American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light by Iain Sinclair Read Free Book Online Page A

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