A Fiction of Memory
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2013
Copyright © Iain Sinclair, 2013
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design: Nathan Burton
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-97127-8
OCEAN
Two Men Smoking
Frozen Air
Lowell
John Sampas
Safe Haven
The Party
Dogtown
FIRE
There’s No Home
Oscar
Vulcano
SMOKE
Kodak Mantra Diaries
New York
The Trespasser
Corso
Burroughs over Kansas
Dream Science
MOUNTAIN
Ripe
Vancouver
Dollarton
Seattle
Forks
Kitkitdizze
Burbland
Berkeley
Hollywood
ASH
America Ground
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
By the same author
DOCUMENTARY
The Kodak Mantra Diaries
Lights Out for the Territory
Liquid City (with Marc Atkins)
Rodinsky’s Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein)
Crash (on Cronenberg/Ballard film)
Dark-Lanthorns
Sorry Meniscus
London Orbital: A Walk around the M25
The Verbals (interview with Kevin Jackson)
Edge of the Orison
London: City of Disappearance (editor)
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire
Ghost Milk
Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime
Several Clouds Colliding (with Brian Catling)
Austerlitz & After
Objects of Obscure Desire
Swimming to Heaven: The Lost Rivers of London
Vulcanic Tryst (with Brian Catling)
FICTION
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
Downriver
Radon Daughters
Slow Chocolate Autopsy (with Dave McKean)
Landor’s Tower
White Goods
Dining on Stones
POETRY
Back Garden Poems
Muscat’s Würm
The Birth Rug
Lud Heat
Suicide Bridge
Flesh Eggs & Scalp Metal: Selected Poems
Jack Elam’s Other Eye
Penguin Modern Poets 10
The Ebbing of the Kraft
Conductors of Chaos (editor)
Saddling the Rabbit
The Firewall: Selected Poems
Buried at Sea
Postcards from the 7th Floor
Red Eye
For Edith and Andrew, onwards and outwards
I return to find secrets. I return to rob them.
– Robert Duncan
and sees all things and to him
are presented at night
the whispers of the most flung shores
from Gloucester out
– Ed Dorn
It was the season of autumn ghosts, a dampness in the soul. 2011 and London had lost its savour. A good step beyond midway through my dark wood of the world, I came to America, hoping to reconnect with the heroes of my youth. The largest, the most light-occulting of all the giants, that earlier race, was Charles Olson: poet, scholar and last rector of Black Mountain College. This establishment, a scatter of buildings beside a lake in North Carolina, now imploded, bankrupt, seemed to us a Valhalla of all the talents: Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn. Pick up the traces anywhere you choose, through fugitive magazines or literary gossip, and they lead back to one man. Olson knew, better than most, that his chosen territory, the Eastern Seaboard, the whaling ports, was once connected to Scotland. And long before Prince Henry Sinclair, the Earl of Orkney, crossed the Atlantic, island-hopping in 1398, to bring back stories of infinite forests and their natives, and to leave his mark stamped on a rock. The native Micmac Indians, according to some authorities, recognized the tall voyager as their man-god, Glooscap. ‘Kulóskap was the first, first and greatest, to come into our land,’ sang the tribal poet. He was ‘sober, grave, and good’. The big man walked on the backs of whales. One of Olson’s youthful disciples, Peter Anastas, carried out proper research into Glooscap; his heritage, the archaeological scratchings, the subsistence life in shack and trailer park endured by the last of the first people in this unyielding place.
Glooscap the man becomes Gloucester the town. By sound, by sonar echo, by necessity. Olson, writing about his childhood and his father, the Worcester mailman, calls the story ‘Stocking Cap’. With some hope of payment, he sent it to the New Yorker in February 1948. It was rejected. Glooscap, Stocking Cap. A nod to elective Swedish ancestors, to Vikings. Cutting holes in the ice, winter fishing: father and son. I loved the old photograph used on the cover of Olson’s memoir, The Post Office: that stern, bulb-headed baby emerging from a sack of letters, hard against his father’s racing heart. Two figures from a race of huge, raw-boned immigrants, studio-captured against a painted pond, a forest clearing. I wanted it to be so. I needed a new mythology to shield against the sense of loss and hanging dread inherent in the invasion and dissolution of my familiar London ground; forty years learning where to walk and a few months to lose it all. Go back then into uncertainty, ocean-venturing exchanges. Ed Dorn, one of the sharpest and most independent of Olson’s Black Mountain students, and just about the only one who bothered to graduate, characterized Gloucester as somewhere settled by people from remote islands who knew how to build fences and stone walls. ‘That’s one reason why New England is really there,’ he said.
‘It’s a tough one,’ Olson replied, laying out the American West as Dorn’s field of study. ‘One thing’s sure: economics as politics as money is a gone bird.’
All poetry, a now-obsolete (and stronger for that) form, Dorn suggested, derived from The Iliad or The Odyssey. Either we stay put, dig in, battle with our gods, or we move, drift, detour: move for the sake of moving. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is precisely what it says: it goes on as long as the roll of paper lasts. Olson was formidable in combining the two archetypal sources: he excavated the particulars of his adopted town and he contemplated the restless sea. Without leaving his high window, he would drive off spleen by charting the madness of those who ventured on the watery part of the world. He began with Herman Melville. Curse me with truth. Call me Ishmael.
Today, quite suddenly, the sun breaks through; I follow Olson’s obliterated footprints. There is the long shadow of a drowned man on the beach. And he is walking, rolling heavy shoulders. You have to be dead yourself, more than a little, to register him. The Atlantic, on this precious morning, is blameless; every pebble visible, an invitation to stripping off and striking out. But it won’t happen, not now. Not ever.
I come along the curve of the esplanade they call ‘boulevard’, from Fort Point, tramping in suspended excitement, with watering eyes, above a beach I know so well; this place I have never been, even in sleep: Gloucester, Massachusetts. Late October, season of perfect storms. Even the houses of the wealthy, set back from the shore, are not immune. Buffalo waves break free of the jet stream; steepling rollers, in a shatter of wet glass, spout and smash, upturning cars, rearing over breakfast bars, their panoramic windows crusted with salt, rattled by scouring grains of sand. You are embedded here, at a small table, with your squirting egg and crisped bacon, your coffee refill. A few, mid-morning, comfortably fleshed, warm-shirted citizens stare out on the rain, the road, the shore, making desultory conversation. Some do not turn their heads. More politics, another dying year. The decline of the fishing fleet. Boarded-up computer-repair shops. Banks like temples from an earlier granite era. Barriers erected around City Hall, the civic centre. Tactful marine presentations in Cape Ann Museum. Safe rocks and secure objects: rescued boats, fading portraits. The original statue of Our Lady of Good Voyage, that draped and crowned votive figure brought in from the church roof, now shockingly out of scale in a dim chamber. Huge hands, this woman of wood: a fish-gutter supporting a model twin-masted vessel.
Olson’s car didn’t do reverse. When a friend, sent out from the upstairs apartment with the great view, on the point, right over the Inner Harbor, to fetch cigarettes and whisky for another all-night session, sandwiches even, asked, with some trepidation, how Charles managed this thing, navigating the icy streets in a defective motor, the poet said: ‘Never go backwards.’ Arm raised – so! – gloved fist clamped to fence, Russian cap and trailing coat. ‘That way. Always that way now.’ Inland, brother. At the end of the poem, of the long emphysemic drag of breath and tumult, the headaches, bunker fevers, heartsick losses, he turned away from the sea. Found a nest in which to die. They carried him, complaining, head first, to the ambulance; crabbed, harpooned. Strike out, stride forward. Then, over Brooklyn Bridge, quoting Lear until the hurt was too much and he gripped his companion’s arm, white, asking for painkillers, and they gave him water. The words on the wall of the hut, the Gloucester Writers Center, where I was now lodged: my wife my car my colour my self. Precisely scored gaps for taking breath.
In the town museum I discovered a painting, studio-posed, reconfiguring some forgotten classical tableau. Rocks. The virgin New England shore of green scrub, grey clouds. Three people: two women and a man. I don’t want to know who painted it. A clothed girl, dark hair depending from a summer hat, props herself on her left arm; she sprawls, shoes off, confronting the bathing-suited figure of a conspicuously fit young man with rather effeminate tresses and supplicant lips. At the edge of the composition, clutching a thick black branch, is another woman, a little older perhaps, more obviously mythological; smooth, bare leg emerging from a long white wrap. Sexual tension, subdued but palpable, plays across the interval between the solitary standing figure and the transfixed couple. The gash dividing the spread of rocks is matted with pubic moss. The couple facing us, recovered from their swim, near-naked but bone dry, make-up intact, confront the clothed girl, whose elbow is scabbed and raw: an orgy postponed. And hung in a corner of a museum nobody visits. As competent and pointless as Augustus John.
Olson’s wife, Betty, found the apartment. And fell in love, at once, with what she saw, inside and out. Romanticizing inconvenience, cold water, cold season, she wrote to Charles, summoning up, across hard-driven distance, his comforting bulk and warmth. 28 Fort Square. They were set down, mature orphans, among the Sicilian community, the working fishermen. And it did play, this fortunate accident. The opening of the poem, after false starts elsewhere, was brought home, earthed. The thrust of Fort Point, lighthouse blinking in the fog on Ten Pound Island. The Inner Harbor. Longline swordfish boats setting out. Olson had tried it, by way of research: crewing. With his size he was awkward. The sea was not, finally, so he said, his trade. Making a lovely phrase, as poets do, out of getting it all wrong. His trade was the sea. And looking at it. Marine charts curling on a clapboard wall. What that early apprenticeship gave him, way short of the reach of a Melville or Conrad, was archive; photographs of a big man in old light, on deck, beside a gaffed swordfish. He knew it was a lie, he was watching the watching. Learning the simplest things last, the jolt of pain going over the bridge. The thickening silence.
When we drove into Gloucester at night, in the rain, Henry Ferrini, Vincent’s nephew, made a little detour to point out Fort Square. Vincent Ferrini had been Olson’s first Gloucester correspondent: the argument, the male rutting in those letters, fired the opening of The Maximus Poems. Buildings torn down. History trashed. ‘I liked him right off,’ Ferrini said. Vincent was the town character, feisty and fast. The poet in the leather hat. ‘Write to me,’ Olson ordered, ‘and tell me how my streets are.’ Already he is laying claim to the territory, the reek of the fish-processing plants.
Damp fog, like a residue of H. P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth, coated everything outside the immediate warmth of the hut and seeped into my skin. I dodged busy traffic – gas tankers, red-and-white Coca-Cola rigs longer than my London street, muddy station wagons – and scuttled down to the harbour. Boat buildings. A chained fleet waiting on the weather. CATERINA GLOU MA. JANAYA JOSEPH GLOU MA. Crosstree masts. Spars. Cables. Fishing lines spooled on giant thimbles at the stern. Impossible, when I try the roadside convenience store, to find fresh fruit or breakfast cereal. Profusion of jumbo crunch, biscuits and pillows of crisps. Racks of root beer. Coke ordnance. Toothpaste-bright sweeties. Local news is the only news. The habit of newsprint dirties the eye.
NAMING OF BULGER TIPSTER WORRIES FBI OBSERVER
A newspaper’s revelation that the tipster who led the FBI to notorious gangster James ‘Whitey’ Bulger is a former Miss Iceland is raising concerns about her safety. Gloucester Times. Thursday, October 13, 2011.
REVISITING OLSON’S LEGACY
The authenticity of this small gritty city and its residents inspired Olson, like an intellectual fountain of youth. Olson left behind his Gloucester epic titled ‘The Maximus Poems’ as well as tens of thousands of scraps of paper and letters filled with his thoughts.
5-DAY FORECAST
Today: Cloudy with rain tapering off. Friday: Periods of rain, some heavy.
Melville’s Ishmael, contemplating a whaling voyage, and the dark Fates who have him under ‘constant surveillance’, imagines newspaper headlines much like the ones I inscribe in my new notebook. GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES. BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN. 1851. Nothing changes. Inky-fingered printers’ devils hit the same buttons. Metaphysical weather systems punctuate the centuries with indifferent rigour.
I explore the hill, noting the vodka bottles and crumpled beer cans arranged on the steps in the gaps between neat clapboard houses. I witness the only black man in town enter the Crow’s Nest, the authentic set for the inauthentic fiction of The Perfect Storm; when George Clooney and the Hollywood caravan rolled into town. Sebastian Junger, who wrote the original story, settled here as a ‘high climber’ for a tree company. He spent many hours in the fishermen’s bar, listening. There was one black sailor on the fated crew. Swordfishing is harsh labour, nobody but the skipper has any relish for the sea. On the morning of their departure, the boys take a pickup truck to one of those big sheds, hypermarkets, out by the highway. They spend $5,000 on steaks, cigarettes, chicken, booze. Anything but fish. Ten thousand Gloucester men, Junger wrote, have been lost to the sea. Names on church wall, year by year. I stop to read the sepulchral memorial on the boulevard, as I pass, following Olson’s evening stroll along the shoreline. Comfortable buses decant sober American tourists. A war that will never be won. But witnessed, with bowed heads, and raised cameras.
Mediterranean Catholicism, in this place I had previously imagined as puritanical and dark, is a rush of colour. Our Lady of Good Voyage, the replica now, is perched on her pedestal, by the blue onion dome, behind a complexity of telegraph wires. Upraised arm, open hand. Halo welded to her shrouded head like a steering wheel. Blood-red candles glow beside the small shrine like Thermos flasks. Or stacked shells in a trench. Blue and gold: the dome, the cross.
Olson, like his fellow Massachusetts author Jack Kerouac, was a Catholic from a working family. His father a delivery man for the mail service in Worcester. Kerouac’s father, in Lowell, ran a print shop. When I walked the beach in Sandymount, Dublin, as a twenty-year-old student, Kerouac was my main man: those bad journeys, the questing, the tedium, and the mortal tremor beneath the surface, which I had not then identified. My companion, Christopher Bamford, who would, after Ireland, take the boat to Boston, and not come back, was peddling Beckett and Genet, all those lettuce-green Olympia Press paperbacks. Footmarks tramped a noose in the grey sand, a prison circuit, as we conjured plays written in a single night and floated magazines that never got beyond the proof stage, the abandoned dummy. As we received our airmail correspondence from William Burroughs in Tangier.
By some weird serendipity, we both returned, the same afternoon, with a slim blue-green Grove Press publication, acquired from a department store on O’Connell Street. The Distances: Poems by Charles Olson. By that evening this poet, new and difficult, was an obsession. ‘What does not change/is the will to change.’ The markers and references and processed autobiographical fragments floated over us, attractive in their obscurity. The man as we learnt a little of him from magazines and visiting American professors became a mythological presence. ‘Ego like a lantern,’ said a pompous fellow, a Restoration drama specialist on tweedy sabbatical, when questioned about why he’d left Olson out of his summary of the landscape of contemporary US poetics. And that seemed to me just what we were looking for: a dark lantern against prejudice and lazy conformity.
Hearing Olson talk, years later, in archive film sampled by Henry Ferrini for his portrait Polis is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, you got the excitement of the expanding moment; a rumbling voice thick with smoke, sweat dripping, black eyebrows emphatic as that other alpha male, Robert Maxwell (press baron, litigant, whale-corpse found floating). The suffering blackboard, a negative window, slashed by chalk prompts, a blizzard of names and dates. Wild, punching semaphore. And the gleaming melon dome of that glistening skull. To surf all those lines of energy and catch it up, almost, in feverish talk, struggling for breath, dark patches on white shirt. A fresh cigarette, a Camel, fired from the stub of the last. ‘I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom Cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.’
The Sicilian quarter, the tight community on Fort Square, where Charles Olson found a safe branch on which to perch, with Betty, in August 1957, was still very much present when I walked there from my roadside hut in October 2011. First floor, balcony on the side, new names on mailboxes: Frontiero, Sova, Borichevsky. And a harbour view that hits home, both directions in time and space: the workaday shacks, rust running from metal fence into stone wall, fishing boats putting out, seasonal pleasure boats at anchor. In the last years, when the task went sour on him, and Olson was alone, it was an exile interrupted by visitors, New York poets or Warhol’s acolyte Gerard Malanga with a thirsty camera.
Olson’s son, another Charles, a Gloucester carpenter who shunned literary events and tributes, was proud to put his hand to the simple memorial plaque, pressing it into wet cement: CHARLES OLSON POET 1910–1970. He said a few words to the gathering of enthusiasts.
Below the apartments, in their brightly painted nonconformity, up against the fence, on the edge of the sea, was an abandoned blockhouse, a whitewashed post-industrial Alamo. The former packing plant of Clarence Birdseye, pioneer of the global frozen-food operation. So Olson becomes an alternative Captain Birdseye, commander of a ghost fleet, wacky admiral on the hill. Or Captain Iglo, neighbourhood eccentric, pipe and flapped Russian cap, sliding down steep steps in the snow, a foot and more taller than the men of the interlinked Sicilian families. Cold cartons of fish fingers no longer thump from the assembly line. There is talk of converting Clarence Birdseye’s plant into a smart hotel. Even Gorton’s, the big Gloucester employer, are cutting back. The paying product these days is cat food. Canned mush for America’s kept-at-home pets. The pampered muses of writers.
At the end of the curve of the gracious marine boulevard, after crossing the bridge over Annisquam River, I arrive at Stage Fort Park. It is no difficult matter to identify the gap in the trees at Half Moon Beach, the bench where the young Olson stood listening to the two old men, as they smoked and talked. This is the pivotal point where, feeling the immense weight of the land behind you, the overriding impulse is to turn and face the sea. The boy, whose wrists were already too much for the sleeves of his tight jacket, said that he was spellbound by what he heard: that male need to talk the day down. He knew their names, Lou Douglas and Frank Miles. A lazy, companionable exchange, in the face of lengthening shadows, as they draw on pipe or cigarette. For Charles Olson, this is where it all begins. Unnoticed, he listens. Then he turns back, up through the deserted park, where earlier he had played baseball with his friends, and across Hough Avenue to the holiday cottage. To his family, the summer community.
The force of Olson as a personality was so potent, back then, because our estrangement from the local product was absolute. We didn’t buy English anger, which seemed to be nothing more than a media-friendly staging post on the way to peevish rural retirement, empty bottles on the porch, second wives in red fur nursing black eyes. We didn’t buy class envy or class entitlement as a thesis. We didn’t buy the campus (or any other form of convenient bureaucracy) as a setting, a vehicle for satire, or comforting murder mysteries. Which is to say, we were denim-and-corduroy puritans with Diggerish aspirations, overread, underused. Wide open to the enticement of the Other, emanations of prairie Spirit; charisma, vision, prophetic pronouncements. Peyote shamanism. Territorial adventures. Peru. New Mexico. The genealogy, laid out with intricate lines and boxes, ran from Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis to Olson and Ed Dorn. Which is why, with no inhibiting sense of contradiction, we sat on a train with cold, greasy windows, travelling the slow way, past reservoirs, pylons, waste-burning chimneys, reed beds, frosted fields and humps, from Liverpool Street to Cambridge.
1971. And the 1960s were hitting their straps, doing the hard graft, after those earlier Kodak-colour excesses, the not-so-free festivals and stalled revolutions. Chris Bamford, a little tighter, more sandpapered, nail-chewing over wide cups of black coffee in the upstairs kitchen, was back from New England on a flying visit. There was content here still to be unpacked, he said. Family to acknowledge. But there was also distance, now he had lived in those fictional places. There had been films with Ginsberg and Ed Sanders. Uncertainties were racked up, mystics and philosophers sampled, along with aspects of sacred geometry and architecture: Blake, Kathleen Raine, Gregory Bateson. The realization, so Chris asserted, of a new planetary culture. The man on these islands with whom he needed to make contact was a certain Mr Prynne, a poet. The poet. The bridge, as he insisted, with brisk cutting gestures, rattling the plates, printing a sticky line of burnt crumbs across the taut ridge of his hand, between the two countries, our soon-to-be-conjoined cultures. He projected some form of eighteenth-century correspondence, actual letters, between himself in Massachusetts and this unknown scholar in Cambridge.
Irregular bulletins from the Lindisfarne Association of West Stockbridge arrived in Hackney; packages were passed around the kitchen table. In the photograph of a conference ritual, whitefolk in loose shirts and tight jeans holding hands in a frowning circle around a Hopi Indian man wearing beads and a bandana, Chris is clearly visible, a head taller than Janet McCloud, a member of the Seattle tribes. For the consecration of ground, before a grail chapel could be constructed, the rind of Celtic spiritual traditions must demonstrate its affinity with Native American practice. ‘I am the hill where poets walk. I am the tomb of every hope.’ There were no known photographs of Mr Prynne. His books were text, pure. With, perhaps, a red-ink diagram. He avoided, as we discovered at the entrance to his stairs, in the labyrinth of his Cambridge college, extraneous academic distinctions. Like a surgeon, he was listed on the wall as a plain mister among congeries of black-lettered doctors and professors.
It had happened again, just like Dublin. Chris acquired a copy of The White Stones, ordered from the English publishers and shipped out, at the very moment when I, stopping to browse on a walk across London, picked up a copy in the bookshop on Primrose Hill, where, two years before, I had filmed an Allen Ginsberg signing session. I stood by the enticingly stocked poetry shelves reading those opening lines: ‘The century roar is a desert carrying/too much away; the plane skids off/with an easy hopeless departure.’ I was sold, instantly. I wasn’t going anywhere, but I loved the idea of it. White stones, like the ones the military used to paint as borders around huts, confirming this transatlantic causeway, but in a powerful new European register. The landmasses had once been attached. The cover of Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, published by Jonathan Cape in London, celebrates Earth before she started to come apart at the seams, some 125 million years ago. The time of Gondwanaland, before the great divorce and migration of continents. ‘A while back,’ as the introductory note puts it. When Ireland kissed Greenland. And Brazil’s shoulder dug into future slaving grounds. ‘The war of Africa against Eurasia has just begun again,’ Olson said.
One of the miracles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the old railway zone of Camden Town, before the strangling evolution of the leather-and-vinyl market, was the independent bookshop called Compendium. The success of this operation was remarkable. It grew, seemingly overnight, from a tall, sallow man hunched, in a wretched, holed-at-the-elbow, down-to-the-knees sweater, at a foldout table with a dozen paperbacks, to an interconnected series of caves, one of them given over entirely to poetry. I bought Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger 1 & 2, date inscribed: 17/2/70. This was a giant leap in the mental health of the metropolis; the confirmation of that unitary vision expressed at the 1967 conference, up the road at the Roundhouse, the old engine-turning shed. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we had an operation equal to Foyle’s in Charing Cross Road – but where the salesfolk actually knew about books – parachuted into a convenient halt on a loop of the North London Line.
Anything was possible now. Stuart Montgomery, the publisher of Dorn’s Gunslinger, a wispy-moustached medical man with a significant hobby, decided to do something about the sluggishness and indolence of the mainstream critics. He flew off to Las Vegas and took a cab to the hotel where Howard Hughes was rumoured to be sequestered in the penthouse, to present him with a copy of the poem in which Dorn shaped the pencil-moustached ghost’s non-existence into a divine comedy of cocaine and virtual travel through high sierras and white deserts running to the horizon like the bad craziness of a Monte Hellman western. It was that craziness we used to call the possible: that an invisible London publisher could provoke a reaction from the richest hermit on the planet, an unbarbered Texan tool-bit weirdo guarded by Mormon goons; that Howard Hughes, a fabulous entity capable of impersonation by Leonardo DiCaprio, would sue a poet and a doctor with unsold paperbacks stacked in his North London garage. Oh yes, those were the days. The bibliographic cornucopia of Camden Town, with its US imports, its French theorists, its New Age primers, was a classic small-business model. Money-laundering to a purpose. The whole pre-Thatcherite, wild-dog enterprise was underwritten by the area’s other growth industry: drugs. Arrest, incarceration, downsizing followed, with the shop taken over by a management committee of the workers.
Navigating the shelves, I pulled out The Kitchen Poems, on the strength of the publisher’s name, Cape Goliard, and in irritation, because this was the title I had chosen, and now had to revise, for my own first book. J. H. Prynne’s slimly elegant package invoked Olson; the cover design was an oil-exploration chart of the North Sea, produced, so it seemed, by Esso. I got, all at once, the common ground, but not how smartly and acerbically this English don bit down on economics, consumption and profit in the body of who and where we were. The tender address. ‘The ground on which we pass,/moving our feet, less excited by travel.’
Mr Prynne had travelled, so he told us when we settled into our big chairs in his Cambridge rooms. He was at home, we were not. But he made us welcome, by staying within the gracious formality of the place where we found ourselves. The sort of unnerving geography we had both experienced in earlier interviews of rejection. He was a tall man, uniformed in pressed grey flannels, with polished black shoes, black cord jacket and white shirt heretically enlivened by an orange tie. The look was not accidental, like our own, nor was it subject to the fads and revisions of fashion. He spoke of a voyage to the ice fringe, the Northwest Passage. That haunting blankness, pictures with no frames. And Boston, he’d done a year there. Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard. Prynne investigated the university bookshop by starting at the left-hand corner of the top shelf, and ploughing on, with the occasional wince and whinny, until he reached Olson. So that connection was confirmed. We felt comfortable enough now, to make our risky suggestion: that Mr Prynne should become the rector, or guiding light, of a British version of Black Mountain College. How this might be funded, who else would be involved, where the premises were to be found, we did not explain. We knew, the three of us, that the proposition was entirely metaphorical.
We also knew that Charles Olson was much more than an outlaw enthusiasm, picked up in Ireland, supported by renegades in Bristol and communes along the Welsh borders; there was a deep engagement within the folds of Cambridge academia. And, more than that, Mr Prynne was a key supplier for Maximus research, a tireless raider of libraries. His relationship with Olson was personal, direct, acknowledged in interviews. Yes, he had heard the century’s roar and visited Gloucester. ‘I read that piece of Jeremy Prynne’s,’ Olson told the interviewer sent to bother him by the Paris Review, ‘and he says everything right, accurately.’
The heaped rooms overlooking the harbour at Fort Square. The large poet has crawled from his bed, sick again, sick of winter, kitchen in chaos, and he gestures his interrogator to a hard chair. He threw a rug from the window, that morning, to signal that he was at home and receiving. America was asleep, he reckoned. The deadest sleep there ever was. Jeremy Prynne, in England, was the energy source.
While Chris, hot, raw, twisted in the depths of the collegiate furniture, teasing out the moral complexities of the questions he needed to frame (so much depended on this), I scanned the bookshelves, encouraged by a long line of Patrick White novels. Here, vividly, and in terms I understood, was a demonstration of Prynne’s doctrine of value. These items were, I felt confident, all first editions (the bonus of originality, first touch), but, in the fashion followed by collectors in the 1930s, the dustwrappers had been removed. Prynne, clearly, had no truck with the recent fetish for book as object, for pretty embellishments by Roy de Maistre or Sidney Nolan. The words spoke for themselves and the rest was some debased form of public relations. Knowing the premium on intact copies, basically those that have never been read, I was a little shocked. And impressed. I was also impressed, and alarmed, by the casual vehemence with which Prynne wrote off certain poets honoured in the alternative canon, legendary names that were supposed to be on our side. He sliced through the looseness of language of some unfortunate who wrote to him asking for a sample of his thought. ‘Like a lump of basalt!’
The afternoon closed down around our conversation, it had run for several hours. Cambridge was wreathed in low-lying fenland mist, bands of frozen air. Every rasped breath a cancelled speech balloon. Anna, who had come along for the trip, the journey from Hackney, was out there, wandering the unwelcoming streets. I excused myself, to find her and bring her back. The novelty of this town soon exhausted itself, she said. After a cup of tea, she even ventured into a bookshop. Prynne was effortlessly courteous, brandy in hand, the chair closest to the fire. He must have wondered what this young woman, my wife, a glamorously chilled figure in a long suede coat with fur collar, was doing, keeping company with vagrant poets of absurd ambition and minimal resources.
I drove Chris to the airport, filming his departure (still scribbling into a black notebook), and he vanished once again, not to reappear for many years. The letters dried up. The correspondence with Prynne never began. Too much to say very easily becomes nothing, silence. From what I picked up as others who knew him passed through London, Chris was importing English artists and seekers. Keith Critchlow, a metaphysical geometer from the Research into Lost Knowledge Organization, delivered a series of lectures on the Platonic Tradition and the Nature of Proportion. And while the esoteric lessons of European cathedral builders were seeded in Massachusetts, Mr Prynne helped to secure passage for the Black Mountaineer, Ed Dorn, into Essex University at Colchester. Where an active American presence was being established under the patronage of Donald Davie, Prynne’s early sponsor. There was a good deal of neurotic shuttling across the Atlantic, often, like Chris, on cargo boats out of Liverpool; the longer the voyage, the better the chance of adjustment. Poets traded in difference, exiling themselves for a season to Buffalo or Berkeley. Dorn repaid the favour, with interest, by publishing The North Atlantic Turbine, mirroring the cover of Prynne’s The White Stones with an Olsonian map of the ocean and its voyagers. Dorn saw himself clearing his debt to geography and opening the way to ‘spiritual address’. ‘Off shore I have missed my country for the first time,’ he said. Colchester offered mornings walking to the Roman wall as the most casual of excursions. If he checked out The Magnificent Seven at the local fleapit, his territory, the Old West, was somehow exotic. And peculiar. A place where Mexicans were played by Germans. Hearing orange gas hiss in the fire at night, he burnt for home.
Mr Prynne stopped once when he was driving home through Hackney, and I returned a couple of times, on book-delivering expeditions, to Cambridge. The fungal abundance of late Olson was being cleaned and shaped under Prynne’s direction, prepared for publication. He understood the rhythms of the work better than anybody else. ‘The poem is simple,’ Prynne stressed, ‘but the life it came out of, and the preoccupations that surround it, immeasurably dense and confused and packed with a kind of fertile obscurity.’ We look for the point of stress where story crystallizes into legend.
The young Chicago-born postgraduate Tom Clark moved from Prynne’s college to Essex. He was friend, editor, amanuensis to Dorn, witness to all the shifts and small secrets of the era. He was onboard when Olson arrived in Colchester, to hibernate like a bear, to deliver all-night, rasping monologues. Clark was a very shrewd and sharp-eyed babysitter. He was one of the first and best to write about Dorn. Years later, Dorn recalled the London taxi in which Olson’s wealthy lover came to collect him, gather him up, setting off for London, books and effects piled on the roof like a gypsy caravan, a train in India.
Dorn and Prynne formed a transatlantic alliance, exchanging letters and texts, collaborating on giveaway newspapers, provocations. Travelling together through wilderness places. Sharing quarters for autumn sabbaticals in shacks and mountain outposts. When Dorn died, from pancreatic cancer, Prynne flew the Atlantic, and crossed the continent, coast to coast, to deliver the eulogy at Boulder’s Green Mountain Cemetery. It was not recorded, nor should it have been. In a conversation, after the event, Prynne remarked on how unusual Dorn had been, in that his ear was so finely tuned to the modulations of the English voice. To John Clare, for example. ‘I was in correspondence with Charles Olson at this time,’ Prynne told his interviewer, ‘and I knew him through the post quite well; and Olson was an extremely difficult, powerful, and overriding personality.’
Towards the end of what had been a dazzling and diverse career, as poet, talker, teacher, Dorn, out of favour and under attack from twitching internet fingers all too easily affronted by his cutting and wilfully incorrect humour, gave his attention to European heresies, the Albigensians of Languedoc. He wanted to get to Rome, where he noticed the cats. Now Dorn, once again, was being published through fugitive editions in England. The poet Nicholas Johnson, through his Etruscan Books imprint, delivered Westward Haut and High West Rendezvous, in which Dorn remarked: ‘It’s a lot easier to be a heretic than it used to be. There are more religions willing to kill you.’
The particular rendezvous that brought me into contact with Dorn occurred in Bath. He was stepping westward again, to witness the solar eclipse, which he described as a ‘big event’. Jeremy Prynne was with him. They had read together, a scene brokered by Johnson, at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. The unusual, probably unique, aspect of this was that Prynne never gave public readings of his poetry in England. He explained once that there might be a confusion of identity, as he had a professional role as a lecturer. The other business was conducted on his own terms. He might perform in Canada or Paris, not here. So this was something very special. And given, without any prior publicity, out of respect and friendship. Prynne spoke of his admiration for ‘Thesis’, from The North Atlantic Turbine. A poem of the far north written in Colchester. ‘Only the illegitimate are beautiful.’ Dorn arrived, Prynne recalled in his obituary interview, at a small remote settlement in Newfoundland, so impoverished that the people there had no desire to know anything of the casual visitors. They turn their backs on them, pushing Dorn not towards resentment or shame but pride: the rare achievement of getting the scene down in measured, careful description. Mapping it just as it stood.
We filmed and recorded the Dorn part of the evening, none too effectively, keeping our distance. Prynne of course banished the cameras and ripped out the microphone. He explained, quite slowly, what he was going to read. And then he read it, without Dorn’s anecdotal asides and the obvious, chemically enhanced emotion.
When we met next day, by arrangement, in Bath, in the abundant garden of a cheese-stone Georgian house, it wasn’t easy to set aside the knowledge that this would, in all probability, be one of the last interviews.
Dorn had always been lean and cool in appearance, hard times known and survived. But there was no surviving the pregnancy of the tumour, or the news from Baghdad, the ruined ‘Cradle of Civilization’. ‘My tumour is interested in what interests me … My tumour is not interested in love.’
‘Before Languedoc,’ Dorn told me, ‘I always had a thing about the Apaches, because their rejection of European values and European existence actually was total. Total. And their hostility was total. And the Apaches were absolutely unapologetic about their primitiveness and their ruthless measures to survive and to exist alongside the juggernaut of what they could see. They saw this juggernaut as unresistible. They saw that. They probably didn’t see the use of the telephone.’
And what about that big shadow on the gallery wall, the missing presence in Bristol, Charles Olson? What were the memories of the era when they all travelled so recklessly and to such purpose?
‘Oh yes,’ Dorn replied, ‘those were amazing times. There were notable evenings in Colchester. Jeremy came over from Cambridge and Tom Clark came around. Olson turned our house into a kind of salon. Those were beautiful active times. I mean not literary active, but more expanded. It was never literary with Charles. He liked the literary. But that was a small role for him.’
And London back then?
‘A lot more traffic and a lot less clutter. The traffic, as random as it sometimes seemed, seemed also purposeful. People actually did have things on their minds, no matter how strange those things were. They were actually going to a place, no matter if they arrived there or not, or if it was the wrong place. For a poet the world is always static in the sense that you’re a mass observer and you can’t afford to care whether people are busy or not. You’re a witness.’
And the Arnolfini – did it matter that there was no proper documentary record?
‘I think last night’s reading was historically interesting and significant. But things of that nature have to be borne away by the witnesses. Sometimes I think that it’s a shame it’s not captured. But, in a way, it’s such a moment that capturing it is defeating it.’