American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (5 page)

For Olson, the big man, there were no true friends, no listeners left in Gloucester. Apart from Vincent Ferrini, that striding presence in the leather cowboy hat voicing his wise-guy poems, working through domestic estrangements in the roadside cabin, the picture-framer’s hut where I was now lodged in my own dank October. You could smell the moves Ferrini made, from bed to kitchen, to backyard, to the shed where materials were kept and bottles left over from poetry readings. Betty Olson, the one who brought Charles to Fort Square, and who resisted this financially necessary move, to take up the distinguished professorship at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was dead. A late driver, resenting the enforced country solitude of their new base at Wyoming, New York, Betty undertook a number of hazardous and unplanned trips, botched returns to Gloucester, escapes from this frozen nowhere. The black Volkswagen bug, bought on impulse, was navigated without a valid licence through snowstorms on unfamiliar roads.

I don’t know what movie was playing in the small town of Batavia on the afternoon of 28 March 1964, but Betty went to the show after buying an Easter basket for her son, Charles Peter. Her husband was much taken with
A Hard Day’s Night
and the Beatles. He responded to the presence of the Liverpool quartet, the news of them, as to something strikingly fresh, but not original; a self-confident street shamanism attracting and holding an audience poets could only dream about. Olson was a convinced Jungian, an advocate of ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’, the alchemy of the black chrysanthemum. Liverpool had a peculiar significance for Jung: it contained the magnolia tree at the heart of the mandala, the Pool of Life. Olson insisted on sitting through a screening of the Dick Lester film for a second time. A new kind of disposable wit and populist energy
was emerging, and he felt, again, his own time was done. The beached whale, the schlump of Gloucester.

Before making her return to the empty house, Betty might have lost a few hours with
My Fair Lady
,
Goldfinger
,
Viva Las Vegas
,
The Night of the Iguana
, or Billy Wilder’s
Kiss Me, Stupid.
Olson, in a previous life, in the heat of his pioneering first book, the supercharged but compacted Melville scholarship of
Call me Ishmael
, went out to Hollywood to meet John Huston,
Iguana
’s director, and to discuss
Moby-Dick.
Jey Leyda sent a copy of
Call me Ishmael
to Sergei Eisenstein, who fired off a congratulatory telegram. Eisenstein, ahead of the Beats and Malcolm Lowry, went south, over the border:
¡Que viva México!
Another lost or aborted project, the Maya in Yucatán (before Olson), revolution, Day of the Dead: all funded by bemused Sinclairs (the novelist Upton and his wife, Mary).

Olson dropped in on Huston at the Warner Brothers studios. Jack Warner was away, until October, on the French Riviera. No hiring or firing could be undertaken. Or so the tactful Huston intimated. They talked books and existentialist philosophy (bluffing, both of them). The mechanical version of the White Whale wouldn’t float in the studio tank. ‘Kill that fucking fish,’ Jack said on his return. The property died, until Huston managed to resurrect it, with a Ray Bradbury script, nine years later. (By way of the film, Melville’s novel became J. G. Ballard’s favourite book.) The only other director in town to receive Olson was Jean Renoir: to whom he proposed a movie based on the shipwreck of the
Essex.
The Frenchman was polite but perplexed. He passed.

Olson, as was his way, persisted; he dug deep into material on John Sutter and the Californian Gold Rush, an episode of cannibalism on an ill-fated crossing of the Sierra Nevada in 1846. He inspected ravished, strip-mined terrain. He dragged himself through the tedium of grant applications, contemplating bad journeys to Arizona, New Mexico and across the border. Nobody was listening. John Huston, in the same year, 1947, went south to shoot
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
: gold fever, gold dust blowing across barren ground. Huston, the man in a white suit, puffing a good cigar, takes
a cameo, beating off a desperate Humphrey Bogart, as he would dozens of other Los Angeles panhandlers peddling scripts and sure-fire literary properties. It would be a while before he suffered the ultimate Mexican nightmare with his 1984 version of Lowry’s
Under the Volcano.
Bad journey, bad juju: Albert Finney failing to ham his way out of the wrong hangover. Rich flesh on the skull. Dead dogs in ditches.

Betty skids on black ice. Her Volkswagen swerves into the headlights of an oncoming truck. Her chest is crushed. An ambulance returns her to Batvia, where she dies.

When Olson was dying in New York, losing bulk, receiving friends and disciples like a shrunken pope, he asked Ferrini to drive over from Gloucester after visiting the apartment on Fort Square to gather up a number of objects, in order to create what Tom Clark called: ‘a force field of magical aura-action against eternity’. Olson specified a map of the Atlantic sea floor, taken down from the wall and now faded to the point of erasure. Rusty pin holes in each corner. Then a portrait of the man himself, the one snatched by Gerard Malanga on the occasion of that awkward and grating interview for the
Paris Review.
Olson is frowning into a low sun, tweed coat draped over shoulders, playing with something that might be a feather. He’s rapping. Workman’s boots, unlaced, on feet that have retired from walking. Vincent successfully locates the Indian blanket, the Russian spoon, the crystal ball (shades of Dr Dee). And two oranges. (Shades of Ballard, who kept a lemon on his Shepperton mantelpiece for years.) Poets know that such power as they have is soon absorbed by the fetishized objects that surround them. Relics are the true autobiography.

Which was part of my difficulty in Ferrini’s hut. The objects, on shelves, table, walls, floor, pulsed at such a high sonic pitch, and there were so many of them. Who could have imagined a song, found among a stack of random CDs, called ‘Like the Swan was a Boulevard’? I played it, several times. The voyage by swan pedalo was so fresh in my mind. The white plastic vessel, once it was
launched, and named, came to life. Our water roads, hugging the coast to Rye, then the rivers of Sussex and Kent, were indeed a shining boulevard.

Slumping in an old chair shaped to the warp of Ferrini’s spine, I sliced through a mound of likely books. Olson’s correspondence with the local paper, philippics launched against the despoilers of his polis, the written city of Gloucester. Memoirs. Histories of the fishing industry. Albums of photographs. And the paperback with which I finally settled down for the night,
Hubert’s Freaks
by Gregory Gibson. Greg was coming early next morning to pick me up for a ride to Northampton, where he was going to stall out at a book fair. This was the right preparation, a tale of dealers, scouts, madmen, and the melancholy underworld of Times Square freaks. The hook was a cache of ‘lost’ Diane Arbus photographs. Greg knew this territory well: the shabby motel rooms, the heavy breakfasts, the dry-mouthed phone calls, interminable sessions with unreliable middlemen. And the remote possibility – teasing, almost within reach – of that big score. Fate games on endless roads. The narrative played, in skilled hands, like a crime novel.

Greg wrote, published, stepped back, published again. Until he arrived at the point when what he wanted most was to trudge along the flank of the Connecticut River, releasing his reports, a chapter at a time, under his own imprint. John Ledyard, Greg’s inspiration, set out in 1786 to walk the world: from London, around the Baltic to Germany, through Russia and Siberia to the Arctic Sea. A ship would be found to carry him to the Pacific Northwest. Then on across unmapped and unimagined America. Ledyard, who laid down the model for future pilgrims of derangement, achieved 10,000 miles, on foot and alone. He fired up Ed Dorn who wrote a poem called ‘Ledyard: The Exhaustion of Sheer Distance’. Dorn noticed that the great man’s journals said nothing about the condition of his shoes, but much about how he tramped towards the Pacific coast of Russia, as the best way of reaching the other side of America. The Ledyard quote Dorn selects for an epigraph is: ‘I give up. I give up.’

The Northampton book fair had the same institutional claustrophobia, cooked up from postponed suicides and pharmaceutical jollity, that you find everywhere, Bloomsbury to Berkeley. Grieving books, accidents of purchase, were displayed like shrink-wrapped evidence in a show trial. I made a couple of circuits, for old times’ sake, and then I hiked through leafy suburbs into the quiet, Sunday-morning town. Of course a couple of discounted purchases had somehow stuck to my hands. My reading, outside immediate research, came down to a select group of authors: Louis-Ferdinand Céline (worked through in chronological order), Don DeLillo (backwards), Malcolm Lowry, Roberto Bolaño, Walter Abish. On my second lap of the fair, I found a promising route to Mexico in Abish’s
Eclipse Fever.
‘I have never been to the United States,’ he wrote. ‘I avoid it out of fear that it will not approximate the United States of my imagination.’

Greg gave me the keys, pressing me to take his car, drive into the country. I thought of Amherst and Emily Dickinson, and then I started walking. Northampton does not have much in common with its English namesake, but the well-kept acres of Smith, the Ivy League women’s college, do invoke St Andrew’s Hospital, the manicured grounds of the asylum where John Clare endured his final exile.

Disturbingly healthy young ladies on bicycles, lustrous in their privilege, passed from hall to sports field to church. ‘It’s a dyke town,’ I heard a beatnik juvenile say to his heavy-metal nest-mate at a folding table where they were trying to flog the accumulated junk of a disestablished community house. Junk that included a tattered pamphlet by Cal Shutter,
Night and More Night
, with supporting quotes from Joanne Kyger and Robert Creeley. There were more joggers than dogs. And you can take jogging, as I knew from the parks and canal paths of Hackney, as an accurate indicator of a vertiginous upward sweep of the socio-economic curve. Along with branded T-shirts mixing conspicuous charity with international merchant banks.

My ramble took me through the centre of town and out the other side. All roads led to a low building with a blue-and-white
sign:
SLEEP DISORDERS LABORATORY.
Stencilled graffiti featured spliff-toking cartoon heads on redbrick walls. A silver-bearded guru with prominent ears and a third eye had a poster announcing the occupation of Northampton.
MEET FIRST WITH YOUR FRIENDS IN PRIVATE, THEN CONVENE AT BANK OF AMERICA
.

I couldn’t get inside any of this. I could flip the images like a carousel and inscribe found texts in my notebook. I could visit the museum and appreciate river-culture figures brought back from the Congo and the usual Euro plunder (Cézanne, Munch, Monet, Seurat). There is a Winslow Homer painting of shipbuilding in Gloucester and a Marsden Hartley mackerel. The museum shop has the smartest scarves in New England. There is good coffee for the laptop scholars.

Obliged to acknowledge the generosity of Greg’s gesture in giving me the keys to his car, I head back to the book fair. The event is taking place in a building on the far side of the hospital.
BABY SAFE HAVEN. PLEASE LEAVE NEWBORN BABY AT HOSPITAL EMERGENCY ROOM OR A (STAFFED) FIRE STATION. NO QUESTIONS ASKED
.

Greg told me to follow the Indian trail. In a book-bearing, automatic car I have never previously driven? Down roads I didn’t know? My first rule in America is:
walk
. Use public transport. Don’t trail Indians. They are much better at it. The surrounding woods were not to be taken lightly. I looped around a few junctions, trying to identify some piece of quiet ground on which to eat a gas-station sandwich. I settled for a cemetery field, alongside the military section. The landscape made more sense once it was framed in the thick rectangle of the nearside mirror. Blank stone slabs leaning against a grey hut, waiting for names and dates.

When a long black limo, sleek as Valentino’s hair, cruised slowly down the cemetery avenue, looking for a particular grave, I thought about Jack Kerouac’s October 1968 excursion: to visit Charles Olson in Fort Square, Gloucester. Widowed, ursine, hibernating, Olson was Shakespearean (
Timon of Athens
) in his solitude. He spoke, early, of Kerouac as ‘the greatest writer in America’. And he feared this
new power coming from the poets of the Beat Generation: that it would challenge or somehow undo his hard-won stance as the major poet of place on the Atlantic rim, successor to William Carlos Williams. The push he made over all those years to forge a republic of letters. With himself, alongside Robert Duncan, as twin consuls: East Coast and West.

When young men arrived at the door on which he left handwritten notices telling them to
go away
(he was sick, under the blankets), Olson riffed on Bob Dylan. ‘He is just beautiful. He is just an absolute delicate thing.’ Kerouac had the authentic voice too, native register. Sturdier than Dylan. Iroquois stock, French-Canadian. This Lowell football player, in a way Olson couldn’t figure, had written the new America into being. The cadences, the rhythms, the runs.
The peripheral vision, the detail.
Jack Kerouac was the embodiment of Olson’s theory of poetics, his dogma nailed to the church door:
Projective Verse.
‘Keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business.’

All those books composed on the run in the late 1940s, early 1950s. The sieving and sifting of memory. Now Jack, sick with success, had to argue his way around the bulk of the intellectually intimidating Charles Olson. It was just that, size. ‘If I was six foot six I could write anything, couldn’t I?’ he said, selling the Gloucester poet short by three or four inches. Jack envied Olson’s dominance over his peers, the academic distinction. How this other man from a working New England town moved to the centre of public life: tutoring the Kennedy boys at Harvard (rich kids who swam a bit and paid others to compose their term papers), then working for the Democrats in Washington and visiting Ezra Pound in the bughouse, to argue out contrary visions of history.