American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (31 page)

I have a letter, received that morning from Cal Shutter, waiting
on my desk. ‘You are not an American,’ Cal said. ‘You will never understand Americans. You want to see Olson and Dorn from their trips to England. Forget it, man. You’ll never begin.’ And I knew now that he was right. I was cured of my interests and obsessions. Cured by confrontation. Cured by the light on the sea. Their intensities would never be mine.

Andrew Kötting is preparing to liberate Edith the swan pedalo from under her blue hood, her chains on the shallow Pleasure Beach pool, beside the silent fairground. To manhandle her across the shingle.
Deadad
is no longer part of this; you can put away the wrinkled rubber skin into one of the caves beneath Marine Court. Andrew calls the inflatable: Bigman. The bear. Maximus. As Charles Olson in Gloucester shaped his own mythology around the curse of inherited size, pillaging historical sources for analogues. Until he stands alone. Above the crowd. Figure of Outward. ‘The sea stretching out from my feet.’

Kötting’s film
Swandown
takes fire when I leave it, when I come ashore at Trinity Buoy wharf, by the lighthouse, to rush across town for my flight to Boston. Then the story begins to say what I couldn’t say, about the condition of this part of London; it demonstrates invasion, enclosure. It mourns, in true Homeric fashion, our parting.

When Ed Dorn writes about Gloucester – which I am approaching again on a wet road, with Henry Ferrini and Greg Gibson, as they detour to find Olson’s apartment – he casts his projection of Bigman: ‘I want him to walk by the seashore alone/in all height/which is nothing more than/a mountain.’

It is that season, darkness coming early, storm systems from across the Atlantic. Kötting, in wetsuit, kicks through the breakers; straight out to the buoy, then west towards Bulverhythe and Bexhill. He tells me that he is swimming to Cornwall. He leaves me his much-travelled yellow bag. And a pair of boots without laces.

Especially to Anna Sinclair for her turns at the wheel and her company on the road between Vancouver and Hollywood. To Muriel Walker for allowing me to quote from the diary she kept during the filming of
Vulcano.
And for the use of photographs from her archive. Andrew Kötting’s dynamic absences in water and mud on the swan-pedal from Hastings, his onboard chatter, were a constant and nuggety provocation.

With thanks for research materials, hospitality and inspiration, to: Valentina Agostinis, Ammiel Alcalay, Peter Anastas, Anonymous Bosch, Bryan Briggs, Brian Catling, Angelica Clark, Tom Clark, Marcelo Cohen, Georg Diez, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Kim Duff, Gareth Evans, Henry Ferrini, Rodrigo Fresán, Deb Gibson, Gregory Gibson, William Gibson, Benedetto Lo Giudice, David Herd, Tanya Hudson, Nicholas Johnson, Mark Krotov, Gerrit Lansing, Amy Evans McClure, Michael McClure, Linda Moorcock, Michael Moorcock, Miguel Mota, John Richard Parker, Chris Petit, J. H. Prynne, Paul Quinn, Kevin Ring, Christopher Roth, Lisa-Marie Russo, James Sallis, John Sampas, Robert Sheppard (and the Liverpool Firminists), Paul Smith, Gary Snyder, Susan Stenger, Colin Still, Philippe Vasset, Gary Walkow, Carol Williams, Patrick Wright, Oscar Zarate. I would like to express my gratitude, as ever, for editorial care and design inspiration from Simon Prosser, Anna Kelly, Anna Ridley and Sarah Coward at Hamish Hamilton.

My rapid-sketched portraits of Charles Olson and Edward Dorn owe much to the pioneering biographies of Tom Clark.
Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life
(New York, 1991) and
Edward Dorn: A World of Difference
(Berkeley, 2002) have been source books on this long journey. I quote from them with the author’s permission.

It was invaluable to view
Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence
of Place
, the documentary by Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf, as well as two other Ferrini films:
Lowell Blues: The Words of Jack Kerouac
and
Poem in Action: A Portrait of Vincent Ferrini.
I’d like to thank Henry Ferrini for making them available.

Thank you to Lane Morgan for permission to reproduce the photo of Charles Olson, 1945, Enniscorthy Farm, Keene, Virginia (copyright © Rosa Morgan).

Gary Walkow’s Mexican-shot film,
Beat
, was more use than anything I came across in the serious-budget mainstream. I quote from Walkow’s substantial unpublished account of this production,
As Bad As It Gets
, with his permission.

Film portraits of Gary Snyder and Michael McClure, shot by Colin Still, were a great help in fixing my Pacific Rim topography. Miguel Mota’s documentary,
After Lowry
, was the perfect complement to his guided tour of Dollarton.
Malcolm Lowry
, the biography by Douglas Day, proved a thorough and reliable guide. Albert Speer’s
Spandau, The Secret Diaries
(London, 1976) was a haunting companion, a dark shadow. Andrew Kötting’s entire oeuvre was snacked and sampled, from film to CD to drawing to live performance and deepwater swim.
Swandown
and
In Search of a Deadad
(book and film) were of particular relevance.

I would like to thank Gregory Gibson for permission to quote from
Walk in Progress
, his privately printed account of the epic trudge down the Connecticut River ‘by a man who finds himself getting old, but not too old to walk’. Rodrigo Fresán’s novel
Kensington Gardens
came along at just the right moment and was supplied by the generosity of the author. My thanks for his permission to quote from it. I’m grateful to Gary Snyder for allowing me to quote his poem ‘For/From Lew Welch’. And to William Gibson for the glitter and shine of the quotes he permitted from
Spook Country
. Nick Baron, from the depths of the Lenin Library in Moscow, has allowed me to publish the letter from Alec Bernstein (Alexander Baron) to Muriel Walker.

Some of the material on Gary Snyder, Edward Dorn and Gregory
Corso was first published, in earlier forms, in the
London Review of Books
and in chapbooks issued by Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene Press. I also quote from my own
The Kodak Mantra Diaries
, originally published by Albion Village Press in 1971 and reissued by Beat Scene Press in 2006.

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First published 2013

Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design: Nathan Burton

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Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-141-97127-8