American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (9 page)

Showgirl, Fleet Street freelance, syndicated columnist, Sheilah
Graham was an author by other means, siphoning (and supporting) the Fitzgerald of
The Last Tycoon
, the broken Hollywood drunk of
The Pat Hobby Stories
. At the West Norwood orphanage, Lily Sheil was head girl and captain of cricket. The children of her marriage to Trevor Westbrook, whose company manufactured Spitfire fighter planes, were fathered, so it was rumoured, by the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the actor Robert Taylor. In 1969 Graham revised the name of her column:
Hollywood Everywhere.

The elements of autobiography that Muriel Walker presented, by way of the items in her collection, gathered in this drowsy Denmark Hill suburb, were as fascinating to me as those of her fellow Norwood orphan. She spoke of the crazy celebrity carousel of looking after Lionel Bart as he raced through drugs, booze and short-circuit inspiration, towards the latest musical disaster, whatever big show he was backing with all his previous smash-hit dividends.

‘Before I went to work for Lionel, he introduced me to Larry Parnes. I worked for him for a number of years, taking care of all those boys: Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury. They came into the office every day. I had to chase them up for everything, deal with their mums. It was quite fun.’

Coffee-bar rock and roll. Movie-star divas between assignments. Former party members morphing into generators of West End musical fiascos: honky-tonk Brecht, a Marxist interpretation of the Robin Hood legend written and rewritten until it was sure to lose every last penny of investment. Capitalism screwed by other means.

‘And then
Twang!!
An unholy disaster,’ Muriel said. ‘Joan Littlewood, who was the first director, was very subversive. She’d turn everything upside down. Although it was a comedy, she took it very seriously indeed. We had Oliver Messel doing the sets. They came on with these beautiful costumes and velvet-lined trees and Joan would say, “Put them on back to front or inside out.” Catastrophe!’

Muriel stuck with Bart, even after this. She found herself reconnecting with William Dieterle when Lionel screened Charles Laughton’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
; before composing his
own, never-produced
Quasimodo.
‘It was brilliant,’ Muriel said. ‘I’ve got the script here. Lionel didn’t have time to read the book. So I condensed the whole of the Victor Hugo for him. Then I hired a projectionist and a projection room. It was only when I saw the credits that I realized it was Dieterle who directed it.’

There was another meeting with Joan Littlewood. ‘She gave me the names of half a dozen people and said, “Could you come tomorrow morning, to the flat, at seven o’clock?” Seven in the morning! In November! Barbara Windsor, James Booth, a few other people. She had an apartment over in Maida Vale. I arrived in a taxi. Barbara was getting out of another. She said, “What’s she want us for at this time in the morning?” We went upstairs. And it was Joan’s birthday party! Cold grouse and champagne. Tom Driberg was there, for some unknown reason. Bizarre. Joan was very close to the Rothschilds.’

Muriel’s generosity was alarming. She let me carry away the journal of the
Vulcano
shoot, the diary of her young life in Italy. And the photographs that went with it. Soon afterwards, Muriel, who was a prolific correspondent, a writer of proper letters (typed for clarity), added a postscript to our conversation. ‘When we bought this house in 1966 we had been proceeding with the purchase when the agent told us it had gone off the market.’ Another offer – one that couldn’t be refused – had been put in. By a Richardson brother. The Richardsons, contemporaries of the Krays on the other side of the river, were scrap-metal dealers from Camberwell with interests in South Africa, mining, property. They were also enthusiastic torture buffs and amateur (
sans
anaesthetic) dentists. Denmark Hill was an area favoured by urban villains who wanted to rise, literally, above the Elephant and Castle and the Old Kent Road. The neighbouring hospital was another convenience. Freddie Mills, the club-owning boxer with Soho connections, lived around the corner.

Fortunately for Muriel, the Richardsons went down, long sentences handed out in a flurry of moral indignation from the same tabloid journalists who had bigged them up in the first place, while boozing at their expense in dives like the one operated by
Mills. Underworld faces inflate suburban property values in direct competition with bent Vice Squad detectives. The first era of gangster-businessmen as the patrons of fading TV stars and cabaret singers, sexual predators who liked to rub shoulders with boxers and gay politicians like Tom Driberg and Lord Boothby, drew to a close. Giving way to teenage scream shows compèred by middle-aged eccentrics hiding behind the shield of conspicuous charity. The toxic jukebox of Jimmy Savile, marathon man, hospital stalker, and marriage counsellor, by appointment, to Charles and Diana.

There was a final word of advice from Muriel about the diaries. ‘You will have seen that the making of the film was a very laid-back affair. We were such a small unit, quite a family, first names all round. There was no hierarchy. I can’t imagine any of it happening like that now. My engagement was casual to say the least, no applications, no interviews, CVs, references, no commitment to diversity.’

I marvelled at how a little, faded, olive-green book, packed with fresh-minted diary entries, could transport me, so immediately, to the Rome of 1949. I admired the photographs of the young Muriel on those unforgiving islands, sitting on hot stones, typewriter on her lap. Anna called her Ingrid. Because of her supposed resemblance to Magnani’s deadly rival, Rossellini’s new mistress: Ingrid Bergman. The Bergman of Hitchcock and of
Casablanca.

Certain figures, in transit between Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Havana, Mexico City, Rome, Athens, Johannesburg, fetch up on the fringes of Hampstead Heath: in Highgate, West Hampstead, even Kentish Town. And they stick, they nest. They like the cafés, the sad bookshops. The indifference of London suits them. Our nicely managed corruption. The potential for disappearance. In a city of exiles only wealth allows you to feel at home. Some of these stalled drifters, in the old days, were patronized by the multimillionaire Marxist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. There were letters of authentication for commissions that would never be fulfilled, or passed down the line to local ghostwriters willing to work for a pittance. I had, from time to time, been one of these. Paperbacks with unlikely covers surfaced in Milan and Paris, then vanished. Crime novels with a political agenda. A temporary sideline for risk-assessment technicians, on a retainer from some Swiss bank, working out of Istanbul or Seville. Occasionally police procedurals were picked up as the excuse for a quickie by Chabrol or Jean-Luc Godard.

Feltrinelli, who later blew himself to pieces in an incident alongside an electricity substation, published translations of Malcolm Lowry. He would make regular trips to see Castro, then on to Mexico City to visit an overnight marriage bureau with his latest mistress (in gold lamé toreador pants and Lolita sunglasses); before hitting the sharp end of the New York literary scene, where he gave a recklessly frank radio interview to Barney Rosset (of Grove Press and
Evergreen Review
), before meeting the respected publisher Roger Straus for drinks and dinner.

Like myself, so many years later, Feltrinelli chased the rank and elusive essence of Beat writing. He said that he was on the trail of Jack Kerouac. (He caught him and became the Milanese outlet for
The Subterraneans
.) In a diary entry, Feltrinelli marked the day when he released a paperback edition of the writings of Ho Chi Minh. His partner, Inge, took herself to the cinema to view a subtitled version of Antonioni’s
Blow-Up
. Feltrinelli reminded her to send fraternal greetings to the Berlin Congress, as coming from himself, Alberto Moravia and Monica Vitti.

The family villa at Gargano on Lake Garda was commandeered in October 1941 to serve as the private residence of Benito Mussolini, who detested the Italian lakes, calling them ‘a hybrid of rivers and the sea’. When the fascist dictator left the villa, it really was the end: the Götterdämmerung for his Republic of Salò, the inspiration for Pasolini’s supremely perverse final film,
Salò, or the
120
Days of Sodom
. (Pasolini was, of course, published by Feltrinelli. Charles Olson revered him as a poet, calling him the best thing to come out of the Spoleto Festival.)

The parties at Gargano, endless, enervated, featuring guest appearances by Saul Bellow, Robert Maxwell, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams, Max Frisch, Ingeborg Bachmann, Cal and Veronica Shutter, were the inspiration for the dissolute and melancholy affair in Antonioni’s Milanese masterpiece,
La notte
. The scene in the wealthy industrialist’s house in which Monica Vitti is pretending to read Hermann Broch’s
The Sleepwalkers
is a tribute to Feltrinelli’s famed hospitality. (He was often out of town when the parties took place; contracts, page proofs, propaganda in his elegant black luggage.) Muriel Walker, as was inevitable, went to Lake Garda. She lent me a copy of Feltrinelli’s astonishing diaries (which were no more astonishing than her own).

‘I made friends, when I came back to London,’ Muriel said, ‘with Bianca Feltrinelli. And her sister Lily. Bianca was married to Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was the head of the publishing house. He was an aristocrat, a
marchese
, a Communist. A very good Communist. And eventually he blew himself up with his own bomb. I stayed with the family for a weekend at the villa.’

I switched, the two books laid out, side by side, between Fel
trinelli’s diaries, published in translation by Granta in 2001, and Muriel’s private pasted-up typescript. Whenever, as a young woman, she qualified an Italian friend as belonging to the Communist Party, Muriel inked over the potentially damaging association. Feltrinelli had no such inhibitions; he catalogued, without embellishment, random trajectories across Europe, flights to Cuba, Mexico, East Berlin. The woman on the Brussels train. The policeman from Bolivia, hiding out in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, who is revealed as a ‘pitiless’ torturer. Feltrinelli deals in lost libraries, archives of revolution. He loves Citroën cars. ‘The triangle can never be closed,’ he wrote. ‘Milan, Moscow, Amsterdam.’ A breakfast meeting is arranged with the man he calls ‘Jaguar’: ‘28, glasses, moustache, tall and robust, thick as pigshit, with interests in lumber, the construction business, refrigerators, a Coca-Cola franchise’. A CIA contact gives him a photocopied MI6 dossier at an airport in Malta. A girl says that she has photographed Hemingway, Picasso, Gary Cooper, Anna Magnani. She looks like Audrey Hepburn with a big black eye, after a night on the town. She tells Bellow that he got it all wrong, in his story set at Feltrinelli’s villa: the pool was covered with pine needles, not algae. Grisha von Rezzori turns up at a party with Anita Pallenberg. Gregory Corso arrives, unannounced, in Milan. The police have every second of Feltrinelli’s trip to Bologna covered. Mounting a surveillance camera on the Asinelli Tower, they have a clean shot of the entrance to Montroni’s bookshop.

The housekeeper, out of breath, calls Inge to the telephone: Mr Huffzky is reported dead in Berlin, three bullets. Thirteen sticks of dynamite were found at the base of the pylon. Feltrinelli’s sand-coloured Volkswagen minibus had yellow drapes over the rear window.

Muriel’s diary, when I examine it closely, is constructed from thin, typed sheets pasted over the original handwritten pages. Occasionally she misses a day, or a couple of days. She is caught up in the excitement of a new city; drinks with friends, theatre visits, dances, debates, flirtations.

Tuesday 7th April, 1949. Luchino Visconti, he explained, was something of a madman. He is apparently very eccentric, with flaming tempers one minute, and best of friends the next. He is a very wealthy man, and Felice says it doesn’t matter to him whether he has a financial return, as long as he can indulge in his art. We very much want to meet him, and will endeavour to do so.

When she arrives in Sicily, Muriel receives another letter from Alexander Baron. There are a number of contacts in left-wing and journalistic circles. ‘After I left you,’ Baron writes, ‘I remembered who Robert Lowry is. He’s a novelist, and Jonathan Cape published one of his books,
Under the Volcano
, last year. So now you can look intelligent when you see him.’

And even get his name right: Malcolm. Their paths do not cross, but Muriel makes it her business to read
Under the Volcano.
She is young, attractive, in demand. Working. Rising early. Waiting for letters. Years later, towards the end of his journey, Lowry comes there too: Vulcano. An Aeolian stopover on the way to the English Lake District. Paying his respects to another dormant volcano. A rock that stands in for the tempestuous Anna Magnani. Her wild Medea hair, her heaving bosom. A great cinema poster.
Mamma Roma.

The rings on the table in the café overlooking Waterlow Park are like imprints of the Olympic manacles. They’d better get the Dettol Surface Cleanser out, fast, before the branding police get to hear of this. The rings map the position of Oscar’s coffee mug over the last few months. Sprays have not been applied. This is Highgate. The politics are laissez-faire, green tinged. Oscar X is not, like Alexander Baron, an internal exile, out of key with the system, but a respected editor and artist who functions within an established alternative, socialism. Oscar flies across oceans, uncomfortably, between crises, professional and personal – and otherwise sticks to his chair, as if it had been built around him. None of the other Highgate regulars, who cluster close to the counter, would dream of encroaching on his territory. They all look as if they are trying to get up the courage
to face the Whittington Hospital. Woodpeckers grind like hand-cranked drills performing prefrontal lobotomies. Smog-coloured squirrels chase their unnecessary tails.

‘And you are going
where
?’

‘America,’ I said. ‘Gloucester, Massachusetts.’

‘You do not say this,
America
. United States, ahh! America is a continent. You are not flying to America. I should make you swim. Santiago is America, Cancún, the Aleutian Islands.’

Oscar grooms his beard as a mime of contemplation. He translates his monologue, in advance, out of Spanish, so that the minor time delay allows the hanging clauses to hover between gravitas and humour. He loves London, it is evident. A good city in which to take meetings. He has summoned me to the old place, where, in the past, I put on time between dental appointments and raids on a basement of used books. Oscar is more of a facilitator, a cut-out man, than a commissar. After letting it lie dormant for a dozen years, he has re-jacketed a book of comic strips called
It’s Darker in London.
He wants me to provide a little padding, firewalls of text between tightly scripted storylines for unmade films. Oscar has rounded up a strategic mix of retired comedians, unemployed TV directors, female slasher novelists, names generous with their favours (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean), and disgruntled artists eager to break free of success, the dismal ghetto of paid commissions. The Evil Empire of multimillion-dollar CGI movies and spin-off toys.

What strikes me, as I watch Oscar replace his brown mug, precisely, in last Friday’s ring, is how prophetic the comic strips now look. London
is
darker, while the public faces of politicians and boosters are ever pinker and brighter; the meat more tightly packed, injected with collagens and vitamin boosts. Jack Kennedy the model: sunlamp sickness, smooth bloat as a newscast of moneyed health. Pleasure-beach cancers. Spinal injections, steel corsets. Perfect smiles. Everything exposed and enquired: nothing done.

Combing stray hairs from his mouth, Oscar is as gloomy as a wet owl. He is talking about a day trip to Barcelona, some Mexican
anarchists he met in a bar. I ask him if he ever came across Roberto Bolaño.

‘That last page of yours. I can’t, can’t …’ He shrugs, he shakes his dark feathers. Hesitation implies sincerity.

I check my strip. Nothing makes more sense. Thefts from Burroughs. ‘Paranoia is knowing more than you can use. Intelligent machines make prophetic guesses from our mistakes. All stories end in death.’

Nothing surprised Oscar like the posthumous fame of Bolaño. He met him several times in Barcelona. And failed to commission a comic strip, a genre adventure, which the Chilean author would have been happy to provide. Money was tight. Roberto hung around the bars, unwashed, gone in the teeth. He devoured graphic novels and science fiction. Or that was the impression Oscar formed, a mirror of his own interests.

‘This man was so …
dirty
.’

I pressed for specifics. I fetched Oscar another coffee. He told me to read a Flemish author he had just discovered, Georges Rodenbach.
Bruges-La-Morte.
‘The saddest story. It is how he writes the city into being: the walls, the water in the canal, they talk to you. Bolaño? He bummed a cigarette, kept the packet. A drinker. We were a loose group, friends, acquaintances. On the move. Barcelona, Las Ramblas. Before the Games. Around Bolaño it always seemed to be raining.’

Now there is regret. Those extraordinary books, folding one into another. Oscar gave me his contacts, people who knew the dead author. Email addresses. I decided to postpone America, all of it, and to book a flight. In past times, as a student and a documentary film-maker, I drove, camped, or came south by train and bus. There was a decent interval in which to get used to the idea of travel.

Marcelo Cohen lived in Barcelona for decades, before he returned to Buenos Aires. Oscar said that he was ‘the first person to write a review of one of those early Bolaño novels’. The two men never met, but Bolaño made a number of ‘strange and funny’ telephone calls in response to this positive notice. Marcelo could tell me all
about them, if I could wangle a ticket to Argentina. Couldn’t I find a suitable film festival or a new author to sell to the broadsheets? Oscar lived with a European sense of the status and commercial potential of writers. I’d been invited, once, to walk across Mexico City, side to side, to patch together a lively account for a travel supplement. I accepted immediately. The commission was withdrawn. Anyone crazy enough to take that one on, without discussing a fee, or the need for an armed minder, was too crazy for a sensible English readership.

After a long weekend poking around stadiums on hills, drinking coffee with friends of Bolaño, watching other tourists and subdued premarital celebrants in drooping reindeer horns, I took the train, off-peak, to Blanes. Everything I had in my notebook was contradictory. A poet. And a compulsive quoter of poets. A night person. And a family man. A mature geek collecting PlayStation war games on credit. A discriminating and an indiscriminating reader. A fastidious book thief, silent among exiles in red Formica fast-food joints. A phone pest whose calls were always welcome. A private man who made speeches to large crowds. A carsick passenger crossing Spain to judge literary competitions. Bolaño had glasses, dark glasses, no glasses. Bad teeth, no teeth, fixed teeth. He looked good in a crumpled black T-shirt, in a weak-eyed, unshaven, cigarette-suckling way. Like a minor cop in a French movie, doing bad things to Algerians, then reading Louis Aragon, over brandy, in hidden bars.

From the train window, white buildings and unfarmed farmland gave way to industry, retail-park outskirts (like Taunton, like Liège), seafront hotels and apartment blocks. I could have stayed at home and run this fruitless expedition on Google Earth. As long as you don’t leave the road, it’s all there. There are barriers on the station, indifferently policed. Returning students, beach sleepers and economic migrants stream through a large gap in the mesh fence.