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

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