American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (30 page)

‘There was a beach where Blake’s wife and sister liked to bathe, and where he had his first Vision of the Light,’ wrote the pioneering
Blake scholar S. Foster Damon. ‘A mile away to the east, behind a tongue of land, lay Bognor, just being built up as a fashionable watering place.’

Charles Olson sought out Damon. In August 1968 he acquired a copy of
A Blake Dictionary
. Damon published poetry under the pseudonym ‘Samuel Nomad’:
Nightmare Cemetery
, sixty-six sonnets from beyond the grave. In 1954 his play,
Witch of Dogtown
, was performed in Gloucester.

The America Ground, to the east of Priory Bridge, was a self-sufficient state, perhaps the only one living according to the precepts of the Declaration of Independence. As interpreted by William Blake. The flag, so I was told by an ancient mariner, sifter of legends, in his Old Town cave, where they know the value of everything and the price of nothing (computer doesn’t work), affronted and terrified the Corporation to the point where they demanded that the shield of Hastings be superimposed, along with a Union Flag to balance the block of stars. The original flag, the one paraded around the bounds, was later presented to the borough in a gesture of reconciliation. Or surrender. But the confederate spirit lives on today in Green Man bonfires, pirate parades and biker-war replays. Most of these manifestations cherished and recorded by Andrew Kötting and his tribe.

By 1800, with Blake settled in Sussex, the America Ground, as if anticipating another poet, a stiff-backed future immigrant from across the Atlantic, was calling itself a wasteland. A shambles. Romantics focused on sliced boats; on hulks rescued from the Condemned Hole, where confiscated vessels, damned as unseaworthy, were kept. Ships taken by the excisemen were sawn in half. Paperless vagrants, fisherfolk, runaways, sturdy beggars, discharged militia, godless drinkers living in a state of concubinage: they clustered on the beach, the marshy meadows.

‘They took possession without leave or licence.’ Eliza Cook, the Chartist poet, on a visit from Southwark, made an entry in her journal. ‘What is called “The Desert” was in old times no desert at all, but a piece of broken ground with patches of green turf and rocks.’
Tents made from hide were pitched against a grounded fleet of cut and upturned boats.

As much in evidence as the Steinbeck camp was the entrepreneurial drive of premature Fords and Rockefellers: the Hastings Breeds laid out ropewalks, operated lime kilns and coal stores. Thomas Thwaites had a tallow warehouse. John Gallop ran piggeries and poverty-row tenements. William Wellard butchered. Thomas Squire slaughtered pigs to order. Sewage ran into Priory Stream. As did the blood and fat of penned animals. Labourers working on the new construction projects bivouacked where they could, in tepees and hutches made from driftwood. And all this was America Ground. A confederacy of dunces.

I see a Serpent in Canada who courts me to his love,

In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru;

I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away.

Blake is the prophet of Lawrence, Lowry,
Moby-Dick.
American smoke infiltrates our cloudy night. ‘Albion is sick! America faints!’ When they demolish the huts and hives, a number of the expelled Americans (Indians of England) take up the shells of their houses and wrestle them, by handcart or on their backs, to St Leonards. Kötting’s Gensing zone, behind the man-made cliff of the present Marine Court, is where they relocate, dig in: Shepherd Street, North Street.

Rodrigo Fresán responded to my request for information about Bolaño. (I spent far too long trying to make something of a snapshot of the late Chilean eating an ice cream on a Spanish beach; head tilted, hair ruffled. In company with an unsmiling man and two smiling women. ‘Bolaño always ends up turning his readers into detectives,’ the blog asserts.)

I am shocked to discover that Fresán has read my books; he acknowledges one among the sources for his novel
Kensington Gardens.
Many, many sources. And this London is the wrong London,
to the west. The novel is a brilliant hallucination unpicking J. M. Barrie and his lost boys, by way of the shattered prism of England’s brief psychedelic moment.

‘I’m afraid I closed the Bolaño Room in my Palace of Memory a couple of years ago,’ Rodrigo said. ‘Mental hygiene issues. I received twenty emails a day asking about his ghost. And I’m afraid I never wanted to be a medium.’

As a gesture of consolation, Rodrigo attached an early profile he’d composed around his friend, author of
The Savage Detectives.
And he told me a little about the book he was currently working on, a novel in which Mr and Mrs Malcolm Lowry share walk-on roles. ‘I’m also reading everything by him, including very strange material.’

At the onset of winter in 2001, Fresán is in Barcelona. ‘It’s cold and there are clouds and there’ll be rain.’ Before climbing aboard the commuter train for his return to Blanes, Bolaño, for the first time in his life (or at least that’s what he swears), steps into a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. Fresán accompanies him, he’s hungry. They have visited La Central bookstore, where Bolaño picks up some books he needs, or might need, for his novel
2666.

‘Have you noticed? Everybody’s here.’

The fast-food chicken operation is like midtown Hastings, where all the bruised exiles wash up, reconvene, pretend they are still in the game. Harsh strip lighting makes them into neon vampires. A club anyone can join: for South American immigrants. You recognize them, Fresán says, by the way they count out the exact change. ‘The almost reverential silence of their chewing.’ The only protagonist of Bolaño’s books is literature itself: ‘the territory of risk’.

I devour Rodrigo’s novel, laying aside my Lowrys and Olsons: it’s absorbing, this thesis, how we can slide back into the labyrinth of fiction and recalibrate it to suit our present purposes. I have no particular interest in Barrie or Kensington Gardens, but the richness of the fictive stew persuades me. ‘They put me on a plane and took me to a house in a place called Tapalpa, in the mountains of Mexico, where an active volcano throbbed. From up high you could see horrible
enormous black birds, like men dressed as birds – turkey vultures – crossing the sky on the horizon.’ Looking for a rendezvous with Lew Welch?

Where does the neurosis end? Rodrigo reveals in a postscript the most alarming fact of all. ‘In the first part of Bolaño’s
2666
, that’s me and my wife, in Kensington Gardens.’ If you cross the line, what then? How can you continue without the services of the predatory author?

2666
, as you can imagine for yourselves, is lifted from my Bolaño shelf; a gold brick with a cover design mixing bands of Gustave Moreau with eye-catching digital numbers ticking down the seconds to apocalypse like an atomic clock. The author in his rear-flap identity photo is corvine, lacking spectacles, a political prisoner again. A redundant football manager heading for Kazakhstan.

My repeat Bolaño journey, now with a single location in mind, is a breathless rush. I remember coming through Hyde Park. I remember a man on the bench in the Italian Garden. I remember the snake. But Rodrigo’s cameo must have been blanked by my distaste for Peter Pan and his feeble statue. Now here he is. We never met in life; much better, much safer, in literature.

‘They sat on a bench by a giant oak tree, Norton’s favourite spot … As dusk fell, they watched a young Spanish-speaking couple approach the Peter Pan statue. The woman was very pretty … The man beside her was tall and had a beard and moustache and pulled a notebook out of his pocket and jotted something down.’

Then comes the snake.

‘There aren’t any snakes here!’ said Norton.

The man’s name is Rodrigo. My email correspondent is lodged in Bolaño’s great book. (He writes books of his own, one of them constructed around this location.) I can walk there and meet him at any time.
He has no time, he can’t
deviate.
The woman sees a snake, the man is preoccupied with his notebook. The third person, the one with a significant role in the narrative, is Norton.

As dusk fell …

I knew from what Oscar X told me at our first meeting in Waterlow
Park that Bolaño, in the early days of his Barcelona exile, was an addicted reader of comics, graphic novels. Was it possible that he had come across my book
Slow Chocolate Autopsy
– and that, as an admirer of Dave McKean, whose drawings and treated images lifted the collaboration, he had leafed through it? The protagonist, a man who can move through time but not place, is Norton: ‘Prisoner of London.’ My book opens:
Norton, no question, was there in the garden when the incident occurred.

Unlikely. I’d like to believe it. It would make an attractive equation: Santiago, Barcelona, London. But my Norton was a lift, I found him in a novel published in sensationalist form as part of an Ace-Double.
Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict
by William Lee (otherwise: Burroughs). 1953. I got my copy signed in Lawrence, Kansas. The Burroughs legend opens:
My first experience with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton.
Norton very soon vanishes from the page, he’s the devil’s advocate: he introduces Burroughs to junk. He forces him to write. To write his way out of the fix. To make the bad journeys with a copy of Céline in his luggage.

‘Norton felt a desire for change. To get away. To visit Ireland or New York,’ Bolaño wrote.

The Chilean’s stroke of genius is to make Norton a woman; young, intelligent, sexually adventurous. The other Norton, the time-chained spectre of Burroughs, is sullen and mean. He thinks he looks like George Raft. ‘Norton was trying to improve his English and achieve a smooth, affable manner. Affability, however, did not come natural to him.’ This Norton was not even Norton. His ‘real name was Morelli or something like that’. Bolaño’s Norton is educated, a free spirit. Everything mine is not. Gender migration never in the script.

In the mirror-world of metafiction, Liz Norton discovers Rodrigo Fresán. She is not stuck in Kensington Gardens, she reads
Kensington Gardens
, a ‘story of shadow identities and suicide’. She reviews
Kensington Gardens
, favourably and at length, for the
London Review of Books.
She makes reference to all seven Fresán novels, six
of which remain untranslated. (She does not digress into the symbolism of 7.) To be English, in the eyes of the Barcelona writers gathered in the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, is to be a savage detective: Sherlock Holmes let loose, with intent, on Georges Perec, Walter Benjamin, Malcolm Lowry.

Norton – who is always referred to by her surname – notices that Fresán has a highly developed sense of London, achieved by an intense programme of reading. Among many other sources, she references J. G. Ballard, Ford Madox Ford, Peter Ackroyd, Barry Miles, Michael Moorcock.
Mother London
leads her to Kensal Green, that mysterious suburb of the dead with its obelisks and broken temples. She commends Fresán’s discovery of the angel tree. A memorial statue divinely impregnated. ‘At some point, a hermaphroditic seed fell into a fold of her stone robe and set down roots.’ Rodrigo must have stalked ground beyond libraries, she supposes.

That angel statue reminded me of Pound. ‘The tree has entered my hands … The branches grow out of me, like arms.’ And the painting
Apollo and Daphne
by Pollaiuolo. I was astonished that among so many angels, so many trees, Fresán found his way to the one photographed for my London book
Lights Out for the Territory.
‘The dead,’ Fresán wrote, ‘become the fictions of those of us who survive them; we subject them to the indecency of deletions, additions and revisions … we end up rewriting that other zone.’

In an afterword to
Kensington Gardens
, Fresán confesses: he does not know London at all, he never left his hotel near Heathrow. Bolaño inserted him as a gesture of friendship. The angel tree, contrived in Santiago and Guadalajara, came from an image in a paperback book.

The English sea rewrites itself; at night we listen to the drag of tide on the shingle, by day the traffic. From my balcony in Marine Court, I watch the parade: the Duvet Man, naked in grubby swandown, and the drinkers ducking into alcoves to avoid another police sweep. A solitary asylum seeker walks to the edge of the waves, foaming scum on his boots, to smoke like Bolaño, or lick at a lardy ice cream.
I have not seen or heard another soul in this building, the concrete plague ship. But I imagine all kinds of occupants; writers who don’t write, but who while away the long hours watching DVDs of Steve Cochran movies like
Private Hell
36
. Other monitors – you hear the sound as you pass down muffled corridors – are playing in empty rooms. Steve is a killer cop for Don Siegel. His investigations lead him to a lounge singer who breakfasts on vodka (an obvious Marine Court applicant). She is performed by Ida Lupino. With whom Steve, of course, initiates an affair. The character’s name is Lilli Marlowe. And Marlowe is where
Slow Chocolate …

Stop.
Cut
. Fresán explains how his invented hero ‘is tired of all his adventures and all the odysseys he’s embarked on in vain’. I sympathize. ‘He can hardly even remember what he’s chasing after, what he never reached.’

If, as I’d like to believe, and as I
can
believe in the context of this book, Bolaño is still alive, still active, where better than St Leonards? The hulk of Marine Court like a ghost ship silvered in ice. (There is another, more upmarket vessel from the same period, in Puerto Rico.) No requirement to visit Blanes or Vulcano, Hastings majors in exile and displacement.
Roberto is somewhere in my building
. He had been readying himself for this, ever since that first novel,
By Night in Chile.
What did he say? ‘It was no accident that his house had appeared to me shortly before in the guise of an ocean liner!’

The copy of
2666
, the only book solid enough to stop my loose stack of uncorrected typescript blowing over the balcony when the door opens, is turned away from me. The numbers of the title are reversed,
2666
becomes
9997.
9997 COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) is a main belt asteroid. It orbits the Sun once every 4.06 years.
Earth-9997
, closer to Bolaño’s practice, is a Marvel Comic in which ‘Death is given the job of manning the collective pool of reality.’ Captain America and his wild bunch of superannuated superheroes have gathered to conquer the aliens. ‘With the advent of alternate realities, somebody has to take these fragments and put them together.’