American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (7 page)

A covert American geometry was starting to reveal itself through the contrary figures of Charles Olson and H. P. Lovecraft: walks as fugues, a delight in magic (without initiation). Gerrit Lansing, remembered and referenced, infrequently photographed, was guide or witness or conduit. He hovered, a shifting fan of elegant self-superimpositions, where Olson remained a loud absence. ‘I
really miss having Charles around,’ Jonathan Williams said. ‘He doesn’t go away. He stays with you.’

How deep into the practice of ritual magic did Lansing go? He was billed to give a private reading to the Knights Templar Order at their Thelemic Symposium. The promoters of this event glossed their distinguished guest as belonging to the tradition of Aleister Crowley, a poet capable of subjugating the whole universe to individual will. ‘Everything that he perceives is in a certain sense a part of his being.’ The alchemy is not the social transmutation of the Gloucester bar, pizza and beer into gossip and speculation, through the alembic of strong digestive juices and whisky chasers. Lansing is a seeker whose mission is to dissolve experience in order to ‘climb the ladder of the visionary spinal chord to issue in the thousand-petalled sun’.

All of which brought us, after circling around Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, to that other topic beloved of poets: money. Patronage. The funding of impossible projects. The situation for Olson in the early months of 1960, locked into his
Maximus
researches, put him beyond the reach of ordinary employment. He
was
employed. The nights were long. Wealthy art fanciers from the New York scene, collectors of fashionable poets, took houses for the summer in Gloucester. Olson paid his respects to Panna Grady, a young woman who was keeping much of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic afloat. She was sharing a property for the season with John Wieners, out on the fringe of the city, near Dogtown. Wieners was a Black Mountaineer, colleague and friend. He was the one who managed, with risk-taking address, a jazzy articulation of the state of coming apart at the seams, bursting the stitches: discontinued telegrams from cold-turkey hotel rooms in Boston or San Francisco.

The big shot at megabucks was John Hays Hammond, Jr, a retired eccentric who built himself a ‘Medieval Castle’ on the headland, a few miles down the coast, high above a wreckers’ reef, in a protected enclave called Magnolia Shore. Hammond invented underwater guidance systems for the navy and was known as the ‘Father of
Remote Control’. He used his fortune to have Finnish masons run up a Disneyland folly made from stones shipped over from the Gothic ruins of Europe. Olson described these vaults as manifest claustrophobia out of
The Masque of the Red Death.
There were ill-directed quotations from every occulted era known to architecture. Sixty-nine ‘Aztec steps’ led down to an inverted-pyramid crypt at the water’s edge; a site prepared in advance, under his own supervision, for the inventor’s tomb. When a potential patron starts drawing up grandiose funerary plans and calling his preposterous seaside villa a ‘museum’, it’s time to look elsewhere.

Gerrit Lansing made the introductions. And Olson, using Ferrini as go-between, put forward an application for a bursary of $10,000 a year, for five years, to carry forward the necessary scaffolding of
The Maximus Poems.
This, in a better world, was a modest proposal. For Hammond, a man of means, capable of anticipating the requirement for a handheld electrical device to save humanity from the tedious labour of crossing the floor to the TV set to change channels, it was beggary. Olson gave readings in the castle, but he also found himself coerced into an Addams Family scenario, acting as outsize greeter at the gate, offering leaflets and canapés before some magical-cultural soirée. Vincent Price meets Vincent Ferrini.

After exploring Stage Fort Park, registering Olson’s bench, the rock with the plaque boasting of the site where, in 1623, ‘a company of fishermen and farmers from Dorchester, England, under the direction of Rev. John White, founded
THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY COLONY’
, I struck off down the road in search of the Hammond Museum.

It was a warm day and the blacktop reflected the heat, the rising carriageway shimmered and wobbled. Managed woodland provided limited shade and screened the life, if any, within spectacular sea-facing properties. On high posts, as I closed on Magnolia Shore, were other white houses, small enough for squirrels, but immaculately crafted. The miniature retreats had shingled roofs and detailing as precise as an architect’s model.

Arched windows of the expensively ruined part of Hammond Castle picked up dancing light from the sea below. The parking area was deserted and the museum closed. Two workmen pulled in to eat their lunch. Venturing a yard from a family car, a woman tried to make a tricky shot, through lush yellow-gold foliage. Her husband, wedged at the wheel, was nervous. He knew his Stephen King. He’d seen movies about weird places in the New England woods.

The plaque I photographed in Stage Fort Park drew Olson’s thoughts across the Atlantic. ‘I want to go to England very soon,’ he said to Ferrini, ‘to get the information to show how this city was in the mind of John White without his knowing what she was, as a place to go fishing from.’ Which meant: Dorchester. Another museum. More research. Hardy country. Powys country. The reasons for the founding of a settlement were easy to understand on such a gilded October day. Half Moon Beach drew lovers and picnickers on to the mammal rocks. In tender groups that formed and re-formed, unconsciously recreating the painting of bathers I studied as preparation for my lecture.

After Olson’s death, aged fifty-nine, on 10 January 1970, a manuscript was found in the Fort Square apartment. A fragment that was the whole.

Now I begin to

go – hear me I

have sent you the

message – I am

gone

Navigating a route out of town, through Halloween decorations against neat weatherboard houses, in their greys and pinks and whites, brought back the uneasy impressions of my first walk: here was a new place on old ground. Little more than 400 years from Samuel de Champlain, in 1606, making landfall in what is now Gloucester Harbor, to draw up an accurate chart of the place he called ‘Le Beauport’, to the commercial venturing of the Dorchester Company, under the direction of Revd John White, in 1623: the founding of a colony. To the setting of an oxidized plaque into a rock on Stage Fort Park by the citizens of Gloucester in 1907.

The dark shades of colonization, the burnings, drownings, broken treaties with indigenous peoples, coloured my local expeditions. It took me a few days to be sure that I was
really
here and that I had caught up with the person freighted so recklessly over the Atlantic. Granite boulders were in evidence at the back of my roadside hut, behind the bar, shouldering through the glacial debris that overhung the convenience store. Human habitation could very easily be swept away. October was the season of storms.

On another beach, in Catalonia, his final port of exile, Roberto Bolaño watched a trio of Russian girls with cellphones. He took them for hookers. There was an old man, near death, a skull on a tight bronzed body – Bolaño wrote about him several times – whose departure, the voyeuristic author convinces himself, will unleash a tsunami to destroy the innocent resort with a giant wave. ‘The earth would begin to shake and a massive earthquake would swallow up the whole town in a wave of dust.’ Would this happen in Gloucester as a consequence of the death of Charles Olson?

CAPE ANN PARANORMAL SOCIETY: GOT GHOSTS?
Candlelit pumpkin heads, American flags. Dancing skeletons. They are in
sympathy with the red-white-and-blue election notices.
ELECT JOE CIOLINI: ABILITY, VISION & EXPERIENCE. ELECT BOB WHYNOTT: COUNCILLOR-AT-LARGE
. A painting on the side of the pizza parlour stays within the same register. An outsize child in dungarees presents an old fisherman with a mastless craft, a version of the ship held by the blue-robed Virgin, Our Lady of Good Voyage. Acid rains have melted the fisherman’s eyes, a spill of black treacle down his cheeks, so that he is indeed Gloucester: vile jellies gouged out, the Gloucester of
Lear.

I cleared the fixed settlement, through subdued trick-or-treat suburbs of devil-masked children on red bicycles. Dogtown was the far side of the Babson Reservoir. I didn’t know exactly where the house Panna Grady rented for the summer season was to be found. It was close to here, certainly, in Riverdale. Olson came often to see Wieners. He wrote of striking deep into the Dogtown woods, to refine the art of getting creatively lost. Without panic.

Dogtown Common is such a solid metaphor. It enfolds the unwary walker so suddenly; a step away from tarmac and contemporary Gloucester vanishes. There is ambiguity in the written records of this place, it wants to be older than it is. Even the name Dogtown is etymologically suspect: spurned, sour, clag-footed. A huddle of the expelled and ill-favoured. Old women threatened by pirates or witchfinders and protected by slavering hounds. An abandoned camp, on high ground, on the track between Rockport and Gloucester, occupied by feral dogs or the spirits of dogs. A forest of unexplained noises and whispers.

Dogtown, as a habitation for Christians, came into being in 1641. It failed and failed better, faster, more visibly, than the rest. Cellar holes beneath ruined houses, stones spilled over stones, became natural forms among the boulders of the terminal glacial moraine. Woodland, cut back by farmers, returned. The metaphor was the reality, the lumber of fearful minds: swamps, bondage tangles, whipped branches, botched sacrifices. The new town with the new churches, clinging to the shoreline, needed the gravitas of the
granite mass behind it; an impossible thicket of interknitted paths opening on a hulk of split rock known as ‘Whale’s Jaw’.
Dogtown.
The very sound of the word was an onomatopoeic moan of undead animals calling to the moon.

There were sounds, gunshots. And signs of a work camp: a tractor, a trailer. One man encountered, early on, loped out from the interior: red cap, red tabard over grey waistcoat, mid-thigh boots, shotgun over left shoulder, hound on a leash.

Dogtown has been worked and worked hard, quarried. The town of Gloucester is made from the bones of the former settlement. In 1967 Briar Swamp was surveyed as a suitable site for a radar emplacement for the Sentinel anti-ballistic missile system. By the 1970s, exploiters and promoters had moved with the fashion: now they proposed a heritage village with windmill and attendant wind farm. As yet, mercifully, there are no legends by Lovecraft carved into glacial erratics, no Innsmouth theme-park caverns with rubber effigies of octopus gods and limited editions of
The Necronomicon.

Dogtown is the physical manifestation of Lovecraft’s adjectival overlay, ruts into rivulets, sheep into stones. The ancient rocks counter the sexual hysteria the Provincetown tourist experienced when he was pitched against the sea: the slippery, sucking, reeking, rotting mulch of fish docks. The wild women of the fishermen’s bars. The sickly luminescence of marine decay, when suppurating clouds rub against a lurid sunset waterline.

‘I have hated fish and feared the sea and everything connected with it since I was two years old,’ Lovecraft said. In his tale ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, an ill-advised visitor, arriving on a clapped-out bus, is drawn towards the inherited traces that repel him most, a corrupted bloodline. Noticing ‘dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls’, he remembers passages from his antiquarian researches. ‘This was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside.’

The trail known as ‘Dogtown Road’ leads to Granny Day Swamp. The temptation to follow obliterated Indian paths through meadows of juniper and thorn is hard to resist. Low rims of brick and rubble encircle unreadable pits, dwellings that seem as much
unstarted as collapsed. The ground is soft. Recent plantings are spindly-thin, black strings of wood like beads of rain smearing ink sketches.

When you can no longer hear the rifle range, you don’t hear anything, even your own footfall. The walk absorbs the walker. You must put aside any hope of navigation. The baffle of the trees, the electromagnetic pulse of the rocks, a rising vortex between claustrophobia and agoraphobia, makes for a clammy hour. Hour? Day. Time has no meaning here. It is not the ghosts, but the knowledge that
there are no ghosts.
Beyond yourself, the solitary hiker with the book in his pocket. The overreacher. Trespasser. Scribbler of lies.

To have a destination, I settled on the clearing where the handsome sailor James Merry fought a young bull, and was gored, tossed, trampled. Self-sacrificed to his own vanity. And drunkenness. An episode of great fascination for Charles Olson, who addresses it in the Dogtown poems of
Maximus.
‘The bios/of nature in this/park of eternal/events.’

Now, with trails branching off, left and right, I found myself in the place I needed to be. Green-white lichen on a stone beside the path. Letters cut, shallow declivities repainted in red:
JAS. MERRY DIED SEPTEMBER
1892. The confirmation of the poem, first read so many years ago, so far away; as myth or fable, like the
Mabinogion
, now fact. I stood in the clearing with its alien grass, like hair or mattress stuffing, summoning the sound of the bull. Or the memory of young bullocks charging me on an Iron Age fort in Dorset, with no obvious way off the track; in spring, away from my pregnant wife, my daughter, trying to assemble the conflicted elements of another book, London. Turf blackened with traces of recent fire.

Olson brought visitors out to Dogtown. Ed Sanders, having driven from New York with Ken Weaver, drummer to the Fugs, made ‘Maximus from Dogtown’ into a song, a chant, a performance. ‘The sea was born of the earth without sweet union of love Hesiod says.’ What Olson wanted to demonstrate was the hinterland of his poem. Dogtown was where the great project cooked;
where pages could be drawn down from above and upwards from the earth.

When Olson came to Dogtown with Sanders, he was wrecked, afloat on bourbon and the leftovers of the Leary experiment in his medicine cupboard, a fistful of psilocybin ‘peanuts’ and a bottle of LSD. ‘Twenty
million
micrograms,’ Sanders said. ‘Enough for Manhattan.’ Olson creeps along in a battered station wagon, ferrying the boys to the Panna Grady house. Sanders (a classicist) envisions him as Poseidon. That greasy sailor’s mane held in place with a rubber band. Ed is downloading, through involuntary chemical rushes, the Lovecraft nightmare of Gloucester’s inhabitants as part-fish; mutating in front of his bulging red-rimmed eyes. Cold-blooded Puritan creatures with gills-in-the-throat. Ocean returnees, reverse evolutionists. The future recorder, through
The Family
, of the Charles Manson dune-buggy madness, wanders off into the serpentine trails of Dogtown; where he is found and rescued by the police in the early hours of the morning. He is wearing his stage outfit, an all-red suit.

The man who comes closest to my own experience of the rock-encrusted kame is the painter Marsden Hartley. Hartley, a seasonal visitor, not a Gloucester native, discovered what he needed in this abandoned landscape, the reservation of holes and stones. Tired, after years of restless travel – Berlin, Taos, Italy, Mexico – he arrived, one summer, expecting not much more than a few weeks of uncomplicated sunbathing on Niles Beach. Then he discovered Dogtown and started work, dividing his day between writing and painting.

Olson was struck by Hartley’s hands; the worn-down ends of the fingers like those of a frostbitten Arctic voyager. He made comparisons with Jake, a native fisherman, nails gone, peeled from years in brine, the wounds of baiting hooks. The painter’s fingers have that sense of being soaked too long. They are, as Olson chooses to interpret it (in the spirit of Wilhelm Reich), blunted from neurotic tension: ‘refusing woman’s flesh’. Away from the sunbathers’ beach,
Hartley’s obscene paws are fins or paint-smeared paddles. The town of Gloucester is a fractured cubist vision of ‘immense houses’, within which are concealed, as Lovecraft wrote, ‘certain kinfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view’.

Hartley’s sexuality, declared or undeclared, troubled Olson, who required a physical signature for what he read as a biological defect. The prejudice warped his critique of Hartley’s Dogtown paintings. The painter would ‘stay too long getting that rock in paint’. And presenting
Whale’s Jaw
(1934), a ‘bald jaw of stone’, as a malignant soft thing, a skin puppet. Olson challenged the eros of Hartley’s transformations, stone into cloth. And his processing of Hart Crane, a reckless poet (avatar of Wieners), into ‘a Marseilles matelot’. The way to confront geology was head-on, in play; as Olson’s father did it: putting himself between the hinges of split rock for a holiday photograph.

In the second movement of
Maximus
, Olson pulls back from harbour to Dogtown – which he associates, in its elevation, with Stage Fort Park. His dad, the mail-carrier, emerges from his tent, a breadknife between his teeth, to threaten the man who is alleged to have made a mild pass at the laughing, round-faced Mrs Olson. He dies, Karl Joseph, of a heart attack following a second stroke. He was fifty-three. His oversize son, wrists poking from his sleeves, refused him, before Mr Olson set off for the last time, the loan of a suitcase with steamship labels.

Marsden Hartley paid a visit to Olson in Greenwich Village, New York, in the winter of 1940/41. There is a process whereby sons become their own fathers, become their own sons. They raise each other up, push each other aside, find new fathers, accept new disciples, new sons: challenging, loving, stalling in guilt and awkwardness. Olson’s cold-water flat on Christopher Street was another cabin, sanctified by poverty, awash with papers and projects. Hartley, in his elegant sea-green suit, knocked at the door. And was served a cup of hot water. In the shock of it, the excitement, Olson failed to add the tea. He offered instead a poem on Hart Crane. Hartley read it and left, without comment.

Undecided ‘between monastery and crematorium’, Hartley took lodgings at 1 Eastern Point Road in Gloucester, where he made five Dogtown paintings. At the end of the summer he didn’t return to New York, he took up residence in a white house with green blinds in Rocky Neck Avenue. The home of a postman. Dogtown was more than a metaphor. In
Rock Doxology
(1931), Hartley’s pods of stone, under a thin strip of sky, ‘deliver sermons of integrity’ (as he wrote to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz). Olson’s gods were older, more elemental: the scrape and scour of ice. Finding a passage out of the rock labyrinth offered him a glimpse at the vault of heaven. ‘I have eaten my father/piece by piece.’

The summer visitors in the art colony at Rocky Neck did not interest Hartley. He conversed with city lawyers and the husbands of women who painted. He spent as much time as he could in solitude among the boulders and scrub. But there were others in the bohemian community, in and out of their swimming costumes, searching for deserted coves, risking new friendships, enjoying picnic parties and sketching sessions, in groups and arrangements echoing the painting that attracted me so much in Cape Ann Museum. The man in his trunks, heaving himself up on a rock, to confront the reclining girl. And the other woman, making up the erotic equation, off to the side; bare-legged in white wrap, hugging the stump of a tree. The only artists Hartley mentions in his letters are Ernest Thurn and his close companion, Helen Stein. ‘She has the touch.’ Stein made portraits of Hartley. While the three of them, going out together most evenings, looked for a movie.

After the Merry memorial and the hidden meadow, Dogtown became oppressive. I decided to divert through the woods in the direction of the Babson Reservoir and the railway. Tracks came and went; much of the way was blind instinct. Hartley had been disturbed in his private meditations out here by the noise of chisel on stone. Scandinavian masons employed by Roger Babson, founder of Babson College, landowner, politician, had been employed to cut uplifting slogans into the boulders: ‘a final and permanent book’.
NEVER TRY NEVER WIN
was the mocking codicil to James Merry’s assault on the bull.