Susan Sarandon leaned across the table of Elaine’s restaurant in New York, and said, ‘Louis and I are going on to Woody Allen’s party later, and you’d be very welcome to join us, he’d just love to meet you both, wouldn’t he, Louis?’ Louis Malle nodded. Brian and I agreed it was a very tempting offer, but thanks anyway, we’ll just grab a cab back to the hotel, after all, it was nearly eleven o’clock. As I write this I can’t believe we were so weary as to turn down an invitation to meet Woody Allen and Jane Fonda, not to mention spending more time getting to know Susan. (Monsieur Malle seemed a nice enough guy, but he was too old and serious for her. What this up-and-coming young actress needed, I reckoned, was to be seen on the arm of a Liverpool poet. This one.) But the arm had to be up early to catch a flight to Toronto, so it left Elaine’s restaurant on 42nd Street and went straight to bed.
The Great American Poetry tour of 1979 had been pulled together by Olwyn, a friend of ours who worked for the London Poetry Secretariat, and Clodagh, a fizzy Irish bookseller, based at the time in Yorkshire, who thought there was money to be made in selling our books at the readings. It would be an On the Road adventure, with Clodagh driving the hired Buick from college to college across the eastern seaboard, with Olwyn in front map-reading and the two poets in the back being witty and lyrical. We flew from Gatwick on 9 March and checked in at the Chelsea Hotel where the desk clerk amazed me by saying, ‘Weren’t you here a couple of chapters ago with the Scaffold?’ I congratulated him on his surreal memory for faces and asked if this time he could give me a room, if not without cockroaches, at least with different ones and he was happy to oblige.
After only two readings, at Colegate University in Hamilton and Bucknell in Lewisburg, it had become obvious that Clodagh had brought too many books. Whereas at home if we performed to an audience of 300 to 500, a third would buy a book after the show, in the States, even though we had some of the biggest ever turnouts for a poet, the only ones interested in buying books were the professors. Eight gigs stretched over twenty-seven days, including an evening at the Harbourfront Arts Center in Toronto, was never going to make sound economic sense, but now it began to look like economic suicide, and the lack of media coverage meant that our visit would remain a secret beyond the thirty-two walls of the venues we played. I am, by nature, reasonably docile and accommodating, but Brian is less so. I’d had the Irish Christian Brothers beating the virtues of patience and fortitude into me at school, but Brian hadn’t. I had been on the road with the Scaffold for twelve years, having to deal with difficult managers, stoned drummers and stroppy landladies, but Brian hadn’t. He wanted to go home and said so frequently in the back of the hired Buick.
Thirteen days into the tour we drove the 380 miles from Lewisburg, crossing the Susquehanna river to stop off in Toledo where we were made welcome by two local poets, Nick Musca and Joel Lipman, who put us all up at their house. At eleven the following morning they dropped Brian and me off at Lucas County jail outside the city, where we would read and run a workshop for those inmates with an interest in poetry. How would we deal with 500 verse-starved convicts, we wondered? After the reading should we divide them into smaller groups for the workshop according to ability or to the seriousness of their offences? ‘Hands up those who know what a sonnet is? Good, hands down.’
‘Hands up those who are in for first-degree murder? Good, hands down.’
As it happened, only three had volunteered, all drug offenders, and our task was to keep them awake when the medication was wearing off and, once the guard had handed out small plastic beakers of pills, to keep them from climbing up the walls and writing gibberish. On our release at the end of the day we were worn out, and looking forward to a few cold beers and a smoked possum pastie, and were totally unprepared for what lay in store. The birds had flown. On the table in the kitchen was a note from Clodagh saying that Olwyn had flown to Los Angeles, which had always been part of the plan, and she had flown home, which hadn’t. It had all become too much for them. Apologies and good luck for the rest of the tour etc. In the corner of the room, like vanities awaiting the bonfire, stood a huge stack of our poetry books.
To this day I’m still not quite sure why they did a runner. I mean, later we would hear rumours of slipped discs, trouble on the domestic front as well as a ‘mushrooming of Brian’s insecurity’, as Clodagh put it in a letter to Jonathan Cape who had supplied the books, but in truth, it came as a bolt from the blue. No hints, no dark mutterings, just a hurried note and the itinerary with details of the remaining venues, as well as the books, most of which Brian and I decided to leave in the safe hands of the Toledo poets to await collection.
Monday 26 March 1979: 7.45 on the road with Nick and Joel, who have gallantly stepped into the breach to drive us to Dayton for tonight’s reading at the Catholic University. They are a sort of literary Cheech & Chong, very upfront and easygoing, forever rolling joints and passing round jugs of home-made ale and wine. I realise that Brian and I are not very good at fun, and assume that if Nick and Joel had been Liverpool poets Clodagh and Olwyn might not have fled.
Next morning Hansel and Gretel are left to their own devices as we board the 10.55 a.m. Greyhound bus for Pittsburgh. Previous romantic ideas about Greyhound buses are quickly dashed, for this one is just another smoky coach filled with those who can’t afford quicker and more comfortable means of transport. Eight hours later the Mersey chapter of white trash alights heavily at Pittsburgh and heads for the university, where it will be staying for a couple of nights.
We are to take part in an international forum, as well as giving a reading, and so are cosseted in the monogrammed heaven that is the University Club. That evening, over a leisurely dinner of Blue Point oysters followed by fillet of beef with blue cheese, served with whipped acorns and marshmallow, we look at the itinerary and wonder if we should cancel the reading at a New York bookshop, for which there is no fee, and fly directly to Canada.
Friday 30 March: You can’t enter the breakfast room without a tie, so the maître d’ pulled out a couple of Garrick Club ties from under the counter so that we could sit down to a plate of sausages, buried alive under french toast the size of paving stones, golluped in syrup. Taxi to airport and a one-hour flight in home-made plane to La Guardia airport. It is 70 degrees and humid in New York, ideal conditions for the mushrooming of insecurity.
As it turned out, the reading that night at Books & Co. on Madison Avenue proved to be one of the highlights of the tour, with a large, enthusiastic crowd including our old friend John Brown from Jonathan Cape, his great-uncle Maurice who had been a sweetheart of Ivor Novello, and a young actress none of us had heard of at the time, Susan Sarandon, who invited us to join her for supper the following evening. If only I had listened to my body: Go to bed reasonably early, Roger, for I need sleep. What I don’t need is more fillet of beef with blue cheese, and bottles of red wine and bourbon, and smoky bars, for remember we have a special date tomorrow and who knows, you may get to meet Woody Allen. But I didn’t listen and next day my body was disassembled, my brain inert and my film career in tatters. On Sunday morning a chastened duo flew into Canada and after an easy 2–nil victory at the Harbourfront Arts Center, which was packed with expats, we shuffled off to Buffalo for the final twitch of the Great American tourette.
Thursday 5 April: Lift to Buffalo with Vic and Gerry, not ice-cream makers, but Canadian poets and friends of Greg Gatenby who programmes the Harbourfront. We pass the Harrisburg nuclear plant with the car windows tightly shut and holding our breath, because there has been a leak recently and people round about are terrified, and rightly so. No one is eating Hershey bars any more because the milk from local cows is said to be infected. For the first time in weeks we read the newspapers in preparation for our return to the real world. In Pakistan, President Bhutto has been executed. At home, Jim Callaghan has been forced to call a general election and in Alabama there is a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
Saturday 7 April: Arrive Gatwick 08.00. Train to Victoria. Taxi to Euston. Train to Liverpool. Thelma to Crete.