American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (19 page)

I thought of a character described by Gibson in
Spook Country.
‘He looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone). Like someone who’d be invited quail shooting with the vice-president.’ Or even out to Hollywood. A complimentary bungalow at the Chateau Marmont. This
happened to Gibson, he had the right profile at the time. He was working on
Pattern Recognition
. A fancy magazine asked him to attend a private festival of films that were shot without film, out-takes from Godard associates in the Dziga Vertov Group. ‘Garage Kubrick,’ he said. YouTube, Gibson decided, signalled the end of print publications putting up novelists in Hollywood suites. We were coming into the age of assembly. There was nobody better qualified to launch my journey south than Gibson. When the sort of objects shelved in this shop – and the people who grazed on them – vanished from the chart, William Gibson would still be operating. He knew both worlds so well.

When Bill was staying in London, at a book-ballasted flat in Camden Town, his host pointed out of the window at an eccentric figure, horseshoe-spined under a rucksack bulging with the sort of small-press poetry Spartacus regulars carry in their anorak pockets, tramping north from the Tube towards Compendium Books. That was me. On the street, of the street: absorbed, burdened. And Gibson’s gaze from the high window was a superior brand of pre-Twitter, pre-iPhone surveillance.
Pattern Recognition
opens on Camden High Street. Accidental pedestrians are fixed between hard covers.

Miguel led us down the forest path to the spring, a well-kept track only lightly heritaged, and attracting, on this crystalline morning, no other pilgrims. The pine resin, the cone-crunching footfall, the glitter of the inlet, did not unpick or intrude upon an imagined terrain so thoroughly colonized and adapted to purpose by Malcolm Lowry and Margerie Bonner. Notice the affection in her voice, many decades after leaving the burnt shack, when she is recorded, remembering the birds, the animals coming to water, in Mota’s film,
After Lowry.
If a pleasant beachside recreation zone within fifteen minutes of the city can be defined by absence, Miguel has caught that spirit in his DVD tribute. You marvel at the courage or desperation required to self-assemble an inhabitable hut from driftwood and sawmill lumber. Lowry was in most respects a handless man (as Robert Louis Stevenson knew the term). He wrote standing up and was punished with varicose veins. But write he did, compulsively; or rewrite, layer after layer, postponing resolution. He prepared the bolus, as he called it, of an arcane, interlinked structure (as rickety as his shack and as magnificent), for the coming fire. Unfinished books were safe from public exposure. Like the Wyndham Lewis of
Self Condemned
, Lowry was an English author who found in wartime Canada the perfect retreat, hell as paradise. Lewis was trapped, in company with his long-suffering and barely acknowledged wife, in the stifling claustrophobia of a small hotel: until, as with the Lowrys, they are ‘blasted out of it by fire’.

Lowry flirts with Margerie’s pills. Lewis, reading about the successful felo-de-se, a double event, of the refugee Stefan Zweig and his wife in their apartment in Rio, is rather envious. The post-war world, Zweig reckoned, would demand more effort than he was prepared to make. Lewis, that hard-shelled crab, puts his newspaper
aside, to acknowledge the spectacle of recent frost on Toronto backyards. Lowry delights in the oil refinery on the far shore, where the S has fallen from the SHELL sign.

Mrs Lewis, Froanna, is a backroom presence, hidden from visitors to the studio, a hand in a serving hatch. Lewis, photographed in his round spectacles in 1940, looks much like Dickie Attenborough playing John Reginald Halliday Christie, the Rotting Hill serial killer. Margerie Bonner, at the lowest estimate co-author of the Dollarton idyll, is feeding Malcolm, channelling Malcolm, reading his pages, making suggestions, confirming his role as doomed (barely functioning) poet-genius – while, at the same time, drawing on aspects of their shared hibernation for her own murder mystery
The Shapes That Creep.
And retreating, when the drinking is too extreme and the pinch of poverty too tight, into a perky, highball-snifting, Laguna Beach novel of her Los Angeles past: more
The Thin Man
, William Powell and Myrna Loy, than the existential delirium of Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in Nicholas Ray’s film version of the Dorothy B. Hughes novel
In a Lonely Place.
The brittle weirdness of
The Last Twist of the Knife
, Bonner’s fantasy return to La La Land, is not helped by the fact that her publishers managed to leave out the last chapter.

‘Eridanus’ they called their small paradise. The tolerated huddle of fishermen’s shacks has now vanished to facilitate a parking zone, memorial stone and clearly flagged trail. In Lowry’s day he was attacked by the Vancouver press, when he was noticed at all, as a wealthy, freeloading scrounger, celebrated by fools elsewhere. Tourist boats on the Burrard Inlet jeered at the squatters and threatened to burn them out.

There is a plaque to honour the years, 1940–54, when the Lowrys lived on the beach. The ‘aluminum retorts of the oil refinery’ are mentioned. And ‘wild ducks doing sixty downwind’. After quitting this paradise, Lowry never stopped dreaming of his return. The mayor of North Vancouver, Marilyn Baker, put her name to the fading metal tribute.

Miguel, effortlessly hospitable, as so many proved in this town,
picked us up at the Sylvia, to make the drive over Second Narrows Bridge and down the Dollarton Highway to Cates Park. He had given up on the England football game at half-time, they were already two down. We parked and he led us to the spot, or as close to it as he could calculate, of the original shack. The one in the photographs. Margerie spoke in Miguel’s film about how Lowry would dive off the jetty at all seasons and swim out for an hour, sometimes two, over to the far shore. After the news of his father’s death he was gone so long she wondered if he was coming back. I thought of Andrew Kötting in Hastings, another deepwater man. The English Channel is a poultice for incipient psychosis. Kötting was known to chase the tide as far as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Watching the film-maker emerge, to hobble over the shingle, I understood the interspecies mutation of being too long in water: red eyes, upper-body bulk, salt-white lips, throat like sandpaper. A compulsion to freeze at the transitional point between land and sea. Chest out, balls pinched like wizened grapes. Arms folded for team photograph. Lowry, who was sent to the Leys School in Cambridge (where J. G. Ballard would go on his return from Shanghai), was a burrowing, bullocking scrum-half. He was also, in his youth, a golf champion. One of his respectable, stay-at-home brothers, Wilfred, won an international cap for rugby in 1920.

It is when they stagger from the water, after a long haul in choppy conditions under white mist, that these boys, Kötting and Lowry, talk in tongues. What they have just experienced, the out-of-body hallucinatory state, dredges up a rush of uncensored memories, their own and those of the drowned, along with stutters and rattles of cold. They are in a different place. It is hard for towel-holders to understand. The late prose of
Dark as the Grave
is as close as we can come to one of those swims. Go with it, go under; fire back the whisky.

The winding path through the woods, between the site where the shack had once been and the general store where the Lowrys collected water and purchased their necessities, is a topographic fiction for both Malcolm and Margerie. For him, a locus of confrontation.
An opportunity to think through his work in regress. For Margerie, the store is society, with all the challenges of emerging from her impoverished retreat: after ugly rows in life, the storekeeper is appointed villain, the killer in her mystery novel.

MALCOLM LOWRY’S CELEBRATED SHACK STOOD ON THE BEACH EAST OF THIS SPOT. HE CALLED THIS STRETCH OF SHORELINE ERIDANUS. ITS MYSTERIOUS SEASONS, HE WROTE, ARE ‘LIKE THAT WHICH IS CALLED THE TAO’
.

A tablet of stone set in November 2004. I’d like to swim, the water is strobing gold. I take off shoes and socks and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. The clear, cold water of the Burrard Inlet, across from the blue, wooded shoreline, and the aquamarine tanks of the refinery, dissolves complexity. Eridanus is anti-Mexico: stillness, silence. Ice on the breath. Long winters. Neighbouring fishermen heading back from Alaska. Months of woodchopping and night jazz.

From among the sharp stones in the shallows, I pick up something that glints like a coin. It is a yellow-gold beer cap,
CORONA LIGHT
, with rusty serrated rim and a black crown. Nothing to do with Lowry; a token of some summer visitor, one of the conference attendees off the bus. I carry it away.

AMPUTEE HAS PROSTHETIC LEG STOLEN FROM CAR. LEG IS DESCRIBED AS HAVING A FLESH-COLOURED FOOT WITH A SILVER CLAMP ABOVE THE ANKLE AND A LONG ALUMINIUM ROD WITH A BLUE FINISH
.
Metronews.

My morning circuit expanded; Anna needed rest to counter the pain in her neck, the aftermath of travel. The Sylvia was the best kind of haunted hotel. Keys disappeared and reappeared. Dim corridors were barely illuminated with flickering
EXIT
signs. Walls bend and warp, blotches appear like a catalogue of forensic stains. You acquire that sense of belonging that comes when you know you’ll be moving on in a couple of days. W. P. White the architect had pulled it off, a valued retreat nobody found good reason to burn down. The performance artist at the desk felt no obligation to come
out of his trance to clock me, at whatever dark hour I took to the streets, with cap and camera.

The idea – and it was barely that – was to absorb the loop of ground, Stanley Park to Coal Harbour and the Vancouver Convention Centre, or, the other way, by Sunset Beach Park to False Creek; to burn fresh neural pathways, to make my plodding steps into a proper architectural conceit. My circuits, coming out of sleep, would stretch, as we drove down the coast towards San Francisco, into a straight line, an unfolding concertina of images, sounds, headlines from free newspapers, words on walls. The Gothic S of the Sylvia, hanging on a shield above the entrance, was the missing letter from Lowry’s refinery hell. And a better shape to walk, a snakier symmetry. Pink light tubes, in a dark window on Nelson Street, spelled
ESTHETICS:
the S and the T and the I burning brighter than the rest.

A Pacific city of this size was, as William Gibson pointed out, a major port and a distribution centre for drugs. Mountain ranges were deforested for Chinese furniture; heroin flooding in, by way of a return, with collateral damage visible in the doorways of Hastings Street East. Beyond that, there would be grand-project remnants, Olympic legacy in the form of an unoccupied athletes’ village, posthumous public art. The 2010 zone and its satellite Paralympic Village, much like London’s Lower Lea Valley and the Royal Docks of Silvertown, floated in a limbo of stalled investment. A fenced encampment of white tents with Moorish peaks and curves, like Kent’s Bluewater supermall rendered in canvas, was hosting a Russian horse circus.

NOW PRE-SELLING. PINNACLE LIVING FALSE CREEK
. A Sikh family talk into competing cellphones, trying to find a cab to get them out of there. The pizza-delivery boy has a T-shirt three sizes too big:
I RAN THE MARATHON.
The old sawmills of False Creek carved up 1,000-year-old Douglas firs. Nothing has arrived, but everything is promised.
COMING SOON: LONDON DRUGS. EDGEWATER CASINO. LEGACY LIQUOR STORE
.

My ultimate Vancouver loop, before the lunch with the Gibsons,
undid me. I came all the way round, after English Bay Park, Sunset Beach Park, False Creek, the giant BC Place Stadium, Downtown, Gastown, to the Waterfront Centre,
IMAX
, seaplanes, post-Olympic Media hub. All the psychogeographic energy lines were feeding into an understated mall: 100
YEARS OF SHOPPING & SERVICES
. A granite Calvinist ghetto:
HERITAGE DISTRICT
. Galleried floors with stone-clad walls. A panopticon for discriminating (but invisible) consumers. And its name was:
THE SINCLAIR CENTRE. SINCLAIR WELLNESS. DIAMOND DEAL JEWELLERY. THE PERFUME SHOPPE. SHARING THE SPIRIT.

A Sinclair could claim credit for all this. James Sinclair, Minister for Fisheries, had a vision: ‘the redevelopment of heritage buildings’. And he sucked me right in. To the one Vancouver construction that drained my sap. I took a bus out of there, back to Central Station, to secure our tickets to Seattle. I gave the only beggar who approached me on any of my walks all my change. He was so self-effacing in his muttered request, it felt like an obligatory toll for free passage. The station was lit like a German opera house.

Without really thinking about it, I assumed that William Gibson was the numinous presence in Vancouver. Like Lowry he came from elsewhere, in part to avoid war. Thereby volunteering for combat status in quite another field. His bad journey seems to have been endured with admirable stoicism and processed into books that surfed all kinds of hip currents. He played the gap between technologies, eco systems, video games, outlaw subterraneas. He chose this place, rather than Mexico and the volcanoes. Some of the Gibson pitch was an evidence swab taken from Burroughs. Burroughs said that his goal was to make it into space with a customized aqualung. Gibson blended inner and outer multiverses, crime and consumer aesthetics, in cyberspace (his term). Name it and you own it. Schooled in Arizona (Burroughs was in Los Alamos, New Mexico), Bill acquired the impressive childhood traumas the best writers need. Teenage angst with Beat paperbacks: life with mother in a monoculture. Everything conspired towards that moment
when he crossed the border, on the drift, with no specific aim, as it was later rationalized, of evading the draft for the Vietnam War. Toronto was too blatant in its mash of runaways, psychedelic headbangers and career depressives. Gibson managed a shop peddling drug paraphernalia. He was lucky enough to meet a woman from Vancouver, Deborah Jean Thompson. Together, they travelled. ‘We concentrated,’ he said, ‘on European fascist regimes with favourable exchange rates.’ Greece was good (DeLillo made telling use of Athens). And Istanbul, that stretch city, a storehouse of future images. ‘We couldn’t stay anywhere that had anything remotely like hard currency.’

In Vancouver Gibson learnt to scavenge and deal (as we all did). And to meld aspects of this transitional life into his fiction. In photographs he looks adequately creased and troubled, with laughter lines too, but behind the thin spectacles the eyes avoid the camera’s interrogation and notice whatever is coming through the door or the wall.

Guu Garden Izakaya is the restaurant William Gibson chose for our lunch and it was a smart choice. We had a walk uphill through the cherry blossom of Nelson Street, overtaking natives, to the corner of Hornby. Finding the right block, a recent mandala development, oval within square, the One Wall Centre, was not to find the restaurant. The place where we would meet Bill and Deb was behind slatted windows and it felt a little like an office extension, or executive canteen for a wealthy but covert television franchise. At home it would be situated on London Wall, not far from the Barbican, close to money but not feeling its hot breath. Customers very much like ourselves, in striped shirts, without ties. The Guu Garden was not a garden and it didn’t have visible lumps of a Roman wall. It was clean, above all, with plain wood tables, perfectly square, and soon covered with round glasses and bowls. The food was good, but not alarmingly so. We let Bill order. I hoped I wasn’t drawing the Gibsons away from work in progress. If so, they showed no signs of impatience. Bill said that he never liked to travel when he was parturient with a novel. They were closer to Japan than Europe.