American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (6 page)

As a direct challenge to Olson and the Black Mountaineers, Kerouac published his
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.
‘Swimming in sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang!’

Sea!
Water flooded the Sampas bar. The power and reach of the Atlantic Ocean as witnessed daily from those seven windows in Fort Square could not be countered by the flood of sound from Lowell’s Merrimack. Jack’s heavy, befuddled head hit the table, his thickening body slumped, and he told the boys to fetch the limo. They would thread a little landscape through the window. Drive, day into night, to visit those New England phoneys, the challengers: Charles Olson in Gloucester and then John Updike.

Nick and Tony were with him. Or, some say, Joe Chaput. It’s not a long run, Lowell to Gloucester. The Sampas boys, humouring Jack, stretched it out. Drinks in the car and a few stops along the way.

‘I was the one formulated the theory of breath as measure, back in ’53, for Burroughs and Ginzy,’ Kerouac slurred.

‘Sure you did, Jackie.’

They glugged Michelob with Teacher’s Scotch chasers. Jack did Céline again, extemporizing brilliantly, in a single-breath, forty-mile sentence, on
Journey to the End of the Night
and
Death on the Instalment Plan
, his favourite novels. ‘He
knew
, that crazy Frenchman nailed it, human existence is rotten and mad.’

Nobody did specifics like Jack, the great noticer. So that became his grudge with Olson, all those dates and names worked into the texture, the chart of the Gloucester man’s epic voyage,
The Maximus Poems.
A hound dog on a beach. The worst of Kerouac’s worst delirium was when Ferlinghetti lent him the cabin in Bixby Canyon and he tried to transcribe the sound of the sea. ‘Someone jacking off on a beach? What does Olson call it, Shit-town? Dogtown? I would never insult the place I lived that way.’

Olson was avid for conversation, the audience that Kerouac could never be. They held the door open and Jack crawled from the car. There were newspapers spread up the slippery steps, a welcome mat for a literary cardinal. The Lowell writer was trampling over one of those sneering Boston reviews and he took it as an intended insult. The night never picked up. Olson had been known to keep young poets, across from England, probably Cambridge, trapped
for forty-eight hours while he pounded them with metaphors, poetry and truth. He whaled his Camels in two drags, as Ed Dorn said. He finished the bottle. He dry-swallowed psilocybin buttons from the cache Leary gave him, a container the size of one of those old-fashioned confectioner’s jars. Pink pills: peanuts. Sweaty excitement fed by the evident intelligence and attentive respect of the willing victim, now groggy, green-white, punchdrunk. He sucked them dry, husked them, striding to the window, then back across the steamy room, temperature cranked to tropical hothouse by the blue flare of the gas stove. Shirt soaked. Gripping the rim of the table. That mesmerizing voice seemed to come now from all corners of the room at once as the formerly young man crawls towards the distant exit, the dangerous steps. ‘The world has moved,’ he reported, ‘in another context, on.’

One of the people I questioned about the Olson/Kerouac confrontation thought he recalled the presence of a woman, a researcher offering secretarial assistance, tucked away in the next room, exhausted, taking this opportunity to catch up on her sleep. She overheard some of what happened. And she was the only one. Name mislaid, present whereabouts unknown. Another teasing mystery. Cal Shutter’s first wife?

Peter Anastas, who came out on the boat with me, around the harbour, saw Olson, earlier that day. Peter, back then, had the appearance of a bearded anchorite. Olson asked the young poet to help him with his Greek. Now Peter was helping me too. I read his books in my hut. I appreciated the tact and warmth of his introductions, the editorial jobs on the Olson archive. I also appreciated the fish soup Anastas and his partner brought in a saucepan to my door. There was a deep reservoir of affection for the man, Charles Olson, and for the way he lived, as night wanderer and chronicler, in this town. The biography by Tom Clark, making a complex allegory from available materials, was much resented. But beyond the fact of the arrival of Kerouac in the black limousine, and the staggering entry to 28 Fort Square over a carpet of newspapers, the slumping into sleep, Olson’s sadness at a lost opportunity, the bringing together
of two compelling and contradictory visions of America, nothing was established. Jack never made it to Updike.

Driving back with Greg after the Northampton book fair, we stalled into a slow-motion jam. ‘It always happens around this point,’ he said. ‘It’ll clear.’ There was more hair in the dealer’s recent past than my own. The dust-jacket photograph from 1998 was pure frontier: Wild Bill Hickok, Colonel Cody, General Custer. Shoulder-length locks spreading over a nice tweed jacket. Greg was less of a dandy, in his hardcore beard, than any of those fabled publicity hounds with their gravity-celebrating moustaches. He looked like a log-cabin survivalist. With big spectacles. Or like the fated man who comes back from the whaleboat disaster to ghost a tale of marine cannibalism. The eyes were haunted and dark-ringed. Which, as I knew very well, is how they get from years on the road, reading too many small-print catalogues and badly typed lists of food substitutes in dim off-highway restaurants.

‘I don’t care for dogs,’ Greg said. ‘There is a common gene with the stupidity of the owners.’ The road would remain snarled, around here, for a month or so. Folk drive out on Sunday afternoons to witness the red-leaf spectacle along the blacktop rim of the forest. We spotted deer. Geese have taken to the inaccessible ground between freeways, cropping grass until they are too fat to fly. Sad ponds choked with goose shit.

‘What do you think about the occupation of Wall Street?’

Greg says that he turns over $650,000 a year for an $80,000 profit. Which makes it a tight operation. There was some insurance dividend from the Ten Pound Island shop after the tree smashed through the roof. But still it nagged at me, as a former dealer, wondering how he kept two places in play, and managed regular buying trips to London. The Gibsons had a house near Cork, bought at the peak of the Celtic Tiger boom, a better place for their daughter’s schooling. ‘In Ireland the kids don’t all climb straight into cars,’ Greg said.

One of the things Greg did, for the hundredth anniversary of
Olson’s birth, was to assemble a catalogue of his publications. He put the books on show at the Sawyer Free Library in Gloucester. A number of gaps in the collection were filled by Peter Howard in Berkeley. There were items I coveted, of course, but prices started at around $500 and climbed into thousands.
Apollonius of Tyana
, set in print at Black Mountain College by Ed Dorn, and carrying a presentation inscription, was priced at $6,500. A little beyond my reach, fortunately. Greg reminded me that Olson’s rent at Fort Square, when he could find it, was $28 a month.

The big payout came with the death of Greg’s son. I read
Gone Boy: A Walkabout
when I got back to the Writers Center. Galen Gibson, an eighteen-year-old student at Simon’s Rock College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was shot and killed at the library door by Wayne Lo, a disturbed youth who mail-ordered a semi-automatic weapon. Here was a brave book, clinical and remorseless. It was well received by the critics, but short of readers.
They couldn’t bear for
this thing to happen.
The story had all the hardboiled elements, including pace, drive, construction, but it was not fiction. There was no consolation to be found when the book was returned to the shelf. It offered an unvarnished register of a reality we might avoid by choosing not to open the first page.

The old life stopped for Greg at the split second of this event, and writing the book was one step towards whatever was coming next. What was required in the enveloping darkness, he felt, was a journey, a walkabout (a concept Greg admitted he barely understood). He developed a technique for ‘revisiting those power spots that are part of your geography’. The terrible pain does not disappear, or take new forms, but very slowly, day after day, the world shifts to accommodate it. ‘It’s a comedy in the classical sense,’ Greg said, ‘in that it begins in disorder and moves to order.’

It was dark now and the traffic had eased. We were back on the road in the stream of red-gold light, heading home.

Then there was the other New England of witch trials, the abiding darkness of reflux Calvinism, legends of hunting parties making necessary sacrifices to the older gods. Out at the ragged edge of Gloucester was an area I would have to explore before I returned to London: Dogtown.

Greg Gibson delivered a gracious introduction to my talk on Olson at the Cape Ann Museum, making allusion to my role as ‘co-commander’ of the swan pedalo voyage through the backwaters of Kent. And then he stepped aside, ducked out, before other friends of the Writers Center, with a straggle of accidental attendees at the event, made their way to a redbrick bar called Alchemy.

After the formality of the lecture, a nervous interlude for sponsor and performer, the Gloucester art community found tables, or spots at the bar, and let out their belts a couple of notches as they settled to beer and pizzas. The overspill of emotion around the idea of Olson, in his absence, was touching. An elderly lady, limping slowly down the stairs towards the room where the talk was supposed to happen, not lifting her eyes to that painting of the bathers, was pleased to have it confirmed that, yes indeed, this was the right place and I was the person. She was a veteran of Black Mountain College, having come there, she didn’t quite know how, in flight from Vienna. An artist, dancer, writer: as they all were.

There were hard-breathing enthusiasts of the poet John Wieners, across from Lowell, with newly published collections and magazines.
A Book of Prophecies
: Wieners writes about Olson and his own mother. He makes lists of poets he has met and celebrities observed or encountered on the streets of Boston. ‘Jean Seberg in a blue coat on Stuart Street, Steve McQueen in hot pursuit.’ Liberal academics from the same city made it to the dimly lit bar. A ponytailed man
with a red notebook took the bus from New York City. The casual chatter, over the fizz of sports screens, the sliding and slopping of big jugs, warm pizza wheels, was a revival meeting for whatever Olson and Black Mountain once represented; a seance at which the tapping of shot glasses on circular tables spelled out legends of the departed poet, his incantatory letters, the songs made from the raw materials of a working community. The amiable drinkers of Alchemy were honouring a sempiternal Olson wake. Against padlocked fish sheds and failing businesses. The Inner and the Outer Harbor.

‘I was interested in the connection with Lovecraft. What was all that about?’

Lovecraft? Did I really throw him into the mix? The spiked youth in the Bolaño T-shirt was sucking water from a plastic bottle like a petrol thief. He was twitchy to get outside for a smoke. His choice of chest adornment?
Nazi Literature in the Americas
. A print made from the New Directions cover. The image, as the goth’s protuberant belly rose and fell, was distinctly Lovecraftian: a grey man, his apparently naked back lurid with obscenely white vegetative matter, staggering head first towards a door that might be a shrouded mirror, or the portal to some unspeakable soul-shredding dimension of eldritch horror. He’s not naked. It’s worse than that. The spine is unhoused, breaking through the fleshy membrane in reptilian metamorphosis. And what appears to be the skin of this man’s back
is not his own.
There is a visible cuff-line. The nightmare figure, like the blood-cupped emanation in Blake’s
The Ghost of a Flea
, can’t lift the weight of his burdened skull. Bone spurs are clearly visible, an external pigtail making an awkward ridge in the skin-shirt the stumbler has borrowed from some peeled and reluctant donor.

I remember that Bolaño, in his fictive directory of American fascist authors (from all the Americas, north and south), mentions the fact that the father of Rory Long (Pittsburgh, 1952–Laguna Beach, 2017) was ‘a friend and disciple of Charles Olson’. I wondered quite how fictive that encyclopaedia actually was. If I said something to the goth about his T-shirt he was sure to reveal the fact that Bolaño
had presented him with it at a science-fiction convention in Albuquerque, after assuring him that
Nazi Literature in the Americas
was reportage, a quick-fire literary gloss on evidence gathered over ten years by an indigent Mexican journalist against a share of future royalties.

Olson, according to Bolaño’s briskly sketched account, visits the poet Marcus Long, father of Rory, at his house in Aserradero, near Phoenix. ‘Hiding under the porch, Rory listened to them talking, while the Arizona dust settled into eternal fixity.’ This was a moment of inspiration, a confirmation of destiny, comparable to Olson’s own initiation, when he eavesdropped on the old men who were smoking, and facing the sunset sea, on their bench in Stage Fort Park.

Schooled in the theory of projective verse, the illusory freedom of open-field poetics, Rory comes to believe that it is his destiny to be ‘a hunter (the poet) tracking down the memory of his tribe for the recipient and constituent of the memory (the reader).’ He embarks on a whirlwind counter-clockwise tour through New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, and back to his starting point, a desert hut. Disillusioned, husked to essence, he decides that the time has come to actually read
The Maximus Poems.
Afterwards, he vomits for three hours, before striking out to lose himself among the pensioned hippies, decommissioned whores, and cold-turkey poetry junkies of the 1970s (the ones who later become traders in used books). Rory contemplates suicide, but is sidetracked into authorship: a neurotic but ultimately successful blend of available genres in the form of speculative screenplays, aborted novels, top-heavy comic strips, pamphlets and polemics. He arrives, in tribute to the grandstanding eloquence of Olson, at the oral. Voice as form. Rory Long preaches, many hours at a stretch, channelling the hunger of his audience and playing it right back at them, for the Texan Church of the Last Days. Biography is a road map that only makes sense with the death of the subject, the writer.

In Bolaño’s absurdist comedy there is just enough of a kernel of truth to hold it together. And to make us wonder if he has cracked
the code. One of Olson’s retreats was the ranch of Drummond and Diana Hadley in the mountains near Tucson. After an exhausting assault on the Californian poetry scene, ‘his mobility limited to the insides of cars’ (as Tom Clark has it), he headed for Arizona.

When the Gloucester giant first encountered Drummond Hadley in Vancouver, he was attracted to the aura of energy and confidence surrounding the westerner. Clark, drawing on the witness of Ed Dorn, and interviews with Hadley himself, reports that Olson demanded a private jet, or at least a helicopter, to carry him to the remote estate for an intended elopement with a young (and reluctant) woman he met at the conference. ‘The best Drummond could do on such short notice was the promise of a pickup ride.’ But it was during this brief Arizona stopover that Olson experienced, within his body and being, a vision of the heart of American reality: earth, not smoke. A purification of the gates of perception engineered in the spirit of Carlos Castaneda. Hadley drove the Gloucester poet, perched like a huge crow, on the storage rack of a four-wheel-drive International Travelall, south towards the border, Mexico. The Baboquivari Peak, away to the west, Clark tells us, was sacred to the Papago Indians. They knew it as the centre of the world. ‘I come from the last walking period of man,’ Olson said. He fingered three terms and laid them out like counters:
Mother
,
Earth
,
Alone
.

The invented poet, Rory Long, a fusion of many themes and geographies, his biography completed, all there is to be known of him, in six pages of Bolaño’s translated prose, folds back into Europe. He composes a text around the lovemaking of the ancient Ernst Jünger and Leni Riefenstahl, up in the heavens, bone on bone, vampiric lusts never to be salved. ‘Why are so many Nazis still alive?’ he asks, remarking that Rudolf Hess, the last prisoner of Spandau, would have made it to a hundred if he hadn’t committed suicide.

‘And Lovecraft?’ the goth said, returning me to the moment, the bar on Duncan Street.

‘It wasn’t anything special. He visited Gloucester in 1927 on one of his strange tours. It just popped into my head, mid-delivery, how
Olson in Gloucester, and Lovecraft in Providence, Rhode Island, were both walkers, doing most of their work at night, living about the same distance from Boston. Lovecraft has his nutty Cthulhu Mythos, stitched together from arcane researches, almost like a parody of the excesses of some of Olson’s disciples. Myself included. And then, many years ago, when he was still a student – he’s now an established performance artist, writer and Oxford academic – Brian Catling tried to get me interested in Lovecraft, while I was pushing him towards
Call me Ishmael
and
Human Universe.
It didn’t really take, in either direction.’

The senior poet resident in Gloucester, a classmate of John Ashbery at Harvard and a friend of Olson, was Gerrit Lansing. Lansing had been there at the party with the clam chowder, crisp white bread, wine and talk, after my boat trip around the harbour. He stayed off the water. Now he was generous enough to host a gathering at his home for the crowd from the lecture, when they had done at the Alchemy bar.

The headlights of Henry Ferrini’s car swept the driveway as we bumped over the kerb and up the slope towards the bright windows of the detached house. Most of the guests were gathered in the kitchen. The Lansing property was on the west side of town, a quiet avenue a little inland from the house where the Olson family boarded for those fondly remembered summer vacations.

After refilling my glass, our host, patron of the whole scene, led me away to the sofa in another, more private, room.

‘Do you pronounce it May-chin or Mack-en?’ he said. Not like the Rugby League malcontent of David Storey’s
This Sporting Life
, as impersonated by Richard Harris, I told him. ‘Oh, Mack-en, Mack-en,’ he tasted, now satisfied.

Arthur Machen, fantasist of the Welsh borders, wanderer of the London byways, was a mutual enthusiasm, a safe topic over which to initiate a conversation between strangers. Many British poets, some of them friends of mine, had stayed in this house. ‘Lee Harwood was here last year.’

Like Olson, Lansing was fascinated by Jung, and by the notion of poetry as magic. He had a photocopy of
Lud Heat
, a self-published oddity of mine from 1975, from the days when I was lucky enough to be paid to cut grass on the Isle of Dogs, to collect broken sherry bottles from the grounds of Hawksmoor churches. Books, Lansing implied, and I was happy to agree, do rather more than furnish a room.

A William Burroughs collector called Jed Birmingham, trawling through three boxes of little magazines, finds a ‘worn out’ copy of an anthology called
A Controversy of Poets
. Excited by a cigarette burn ‘the size of a dime’ on one of the yellowed pages, he convinces himself that this scar was inflicted by Charles Olson during an all-night, table-thumping monologue. He recalls, perhaps, the ‘sad party’ in Ferrini’s hut, when Vincent, in company with Olson and Lansing, drank and debated their reception of the groundbreaking Don Allen book,
The New American Poetry.
Olson, writing to Allen, marvels at how ‘the little man – Ferrini – held his broken heart in his throat’.

The clincher, for the connection of the cigarette burn to Olson, arrives when Birmingham discovers the ownership signature in his battered book:
Gerrit Lansing
. He looks again at Lansing’s introduction to Olson’s
Letters to the Gloucester Times
, published by Greg Gibson’s Ten Pound Island Books. ‘It was the eyes I noticed and was noticed by when I first came on the man sitting behind the table at 28 Fort Square.’

Gerard Malanga, who featured in Warhol’s
Chelsea Girls
,
Vinyl
and
Kiss
, was the houseguest of Lansing when he conducted that interview for the
Paris Review.
Birmingham decides that Malanga borrowed Lansing’s copy of the anthology, and brought it along to Fort Square, where an increasingly irritated Olson, whaling his Camels with rasping gulps, burnt a hole in the offending page. ‘Never in my life in court or in secret,’ the poet fumes, ‘have I known such questions. I think you’re an agent of a foreign power. Signor Malanga, I will expose you to your nation.’

Gerrit Lansing is establishment, old family, hospitable to our
floating court of strangers. We talk, but in the shifting modes of the party, the demands on his attention, we are not going to advance beyond the niceties of the social. Lansing is one of those figures, affectionately referenced in all the memoirs, that never quite come into focus. A Henry James extra in a Hunter S. Thompson report. He’s alert, youthful in style and sweater, but outside time: like a Marsden Hartley portrait, in an upstairs room at Cape Ann Museum, growing a little younger, a little smoother, with each passing year.

Jonathan Williams, publisher from Stuttgart, during his military service overseas, of
The Maximus Poems 1–
10
, credits Lansing for the introduction to his long-term partner, Tom Meyer. ‘We were talking, just the usual stuff. I said to Gerrit at one point, God, I said, I get really tired of these third-rate straight poets. Aren’t there any good gay poets? And Gerrit happened to have met Tom and suggested I write to him.’

As a youth, Williams haunted the Argus Bookshop in New York; he started on poetry when he had finished with Lovecraft. Only when there was absolutely nothing else by Lovecraft to secure, not a contribution or a fugitive letter, did he broach Olson.

Richard Owens, writing about Williams, soon after he died, called him ‘a living library’. The man had touched, handled, absorbed so much; making it his profession to seek out the reforgotten, the retired, the convalescent gods of heroic modernism. He photographed them in their lairs in New Mexico, Colorado, Brooklyn, or the Welsh borders: shocked, proud, exposed. But he was also a walker, covering 1,500 miles of the Appalachian Trail, and roaming over much of northern England, France and Spain, before returning to his base near the Quaker Meeting House at Brigflatts in Cumbria. The home he shared with Tom Meyer.