Read American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light for Free Online

Charles Dickens once did, and making pointless reports. They cough out books and papers in sorry imitations of spontaneous composition, their antics anticipated by Kerouac in the figure of Count Condu from
Dr Sax.
Condu is a vampire, newly arrived from Europe, hot for innocent American blood, ticking over on a pint and a half decanted from a young girl, ‘just below the ear lobe’, after stepping ashore in slushy, fish-smelling Boston. The
coming energy thieves, fact-checkers from the academies of Budapest, Berlin, Rome, London, must be countered by the native Dr Sax (an avatar of W. C. Fields and William Burroughs), who takes the form, this time round, in a perfect Kerouacian shift of gears, of the poet Carl Sandburg: ‘thin as a shadow on the wall’, walking at night through a black area of Long Island, having just come off a Montana freight train.
    9 Lupine Street in Centralville, the birth house – remembered, in shimmering golden hurt of light, 12 March 1922 – is a quotation. Fresh-painted, balconied, red-shingled, with drooping flag and satellite dish on the roof. On the street are two deep-red recycling bins. This is now a well-kept, security-fenced neighbourhood of shiny black cars and broad puddles reflecting and inverting the quiet scene. A green memorial plaque confirms absence, end of story.
    ‘I have a recurrent dream,’ Kerouac said, ‘of simply walking around the deserted twilight streets of Lowell, in the mist, eager to turn every known and fabled corner.’
    From the moment of reading
Maggie Cassidy
, in Wales, at the period when I was researching the life and mythology of Dylan Thomas by interviewing his friend the poet Vernon Watkins in his Gower bungalow, and BBC producers in Cardiff, and publicans and fishermen and fellow drinkers in Laugharne, a process of twinning and twisting and overlaying began to evolve. I wouldn’t have presumed on identification with Kerouac’s achievement, only with some of the biographical incidents that went into the mix. There was the attraction of the footballer held back by the compulsion to write, accepting poetry as a filter between experience and the invention of a self fit for the world that contains it. Kerouac grew up hearing that French-Canadian patois, as I was attuned to Welsh as the first language of my mother, maternal grandparents and great-aunt, and of the small mining town as I moved around it, an appendage of the old folk, kicking my heels, waiting for elaborate exchanges of courtesy, in words I experience but do not properly understand, to play themselves out.
    So there was place: working, failing, romanced. I went with my
father to visit a hermit who lived under a corrugated-iron roof in an excavated warren, in the tolerated corner of a farmer’s field. The image stayed with me, that there were such invisibles, grizzled solitaries who performed a role like the disreputable vagrant figures out of the western states, coming to lodge in riverside Lowell huts, before fading into their fictional roles as spooks or freaks in the apocalyptic vision of a provincial town splitting open to reveal the maw of hell, the day of judgement, at the climax of
Dr Sax.
When hills and lakes are revealed as manifestations of a life-swallowing serpent: the labyrinthine cellars of tortures, heresies, imprisonments. The murders Kerouac would witness directly or share with friends like William Burroughs.
    South Wales/Massachusetts: if there was a secret in America worth extracting, it was known to Dylan Thomas and to Kerouac, both of them drawing on the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake.
But without that Homeric reach, the confidence to go all the way back to the roots of language. They traded, these drinkers, small-town boys on show in cities, in the hot, wet secretions of their hyper-magnified childhoods. Funerals of siblings, aunts, parents. Do not go gentle. Unresolved arguments with dead fathers who won’t go away.
Dr Sax
composed in Mexico City, ‘Ancient Capital of