American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (4 page)

So there was place: working, failing, romanced. I went with my
father to visit a hermit who lived under a corrugated-iron roof in an excavated warren, in the tolerated corner of a farmer’s field. The image stayed with me, that there were such invisibles, grizzled solitaries who performed a role like the disreputable vagrant figures out of the western states, coming to lodge in riverside Lowell huts, before fading into their fictional roles as spooks or freaks in the apocalyptic vision of a provincial town splitting open to reveal the maw of hell, the day of judgement, at the climax of
Dr Sax.
When hills and lakes are revealed as manifestations of a life-swallowing serpent: the labyrinthine cellars of tortures, heresies, imprisonments. The murders Kerouac would witness directly or share with friends like William Burroughs.

South Wales/Massachusetts: if there was a secret in America worth extracting, it was known to Dylan Thomas and to Kerouac, both of them drawing on the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake.
But without that Homeric reach, the confidence to go all the way back to the roots of language. They traded, these drinkers, small-town boys on show in cities, in the hot, wet secretions of their hyper-magnified childhoods. Funerals of siblings, aunts, parents. Do not go gentle. Unresolved arguments with dead fathers who won’t go away.
Dr Sax
composed in Mexico City, ‘Ancient Capital of Azteca’, in 1952, as Dylan Thomas is tinkering with
Under Milk Wood
in claustrophobic New York, on his fatal fourth reading tour. And just after Charles Olson returned from Yucatán: a barefoot sabbatical playing the archaeologist of morning, picking up broken shards and composing fevered letters to Robert Creeley. ‘And I waste time reading, murders.’

Robert Frank, the great Swiss-American photographer who collaborated with Kerouac on the film
Pull My Daisy
, and the record of transcontinental drives published as
The Americans
, comes to London: for Bethnal Green hearses, tight-rolled City bankers, coalmen heaving sacks. In 1953 he undertakes a documentary record of mining life in the Welsh town where I grew up, Maesteg. Now he has me studying prints to see if I can find my ten-year-old self among the children venturing on a thinly grassed mound at the head of the
valley. I track Frank to the graveyard he passes on his way to the railway station. His return to London. ‘My absent memory rests within these photographs,’ he says.

Like Kerouac, I heard about the early death of a sibling, in my case a sister. It happened too soon in her short life to have the haunting impact of Kerouac’s brother Gerard, who was gone at the age of nine. With all the curdling pieties and rituals of immigrant Catholic loss. Like Kerouac I was slow to draw breath, a blue baby. Provoked to shout only when hope was fading, after my visiting father dropped a book, a detective story, on my head.
Crackerjack.
Lupine Road absorbed the tragedy of new life. The writer’s fated entry to the wheel of existence. Safe in heaven dead, Kerouac said. It is all emptiness. ‘I could walk right through you.’

Would John Sampas come to the restaurant? The place was his choice, not Henry’s. Henry knew better spots, but Sampas was the keeper of the archive. If he liked us, if I performed, we would be invited to the house. There had been so many bitter battles over the Kerouac estate, which was now worth millions of dollars; juvenilia, false starts and fragments appearing in nicely produced hardback editions. No longer Panther and Avon and WDL. The friable paper, the gaudy covers, the sensational copy.
Tristessa
: ‘The real tragedy of narcotics and prostitution. A young American writer staggering between the forces of desire for her and horror for what she has become.’
Maggie Cassidy
of Lowell: ‘The vibrant, demanding, woman-bodied girl who fascinated and confused the man she yearned for.’ 1960. The covered market by the bus station, Maesteg. Two shillings and sixpence.

When the bloated body of Jack Kerouac was flown from Florida to the Archambault Funeral Parlor, the doorway Henry points out as we drive alongside, Gregory Corso wanted to find a way to assert the revulsion he felt, the evident fact of the thing:
Doctor Death
. His poet friends and members of the Sampas clan had to restrain him before he tipped the corpse from the open coffin and dragged it across the floor, screaming: ‘Nobody at home. Nothing left. Jack’s
gone
.’

Already the politics of possession are established; work, published and unpublished, has become an estate. Before too many years have passed, Hollywood will take notice of a property they spurned when Kerouac was doing the pitching, and offering Marlon Brando the historic, career-defining role of Neal Cassady in the movie of
On the Road.
With Jack impersonating his mythologized self, Sal Paradise.

Down these Lowell steps they come, the pall-bearing Greek cousins in tight coats, the bar owners, the Kerouac chauffeurs and drinking buddies of the last desperate years, along with the frowning, bearded Ginsberg in his shiny anorak, chairman of Beats Inc., the underground corporation. A glittering-eyed Jewish intellectual among mill-town working men. The old alliance, damaged and set aside, between the booze-addled Kerouac (in flight from the noise of Vietnam) and the ever-available, public Ginsberg, was mended in death. There was a twilight rebirth coming for both of them, of millennial reissues, new introductions, archives made over to wealthy academic institutions. Agents and percentage deals and personal assistants in white trainers. Corso, the canny street kid, was right. This was a clown-as-Hamlet afternoon, a chance to ventriloquize the bleached skull. To finesse whispers of forgotten Montreal TV into approved legacy promos. Celebrity seances and horribly bad journeys will be remade in heaven on gold cards.

The last phone calls were ugly. Kerouac told his editor that he was going to Germany: ‘to see the concentration camps and dance on Jews’ graves’. And the worst of it was, this man reported, that Jack didn’t even sound drunk.

The
Dr Sax
grotto was our final call before the restaurant. You could hear, close at hand, the rush and surge of the Merrimack. ‘This is New England,’ Kerouac wrote, ‘half like rainy Welsh mining towns.’ Rainwater was running in thick beads like glycerine tears down the square chin of the saint with the upturned eyes. These sideshow stations of the cross would be blasphemy among the slate chapels of the primitive Methodism of Maesteg; whitewashed temples like
Libanus, where, at six or seven years of age, I recited a few verses of the Old Testament, learnt phonetically, in Welsh. To a chorus of approval from the nodding elders.

Kerouac positions his grotto between orphanage and roaring river. ‘Fireflies in the night flickering to the waxy stare of statues.’ Some of the display cases for buttermilk figures representing the passion of Christ are empty. Stolen? Removed for renovation? There is a rocky Lourdes shrine with a Cecil B. DeMille crucifix and a near-naked martyred man. Nailed, agonized, unrisen. In the cave of the grotto, thick votive candles splutter in medicine jars dressed with novelty illustrations of Mexican vitality. The supplicants, this day, are Cambodians. Henry is a little distracted. He’s waiting for a call from his wife – at home in Gloucester, facing hospital tests – and trying to negotiate the sale of their car.

Kerouac was always looking for new borders. When situations of his own making – publishers, wives, mother – became difficult or impossible, he ran to Mexico City; the adobe hut on the roof, the company of Bill Garver, wise old junky, a connection who asked nothing of him. He liked the economics of ‘fellaheen’ streets, the cheap prostitutes and stimulants. He liked the solitude, the opportunity to uncoil narratives at his own pace, to improvise.
Mexico City Blues.

Ellis Amburn, a sympathetic but undeceived witness of the end of Kerouac’s writing career, his editor on
Visions of Cody
, has the troubled author, in the grip of hallucination, spooked by intimations of future fame, striking out, in July 1950, to walk from Mexico City to New York, carrying two and a half pounds of marijuana wrapped in silk and lashed to his waist. Jack seems, already, to be trespassing on arrows of predetermined energy, directions of travel, undertaken by Malcolm Lowry or fictionalized by Roberto Bolaño. His fate as a rootless wanderer is confirmed after he crosses the border at Laredo and encounters an old man with long white hair. ‘Go moan for man,’ he is told. ‘After that,’ Amburn reports, ‘Jack seemed to accept that it was his destiny to walk across America on foot, often in total darkness.’ The manifest of the essential bad journey,
the suicide tarantella attempted and endured by Lowry, Neal Cassady, the poet John Hoffman, and Cabeza de Vaca in the sixteenth century, was in place. Magnetic attraction in the shape and shadow of a smouldering volcano. A land breast. The dark god Vulcan of the Lowell Mills made actual in sparks of iron-fire.

There is an ‘immense triangle’, Kerouac said, between New York, Mexico City and San Francisco. Self-defined as a ‘religious wanderer’, he would trudge, in hobo mask and threadbare disguise, from city to city, never settling, endlessly perching, recording, remembering, suffering: to gain his ‘foothold in heaven’.

Remember the scene in
The Godfather
? The neighbourhood trattoria, the garlic-and-tomato ooze of the kitchen, the tightness of the tables? The gun hidden in the toilet cistern? Large men with heavy elbows. Big white plates. Wine bottles. Cones of laundered napkin flicked open, bibbed around bullish necks. All that screwed-down testosterone rage, liable at any moment to send bread rolls, forks, spoons, water jug, cigarettes flying into the air in a Futurist explosion. Marinetti meets Mario Puzo. Which would, Hollywood style, cut into a montage of spinning newspaper headlines (a vortex), final editions soaking up lung blood.
This was not like that.
The restaurant, chosen by John Sampas, was deserted. Even by Sampas. Maybe it was too wet for him to come out. A long, low room with tables in regimented lines lit like the interior of a satin-padded, diamond-pattern coffin. A soundproof immersion-chamber for a wealthy narcoleptic who wants just enough light, should he wake up, to read
The Premature Burial.
It is rumoured, as I’m sure John Sampas, a cultivated man, would know, that Edgar Allan Poe visited the Lowell tavern known as the Worthen House, where he composed part of ‘The Raven’. This town was also the birthplace of Bette Davis and James McNeill Whistler, both of whom got as far away as possible as soon as they could.

The spaghetti joint where little, broken-mouthed Al Pacino proves himself by blowing away Sterling Hayden (in life, a disgraced leftist namer of names) is square on to a working street in a part of the Bronx unvisited by restaurant critics. (Relocated for convenience to the Luna Restaurant on White Plains Road, off Gun Hill Road.) From a midway table, keeping your back to the washroom, you face a wet window, slithery with neon, passing traffic.
Nothing passes in Lowell.
We’re downtown, close to the civic centre, and it’s
reasonable to expect a knot of black suits with expense accounts, relaxing dealmakers, worldly priests and patrons.
Nobody
. Efficient staff come straight at us for our drinks order, then vanish. Grape-bulb lights depending. Icy-white cloth. Pink napkins. Tall menus like Orders of Service at the crematorium. Red-rimmed chairs with curved backs. No windows, no street. Reproduction French posters advertising drinks they don’t serve. Empty mirrors innocent of breath.

Knowing something of the period when Kerouac, having married Stella, John’s sister (as a surrogate for his soulmate, Sammy), was sheltered, indulged, adopted by the Greek clan, I formed the impression of a group of local fixers who worked hard and got lucky. They always had a stool for Jack in Nicky’s, the Sampas-owned bar managed by Manuel ‘Chiefy’ Nobriga. John’s father, George, back in 1941, got into some bother with a man called Peter Apostalakos. ‘That guy is
stalking
me.’ He responded to this annoyance by shooting him dead. The argument between the two men had been running since 1920. John Sampas explained that the Lowell community turned against his father because he had once led strikes in the local mills.

The first physical attribute that struck me about John, when he was led to our table, and after he had removed his cap, was the permanently raised eyebrows: lightly pencilled accents. Punctuation marks signalling a certain fastidiousness of discourse. This man had endured many such conversations, clearly; biographers, thesis brokers, bounty hunters circling around the Kerouac archive. He demonstrated immaculate, almost military, grooming: clipped white moustache, low-slung attentive ears, and high, thin neck. Careful, wounded eyes. A dark corduroy jacket with blue-check, button-down shirt. The spectacles on a string were brought into play to interrogate a menu with few surprises. He ordered, with an imperceptible sigh, what is always ordered. He ate slowly; cutting, laying the knife aside, employing his fork for tuning unheard melodies, not spearing and lifting. A practised ritual of public dining around which a dialogue will, eventually, take shape: with Henry
as silent referee, mediator, witness. And timekeeper too, because issues back home in Gloucester are preying on him.

‘I did lunch with Olson, oh yes, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. Along with Mr Jonathan Williams and his ex-lover, Ronald Johnson. The poet.’

What we never appreciated, as students back in Dublin, was how tribal and interconnected the American countercultural scene actually was: everybody met everybody, everybody fucked everybody (as with any museum-quality art movement). They feuded, fought, formed intense friendships, sulked for generations. And they all kept records (pension plans). Gunslinger poets, jealous of reputation, were forced to become air-miles performers on Midwest campuses, checking out student audiences for potential lovers and patrons. The first-generation Beats of the 1940s all slept together at some point, in a writhing pod of favours and exchanges, permutations now being catalogued and exhibited like sacred relics with unholy price tags.

‘Jack admired Olson, which was why he made that trip to Gloucester. He was fascinated by the
idea
of the poet.’

As we ate, in swift raids, trying not to make a hungry mess of the beautiful still-life arrangements on our large plates, the rich red sauces and drowned vegetables, I learnt from John Sampas something about how solitary these writers were in the working New England world. Alienated, in the end, by the view of the harbour from the seven windows at Fort Square, Charles Olson turned inland to the ancient rocks of Dogtown, the glacial moraines. ‘Distance is closing in,’ said the poet Tom Clark, who crafted an Olson biography that succeeded in enraging most of those who knew him in Gloucester, or who had a heavy investment in contriving legends acceptable to the paymasters of charitable foundations and universities. Once the most public and engaged of the makers of lives of the poets, in the classical tradition, Clark had retired, somewhat bruised but still active, into his own forms of silence. Or to presenting himself, as he was at the start, as a pure poet. Behind him, or alongside him, producing invisible versions of the same stories, was
the Black Mountain survivor I wanted to track down, the unrecorded and unphotographed Cal Shutter. I thought of Shutter, rumoured to have crossed into Mexico, as the last man standing in a very long line. If Shutter had been too young to live up to his boast of taking classes with Olson at Black Mountain, he had certainly been in England for a few years, studying (and editing small magazines with Andrew Crozier and Roy Fisher) at Keele. When all that went wrong, he lived in a Peak District cave. Some say that, fuelled on pills and whisky, supplied with a portable typewriter and a torch strapped to his head, he died there.

The trade, today, is gossip. We settled to it, we established some measure of common ground. I offered just enough, by way of names and dates, to engage John Sampas. There was the night when a dealer we both knew, call him Jeff Klippenberg, came to the door to ask if he could introduce a potential customer, a very good customer, to the Kerouac archive. A person called Johnny Depp. Had John fixed a price yet for Jack’s old raincoat?

I was grateful, decades ago, to have shifted all the remaining copies of my long, thin book on Allen Ginsberg’s 1967 visit to London,
The Kodak Mantra Diaries
, to Klippenberg’s address in Massachusetts. For a pittance. But making room in our tight terraced house for plenty more stock, the books I trawled from the streets of Hackney and Whitechapel. John Sampas didn’t have these problems, the items in his care were valuable. They were relics. They could be edited, dusted down, released on to the market.

Depp dropped around. With his chequebook. A deal was struck. He was a pleasant, modest young man. Not bad looking. Polite. The quantity of noughts made the eyes water, but what I never managed to learn as a dealer is that
you
can’t charge too much
for the unique item. Price confers value. The customer expects it. The least you can do is to offer your client the status of having paid a spectacular premium, thereby demonstrating seriousness. Vendor and Hollywood vendee did their best, in this case, to cut out the middleman. They went to dinner. They sat in this restaurant. They had a decent bottle. They enjoyed themselves.

A little of the Sampas history emerged. An office career, accountancy or some such, the Boston money markets, and then American antiques. Henry characterized it as ‘bits and pieces, smart junk’. A good eye, probably, a fondness for scavenging: collector and trader. John tells us how he acquired, sight unseen, a case of inscribed Isherwood first editions. But that was then; now he’s like a senior Beat Generation diplomat, an ambassador with polished skull, silver half-moon moustache, dangling spectacles, freshly ironed shirt. A man for whom there will always be lunches.

With Olson it was more about drinking, that day at the Ritz Carlton, than poetry. Olson liked to smoke and talk, to build up a head of steam for an audience that included his publisher, Jonathan Williams. Sampas met other poets too, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, as they passed through town on reading tours. Hubert Selby, John said, was a civilized man dealing with a savage hinterland. And then there was the night cruiser John Rechy who reported on adventures in leather bars and bus stations.

Sampas is a little hard of hearing. There is that brief delay of a news report from a dirt road in Afghanistan, when the questioner in the studio has to fix an interested expression while he waits. The most recent visitors are connections of Walter Salles and the team making the movie translation of
On the Road.
(A film that turned out to be more about research than delivery.) John’s sister Stella invaded the office of Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord, to demand the original, pasted-together teletype roll on which Kerouac typed his most famous novel. John was caught up in complicated dealings with Ferlinghetti at City Lights, out in San Francisco. The veteran poet and publisher was hanging on to his cache of Kerouac manuscripts with studied tardiness in correspondence. Henry travelled out there to shoot an interview, but got nothing. He tried his
Lowell Blues
script on a barker outside a North Beach strip club. Depp was gracious enough to do his readings for this film as a favour, an act of respect for a writer he admired.

I told John how heart-stopping it had been to be confronted with the brown, stiff-covered Kerouac exercise book with his progress
report, the word count of the composition of
On the Road
, in that temperature-controlled vault at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. The work journals Kerouac kept so meticulously were dated year by year. A life in paper. I wondered how this one had escaped the archive in Lowell.

‘No mystery,’ John said. ‘Gregory Corso. He stole it.’

Corso lifted what he could from his friends, to run to the New York bookdealers who looked after him, giving him a place in which to live, and collecting his heroin. Ginsberg left instructions with this benevolent couple, to call him so that he could come down to the shop and buy back his own presentation copies and manuscripts, after Gregory had been paid. In the end, many of the failing Beat veterans passed into the hands of youthful carers in pressed white jeans; male nurses, business managers, curators of the legend, granters of access. John Sampas adopted a young Chinese boy and was putting him through law school.

I picked up the bill, modest by Charlotte Street standards, and we drifted out to the street. We were invited back to the Sampas property for coffee and a leisurely tour of the holdings. But it was not to be; Henry needed to get back on the road, time was pressing, he had a car to sell in Gloucester.