The following is, I believe, a sort of lost Patteran Page. I came across it whilst pruning my blog archive folder. It’s dated June 16th 2005, but it seems that it never got any further than desktop before being consigned to the vaults. So here it is emerging into the light…
GO WEST…
I wrote a while back about my long-term, long-distance relationship with America, including as metaphorical illustration of the passion a poem called Driving to America. Further reflections were stimulated recently whilst reading a fascinating book by Barry Miles called The Beat Hotel. It depicts an on-&-off six-year period spent by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso & William Burroughs in a run-down little hotel in the back streets of Paris. Behind the accounts of their day-to-day lives – Burroughs’ constant quest for exotic drugs, Corso’s womanising & trips into Europe, Ginsberg’s attempts to interest publishers in France, Britain & America in the work the three of them were producing – is a delightful picture of the Europeanising of three very Transatlantic Americans. There seems little doubt that the breadth, depth & character of the writing that emerged from all three during the late ’50s & early ‘60s owed much to their apprehension of a larger, more cosmopolitan world, experienced within that most cosmopolitan of cities.
For me, middle class & English, the preoccupation with America began in childhood in the ‘50s – an easy obsession in a Britain still under the post-war spell of American culture. With enormous reluctance, my grandmother took me to see Where The River Bends in a dark & smoky South London cinema. While I fell in love with James Stewart in a sheepskin jacket, she counted the minutes, grudgingly admitting only to admiration for the scenery.
But from that brief encounter on, I was entranced. The scrappy back garden of my grandparents’ apartment, the local bomb sites, Balham Common all became part of a dreamscape of high bluffs & roaring rivers. Wearing my grandfather’s panama hat & a bright orange cowboy shirt with white piping around collar & cuffs, & packing a golden Lone Star six-shooter, I roamed the range. And then, when pocket money started – in pence first, then shillings – I began the huge collection of Western novels, biographies & histories that still fill shelf space in this room.
Later, the sense of a mighty landmass on which those early settlers made so little initial impression was augmented by a powerful awareness of its urban culture. New Orleans jazz came first & then shortly afterwards the hurricane impact of rock and roll. There I was, a porky little boy with a side parting & sensible shoes, transfixed by the barely contained hysteria of Presley’s rockabilly & the thick, glossy shufflebeat of Fats Domino. I wept at Buddy Holly’s death; I rejoiced at the arrival of the 45 rpm disc; I learned E, A & B7 on a Spanish guitar.
The arrival of adolescence & the discovery of the Beats occurred simultaneously. As if timed to accommodate that first testosteronal rush, a fat little paperback appeared in the station bookstall – Protest – The Beat Generation & The Angry Young Men. I couldn’t identify with the latter – all those disaffected British working class youths who’d just missed the War & were pissed off with everything in a beer-&-fags sort of way. But the Beats seduced me instantly. Where once I had been John Wesley Hardin, hands clawed over my low-slung guns, or Gene Vincent, pop-eyed & skew-legged at a microphone the size of a small icebox, now I was Dean Moriarty & Sal Paradise digging Charlie Parker in Birdland. I filled school exercise books with appalling pastiches of Kerouac’s laconic, Corso’s manic & Ferlinghetti’s epic verse. I wore a huge black jumper & tight black jeans. (I drew the line at sandals: my dad wore them all the time, with thick grey socks). By the time that The Beatles arrived & were swiftly superseded by The Rolling Stones & Bob Dylan as icons of cool to die for I was way ahead of the game.
The world turned & turned again. With bewildering speed we stumbled out of the 20th century, mass-communicating & multi-tasking like professionals so that even the enemy – the old, &, more deadly still, the middle-aged – knew the meaning of zeitgeist. And as one of the latter I do my best to keep up so that I can engage the young in erudite debate about the socio-cultural authenticity of hip-hop lyrics & the future for lite-metal bands.
But from within this postmodernist Piccadilly Circus of merging & synthesising influences I look back sometimes with fierce nostalgia to the innocence of my own Wild West, my own jump-jive rockabilly parties, my own Greenwich Village coffee house poetry readings. Purity & unadulterated essence are what we all seek to restore, I guess. And that dreamtime America provided both landscape & soundtrack to my childhood & youth.
Well, the overwhelming message is that dreams are dreams & the real world of school, work, ill-health & death is where we should spend our days. But the weirdest of codas to my own dreamtime USA was provided when I visited the States for the first time. As I stood by the Pacific on the North Oregon coast, or watched the trucks barrelling down through Seattle, I realised that in some strange, prescient way I had anticipated what I now perceived & that dreamtime & realtime America were very close &, without having noticed, I had stepped across the dividing line.
11:12:06 PM 
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