American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (18 page)

Remember how, in
Dark as the Grave
, Wilderness/Lowry signals his love for Primrose/Margerie, when everything in their relationship is in ruins, by drinking a foul beaker of some fruit concoction, a
refresco
, from which the serving girl has to pick the flies? Every cell of his being is screaming for beer, mescal, tequila: the worm.

He chokes on her pills. Sodium amytal, three-grain strength. Bottle missing from wife’s drawer, her underthings. He has stolen her death. This is the final volume in the trilogy of mysteries she has no need to complete: Burrard Inlet (present), Southern California (past), Ripe (for ever). Before the funeral can be arranged, conspiracy theories start in whispers, before becoming scholarly papers and future blogs.

On that first Ripe visit, after Vancouver and the Burrard Inlet, and lunch with William Gibson, we found the graves, located the Lamb, wondered about the White Cottage, failed with the Yew Tree, and achieved little beyond some primitive empathy for how it must have felt to be exiled to a small English village that had no use for your presence or past achievements. The Hollywood
Rebecca
model, with Margerie as the innocent second wife (the Joan Fontaine part), at the mercy of Jan Gabrial’s exotic original (the first Mrs de Winter), made immortal by
Under the Volcano
, was hard, then impossible, to sustain. Californians live through quotation, a remake authenticates the status of the first attempt. Ripe was not Manderley.

Lowry’s name on a curved slab, a granite postcard buried in an extension of St John the Baptist Church, is not in deconsecrated ground, but this garden strip, close to a low wall, has a detached aspect. Like a recently abandoned allotment. Margerie is not beside him or with him. The salient facts are faded but visible. Combing back untrimmed blades of grass, I discover a glazed tablet with a Spanish inscription:
¡Le gusta este jardín? Que es suyo? Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!
I have a notion where that comes from but I’ll have to check. Also buried are several empty mescal miniatures. And a Guinness can. The grave is thoroughly libated. Wild roses thrive.

Margerie proves harder to find. A little notice in the porch of the
locked church offers a guide about as reliable as the spelling of Mrs Lowry’s name.
MARJORIE B. LOWRY. JULY 1906–SEPT 1988. O COME TO ME AGAIN AS ONCE IN MAY
.

A visitor, researching Margerie’s film career, and fresh from Gordon Bowker’s article in the
TLS
, which detailed questionable aspects of Lowry’s death and the subsequent inquest, became frustrated with the difficulty of confirming the proper memorial above her grave. ‘I couldn’t make up my mind over Marg’s guilt.’ As he speaks, a shaft of sunlight breaks through the clouds to reveal a stone from which all traces of Margerie Bonner are lost to orange spores, weathering and bird lime. She could not be planted further from her husband without striking off towards Charleston.

She met him in Hollywood on 7 June 1939. He died on the night of 26 June 1957. Or early the following morning. On 2 May 1946, the Lowrys were sent to 113 Bucarelli, reputed to be the least pleasant jail in Mexico City. After dark they were driven to the station in a taxi and removed to Nuevo Laredo and deportation from Mexico. The garden gates closed. And never opened again.

With Anna rested, and restored to Hackney life, a second attempt on Ripe seemed appropriate. I had been reading a series of four strange western novels by the Oxford academic Brian Catling. His Amerika was like Kaf ka’s, better than the real thing; a hallucinatory construct out of
True Grit
and Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian.
The series ended with a phrase that haunted me and set the tone for our return to Sussex:
They were buried the same afternoon in separate cemeteries. Nobody asked why.
I returned to source, the Lowry texts.

Jolted at the back of the bus, when he brings his second wife to Oaxaca, Lowry catalogues a priest in mufti travelling with his brother, and some kind of lawyer with a briefcase. He registers them as clots of words, unresolved sentences; descriptions he can’t be bothered to transcribe (but he
is
transcribing, he is calibrating his own impotence). A writer without curiosity is a straw man. This landscape of organ cacti and varieties of red earth is nothing more than a smear of shop-soiled phrases, typewriter ribbons flapping
against the window. Vultures in the washbasin.
Darkness, and strange lights were moving in the hills.
Friendship is played out, love has died. Lowry’s myths are lies, no sailors were rescued from the sea. Every acquaintance is a potential character. Margerie is required to fill in the physical details, to give him the correct names for the plants and planets.

I tell Anna the story of the last Ripe night, to see if her instincts can identify the clues I missed. Studying my outdated Ordnance Survey map, she spots a PH that might be the Yew Tree Inn. We drive there and recapture something of the
Straw Dogs
atmosphere of the Lowry sessions. The locals, mid-afternoon, are established in the back bar; boisterous, work abandoned, or suspended in the drizzle, in no hurry to return home. The landlord is a turn and knows it. The notion of coffee at this hour is impossible to sustain: ‘Machine’s on the blink.’ He manages a couple of large white wines, slops them over the table, and takes himself out to the yard. Where he fails to light a fat cigar. But almost fires his brandy.

It needs Professor Catling to do justice to the slow theatre of the pub, the hours required of looped anecdotes and unsynchronized laughter, before violence erupts and murders are carried back to curtained cottages. Pub time is no time, liquid relativity. When he’d done with the American West, the Oxford don scripted a tale set on the Isle of Man. A Lowry connection. Lowry wrote about the Manxman they couldn’t hang and how, neck scorched, he came back from the execution pit to accept free rounds for ever from his burnished seat at the bar. A friend and protector at the Burrard Inlet, Dollarton, through all the fires and troubles, was the Manx boatwright Jimmy Craige. The Isle of Man was another Vulcano, a site of exile and madness, fishermen eager to be elsewhere. And convenient for Liverpool, city of the Lowry family business. Museums of syphilitic horror.

After the Yew Tree, we took the road to Ripe: puddled tarmac, no verges, a high-hedged narrowness with a single kink. The village is unpeopled, the shop shut. The White Cottage, where Lowry died, is decorated with a blue-and-white heritage plaque the size of a sat
ellite dish. There is a hinged mirror with its wooden back turned to the upstairs window, the room where the novelist sat in a heap listening to
Le Sacre du printemps.
You can see the attraction; the village inn, the Lamb, is at the end of the lane. Faint lettering on pink brick. A hanged white sheep.
OMNIBUSES STOP BY REQUEST
. A good place from which to be barred.

The Lamb Inn features a many-spoked wheel with three conjoined gulls’ wings pinned to the hub: an echo of the Three Legs of Mann, the symbol of Lowry’s first island. The spokes of the wheel represent the rays Sigbjørn Wilderness watches from his Cuernavaca tower as the day dies and he decides how late he can drink before it counts as a morning start. The three-legged device was well known on Sicily and Vulcano. Wings and wheels recall Ezekiel: 3.13. ‘
I heard
also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of a great rushing.’ William Burroughs carries his King James Bible, unopened, to Mexico City.

Le gusta este jardín.
Somebody literate has left this Mexican tribute in the grass. A decorative plate of thick ceramic leaves and cobalt sky with yellow sun-face. Sun as volcano. ‘What is the book – is it a sort of detective story?’ The Oaxaca drinking pal, Eddie, asks Wilderness.

A translation is made. ‘Do you like the garden which is yours? See to it that it is thus: that your children don’t destroy it.’

Lowry wrote the words on a crumpled scrap of paper, so he claims, from a wall in Oaxaca. ‘We evict those who destroy.’ When they arrive in Matamoros, on the night before the return to Oaxaca, City of Death and candles, the bus deposits them beside a hotel called El Jardín. ‘So dark this Mixtec city, absolutely and so utterly dark and sinister it was almost beyond belief.’ The notice from a public garden –
¡Evite que sus hijos lo destruyan!
– is as much part of the quest as the figure of Lowry’s one true friend, Fernando.

The turf of the burial ground is soaked with evening dew. The heavy pink roses are like the petticoats of fire victims. Who left this
message? Julian Barnes, talking of Flaubert, asked: ‘Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why aren’t books enough?’ Alberto Rebollo, president of the Malcolm Lowry Foundation of Cuernavaca, came to Ripe and was photographed kneeling in homage at the grave, pouring a mescal libation over the hidden plate with its quotation. His account of this visit is like so many others: he is disorientated, lost. He asks for directions (a mistake). ‘I was about to cross the threshold, I had the feeling of being an actor in a film or in a dream.’ Another scholar told him that it was a waste of time talking to the dead.

Rebollo, like the Sussex painter and friend of Conrad Aiken, Edward Burra, understood borderlands, conversations made over cigarettes in cemeteries. Burra, the most Mexican of English watercolourists, visited Lowry in Spain and then in Cuernavaca. His carnivalesque images are the best windows on the Lowry labyrinth: ghost dances of outside animals and late-humans grinding bones in subterranean bars. Feathers and fruits in ornate glass coffins. Voodoo eyes made from bottle-stops. Zoot-suit skeletons fleshed in labial folds. Barbiturate jazzers eating their own tongues in El Greco delicatessens. Delicious fur-collared Harlem whores dealing tarot cards in all-night cafeterias.

Burra called Rye: ‘Tinkerbell towne, an itsy bitsy morgue quayte DEAD.’ His painting of the churchyard, now hung in the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings, parallels or makes play with events at Ripe. A defeated woman, back against the flint wall, contemplating the graves. A man, kept apart, down in a heap like Lowry in the bedroom at the White Cottage, his head leaking nightmares. And this narcoleptic couple duplicated in a hobbled pair creeping along the wall: a black widow, a sexless mannequin as grey as the inside of a glove. Lowry and Burra did not bond. The large watercolour was produced a year or so after Lowry’s burial in the Ripe church dedicated to John, the decapitated wilderness prophet.

Anna’s energies were fading fast. She strolled the perimeter of the primary school and retreated to the car. I inspected a hole in the wall in which spiders had left a smoky web sagging with husks of
flies. Then I retreated, for the last time, to Lowry’s grave. Two fat rabbits with fluffy white tails were nibbling. As I approached, they bounced away into the undergrowth. Lowry had a thing for rabbits. It was a symbol he laid down with care. ‘Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit,’ he said. Mexican painters riff on the eternal argument between hare and coyote. Hare climbs a ladder to the moon. He gets away.

Back in St Leonards in time for an evening swim, I discovered a newly stencilled graffito on the wall beside the flat stone table on which William the Conqueror was reputed to have dined after coming ashore at Bulverhythe. It was a rabbit. It was
the
rabbit. Ears cocked, whiskers bristling. A symbol too far? No matter how enthusiastically he bounds, this phantom animal, made from black marks on a white surface, will never experience the sea.

‘Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television,’ William Gibson said. I could see what he meant: a widescreen economy of rinsed light that was profoundly satisfying in a superficial way. My theoretical Scottish roots were refreshed by the sharp-edged, lung-scouring clarity of the waterside set, a prodigious end-stop of snow-capped mountains. The sweep across the First Narrows Bridge from Siwash Rock in Stanley Park was like a Hollywood studio logo from the days before films were financed by more production companies than there are categories of hepatitis. Or like that anonymous mural you spend much of the meal exploring in a deserted Chinese restaurant in Aberdeen. ‘Anti-buzz,’ Gibson concluded. ‘Definition by absence.’

It was 6 a.m. and I was throwing off the longest flight of my life by making, as I’d always intended to do, a two-hour walk through wherever I found myself on the Pacific Rim. The walk would be a flattened loop, a prison circuit like Albert Speer in Spandau, or Henry James worrying a single sentence into a turn around his enclosed garden in Rye. Later, in a hotel in Paris, a few lines in the
International Herald Tribune
would remind me of my self-imposed Vancouver ritual. There was a man they called ‘the pacer’. He kicked up the dust of his secure compound, erasing or complicating his own traces. This exercise regime or period of solitary meditation was rebranded as an event, an artwork, without his knowledge or permission, by a covert American surveillance crew. Curious strangers hidden in neighbouring properties. Remote technicians evaluating 24-hour drone cinema feeds. ‘They were never able to confirm the man was Bin Laden.’ But they sanctioned his execution.

That first morning circuit I picked up a
Metronews.
TWO CANADIAN
PLANES JOIN LIBYAN MISSION. TWO CANADIAN CF-18S WERE TASKED WITH AIR-TO-GROUND ATTACK MISSIONS. NEITHER SORTIE DROPPED ANY BOMBS
. On the ride in from the airport, Kim, who had arranged my reading, said: ‘Goldie Hawn lives there.’ In a free paper, skimmed over a substantial Chinese-Canadian breakfast on Nelson Street, Goldie yapped about Elizabeth Taylor, 79, who had just died (congested heart failure), and the problems of celebrity. ‘She was gorgeous in her prime. I don’t know the titles of any of her movies.’

There is a fir tree on the roof of an apartment block. A dark, rather melancholy woman, in a borrowed camelhair coat with collar turned up, scuttles out from a shop with a blinking sign, carrying an empty violin case.
PAYDAY LOANS. PROFESSIONAL NAILS. HOUSE OF TOBACCO
. Gallery-quality light-tube signage in red and green. When I try to cash a cheque, after my reading, the post-office operative in the local mall tells me that they don’t keep cash on the premises. But they’ll get it in and ring me at the Sylvia Hotel. Poverty and courtesy go hand in hand. White pleasure craft in the marina. Golden towers of glass along the waterfront as the sun rises. Prescription regulars waiting for their plastic thimbles outside locked offices. Inukshuk: ancient symbol of the Inuit. On Deadman’s Island, the tribes buried their honoured corpses in the trees. John Morton, a settler, made the observation in 1862: ‘hundreds of red cedar boxes, lashed to the upper boughs’. The Squamish Nation: 200 dead warriors roosting among the leaves.

The path around the rim of Stanley Park offered me a credible account of where we were, by means of evergreen slopes, a pleasing succession of views: cormorants on black rocks, container ships riding at anchor. Tamed metaphors of wild nature lifted my spirits by invoking not only my circuits of Victoria Park, back home in Hackney, but also the opening movement of Lowry’s
Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place
.

The first story in this posthumously assembled collection, ‘The Bravest Boat’, has a morning-after flavour about it, the topographical shakes; Lowry can’t quite trust his rhythms. He reaches out, to
touch place, in the act of leaving it. ‘Far away over in America the snowy volcanic peak of Mount Hood stood on high, disembodied, cut off from earth, yet much too close.’ The mountain vision is the prolegomena to a Mexican return; volcano tourism, the bad journey by way of the Panama Canal, Rome, Naples, Sicily. To Ripe. But Mount Hood, now cited, is also a bridge towards the poets of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder:
Desolation Angels
,
Danger on Peaks.
Lowry establishes the model for cross-border escapades, disappearance into the ash. His poems, for which no other publisher showed much enthusiasm, came out, alongside Ginsberg and Corso, as a City Lights pocketbook. But Lowry remained unvisited by the coming generation, missing in action, a Mexican-frontier casualty like Ambrose Bierce. Alive but past recall.

Kim Duff, who described herself as ‘the one with red longish hair wearing blue jeans and black boots’, offered to pick us up at the airport. ‘The Sylvia is the perfect place to stay in Vancouver on bright spring days.’ London was not so bright. In pursuit of the background to Professor Catling’s western novels we took ourselves, just before packing for Vancouver, to a boutique cinema in Shoreditch where they were showing the Coen Brothers’ unnecessary remake of
True Grit.
Which was closer to the book, if that is a virtue, than Henry Hathaway’s crusty original (which found room for a wired Dennis Hopper, who was given the part as a calculated affront to the tank-driving Republican John Wayne).

The Rooster Cogburn of the Charles Portis novel is more complex than John Wayne. As Donna Tartt said, when she introduced the reprint: ‘Rooster is somewhat younger, in his late forties: a fat, one-eyed character with walrus moustaches, unwashed, malarial, drunk much of the time.’ Cogburn is a veteran of the Confederate Army, one of William Clarke Quantrill’s notorious border raiders. The darkness in Rooster, unexorcized, is never taken to a sweat lodge. It belongs in a massacre; one of the grimmest episodes in a war of violent extremes. It happened in a small Kansas town known to be a nest of Abolitionists: Lawrence. Final shelter of William
Seward Burroughs. Out of the Wichita Vortex come the rough riders of the Apocalypse.

The whole Shoreditch area was now a fashion feast where major designers rented pop-up cubbyholes to appear like rough trade. Hunger drove us into a basement of clinking City folk. Around 2 a.m. Anna felt the cramps and was violently sick. In shallow sleep I heard a crash, but didn’t wake enough to investigate. Crashes on the street outside were a commonplace. This time, as I discovered, my dehydrated wife had fainted and slumped to the floor, damaging her neck. She was in enough pain to consider pulling out of the American trip. How she would endure a lengthy transatlantic flight, when every move was agony, I couldn’t imagine. She fired down the pills, finished her packing, and got in the cab.

We were pulled out of the line, our attempted check-in aborted. Asked to report to the desk, with fears – among an irritable conga of Orthodox Jews, Indian traders with large cases, extended Chinese families, students and returning backpackers – of being bumped, left to sleep at Heathrow or made to return another day, we were upgraded for the first and only time to business class. After which, everything was possible. We were put to sleep, like effigies on a marble tomb, in pods, but reversed, feet to partner’s head. The unwatchable film I watched was Oliver Stone’s
Wall Street
, bad money chasing worse investments. Mountain ranges far below dreamt us back to life. Icelandic volcanoes bided their time.

Kim Duff was all that she claimed. Her partner was a star tattooist with artist status. They delivered us to the Sylvia Hotel, a place now favoured by senior citizens with mannerly dogs. I liked it at once.

We talked about the jet stream. And the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown. Kim said that the Canadian government had ordered pharmacies to stop selling potassium iodide because people were bulk buying. The Japanese disaster, much closer here, was a boost to drug companies who are always trading on scare-shock newsreels, world-ending horrors countered by an upgrade of vitamins.

The Sylvia bar was an aquarium of brandy light: dark wood, low
couches embroidered with floral patterns, and a wide window on English Bay Beach. Better far to drink than to eat in such a place. Lowry spent many hours in the permitted limbo of the clubbish Sylvia, such a short step from the street. ‘This is the most hopeless of all cities of the lost,’ he said. As an inducement to Dylan Thomas. When they slumped at this bar in April 1950. Their ghosts never left. The fourth trip to the North American continent was the killer. And this was mine. William Gibson, who moved through airports with such familiarity that he barely registered on their surveillance systems, saw Vancouver quite differently. ‘Strangely clean, lacking in texture, like video games before they’d learned to dirty them up.’ Kim was excited, at a modest Vancouver pitch, about the rumour that Gibson might appear at the anarchist bookshop for my reading the next night.

The hotel, a solid commercial enterprise, has no more right to its position than the squatters’ shacks at Dollarton. Posing beside the Burrard Inlet, before or after a swim, Margerie Bonner blesses the forest and the water with a glow of entitlement that is somewhere between post-coital and quietly astonished.

The evening sun burnishes Kim’s long red hair as she drives us downtown for the reading. There will be a meal first, close to the financial district of Gastown, where Kim used to work, before she declared as a poet. I have a chance to connect with some of Vancouver’s Olsonians. The Gloucester man’s conference visitation, the gathering of the clans in the summer of 1963, left an indelible stain. Creeley, Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, all the high geographers of projective verse were in town: performing, yapping, seizing the day. Olson, according to Tom Clark, set up court on a balcony ‘overlooking the majestic peaks of the North Coast range’. Cigars, jumbo milkshakes, three-decker sandwiches: he ordered everything. And he delivered, so he thought, the best reading of his life: four breathless hours, before the janitors closed the building. Such a performance is shared with an audience; they feed it and make it happen. In Vancouver the listener-participants were trained to the
task; here was a city much visited but otherwise indifferent to culture, saving their riots for ice hockey, Stanley Cup results that went the wrong way. Conrad Aiken, reporting from Granada, where he attended a bullfight with Lowry and his temporary roommate Ed Burra, got the dynamics of performance just right: ‘The audience an important factor – almost more than the bull.’

The poets, at our communal Lebanese table, suffer agonies of choice; a menu card is a minefield of possibilities. Rituals of anticipated digestion – swift beers, disallowed cigarettes, dope postponements – make for a warm but edgy occasion, with the event at the Spartacus bookshop hanging over us all. A visit by the English poet Tom Raworth, the last of the transatlantic men of the 1960s, is fondly recalled; his performances on and off the podium. How
fast
he was, in delivery and witness. ‘The view is again unapproachable.’

The significant moment for me is the meeting with Miguel Mota, a Lowry scholar at the University of British Columbia. Miguel solves, without my asking, the logistical problem of getting across the water to search for traces of Lowry’s shack at Dollarton. This, after all, was the underlying motive for my trip to Canada. Back in Dublin, when I was making contact with Burroughs and immersing myself in Kerouac and Snyder, the idea of Lowry diving off his rickety pier into the cold waters of the Burrard Inlet was more potent than my reading of
Under the Volcano
and
Lunar Caustic.
The nature of that healing retreat, with Margerie Bonner, after the madness of Mexico, was as seductive as anything I managed to extract from the published texts. And yet, although I lived alongside the Forty Foot, the rocky swimming place in front of Joyce’s Martello tower in Sandycove, I never swam in Dublin. Now Miguel will pick me up on Saturday morning and drive me to the creek.

The Spartacus shop, in which I experienced, immediately, the thermal glow of time-travel, was the sort of generously overstocked, musty cave that London no longer possessed. The attendees, many of whom, I’m certain, lived in the place, had aged with the books.
A new voice was an acceptable intrusion on the permanent party. An earlier version of Spartacus had burnt down, like Lowry’s shack – and, like the shack, had risen again. The area was called East Hastings Street. Which was spot on: drift Hackney, collectivism, used books, used people. These are the brave ones who turn a merciless urban highway into a seashore; by scavenging, slumping against buildings to watch the race of clouds; by walking as if they are swimming. Remembering only what needs to be remembered.

There is a man who is filming, forty-four years after the event, a documentary about the Dialectics Congress at the Roundhouse. I am called on to dredge up memories of the 1967 Ginsberg shoot. There is Peter Quartermain, a friend of Patrick Wright, once a Hackney neighbour, now a distinguished cultural historian. Patrick, who lived here as a postgraduate, stressed that the north–south orientation was far preferable ‘to any engagement with Winnipeg and the prairies and beyond’. Like so many others, Patrick succumbed to the romance of crossing the border, heading for California.

‘You could sense something of Ken Kesey’s world, with that mixture of down-home conviviality and know-how with home-brewed psychosis.’ Patrick made his retreat to ‘a tin lawnmower shed fitted with a woodburner and planted in a juniper forest in Siskiyou County’. ‘Not much to visit there,’ he told me, ‘although the big volcanic mountain – Mt Shasta – is like a marvellous Fuji for Northern California.’

A latecomer, tall, bespectacled, light-boned, took up his position near the door. He was noticed by some, but they didn’t pester him or come at him with the typescripts and privately printed booklets that professional event-attenders carry in plastic supermarket bags to every reading. William Gibson. I met him, once, at a talk he gave at the ICA in London. Now we arranged to have lunch.