American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light Read Free Page B

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