American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (11 page)

At 2 p.m. the car was still not fixed, so we stopped at a little open-air trattoria and had lunch. I brought the typewriter on to the table, and continued working till four.

What I like about Muriel’s diary is the lack of artifice. After a few days, there is no mention of Felice back in Rome. And Tellini, with nothing much said, emerges as a volatile presence. When he quits the shoot, Muriel waits hungrily for the boat bringing letters.

Piero is separated from his wife. We found a restaurant high up above the sea in the mountains overlooking Naples, with all the lights in the bay twinkling, and Vesuvius in the background. We had a man with a mandolin playing and another man singing Neapolitan songs. They came to our table, and Piero asked them to play two songs which I had never heard, but I could have cried.

After such romance, Vulcano is the end of the world: paradise to inferno.

We took the little motor boat, and set off to Vulcano; we left Lipari behind us, with its grey, gruesome, fortress-like prison, right on the cliff edge.

We arrived at Vulcano. My immediate reaction was to run off home. The only deterrent was the fact that I couldn’t swim. There was nothing to be seen – just nothing except for the rocks of the volcano and at the top smoke pouring out from the crater. In fact, during this passing of the island in our boat, I had the strangest sensation: I was here in the middle of the blue, very deep blue Mediterranean,
very calm, under a clear sky and very hot sun, on a little ship, that had the gramophone playing modern songs.

We disembarked. There seems to be no habitation. Just one or two tiny hut-like constructions, some with straw roofs. There are the rocks, many-coloured, from deep red to green. There is sulphur over everything, sending a strong smell in the heat of the sun. There are cactus plants and a yellow plant, ginestra, that gives an overpowering sweet perfume. Our little hut is on its own in the middle of this wilderness, with a strange little straw affair for sanitation; the pigs, goats and chickens run freely about the place. We have no running water, and have bowls of water brought from the well. We eat all together, the whole unit, in a tent. There is the sea, unbelievably blue. And above all, the crater, smoking day and night.

Photographs from that time, from Muriel’s carefully preserved Denmark Hill archive, confirm and refine these impressions. In her summer dress, with her dark hair, sitting on the rocky ground, typewriter on her lap, Muriel could be cast as Magnani’s younger sister, or the character played by Geraldine Brooks in the film. Geraldine and Muriel become good friends. Anna starts to call Muriel ‘Ingrid’. She says that the English production secretary has the look of Bergman. Employing this young woman as companion, secretary, coat carrier, is an insult aimed at her detested rival.

Dieterle stays aloof, forensic in white cotton gloves. Like a Beverly Hills gynaecologist. There is one extraordinary sequence where Magnani labours, in the reek of sulphur, alongside women in the hellish quarry of the pumice mines.

We came alongside Lipari’s pumice mines. It is a huge, monstrous mountain, composed entirely of dazzling, chalk-white pumice dust and stones. My heart sank when I knew that we had to climb right to the top to find our location. There is no solid matter, but just this powdery substance which crumbles as one puts one’s foot down. The place was filled with mineworkers – mostly women – a few men and little boys. Most of the boys wore scarves wound round their heads Arab fashion.

The critic Manny Farber, talking about another Rossellini film,
The Miracle
, catches the physical impetus of Magnani, how she becomes a force of nature. He says that her sullen intensity ‘paralyzes the brain’. ‘The chaotic editing of unbalanced images captures existence in its most unrelated, dishevelled state.’

Muriel’s innocent recollections of daily life hint at molecular
changes, London is a dreamscape she can hardly imagine. Her friends at the Unity Theatre are putting on a production of Robert Tressell’s
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
For a moment, reading the letter, she is envious – and then the magnetism of the mountain, the blue of the sky-reflecting sea wipes all that away.
Errol Flynn parks his yacht and strolls through her sleeping quarters. With one of her new friends she finds a deserted cove, a break in the rocks. They wallow and bask. They flirt with disappearance. As, years later, another Anna, an Antonioni fiction played by Lea Massari, arrives on a neighbouring island, the volcanic stump of Lisca Bianca, to vanish; to pass the narrative burden on to a new mistress, Monica Vitti:
L’avventura.
Massari suffered a heart attack and was unable to complete a swimming sequence. The assistant director, Franco Indovina, pulled on a petalled cap and bikini to double the passage between pleasure boat and shore.

Worlds are splitting, duplicating; memory movies impose themselves on starlit skies watched, after dinner, from a flat roof. Rough wine. Bells on the goats. Stones burn the feet. Muriel is spending more time with Geraldine Brooks.

Called through to Gerry and went up to her apartment. Spent a few hours giggling like schoolgirls, then had dinner in the hotel.

Back in Gerry’s rooms we decided to play the ‘ouija’ board. Really spent a couple of crazy hours. It was a very hot evening, so there we were the three of us, in just our undies, earnestly engrossed in the upturned glass. We were nearly hysterical at times, but kept at it till 1 a.m.

The stage blocking visible beneath the record of the filming of
Vulcano
– and even the framing of the stills (Tellini sitting against a wall with Magnani and Harriet White, her previous companion) – brought me right back to the painting in the Cape Ann Museum: two women, one man (beached swimmer), a rocky ledge. That figure kept repeating. There were the opposed divas, Magnani and Bergman, with their cannibalistic love object, the director in his black beret and dark glasses, open-necked white shirt, lying on the ground: fed, satisfied. And the vanished Anna of Lea Massari, posed at the left of frame, on Lisca Bianca: pouting, dark, broody. Her summer friend Monica Vitti clutches the hand of Michelangelo
Antonioni as they bump across the ruffled Aeolian Sea in an open boat. One woman, many men.

And now, so the diary records, Muriel Walker (née Dobkin) and Geraldine Brooks (née Stroock) discover that they are both Jewish, both leftist: ‘She told me wonderful stories about the Hollywood witch-hunt, during the Un-American Activities Committee.’ They notice different men, Piero Tellini and the actor Rossano Brazzi, pulling themselves out of the same sea. The equation never changes. One woman: lethargic, summer dress. One woman: older, with a robe or towel. A man intruding. What does the Ouija board foretell?

I asked a friend from Sag Harbor to ask another friend in Gloucester to visit the museum, and to send me the name of the artist. I have it: Leon Kroll.

I researched the stern-visaged Kroll. He comes across in his studio portrait like a transplanted Hollywood accountant ambitious to produce musicals. ‘He has the eye of a hawk and the heart of a dove.’ Kroll was born in New York City. He travelled in Europe, making the acquaintance of Chagall and the Delaunays, Robert and Sonia. He spent his summers at Folly Cove, Gloucester, Massachusetts. He died in 1974 at the age of eighty-nine.

‘To write novels you don’t need an imagination,’ Bolaño said. ‘Just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections.’

– Javier Cercas

As I walk over the high-sided railway bridge, through the urban village, down Primrose Hill towards the park, in that fabled summer, I am trying to prepare myself for the coming interview; a measured approach to an unapproachable house. Even as we reinvent ourselves, we are mired in what was there before; the changes in unchanging London. I had been given an address in Hanover Terrace, beside Regent’s Park, in the parhelion of wealth and privilege. It was impossible, coming from the register of rented rooms, up and down the Northern Line, to imagine the interiors, the lives lived within these neoclassical Nash terraces, miracles of whiteness with brightly painted doors. When, a little later, we moved east, we would hear from an Essex man, a jobbing electrician, how he rewired a Regent’s Park villa for his old mate from Hackney Downs, Harold Pinter. The electrician described Pinter’s new house in terms of goods and fittings: white sofas, rich curtains, bowls of waxy fruit, tall flowers on glass tables.

The other picture I had to work with, a series of tracking shots, crane moves between floors, lifts and swerves on spiral staircases, following ascending and descending hierarchies of indoor servants – very much the mode of the Losey/Pinter film of Robin Maugham’s
The Servant
– came from my wife, from Anna. Having abandoned her job with a multinational detergent-and-toothpaste company near Blackfriars Bridge, a set-up with which she was never comfortable, she was also walking west: from our single room on Haverstock Hill, where we looked down on a magnificent copper beech tree, but had no access to the garden. She carried her uniform, a blue overall, to the wealthy Jewish household in Swiss Cottage, where she was being instructed in the finer points, the high art, of being an upstairs cleaner. Bathrooms: how to dry the deep
marble-surround tub, after the scouring, with a towel. Skirting boards to be treated with a damp cloth, before the chemical spray, the dusting, the Hoover. They were pleased with her. ‘You can always tell when Anna has done a room,’ they said, over hot chocolate and home-made biscuits, at the morning break. But really you couldn’t, she told me, those rooms were never anything but immaculate. Dusters were washed every day. In Haverstock Hill, our room was stacked with camera boxes, shoeboxes of wedding presents, and the shoulder bags of assorted, passing-through-London casuals, former students and pub people from Dublin. The plumes of Sumatra cigar smoke came from the Dutch cameraman who would be working alongside me on the Ginsberg film. There was an insistent Proustian blend of patchouli and cauliflower cheese in unscoured pans.

I had scripted, on a couple of pages of thin blue paper, a documentary film, an essay that was a linear diary of events with no countercurrent, no resolution. It was like composing, on a camping table, above the golden-red umbrella of that tree, a list of happenings from a parallel universe. But London – Camden, Primrose Hill, Hyde Park, Chelsea, Kensington, Notting Hill – was entirely parallel in July 1967: plural, overlapping, narrated in so many excited voices, so many variants of the same tale. I pitched a fiction.
We meet Allen
Ginsberg. We visit the bare flat where Ronnie Laing lives with his family. We witness William Burroughs stepping, hat tilted over eyes, from a taxi.
Easy to type, difficult to deliver. The Germans in Cologne approved my proposal. Cameras and sound equipment had been hired from Samuelson’s. The countercultural fantasy had, within two days, to be translated into a shooting schedule.

Barry Miles at Indica Bookshop in Southampton Row gifted me with the contact address and now it was up to my limited powers of persuasion; my dumb belief that this would happen because it was already written, and would be written again, as a private record or unpublished book, when the madness of the film moment was over. Summer of love. Season of images.

Ed Dorn, friend, pupil, associate of Charles Olson, gave one of
his late poems a title that haunts my remaking of that July evening, the pressing of the bell at the gleaming door of Panna Grady’s rented Regent’s Park mansion. ‘The Deceased are the Travellers Among Us’. Dorn finds his epigram in Adorno: ‘Normality is death.’ There was nothing normal about this exchange. ‘Hands cold,’ I wrote in 1971, re-remembering, making the ordinary exceptional. Hands cold, throat dry as newspaper. I am ringing the wrong bell at the wrong house. I am redirected. The Grady property was once the Chinese Embassy. It stood in that relation to the park.

‘You want to see Allen?’

She is amused, this slim woman with the thing for poets. The young mother who did so much in terms of supporting the scene. And who caused such havoc among her art-scene admirers. Poets came and went, as courtiers, clowns. Panna Grady was a sexier (more real) version of Katharine Hepburn in all those smart-chat, tennis-racket movies.

‘Why don’t you do something with Bill? He
likes
making films. And he’s around. We had a party the other night. We all went out to dinner with Tom Driberg.’

I was already in correspondence with Burroughs. He might be on for it. But the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation (for the Demystification of Violence) at the Roundhouse in Camden Town was not an event at which he wanted to appear on the platform. He showed up, to make contact with American friends, connections with Trocchi, and then he faded into the shadows.

I perched on the edge of one of those sofas the Essex electrician described. And I tried to take in the way money rubbed against poetry: in paintings with star names, inscribed limited editions, North African rugs, limply decadent funeral lilies. Filtered evening light from the private garden sharp-focused designated flaws in pale wood. Ginsberg is out there in the summerhouse, with his youthful attendants, one male and one female. He calls the girl his guru. She is thin and fiercely self-contained in perpetual dark glasses. When she emerges from the summerhouse, carrying a shirt on a hanger (fresh from the laundry for the next round of TV interviews and
bookshop signings), she is naked. Waking from a trance to stroll among luxuriant Douanier Rousseau bushes.

‘Get that! Get that!’ Ginsberg shouts. ‘You missed it.’

He’s in a hallucinated summer city. It is one of those delirious times (they never last beyond two or three weeks). Like the spontaneous ceremonies around the death of Princess Di: mobs forming and reforming, home-made tributes, flowers, silver balloons, candles. Hyde Park. And Hyde Park again for the 2012 Olympics. Agonized athletes swimming the length of that drowning pond, the Serpentine; cycling, running down tight corridors of close-packed, flag-waving crowds, and through avenues of ancient, dignified trees: broad-leafed lime, red oak, silver birch, weeping beech. The Hyde Park of the Rolling Stones concert, the Brian Jones tributes echoing Shelley, mourning Keats. Shelley’s first wife, pregnant, in despair, threw herself into the Serpentine. A monster Olympic screen playing headshots of a triumphalist Boris Johnson working the mob, building the rhythms, repeated phrases, hair flopping, volume rising: all derangement, mass hypnosis. It happens in London, as elsewhere, at regular intervals, a swelling tide, a ripple of choked
emotion. As if the dark heart of those public buildings could be exposed: the power, the hidden courtyards. Curls of dead smoke in secret basements. Grand offices and marble staircases lined with portraits. The city releases a sexualized hysteria of flags and cheers and glad contact: kissing and touching and incontinent weeping. Choked performers shudder for cameras in enforced intimacy. Cynical media professionals are watery under the pink powder.

It was palpable in July 1967. How, when I drove Ginsberg across town in my battered red Mini, the youthful tribes, having no clear sense of who he was – a bearded face from TV screens in other people’s houses, from tabloid Hyde Park dope-rally headlines – rapped on the roof, leant in at the side window, with daffodils and peace signs. Celebrity as a shattered crystal. William Blake our contemporary. London relents, in cycles of mesmerized communality: free concert, royal wedding or royal funeral, riot. Break the glass. Loot, trash. Ding dong! The witch is dead. Burn down shops and warehouses. Episodes of euphoria alternate with long-suppressed rage. Justified grievances. An unearned sense of entitlement. Before the Swiss banks resume normal service.

‘You’ve missed Charles.’

Olson was here, in bed, upstairs. Here in this room, shrouded in layers of rugs and wraps, talking to those who came to visit, to pay their respects. Long afternoons. In the confusion of my twenty-three-year-old mind, the models for a way forward, the established guides with their honed mythologies, were complicating the issue, dissolving, one into another.
The Deceased are the Travellers Among Us
. They take life, as Dorn says, a lot less seriously. When we write of this, as Tom Clark did with his Olson biography, we forge new fictions. The world leaks like a paper-tissue tourniquet.

We came, as a group, to sit by the lake in Regent’s Park. When it was my turn to question Ginsberg, with his glittering eye, his gleaming cranium and shamanic red silk shirt (decorated by Paul McCartney), I knew that I had overprepared, done too much reading. Allen was in the amphetamine rush of rhetoric, peddling
breathing techniques from India, busking squeezebox chants, mediating between Black Power and San Francisco Digger opportunism: he didn’t need what he took for literary nitpicking, laboured demands for questions he had no way of answering. Ginsberg had perfected a repertoire of standard anecdotes, a constantly revised history – with a hot fix of recent, excited, all-night conversations with Olson, Burroughs, Panna Grady. To which he now added the sight and odour and touch of those master manipulators, the millionaire rock stars with their willingly seduced multitudes. He huddles with McCartney; he tries to teach Mick Jagger how to breathe. Celebrity feeds on celebrity in a cannibalizing ring fuck. Morning interviews, squatting on the grass, hold up the party. Ginsberg is a vampire for fame, immortality.

‘It got really scary for me. Then it was all right and I could be scared and live with that, because I was more important than the LSD. In a way, I renounced LSD and at the same time I got a flash of my own presence and the presence of everything around. A unitative experience based on the strength of compassion for myself. The LSD was no longer a god or even an authority above my own authority. After which I went to Vancouver and had a big meeting with all the poets: Olson, Creeley, Philip Whalen, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan. All the seraphs of that particular area.’

Panna Grady doesn’t join in the talk. But she is adjudicating Ginsberg’s shifting expressions. The men are in summer shirts. Panna wears a herringbone tweed coat. Hair falling across one eye. It’s the face, intelligent, distracted, of a model from another studio. Always on the move, packing her cases, booking tickets on ocean liners, fielding calls.

The twin energy streams of contemporary US writing, Beat and Black Mountain, mingled in Donald Allen’s
The
New American Poetry
, were now engaged in Pacific Rim conferences, at Berkeley, at Vancouver; or in social gatherings, bars, art openings, brawls in New York and Boston. Some of the Black Mountaineers wanted more of the gold ticket, acknowledgement in
Time
and
Life
, top-dollar transatlantic gigs: a drooling audience of submissives, patrons with Savile
Row tailoring, sex partners with apartments on the park, ranches in New Mexico. Some of the Beats hungered for academic sinecures, placement in the accepted lineage of modernism. They sniffed around each other like prowling beasts, jealous eyes on the lion tamer’s polished black boots. They listened for the crack of her whip.

Olson praised Kerouac. Ginsberg visited Panna Grady’s summer property in Gloucester, which she was sharing with the Boston poet John Wieners. The bearded New Yorker listened to Olson and absorbed his argument as part of the fabric of what he now delivered as we sat in a broken circle on the Regent’s Park grass. Panna’s young daughter was climbing on and off her lap. The stone-silent girl from the summerhouse, lost in her hijab of hair and dark glasses, was staring at the ground. Hands interlocked in a mudra grip, as if cradling a small, hot bird.

‘Olson declared that history was ended – in the sense that what we know of history is only what we know of images left behind. Those images were an abstraction from the actual event, so history was just another poem, as interpreted by those poets, some of them bum poets, who happened to be around. And now there has been a change of consciousness – to include
event
as part of the abstraction of history. And electronic eavesdropping equipment, now in its primitive stage, will ultimately develop so that anybody can tune in on the president, can get into his bathroom through laser beams. Which means that all secrets are out.’

In the tall-windowed room, I could feel the weight of the absence of Olson, who, for so many months, lay, or sat smoking and growling, in a king-size bed somewhere in this house. I had missed the possibility of that connection; the
Maximus
poet had gone to ground. In hotels. In Berlin. In Dorchester. And back again to Gloucester. Plane tickets, pills. Emergencies. Urgent invitations to female friends, with whom he remained in sporadic correspondence, to join him in Crete. More importantly, much more importantly, his papers were being sifted and sorted and prepared for publication.