American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (8 page)

Above the reservoir, I found a flat ledge on which to take my lunch. Then I crossed the high-speed tracks, scrambled through bush and thorn, dodged traffic on Route 128, and returned to Gloucester by way of retail parks, hypermarkets and more suburban housing dressed for Halloween.

On my last morning before flying back to London, I booked a whale-watch cruise. I liked the idea of putting out to sea, even for a few miles, but the excursion was being made for my wife, who spoke so often of her desire to witness the transit of these mysterious creatures. It was late in the season. Rain set in before first light, wind rattled the roof tiles. The voyage was cancelled. I bought a blue T-shirt saying
IN COD WE TRUST
and made for the Sawyer Free Library. I had heard that some of Olson’s own books had been lodged, after his death, on the open shelves. There were unrecorded annotations.

I started with
Paintings of D. H. Lawrence
, New York, 1964. Notes and prompts in Olson’s hand – future poems? – sprayed across the endpapers. ‘Monday evening – Dec 13, XLV.’ The script was not easy to decode. But the librarian was prepared to make photocopies. A remark of Lawrence’s was flagged up: ‘Things happen, and we have no choice.’ I came on a painting from 1928,
North Sea.
Two naked women, one man. It had been bought by Aldous Huxley and destroyed by fire in California, ‘some years ago’. I did my best to transcribe the Olson poem. With so many cancellations and revisions, this was a harder task than the hours I spent with a magnifying glass reworking John Clare’s
Journey Out of Essex
in the Northampton Public Library. ‘New Wld bullshit,’ I read. ‘Universalism’.

The only way to properly experience Olson was to watch one of the extra features on Henry Ferrini’s DVD. The poet, caught sweatily close, mammal head lolling and rocking, reads ‘The Cow of Dogtown’ from
Maximus Poems
IV, V, VI
. I could have attempted this without leaving Hackney. But having absorbed a little of the
weather of place, the poet’s performance hit with new force. In his Fort Square apartment, up against a wall of maps and photographs, Olson is, absolutely, in flow of inspiration. The balletic precision in the waving and signalling of arms as he conducts this torrent of words, at varying pace, cigarette stub pinched flat between finger and thumb. I never witnessed such a thing, such naked delivery. The gathering together of geological particulars, and the processing of technical terms into the energy field of the poem, was what I wanted from Gloucester.

Nothing more than that, he taught us how to read. The gossip of slack biography is impertinence. The man lives in language. He knows just how to end a passage, arms flung wide, as he brings ‘Maximus from Dogtown – II’ into harbour. What is broken and fragmentary on the page coheres. A secret formula. ‘Heart to be turned to Black/Stone/is the throne of Creation.’ The other side of heaven, for Charles Olson, after Dogtown, is the ocean. I play Ferrini’s film again. And again. And again. I love the way Olson says
carbon.

In the movie one of the actors said ‘we’re being chased by a volcano’.

– Roberto Bolaño

I’ve never forgotten the day Alexander Baron, the once-celebrated author, returned to Hare Marsh, the home of his grandparents, and to his original identity as Alec Bernstein. Hands deep in pockets, feet fixed to the earth, as if set in concrete, Baron twisted his head to avoid the interrogation of the camera. The deep past of Whitechapel’s tenter grounds, behind Brick Lane and Truman’s Brewery, and alongside the corrugated-iron fence, the cropping ponies, the bridge over the railway, visibly tested the tough old soldier. In his white raincoat, landed with this abrupt challenge, to recall the gestation of those early novels, he resembled the Italian-born actor and former prizefighter Lino Ventura, who made a career playing serious men, on both sides of the law, in films by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jacques Becker. Baron, a Hackney boy, and in his younger days a committed Marxist, had something of the wounded commissar about him, a history lived and not regretted. He was still writing because that was what he did, but there was no expectation now of his books finding an audience. ‘I don’t know who the publishers are.’ He split himself into the two brothers of his 1963 novel,
The Lowlife
. He enjoyed the respectability and silence of the North London Jewish suburbs and the remembered topography of a difficult past. Baron spoke, and his speech seemed to be pre-written like the text of a set-aside autobiography, about his return from the war. He came back to his parents’ house to rest and recover. ‘You’ve stirred up memories there,’ he said, spectacles glinting.

It was hard now to imagine the scale of success of Baron’s first book,
From the City, From the Plough
, published by Jonathan Cape. An account of war from the ranks. In paperback, Baron’s gritty fiction ran through countless editions. ‘It brought me a healthy income,’
he said. ‘I can’t complain.’ His second novel,
There’s No Home
, dealt with the invasion of Sicily, the interval between battles, the bored military and the abandoned wives. Later he drifted into serial adaptations of heritage classics for television; bit by bit the novels thinned out and finally disappeared.

‘The writer’s job,’ Baron said, ‘is to be a spectator, to step back, to see more of the game. And to make sense of it.’

He laid out, very succinctly, my own statement of intent. One which I had lived with for more than forty years, but which I was now determined to subvert, by travelling to places where I would be a stranger, without language or backstory. Roberto Bolaño caught it in a sentence. ‘For him
exile
was the secret word for
journey
.’

On the ridge of a park on the wrong side of the river, everything is skewed and ripe with novelty. The view, over the trees, across regiments of uniform houses, sets out a different London. The suburban villas at the crown of the hill are private, recessive. Nobody walks the morning streets.

Muriel Walker is waiting for me. I can’t estimate her age, but she was involved with the radical Unity Theatre in the 1940s. Which was where she met and became friendly, a comrade and a colleague, with Alec Bernstein. Muriel wrote me a letter.

I recently bought the new edition of Alexander Baron’s ‘Lowlife’, with your introduction. I first met Alec Bernstein, as he then was, at the Unity Theatre, soon after the war. Having read your introduction, I thought you might be interested to see a copy of a letter Alec wrote to me in August 1949, when I had left to go to Italy, where I worked as production secretary to the director William Dieterle on the film ‘VULCANO’, and subsequently back to Rome with Anna Magnani as her private secretary. Alec describes the work involved in writing a new novel. I hope this proves of interest.

As of course it did. The film
Vulcano
, about which I knew nothing, had a title that sat squarely with material I was gathering up for
a new book. The accident of being held in San Francisco, in May 2011, by the eruption in Iceland, converted a bureaucratic nuisance into a gift, the smokescreen for a new adventure: the tracing of bad journeys aimed in the direction of smoking volcanoes in Mexico or the Aeolian Islands. I was inspired by films shot by Francis Alÿs, the Belgian artist, now living in Mexico City, who ran into the vortex of dust storms and whirlwinds, often at the expense of his recording equipment. The sound was like death talking.

At a certain point in the journey of any life, a home is curated; it becomes an occupied memorial to dispersed family and friends; a museum of loneliness decorated with photographs of dissolved beings, paintings keeping rectangles of sunlight away from fading wallpaper. Votive objects achieve status only through our long engagement with them.

Muriel is trim, alert, dark-haired. Her hands tremble slightly as she slides the evidence, the letters, magazines, theatre programmes, spectral photocopies, across the dining table in her front room. Again I have that sense of a scripted narrative that an actor – in this case Muriel Walker, shorthand wizard, lightning typist – delivers, by reading aloud from the autobiography of an intimate stranger. Before we come to the colour footage of Rome in 1949, the dust and sulphur of the volcanic island, and the young woman of twenty-two who hoped to stay away from London for six months, we must understand the founding fables of a life as it might have been contrived in an Alexander Baron novel.

Muriel Walker was born on Commercial Road to an immigrant Jewish family. Her grandparents wrote to the brothers and sisters left behind in Russia, sending prepaid postcards in hope of a return. Muriel has seen the letters. Her son, who lives in Paris, arranged for their translation by an old man who had been in the camps.

The phoney war is a vivid memory. Muriel watches while her cousin ‘clatters away’ at a sewing machine. She is transported by tram on a cruel diagonal across London, Hackney to West Norwood.

‘The matron asked my mother to wait while I was taken up the
central staircase. I was taken to a bathroom and made to bathe. There were two or three other new arrivals, but they spoke no English. I learnt subsequently that they were German Jewish refugees.’

The regime at the Jewish Orphanage in West Norwood is benign, the food nutritious. The cooks are Irish. The education efficient. Attendance at synagogue is not optional. With the outbreak of war in September 1939, the orphans decamp for the south coast. At fourteen Muriel wins a scholarship to Wandsworth Technical College, which has now relocated to Guildford. She acquires the secretarial skills that will carry her to the Unity Theatre and, later, to Rome.

Muriel said that she had no objection to my making a recording of our conversation.

When I was at the Unity Theatre, I got to know various people, and we became great friends. Warren Mitchell was part of our particular group. Lionel Bart, Bill Owen, Julian Glover, Alfie Bass. Beryl, who Alec refers to in his letter, came to Italy with me. We went off, just on spec, one February. We bought one-way tickets for £
8
. With no return date.

When we got to Rome, we found a bedsitter. Then I got an introduction to somebody who was doing pre-production work on a film called
Quo Vadis.
It didn’t actually
get made. Another version did.
Then somebody introduced me to a woman who ran a newspaper. She said, ‘Would you be free to go down to Sicily tomorrow?’ ‘Sure.’ I left Beryl in Rome.
I travelled down with the assistant director and the writer Piero Tellini who had worked with Rossellini on
Rome, Open City.
We stayed, the three of us together, in Ravello. For about three weeks. Writing the script. We used to take the Italian version, which Piero wrote every day, drive down to Naples, and give it to Erskine Caldwell. He would do the English version.

You know the history of
Vulcano
? Rossellini went off with Ingrid Bergman to make a film on Stromboli. So, at very short notice, Anna Magnani got the company together: the director William Dieterle, Rossano Brazzi, Anna herself, and the American girl, Geraldine Brooks. Even with all those talents, the films failed. Both of them.
When we finished filming, Anna asked me to go back to Rome and work with her, in her apartment. She just
fancied the cachet of an English secretary. She wasn’t filming at that stage. We’d go off in her car, everyone knew her. She was a great personality. People would stop and shout, ‘Ciao, Anna. Ciao, Anna.’ And she waved. It was good fun. At the end of the year, I’d met somebody. I decided,
OK
I’ve done it. I came back to London with an Italian husband.

In some unexpected way, through Muriel Walker and Alexander Baron, who both belonged at various times to Jewish Hackney, those tributaries off the great north-flowing stream of Kingsland High Street and Stoke Newington Road, I was being nudged towards Sicily and the Aeolian Islands. ‘A very strong smell of sulphur.’ A smouldering volcano as the mouth of hell. Scandalous women in billowing skirts running barefoot over hot ashes. A sea as blue as murder.

Sicily was very much part of Baron’s own bad journey to the end of the light, the experiences that left him, at the end of the war, wandering like a sleepwalker through the nocturnal streets of Hackney. Traumatic events in remote, sun-bleached places made him a writer, his politics tactfully subsumed in the crafting of those early triumphant fictions. I read Baron’s London books first, because they revealed to me layers of social history, alive with wit and spunk; and the territory from which my own fictions were being dredged. Much later, as an older man, I went back to the beginning, to the Italian novel, the book of invasion,
There’s No Home.

‘With the black wall of lava rising behind them in a menacing silhouette,’ Baron wrote, ‘the men looked up from the floor of an infinite cavern of sky into whose shadowed and mysterious depths the black shapes fell away beneath them.’

I wondered about the photograph of the young woman in the striped knee-length dress and the high sandals on the inside cover of the paperback reprint. Who was she? The model for the woman with whom the sergeant in the occupying army has an affair? Any potential autobiographical overlay is further emphasized by the photograph, inside the rear cover, of a bespectacled Alexander Baron, cigarette in mouth, cleaning his rifle.

Muriel couldn’t confirm or deny the affair. Baron, many years later, said: ‘The women of Sicily were to be the subject of my second novel. They were more natural and knowing than English women. The girls wore short print dresses faded by much washing. They walked clack-clack down the street on wooden sandals.’ He recalled an incident when, during one of his solitary walks, he found himself ‘squeezed on a bench among an audience of women who were all weeping loudly’. They had gathered, like starlings, in an open-air cinema, in a hidden square. They were watching William Wyler’s version of
Wuthering Heights
and keening at the fate of Merle Oberon’s Cathy Earnshaw. ‘Ah, la poverina, la poverina!’

When the young Muriel was in Italy she received a letter from Baron, back in Hackney.

I wandered out to the letterbox at the end of a horrible day’s work, feeling very tired, and behold! – there was a sunlit little picture of Rome staring up at me from the mat. After a first sensation of pleasure that bore a remarkable resemblance to a four thousand volt electric shock, I sat down and drifted off into a daydream about all the things that (in order to get on with my job) I had forced into the background of my mind: the white glare of the sunshine, the incredible shrill chatter and babble in the streets, the white villas on the hillsides and the cypresses guarding them like black spears, the trams swooping past with that screaming whine and as much clashing and clanging as a brigade of tanks.

Have the colours faded off those lovely picture-postcard visions? Is it just like London to you, only hotter and noisier? Do you get fed up with the people, their bewildering volatility, the shameless and quite childlike greediness and cowardice that so many of them readily display? Are you ever homesick?

You probably know more about what’s going on at Unity than I do, for I only wander out of the house (in a daze!) once every couple of weeks and spend a half-hour or so in the theatre bar drinking those vile Coca-Colas and trying to find out what’s going on there.

As for me, I have never worked so hard in all my life. I had hardly finished one novel and put it into the press when – while I was resting
and wondering which part of the Continent to grace with my presence – I went mad about yet another, and started on it. It will take me at least till November, and as it is a very long, complex and delicately-woven story the labour is quite heartbreaking. I write and write, round the clock, tear up, revise, polish passages again and again, go to bed at one in the morning and – after lying awake for an hour – return to the typewriter at two o’clock and work till daylight. It is all quite insane. I haven’t gone out, even for the simplest form of relaxation or human company, for months, and am in fact merely a sort of human (if human is the right word) extension of my typewriter. I suppose the gruesome end of it will be that the book will turn out to be no good.

I dream – though heaven knows what will happen! – of finishing this latest before Christmas, then going out to Italy (Rome, Florence, Venice) for the three worst (in England) months of the New Year.

On the beaches of Sicily, Baron cleared mines under constant enemy fire.
There’s No Home
is a dreamlike lull, an interlude; infantrymen who are waiting for the next push form liaisons with the deserted wives of Catania. White light scalds. He works through the night, in Foulden Road, Stoke Newington, tapping his portable typewriter like a man drumming on a hollow skull, driving it to talk. At dawn, once again, he takes to the wet streets. Heading south, without taking any conscious decision, towards the Whitechapel labyrinth. Hare Marsh and the tenter grounds.

The table in the house that overlooks the park has been set out with archival boxes and grey photographs held with paperclips. Muriel’s hands flutter as she shuffles the pages, searching for confirming evidence. ‘At Norwood there was a girl I didn’t know, she was there sometime before me. Lily Sheil. She went on to become the muse of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And a Hollywood gossip columnist. Sheilah Graham. The orphanage was supported by the Rothschilds, people like that. It was pulled down, twenty or thirty years ago. An empty site. Now they are turning it into a leisure centre.’