American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (3 page)

Dorn and Prynne formed a transatlantic alliance, exchanging
letters and texts, collaborating on giveaway newspapers, provocations. Travelling together through wilderness places. Sharing quarters for autumn sabbaticals in shacks and mountain outposts. When Dorn died, from pancreatic cancer, Prynne flew the Atlantic, and crossed the continent, coast to coast, to deliver the eulogy at Boulder’s Green Mountain Cemetery. It was not recorded, nor should it have been. In a conversation, after the event, Prynne remarked on how unusual Dorn had been, in that his ear was so finely tuned to the modulations of the English voice. To John Clare, for example. ‘I was in correspondence with Charles Olson at this time,’ Prynne told his interviewer, ‘and I knew him through the post quite well; and Olson was an extremely difficult, powerful, and overriding personality.’

Towards the end of what had been a dazzling and diverse career, as poet, talker, teacher, Dorn, out of favour and under attack from twitching internet fingers all too easily affronted by his cutting and wilfully incorrect humour, gave his attention to European heresies, the Albigensians of Languedoc. He wanted to get to Rome, where he noticed the cats. Now Dorn, once again, was being published through fugitive editions in England. The poet Nicholas Johnson, through his Etruscan Books imprint, delivered
Westward Haut
and
High West Rendezvous
, in which Dorn remarked: ‘It’s a lot easier to be a heretic than it used to be. There are more religions willing to kill you.’

The particular rendezvous that brought me into contact with Dorn occurred in Bath. He was stepping westward again, to witness the solar eclipse, which he described as a ‘big event’. Jeremy Prynne was with him. They had read together, a scene brokered by Johnson, at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The unusual, probably unique, aspect of this was that Prynne
never
gave public readings of his poetry in England. He explained once that there might be a confusion of identity, as he had a professional role as a lecturer. The other business was conducted on his own terms. He might perform in Canada or Paris, not here. So this was something very special. And given, without any prior publicity, out of respect and friendship
. Prynne spoke of his admiration for ‘Thesis’, from
The North Atlantic Turbine.
A poem of the far north written in Colchester. ‘Only the illegitimate are beautiful.’ Dorn arrived, Prynne recalled in his obituary interview, at a small remote settlement in Newfoundland, so impoverished that the people there had no desire to know anything of the casual visitors. They turn their backs on them, pushing Dorn not towards resentment or shame but pride: the rare achievement of getting the scene down in measured, careful description. Mapping it just as it stood.

We filmed and recorded the Dorn part of the evening, none too effectively, keeping our distance. Prynne of course banished the cameras and ripped out the microphone. He explained, quite slowly, what he was going to read. And then he read it, without Dorn’s anecdotal asides and the obvious, chemically enhanced emotion.

When we met next day, by arrangement, in Bath, in the abundant garden of a cheese-stone Georgian house, it wasn’t easy to set aside the knowledge that this would, in all probability, be one of the last interviews.

Dorn had always been lean and cool in appearance, hard times known and survived. But there was no surviving the pregnancy of the tumour, or the news from Baghdad, the ruined ‘Cradle of Civilization’. ‘My tumour is interested in what interests me … My tumour is not interested in love.’

‘Before Languedoc,’ Dorn told me, ‘I always had a thing about the Apaches, because their rejection of European values and European existence actually was total. Total. And their hostility was total. And the Apaches were absolutely unapologetic about their primitiveness and their ruthless measures to survive and to exist alongside the juggernaut of what they could see. They saw this juggernaut as unresistible. They saw that. They probably didn’t see the use of the telephone.’

And what about that big shadow on the gallery wall, the missing presence in Bristol, Charles Olson? What were the memories of the era when they all travelled so recklessly and to such purpose?

‘Oh yes,’ Dorn replied, ‘those were amazing times. There were
notable evenings in Colchester. Jeremy came over from Cambridge and Tom Clark came around. Olson turned our house into a kind of salon. Those were beautiful active times. I mean not literary active, but more expanded. It was never literary with Charles. He liked the literary. But that was a small role for him.’

And London back then?

‘A lot more traffic and a lot less clutter. The traffic, as random as it sometimes seemed, seemed also purposeful. People actually did have things on their minds, no matter how strange those things were. They were actually going to a place, no matter if they arrived there or not, or if it was the wrong place. For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You’re a witness.’

And the Arnolfini – did it matter that there was no proper documentary record?

‘I think last night’s reading was historically interesting and significant. But things of that nature have to be borne away by the witnesses. Sometimes I think that it’s a shame it’s not captured. But, in a way, it’s such a moment that capturing it is defeating it.’

An old man, made slow and gracile by the years on him, wakes in a strange house in an industrial town. His own, his home. And they are in the flux of transition, both of them, man and town. He moves now with such stiff, mimicked precision, feeling for parts that creak and resist, reaching towards fresh morning pains, paddling his way to heavy velveteen curtains he will not open. Or so another man, myself, in an unfamiliar place, a Massachusetts fishing port also in transition, in steady rain, tries to imagine. Coming back, careful with door handles, table edges, from the cold narrow bathroom, in blue Texas T-shirt and no pants.

The man in Lowell I hope to meet, later this day, is John Sampas, Jack Kerouac’s brother-in-law, last survivor of a family of ten: keeper of the archive. How does it feel to sleep in a house pillowed and bolstered with all that
stuff
? The early novellas, the work journals, typewriters, raincoats, rucksacks. The meticulously kept files, the photographs from the road. The letters, postcards. The maps, football helmets. The Catholic-Buddhist scrolls and relics from which no life can ever be reassembled. Kerouac was the dark angel, freeing himself from the wheel of karma, the corporeal shroud. But he was also, and it was the source of the tension that fired his art, ‘Memory Babe’, an inspired celebrator of the ordinary: passing seasons, winter streets, floods, bars, factories (from the outside), woodsmoke, night, touch, family, friends, restlessness, kitchens, insanity, murder. John Sampas, my conduit to all this, if he appeared at the restaurant, if he approved my conversation, was going to challenge, or completely abort, the managed schizophrenia of my two worlds: fictional projections (myths, myths, myths) and the evidence of the eyes (never to be trusted). Trying to keep it together,
the Lowell of my reading, with the Lowell revealed through the rain-streaked car window, brought everything to a grinding halt. There is a special kind of writer’s block when there is just
too much
material; all those journeys to the end of the night become, like the Kerouac archive, chains and anchors. How does Sampas sleep among the terrors of so many unborn or abandoned projects, Kerouac seizures that never became living books?
Does he sleep?
Does he stand erect, trembling, licking the cold sweat of the moon from his frozen window?

It wasn’t easy in the Gloucester Writers Center, in my generously stocked roadside hut, to reinvent myself as a single man in a narrow bed, denied the warm curve of companionship, that earthing of dreams Anna provided for so many years. She experienced the worst of my imaginings, while I snored contentedly. She saw the things that were there, the elements in the room, the others. I was always too dumb to put much faith in visible spectres. But this hut pulsed with the man who had just stepped out, the late Vincent Ferrini, his books, belts, blankets. He worked here, framing pictures. He ate here, slept here. He conducted his affairs. He scribbled compulsively at this table. He listened to cars on the wet road, rain beating against the flat roof, moans from the harbour. Olson was more of an invoked presence: a collection of books by and about him, without the thumbprint of ownership. Photographs as proof of absence. Texts reduced to artworks. A blackboard, close to the door, flagged up future events. Strange to see my own name among that scatter of local activities and open evenings, beneath
POET LAUREATE
and above
THE DEVIL AWAKENS
and
POTTY TRAINING.
‘Man in America was late,’ Olson said. And now I believed it.

Henry Ferrini was a used man in a used car, in the most honourable sense of that term. Preoccupied, life-enhanced. Troubled. He sported an Afro-American jazzman carpet-cap, a brown leather jacket, black waistcoat, warm pink shirt. Contacts made, when he shot his film
Lowell Blues
in Kerouac’s town (of childhood, adolescence, late return), smoothed our venture. Henry could be
persuasive or persistent, obviously. I was here, on the wrong side of the Atlantic, to prove it; watching windscreen wipers scratch and smear. A wooded highway in low visibility, the road between Gloucester and Lowell, a short American drive.

When the two men, Henry and his friend Greg Gibson, author and antiquarian bookseller, met me in Boston, that first night, they were reassuringly non-corporate, unshaven. They referenced a fondly remembered past as house painters, getting by on ten good days a year, if they were lucky. The Gloucester road, siphoning heavy commuter traffic towards the new bridge, was a river of culinary temptations for Greg. He talked about chomping his way south down Route 1, all the way to the Florida Keys, investigating off-highway eateries. Red-and-yellow lights, emphatic signage. Pancakes, bacon. Weak-coffee refills. Big wet windows. Book-hunting as an excuse, but really the release of being away from home, out, on the move. A tree had fallen on his shop, freeing him from that duty, being there, dealing with customers. Greg was a man who liked to take his solitary evening cigar a short distance from the motel, into the trees at the end of the field; intimations of pioneer America in animal noises, rustlings, sweeping headlights on the Interstate. Before whisky in a hot room, the long night.

They spoke, taking turns, about oil companies, the fishermen of Gloucester screwed by Obama and the banking interests who tug his strings. But the Portuguese are adaptable. Look outside, every few miles another branch of Dunkin’ Donuts. Sugar-dough treats launched with pay-off fish money, juice of cod. Boston is a winking panorama of immigrants still orientating themselves after a few hundred years, conversing in dim sports bars: Robert Mitchum in
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
. They read crime, Henry and Greg. They quote Elmore Leonard. Greg calls him ‘Dutch’. He hopes to get a quote for his new hardboiled novel. It’s probably too late. Leonard’s old. He’s generous but fading. He’s not going to get through 200 pages.

South Boston sprawls in managed decay. How did crime boss Whitey Bulger, killer and patron of killers, stay free for so long? As
an informant, a conduit, that’s how. My twin Gloucester guides run the conspiracies you’d expect. After the close of business, Whitey goes west. The FBI pick him up in San Diego. He wasn’t ready for Mexico. All Americans dream of better elsewheres under the protective shade of the same flag.

What I brought into the car was a cold shudder of the Thames, a journey from Hastings on the Sussex coast, by sea and river, to the Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley. I told Henry and Greg about the Andrew Kötting film with which I’d been involved; a mock-Homeric swan pedalo odyssey through the miraculous late warmth of St Luke’s Little Summer. We had pedalled our unnervingly dignified and stable creature through Kerouac’s favourite month: ‘October in the Railroad Earth’. It was my intention, unrealized, to counter the hubris and mass hallucination of the Olympic moment with a marathon of our own through the secret waterways of Kent, the Medway and the Thames Estuary. I failed of course. Having to step ashore at Trinity Buoy Wharf and rush across town to make my flight. Deserting Kötting and the project.

They were amused, I think, Boston possessing a lake with the mother of all swan boats. Greg had identified his own measure of difficulty, on an altogether more impressive scale, by deciding to walk down the Connecticut River. He would keep a record of his adventures and publish his journal in annual instalments. No Thoreau raft on the Concord for him; no paddle and drift. ‘A man who finds himself getting old, but not too old to walk,’ he said. Greg dresses his venture in respectable trappings. ‘A deconstruction of the legend of John Ledyard, who made a similar journey in 1773.’ The reality is a noble but futile attempt to outdistance age; to trudge, grind, suffer, because Ledyard, sensibly, travelled in a canoe. Latecomers to an old land, we blend absurdity with hobbled heroism, in marching after legends of the frontier, wonders of geography, aboriginals, monsters of the forest. ‘He finds Ledyard strange, and he finds the American people strange.’ Without doubt, Greg finds me strange too, tramping London’s motorway verges, gasping through tunnels under the Thames, pedalling a plastic swan like a
Saga-holiday veteran on a treadmill. The refinements of elective masochism are subtle and sublime.

The Connecticut River is a watershed sister to Lowell’s Merrimack, wellspring of Kerouac’s mythology in
Dr Sax
and
Maggie Cassidy
. The helicopter shots of Henry Ferrini’s lyrical film, the swoops over bridges and bends, factories, falls and eddies, the tumble of Kerouac’s evocative prose, are complemented by readings from Johnny Depp, Gregory Corso, Carolyn Cassady, Robert Creeley.

‘How did you land those names – on such a tight budget?’

‘Find the number and ask.’

The film, Henry tells me, is on a loop. It plays as a perpetual Kerouac memorial in a town that never had much use for him when he was around. The great Blakean mills of Lowell, copied from Lancashire, have been rebranded as universities, intellectual hubs. Serious investment follows. Kerouac festivals. Everybody needs a measure of exploitable content. A handsome face with a brave smile for the poster.

Henry started me at the grave. Rain was still coming down, more mood music than nuisance. At first we drove through the gates of the wrong cemetery, St Patrick’s; then on, directly, to Edson. We made a few slow passes down broad avenues before Henry got his alignment right. A rush of remembered photographs: Bob Dylan, hands in pockets, accompanied by Ginsberg and the gang. The Rolling Thunder Revue
. Renaldo & Clara
.

Kerouac wasn’t in the ground with his father and brother in Nashua, New Hampshire. Capitalized on a grey granite envelope, he was inducted into the sprawling Sampas clan, the Lowell Greeks
. HE HONORED LIFE.
And reverted, in eternity, to John Kerouac: the name on the cover of his first realist novel,
The Town and the City
. Ti Jean. A French-Canadian incomer who spoke in patois and understood no English until he was six years old. Dead Jack is with Stella, his last wife. And alongside his childhood buddy, and early literary conscience, Sebastian ‘Sammy’ Sampas. The brother who died of
his wounds, after Anzio, in 1944. Around the rim of the memorial panel is a neatly arranged crown of red-gold maple leaves, a fiery wreath.

‘Most days you’ll find messages, joints, prayers,’ Henry said. But this October morning, it’s a flag; the right size to float in a Florida cocktail. The Stars and Stripes skewered through a tribute to the dead man composed in very large letters on lined white paper.
WE BELIEVE IN YOUR BELIEF
.

Driving over the bridge was my first sight of the Merrimack, with Henry providing necessary guidebook information, the verbal footnotes he left out of his film. Infiltrating the set of a Massachusetts mill town was in so many ways a raid on my own past, a return to memory movies conjured by my adolescent reading of the Kerouac saga. I’d been given
Maggie Cassidy
at just the right moment; the narrative structure, I recognized, was much cannier than I appreciated at the time. I took a deep breath and submerged myself in the breathless physicality of competitive sprints (Kerouac the failed sports reporter). Kitchen conferences of a suffocatingly close family. Snow outside. Distances recorded of meandering walks across town. And that lovely dark-haired girl, down on the straw, in an off-the-shoulder print dress and black stockings. She was nothing like Maggie or her real-life inspiration, the Irish girl Mary Carney. As she sprawled invitingly on the cover of the slim 1960 Panther paperback original. ‘I won’t even know where your grave is,’ Mary says.

Invaders sniff around cold post-mortem traces, measuring ripples in the tar, photographing funeral homes, referencing the now-silent mills, as Charles Dickens once did, and making pointless reports. They cough out books and papers in sorry imitations of spontaneous composition, their antics anticipated by Kerouac in the figure of Count Condu from
Dr Sax.
Condu is a vampire, newly arrived from Europe, hot for innocent American blood, ticking over on a pint and a half decanted from a young girl, ‘just below the ear lobe’, after stepping ashore in slushy, fish-smelling Boston. The
coming energy thieves, fact-checkers from the academies of Budapest, Berlin, Rome, London, must be countered by the native Dr Sax (an avatar of W. C. Fields and William Burroughs), who takes the form, this time round, in a perfect Kerouacian shift of gears, of the poet Carl Sandburg: ‘thin as a shadow on the wall’, walking at night through a black area of Long Island, having just come off a Montana freight train.

9 Lupine Street in Centralville, the birth house – remembered, in shimmering golden hurt of light, 12 March 1922 – is a quotation. Fresh-painted, balconied, red-shingled, with drooping flag and satellite dish on the roof. On the street are two deep-red recycling bins. This is now a well-kept, security-fenced neighbourhood of shiny black cars and broad puddles reflecting and inverting the quiet scene. A green memorial plaque confirms absence, end of story.

‘I have a recurrent dream,’ Kerouac said, ‘of simply walking around the deserted twilight streets of Lowell, in the mist, eager to turn every known and fabled corner.’

From the moment of reading
Maggie Cassidy
, in Wales, at the period when I was researching the life and mythology of Dylan Thomas by interviewing his friend the poet Vernon Watkins in his Gower bungalow, and BBC producers in Cardiff, and publicans and fishermen and fellow drinkers in Laugharne, a process of twinning and twisting and overlaying began to evolve. I wouldn’t have presumed on identification with Kerouac’s achievement, only with some of the biographical incidents that went into the mix. There was the attraction of the footballer held back by the compulsion to write, accepting poetry as a filter between experience and the invention of a self fit for the world that contains it. Kerouac grew up hearing that French-Canadian patois, as I was attuned to Welsh as the first language of my mother, maternal grandparents and great-aunt, and of the small mining town as I moved around it, an appendage of the old folk, kicking my heels, waiting for elaborate exchanges of courtesy, in words I experience but do not properly understand, to play themselves out.