American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (26 page)

Shutter spoke about the messy afterlife of his old friend Tom Clark’s Olson biography, a book he admired without reservation. Veronica interjected: ‘Ralph Maud’s was a parasitical book. It couldn’t have existed without Tom.’ Which was certainly true: the Maud thesis,
Charles Olson at the Harbor
, was repudiation, line by line, of Clark’s allegory of a poet’s life. Such free interpretation offended Maud’s proud sense of witness; it unmade a thriving academic industry. ‘He is nibbling at Tom’s crumbs,’ Cal said. Our night-blogger could be peppery and gracious at the same time. But he was
on
, flying, catching Anna’s interest, as he did the English voices, the Cambridge gossip: how he led Allen Ginsberg, sated on the Welfare State Rupert Brookes of the 1960s, bright-boy pick-ups from his reading the night before, to the locked double doors of E. M. Forster’s rooms in King’s. Tom Clark, so Cal reported, was the babysitter when Olson trundled into Colchester to see Dorn. ‘Charles would go for three days, just talking. Then for two days he would sleep. Then he would disappear. Read Tom’s Dorn biography. He lays it down, man. I mean he was really
there
.’

In profile, Cal is a porcelain mask of extreme delicacy, with not one superfluous crease or fold. The skin is powder pale and threatens to rub away like damp India paper. Eyebrows are raised in quizzical arches. Mouth a downward curl. Our host was prepared, like the naturalist Edward Wilson, a Caius man like Tom Clark, for overwintering in an Antarctic hut with Captain Scott. He wore leather fingerless gloves, a striped stocking cap and several layers of touchline wool. Unsleeping as the world snored in hoggish slumber, he fed his widescreen computer. Day after day, publication took the form of crafted pages of text and image: Dorn, John Clare, Kaf ka, Creeley, Philip Whalen, John Wieners, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Hardy. And of course Tom Clark. With shimmering photographs of mountains, mists, stags, oceans, streets. This epic free-service anthology took the place of the mimeo mags that once
poured out of Essex. The labour of keeping the texts alive was monastic and involved a measure of dialogue with unseen readers who made their comments bright and tight.

Now, in pinched and increasingly desperate times, Cal recalled Clark’s road trips, voyaging with Dorn across the upper plains in 1979, as a treasured memory. But no more real than a viewing of
The Magnificent Seven
in a clapped-out print in the Colchester Odeon. Dorn was driving back into his own deleted history, searching for evidence, in the shape of enduring restaurants or brokenbacked hotels, that his projection of self was here ahead of the present text. The two poets followed the Belle Fourche up towards the Badlands, for a circumambulation of Devil’s Tower. ‘It’s a
long way
around Devil’s Tower,’ Cal said. Dorn, moving or at rest, was the finest reader of landscape the West had. ‘Those two boys, big poet and his buddy, his editor, had the best of it. I travelled alone. Did you ever read Wurlitzer?
Nog
, man, that’s how it was. Never wake inside the same head twice.’

Cal enjoys it so much, you can’t call his pitch a complaint or threnody. Bad luck is simply a confirmation of status, being at the end of an honourable line. The house is falling down. Veronica is unwell. Cal’s bones are as brittle as celery sticks. He mislaid his income when the college where he worked, a money-laundering scam, folded. He sued. They shifted all their assets elsewhere. He not only lost his pension, his resources were drained by lawyers. Darkness was kind. Cal hunched over the candlepower of his widescreen computer painting poems, tapping away in biker’s fingerless gloves, like a miser of words, a secret alchemist of the old America (1948–78). Black Mountain, Beats, late modernism.

‘Would you take on another biography, a road novel?’

‘Nobody’s asking. No one knows anything. It’s all been rewritten. So a lot of people know a lot of things about other things they’ve been told to know about. Even though those things are very empty. And the experience of those things is itself hollow. When I try to resurrect certain things, I find that people are utterly innocent. I had
a fellow telling me that the Czechs are embarrassed by Kaf ka. Good for Kaf ka. In a way, I find solace is not being visible.’

The dish of cakes was painfully visible, within reach, varnished, and speckled with raisins. Anna’s eyes were watering, but she was too English to reach out. Or not polite enough, in this context of offered friendship and exchange, to ask. There was tea – or was it coffee now? – to lubricate our talk. The cakes were like family fossils, a badge of the social; when we left, they would be put away until the next time. An heirloom in superglued crumbs.

‘Nobody has set foot in this house for three years,’ Cal said. Overplaying it perhaps, by a month or two. Making this beautiful spectral pair of time-travellers seem like characters in a documentary by Albert and David Maysles. Like
Grey Gardens.
I had to be careful not to turn into Louis Theroux.

Shutter was the unofficial archivist, through his biographies of Douglas Woolf, Weldon Kees, Robert Creeley and Rudolph Wurlitzer, and now his nightly blogs, of the lineage of the living stream of American poetry. From which he felt unjustifiably excluded; attacked by new alliances, new academies; mistrusted by the keepers of typescripts, letters, journals. ‘It’s the same for all of us trying to do serious work. Everything was done to prevent Tom Clark having access to the Olson papers. To the extent of the bald-faced statement that there was no Xerox machine at the University of Connecticut.’

The man in the cap, racing away at the table – ‘It’s all so awful and
weird
, man’ – was at risk of giving paranoia a good name. He lodged inside it, making the scene literal, manifest, a thing of wonder. The history of this handsome couple, courtship, flight, accidents of the road, was a self-perpetuating legend; backed by books and photographs. ‘Don’t touch the wall. Your hand will go straight through.’

Ed Dorn was the lamp, the inspiration. Shutter saw himself, by way of his friendship with Tom Clark, as the
Gunslinger
poet’s back-up amanuensis, supporter, fall guy. There were evil times
when Dorn came up against internet surges of reflex dogma in reaction to the whips and scorpions of his disaffected satire. Hysteria and an easy moral outrage are conditions of Pacific Rim technology.

After their time together in Colchester, after the road trips, the admiration Clark had for Dorn was absolute, so Shutter told me. And, in that sense, Olson, as Dorn’s abiding mentor, had to be challenged, or made ridiculous. ‘Those later years, man, when Olson hung around wearing nothing but a bath towel! Ordering up meals from the hotel staff downstairs. When he was out, his people cleaned everything. They took all his junk, coated it with dust, transferred it. Charles never noticed. Popes have never had that kind of service.’

And the last days of any of us? The work loses its potent illusion of edge and discovery, but it continues in Beckettian absurdity. Among the boxes and the dust and the pictures. And the impossibility of achieving shape. Memories sag, narratives sprawl, comfortably, like a drinker’s belly when the muscles have gone. Eyes fail. Voice rasps on.

Shuttling between logging camps in the Northwest, cramped apartments in Seattle, driving truckloads of malevolent furniture from Arkadelphia to Pocatello, dodging the hungry bugs of the Hotel Dante in San Francisco, plotting escapes to Mexico City and Yucatán, Dorn’s road trips echoed Kerouac, and reflected a restless post-war spirit. He said that he was not, initially, a man of the West: he passed through, by bus, or shared car, from Illinois to California (where he starved or wandered the streets like the ghost of his future).

‘He was inflamed,’ Shutter said, ‘with a strong desire to travel down the spine of the continent.’ Dorn spliced Olson’s interest in Mayan glyphs against Wilhelm Reich’s theories of psychosexual energy. ‘Lima might be a mighty fine place to retire to.’ There were no orgone accumulators in the garden.

The story always looped back to the three men – Olson, Dorn,
Clark – in Colchester. Helene Dorn, Ed’s first wife, the one with the bad back, said: ‘
Do
something, Ed, you’re not staying up another whole night with him.’ Sunset to sunrise, Olson would ramble, growl, thump, burn: Clark reported. Shutter never forgot his description.

‘In the morning, Helene would come down. “Oh no! God!” Before I got Charles to the room where he was supposed to be staying. It was so precarious. The kids had bunk beds. They were real light beds and Charles was huge. He was supposed to be going to Dorchester to look at the museum.’

The computer was pinging in an inner chamber. Cal rushed off, and came back, to continue, without missing a beat.

‘Look, man, what did he do? As a scholar, Charles was out of it by about 1937. The best he could do was sit against a fence in a daze. After Melville, it was instinct and intuition. It was all
I Ching
and the Tarot. “I look therefore it’s interesting.” The subjectivity is all there is.’

At the time of the 1966 World Cup, Tom Clark commissioned football coverage from Dorn for his mimeograph magazine series. Dorn returned the favour, making Clark sports reporter for
Bean News.
They had some fun with the sanctimonious robot-speak of professional commentators. Football, they recognized early, was the new politics.

‘Ed was a lovely guy, with that brilliance of being on the edge,’ Shutter said. ‘A writer. A good reader. He knew the world. And to travel with him, as Tom did, the landforms were a map he could read like a story. There is no comparison with Olson in terms of being able to understand these things. It was theoretical for Charles. It was all from books. Charles was Ed’s guiding teacher, the one who taught him that the adventure of the mind was something that he should embark on. Charles encouraged him. And he loved Charles deeply for that, always. But he saw Charles with a true eye. And was respectful. And honest and objective. And a good and faithful student.’

Veronica topped up our cups. Then stood at Cal’s shoulder, glancing rather wistfully towards the white light of the window and the street beyond. Our talk was live, a useful tying together of loose themes. Or the spur for fresh voyages. The devouring passion was Manchester United, that’s where Cal’s intensity cranked up. And this was what Veronica anticipated and feared. When the drama shifted, abruptly, from Olson to Wayne Rooney, it was time to let the morning in. A snort of honey-scented air before the retreat to bed. In preparation for another long night siphoning pirate feeds from Stamford Bridge and Old Trafford. Like impoverished Nigerians tapping mainline oil pipes in the delta.

‘Poor kid. Some people are going to age better than others. Rooney’s dad is the endomorphic boxer type. You saw from his dad what Wayne’s going to look like when he’s thirty. His touch is great, but his body’s getting thicker. He’s got this grudge against the world because of it. Soccer, for me, is the only theatre of interest. It’s world theatre.’

We got to the inner sanctum, the shaded room where Cal replays, with commentary, Rooney’s hat trick for United against West Ham at Upton Park.
This is unreal.
I’m standing in the half-dark, on the far side of the world, before we’ve enjoyed a bite of breakfast, watching a balding young Scouser’s demented assault on the camera. Expletives undeleted. And listening to the last American poet’s interpretation, as he plays the illegitimate clip over and over.

Cal produced a tall ledger, pages ruled, script in red and blue, recording – like the BBC’s sheepskin-coated John Motson – every goal scored in the English Premier League: marksman and assist, pattern of play. It was occult: the gematria of triumph and defeat in Blackburn, Stoke, Norwich, West Bromwich, Swansea.

While we were witnessing the Rooney goals, Veronica showed Anna the way to the bathroom in the basement. An adventurous descent. This lightless vault was glaciered with the usual books, papers, correspondence; boots, shirts, scarves of a lifetime. Against the wall rested a number of warehouse-scale paintings. They were
by Shutter. And depicted spot-the-ball freeze-frames from decades of English football.

Veronica gets her wish. Cal plasters exposed skin with thick white ointment; he’s like a Venetian aristocrat protecting himself against the contagion of plague-threatened streets. He limps. Anna moves slowly too, in sympathy, feeling the crimp of travel in neck, back, knees. This is a
wow
moment for all of us, an expedition to the summit of Indian Rock. Veronica is in fetching, broad-brim Bloomsbury hat, Cal in a soft-blue fisherman’s cap. We zigzag across old grey stone, above the trees, the red roofs, the sea. ‘The fog on the Bay,’ Cal says, as he pants up the last few yards, propelling his slender weight on a stick, ‘is pollution from China.’ He points to the neighbour’s house where the cops shot and killed a man after a domestic argument. ‘They call it suicide.’

When we returned to Hackney, still haunted by the afterglow of this hallucinatory encounter, Shutter kept in touch by email. He was busy, he said: ‘writing weekly reports, for a fellow once of Manchester, now a resident of Buenos Aires, on the subject of Argentines playing football in Mexico’. It was of course ‘an entirely onerous chore’. As surreal but apposite a form of patronage as I could imagine.

Then Veronica took over. Cal had drained himself with nocturnal research, chasing a bad-journey trail of fugitive images, mountain to mesa. He forgot to tell me about the little thing he had with Julie Christie in Bolinas. Our walk to Indian Rock must have encouraged him to venture, once again, among the quiet suburban streets.

Early one evening, on a pedestrian crossing, Shutter was struck by a car driven by an elderly, half-blind woman, suffering, so Cal later implied, from dementia. He was dumped in a hospital in Oakland in an ER ward, among numerous gunshot victims, drug overdoses and indigent asthma sufferers.

‘Bit of a bad patch,’ Cal reported, after he discharged himself. ‘Many
body parts bent out of shape and could use magical replacement. Still one skulks on beneath the coverlet, stubbornly breathing.’