t shoot yourself after all.’

‘Yes I did’ he said,

and even then I felt the tingling down my back.

‘Yes you did, too’ I said – ‘I can feel it now.’

‘Yeah’ he said,

‘There’s a basic fear between your world and

mine. I don’t know why.

What I came to say was,

teach the children about the cycles.

The life cycles. All the other cycles.

That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.’

Three miles outside Nixon, heading north-east, getting away from Reno as rapidly as was practicable, Ed Dorn stopped to pick up one of the First (now Last) People, a man who said he was half Shoshone and half Paiute. And who was making a fifteen-mile hike towards Route 40, where he hoped to find a ride to a town run on gambling and drive-through divorce: ‘The Biggest Little City in the World’. (You can see something of the bounce of light, the affectless hardbitten opportunism, in John Huston’s film
The Misfits.
Wild horses as uncanned dog food. The name actors are doing it for the last time, nursing cancers and bungalow death wishes. Arthur Miller certainly wishes he had left his script as a
nouveau roman
. But he manages to locate a new wife among the throng of international photographers who have been hired to add class to a failing product. The portfolio of Magnum stills overwhelms the movie. And appeals to an entirely different audience of collectors and aesthetes.)

Questioned, as they jolt along, Dorn at the wheel, the black photographer Leroy Lucas beside him, the walker explains why his journey is necessary. He is going to sell a pint of blood for five dollars. Fresh blood is the only available welfare. The buyers don’t discriminate, they’re not like the Diners Club vampires of Forks, with their preference for free-range forest animals. ‘They just mix it all up. Nobody knows where it comes from.’

Dorn reveals, by way of return, that in the pinch of his own early poverty, he would trade blood for twenty-five dollars a pint in San Francisco; after affirming that he had not travelled in alien lands. There were certain obvious territories carrying a freight of fear. Ed played safe. ‘It was best just to say you had never been to
any
foreign country.’ What this anecdote seemed to demonstrate was the
economic stretch between the Humboldt River, on the California/Nevada border, and the promised lands around San Francisco and the Bay Area. Where uncontaminated white life-juice carried a value multiplied by a factor of five. The Black Mountain poet Cal Shutter, for example, sold so much blood between 1966 and 1972 that he found regular employment playing vampires in underground movies for Kenneth Anger and others.

Coming from Kitkitdizze to Nevada City, it was tempting to follow Dorn east to Reno, and then into the unknown and challenging geographies he describes in his finely crafted 1966 book,
The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin-Plateau.
Nobody I know can do the angles of managed (and self-inflicted) awkwardness so well: to be what and who you are, with no baggage; a clear eye on foolishness, corruption of means and language. When you have to sit on a smeared, sodden chair in the home of a 102-year-old Indian in a wilderness hovel, do it. Register the mechanisms. Make the trade in cigarettes. Shape the episode into masculine prose.

There is no point of exchange now, even the names Shoshone and Paiute are imposed. If you have seen enough westerns you know how the structure works: the cops are muscle for the money, and the prejudice they choose to indulge in the privacy of the jailhouse is their own affair. Whoever or whatever arrives in town, without invitation or bags of silver dollars to feed the stalled herds of machines (like factory-farm hogs), is advised, in no uncertain terms, with weighted and ironic formality, to keep moving. ‘Step out of the car, please, sir’, it is understood, means its opposite:
drive.

The dry heat of the Basin-Plateau was attractive after our Impala-surf through the wet sponge of the Olympic Peninsula and Oregon. Dorn was the ideal copywriter for the Badlands. ‘Well known only to a few gamblers, professional criminals, movie stars, divorcees, and, of course, the people who live there,’ he wrote: as he journeyed, Reno to Pocatello, hanging out with a terminally drunk rodeo rider who decides to mount a cow at midnight, wearing a set of boy’s chaps. Or eating the sour-sweet glue of Chinese slop under interrogation from the ancestors of the men who slaved
to build the railways. As the safest option in a settlement of culinary fundamentalism. And bars of workless working men where nobody moves for fear of falling over.

Swerving away from Dorn, from the potentialities of that special kind of intelligent abhorrence, was to reconnect with a simpler narrative: Sacramento, San Francisco, Los Angeles.
And the poet Tom Clark
. It began to look as if Clark, biographer of Kerouac, of Dorn, and his mentor Charles Olson, was the person to visit. All trails led to an address somewhere across the Bay that Clark was careful to keep private. And to the problematic physical and material circumstances of this underappreciated lyric poet: as he reported them. Things were bad and somehow Tom thrived on it. Not for nothing had he contrived a novel from the darkest days of Céline: the apocalyptic German night, the headlong flight under bombing into Denmark.

Tom did not encourage random cultural tourists, but I persisted. To the point where, between the lines in a flurry of emails, Clark mentioned the fact that Cal Shutter was still around, still with his wife of many years. If Shutter stepped outside his nest, which he rarely did, it was hellfire and damnation. Food had to be foraged. From time to time, Clark said, the veteran poet, bloodless and abino-white, begged on the streets. Solicited coin. He had Clark’s sympathy. Tom had retired from the fray, but he retained the sharpest memories of old poetry wars and shifting alliances; the ways in which reputations are made and lost. He was the former poetry editor of the once-hip
Paris Review
, a colleague of George Plimpton and his ilk. There were numerous books to Tom’s name: poetry, biography, criticism. Scholarship with punch. He had studied at Caius College, Cambridge, where J. H. Prynne was his Moral Tutor. He taught at the University of Essex in the high days of the 1960s. Now every excursion to San Francisco was an adventure. The pinch of these darks days left him like a desert father, a fiery monk defending a discontinued theology.

Triangulating other contacts in the Bay Area, including an English exile who lived in a communal house that once belonged to the
actress Tuesday Weld, I teased out an address, deep in Burbland, for Cal Shutter. After repeated calls, I managed to speak to Shutter’s wife and protector, Veronica. By good fortune, it turned out that she had lived for a few years in east London. Someone sent her a paperback of
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire.
She remembered a few of the faces from Montague Road. She would persuade Cal to let me record an interview. But there were strict rules and conditions attached.

Setting a time for our meeting wasn’t easy. I would have to rise in the dark to complete my Speer circuit down California towards Chinatown, the Financial District and the Ferry Building. Shades of Spandau were starting to dissolve in weak sunshine as I relished a good walking city. ‘Cal is nocturnal,’ Veronica said. ‘I am the reverse. Consequently the one time in which we are both relatively aware is the early morning.’ It would have to be 8 a.m. in the foothills of Burbland, in order to find husband and wife upright. There was no mobile and an unlisted landline (which Cal would never touch). Even his emails slipped out under Veronica’s name.

Driving down 80 from Sacramento, then over the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, made me wish I had the camera not the wheel in my hands: San Quentin never looked better. The ugly prison was a castle of cheese, finely grated by the steel stanchions of the long bridge, while the waters of the bay twitched and flickered. It was a homecoming, our return to San Francisco: the Holiday Inn and the Greek café on Polk Street. I dozed that night within the grid of a familiar city rising to a ridge of towers beyond which you glimpsed the thick blue sea, a nervous morse of lights. Beside my bed was a copy of Tom Clark’s new and selected poems,
Light & Shade.
His ‘Message in the Fog’ was stark: ‘one solitary/roosting/sooty grouse/hoots’. I remembered how the poets in Colchester, English and American – Dorn, Clark, Tom Raworth, Cal Shutter – squeezed so much juice out of John Clare. Pure recognition. Fellow feeling. Joy for life.

Sally Vincent, when I mentioned my hope of visiting the Shutters in California, hissed. Bridled. Turned for confirmation to her husband. Ralph Vincent was giving a reading with Tom Raworth and Lee Harwood in a Brighton pub. The younger locals who packed the floor were surprised, and even grateful within bounds, to find these ever-alert veterans breathing, on their feet, and in good voice. They were part of the somatic drift to the south coast; a non-retirement or economic retrenchment much like the marine twilight of their London parents’ generation, out of Streatham and Croydon to Hove and Bexhill-on-Sea.

But the point with Tom and Lee – the glamour, if you like – was the transatlantic gold card, the respect in which they were held by their peers on the far shore. Just as Clark and Dorn (like Clark and Lewis on their Mississippi raft) locked down in Colchester, to sample the mysteries of the English pub, boredom as a resource, so Raworth and Harwood headed west; reading, performing, socializing in Marin County, Boston, Portland. Writers’ colonies in which to keep journals about not writing. Zoos and white galleries favoured by the New York School. Borrowed apartments where
families could be lodged for a season against the endless peregrinations of the freelance life. They turned up, when the offers came, like grape-pickers. Much of this was a matter of basic friendship, contacts sustained during the last days of the postal service; letters, cards, enclosures, satiric collages.

The Vincents, in San Francisco on their first and last US adventure, were invited to pay a visit to the Shutters in Bolinas. Which involved, as Sally described it, a long hot bus ride with the kids. She found the house and knocked on the door. ‘Cal’s away,’ Veronica said. The disconcerted English group, the children now restless and thirsty, poked around the fringes of the property. From a point among the trees, they spotted Shutter: on the roof, embracing a chimney, behind which he was trying to hide himself. It was a welcome worthy of Watts-Dunton keeping the curious from Swinburne’s door at the Pines on Putney Hill. Sally never forgot or forgave this episode. She left an upper-case message in marker pen on card.

The younger Cal Shutter, naked or nearly so, tightly beshorted, cross-legged on a white wood throne, can be seen on the cover of his 1975 publication,
Pink Sand.
An affectionate domestic portrait by Veronica. The hair is conservatively tribal, long but unshowy; a pleasure-beach saddhu, lean to the point of statement. One of the fine young cannibals of the Slide Area: mind surfer more than wave-breaking narcissist.

Even the best intentioned and best informed of visitors can intrude. Until the hour of our meeting comes around, who knows if it’s welcome, if it will work? Much of Cal’s life is programmed by his remote viewing of the calendar of English Premier League football. But he also keeps a blog on what’s happening in Mexico. Javier Hernández, known as Chicharito, the Manchester United striker with the supreme neck muscles, a steal by Sir Alex Ferguson, is therefore a figure of considerable interest. Cal rates poets like footballers and footballers like poets. He also makes paintings. And collects anonymous yard-sale photographs of shorelines with no figures or narratives.

Anna, who doesn’t like reading when the car is in motion, and who often makes her more telling discoveries after the potential detour has flashed past on the blind side, is much better with maps than Pavel Coen. Last time out, Coen dropped us deep into Oakland. Anna located the Shutter neighbourhood with fifteen minutes to spare. I could hear her stomach fluting gently. There had been no time for Bob’s Diner; eggs over easy, crisp bacon, and leisurely coffee refills.

Breathe it: the distance from Colchester’s winter damp. How much faster and more laconic the prose would have to be. How gladly naked and sun-kissed. The avenues were wide, unpeopled: proud, established, civic suburban. Anna put us in the zone, I zeroed in on the house. A lush crop of untroubled grass dense with bluebells. An enviable property, once; white with Arts and Craftsy windows in asymmetrical arrangements of narrow verticals and broad rectangles. External steps have to be negotiated with discretion, too heavy a tread will turn them into a mantrap. I checked the roof. Nobody was hiding there.

Veronica made us welcome, immediately. She was a beautiful woman whose thick red-gold hair fell to the shoulder. The table to which she led us was dressed with wild flowers and set out with decorative, gold-rimmed side plates. There was an inherited teapot, a waxed carton of Clover Milk, enhanced with vitamin D, and a selection of interesting rocky cakes on a shallow dish. A leaf-filtered sunstream flowed through uncurtained windows to backlight Veronica’s abundant tresses. Dark wood. Glass-fronted cabinet. Wooden elephants. Plants in pots. Unframed paintings. ‘The fading vestiges’, as Cal has it, of the best kind of American dream.

We chatted. Would the man appear? Then, arriving at the table from some dark interior space, out of a cupboard, as it seemed, Shutter was among us. He was not only nocturnal, he looked nocturnal. If I didn’t push our chatter forward with sufficient engagement, he would dissolve across the flower-patterned oilcloth in a puddle of Clover-flavoured milk. The internal clocks of the other figures around that Burbland table were set to morning alertness,
while Cal was visibly winding down, shedding his nightskin. Those years of blood-draining made him glow like a fish who lives so deep within the ocean that it has to manufacture its own light.