to america/not to america

I was supposed to fly to the USA on Thursday for a three-week trip, giving readings in Florida, Boston and the Bronx and running a drama workshop in upstate New York. But because of a past error, there is a note about me in the US customs system. In 2022 the college hiring me to give some lectures didn't tell me the right visa to travel with, so I was refused entry and flown back to London. Because of this, and the fact that the UK Foreign Office just last weekend changed its advisory on visiting the USA - warning that any discrepancy in paperwork could result in deportation or imprisonment, as has already happened to tourists and academic visitors - I’m too afraid to fly and have cancelled the trip.

***

This Post is a love letter, till we meet again.

In the autumn of 2023, and several times since that incident - in the years before the new regime - I did fly to America.

I had adapted my book Drinks With Dead Poets as a one-act play focusing on American poets, written in the summer of 2023, for my friends at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, and we staged this version for a week at the Nyack Festival, an hour up the Hudson River from Manhattan. I played Max, a version of myself. In the following spring the play had a run off-Broadway, with a proper actor taking the role of Max. We were nominated for ‘Best New Play' in the Broadway World Awards, and came second.

I present a section of the play here, adapted for Substack.

***

On the hottest day ever recorded in America, a bewildered Brit called Max wanders into an empty bar, with nothing in his pockets but toy soldiers.

He meets Ashling and Zack, who run the bar. Ashling is busy: she has been ordered to erase every word in an old copy of Wuthering Heights and seal it in plastic for burial. Ashling is a ‘Rag’, one of the Minority: she is attached to a silken rope that leads out of the door. It tethers her to every other Rag in the nation, but the Rags are tolerated by the Majority, the ‘Flags’, because there are so few Rags left, and, after all, there are good people on both sides.

And besides, the ribbons are pretty: ‘Ashling has a blue ribbon,’ Zack explains, ‘but Helen Proctor’s is purple. Jenny Danville’s is of white and purple lace. I know for a fact on account of I had to help the young lady out the other day, she got all tangled up with the Greenwood twins in the churchyard, but they will go round and round.’

In truth, this America - that has developed while Max was sleeping off some heavy smokes by a campfire in the Catskills, in the way of Rip Van Winkle - may seem dystopian to you or me, but is in fact quite peaceful, as resistance has been almost wiped out, and the Flags live their lives untroubled by dissent or protest or thought of any kind.

Here are some of the new Constitutional Amendments mentioned in the play:

The 28th: ‘The Right To See No Evil.’ The 29th: ‘The Right To Hear No Evil.’ The 30th: ‘Whatever the Other One is.’ The 66th: ‘The Law shall protect those who wish to live In Other Ways’. The 67th: ‘The 66th Amendment can go screw itself.’ The 97th: ‘[Books] shall be buried at the appointed depth, which shall be no more nor no less than three feet and two inches.’ The 98th: ‘That there should be enough opposition voters to force a vote, but not enough to win it.’ The 99th: ‘You know we said the books should be buried? We mean burned.’ The 100th: ‘That a Hoedown shall be held while the books are being burned.’

Today is the day of the County Fair, there’s dancing and stalls and a Prettiest Leg contest, and a Liberty Barbecue.

Twelve books had been hidden in a hollow in the woods by an old woman, Mrs Manitou, but they found her. She has been taken away to ‘The Festival, where she’ll have her own stall and everything’ and the twelve books she was hiding will be burned at the Fair.

***

Those twelve books were all books about American poets, their lives and letters. They are the last copies of those books on earth, and as the sweet smoke drifts into to fill the air in the bar, strange things begin to happen…

It’s the Drinks With Dead Poets way: everything the Dead Poets say is something they wrote, verbatim, in a diary, or a letter, or a memoir…

So Ashling and Zack seem briefly possessed by the spirits of Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, helplessly voicing the words they wrote, while Max tries to understand…

Ah, music, very nice, that’s not a hoedown.
I don’t hear anything. I smell the barbecue – disgusting.
I guess the wind changed direction, Ashling.
We’ve had no wind since Eastertime. Heaven is large, is it not?
 
[As ASHLING breathes the smoke from the barbecue, she is turning into EMILY DICKINSON, and can only speak the words Emily wrote. MAX is confused]

I’m sorry, what was that?
Life is short, too, isn’t it…
You’ve taken a spiritual turn, Ashling, I like it.
Then when one is done, is there not another, and – then if God is willing, we are neighbours then.
I don’t know. Ask Mrs Manitou.
Wouldn’t I love to be there…
What at the Festival? It does sound peaceful. As in Rest in Peace.
October is a mighty month. Today has not seemed like a day. It has been most unearthly.
I second that, my friend.
The world is just a little place, just the red in the sky before the sun rises, so let us keep fast hold of hands, than when the birds begin, none of us be missing.

Can you hear that music?
The bells tick in Amherst for a fire, to tell the firemen…
Amherst again… I think I know who you’re playing, Miss Ash. Zack does his poet and you do yours. I might move here, it’s great.
I love my friends. I know it’s love for them that sets the blister in my throat.
This is a role-play if it’s not a dream. And it’s not a dream because I can see my toy soldiers. So you’re a poet in Amherst?
I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.
Since we’re – wherever we are – I’d love to ask you some questions.
Love makes us heavenly without our trying in the least.
Well. Yes. What made you a poet, my friend?
I had a terror I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying-ground, because I am afraid.
Don’t be afraid. Noli timere, as Mr Heaney said to his wife on his deathbed.
Little cousins – called back.
And that’s - what you said - on yours...

Max begins to figure out what’s happening…

Zack, can I ask you, was Mrs Manitou a lover of poetry?
Sure she was. That was all she knew and what the hell use is that?
Do you know what the twelve books were, the ones they found in her folk museum?
Why would I know that, I abide by the law. Man it’s hot out there.
But – what if they were books of poetry, or old journals of poets, or letters, or diaries – and as we speak those books are burning…  So… what happens to the words when they leave the page and take their leave of the world…
Good kindling for a cookout, what’s your problem?
But if it’s never been this hot… what if, at these temperatures…
Lost me, you freak. I figure you for a limey Rag.
What if… the words know they have to leave, like butterflies, but they don’t know where to go, so they settle on a human soul, where they can be heard aloud one last time…
And I figure it’s time you were on your way.
Butterflies on human souls, before they’re gone forever…

[The chaos grows, and as more smoke fills the room, all sorts of other poets’ voices are heard from the mouths of Ashling and Zack. At one point Ashling can only speak the words of Edgar Allen Poe (bold) and Zack only the words of Sylvia Plath (bold italic)…]

A pretty little witch! A pretty little witch! Bostonians…
Mr Poe, do you mind? I’m talking to Miss Plath now –
I like Boston. I was born there, I am heartily ashamed of the fact.
Can I introduce you guys?
What if our work isn’t good enough? Rejections, rejections…
We all get rejections, Sylvia –
Isn’t this the world telling us we shouldn’t bother to be writers?
You should definitely bother!
The Bostonians are very well in their way.
Edgar, that’s cool, I’m just trying to talk to –
Their pumpkin-pies are delicious. Their poetry’s not so good.
Is anyone anywhere happy?
Bostonians… Frogpondians! Write what I would they would swear it to be worthless. Were I to compose for them a Paradise Lost they’d pronounce it an indifferent poem! So I delivered them a juvenile poem and they received it with applause.
You’ll do all right, Edgar, believe me.
The Frogpondian newspaper insinuates we must have been ‘intoxicated’ to deliver such a poem to them. Why can’t these miserable hypocrites say drunk and be done with it? I have a great deal to do; and I’ve made up my mind not to die until it’s done.
Tell that to her.		[i.e. Sylvia]
I advise her to get drunk too, as soon as possible.
Cheers. Always delightful hanging out with poets.

[Ashling (as Poe) delivers ‘The Raven’ for one last time on earth, and is gone.]

[When Ashling returns she is someone completely different…]

Civilization is coming to an end.
Here we go again – and what do you do, ma’am.
[sarcastic] ‘And what do you do, Mrs Parker?’ I write. There’s a hot job for a healthy woman. I wish I’d taken a course in interior decorating. I wish I’d gone on the stage. What do I write? I write captions. ‘This little pink dress will win you a beau’, sort of thing.
So a magazine?
They were plain women working at Vogue, not chic. Nicest women I ever met. Most of the models are from the mind of Bram Stoker.
Can you cheer us up, Mrs Parker? Sylvia’s losing hope and I’ve lost my mind. Say something funny?
I ain’t funny. I haven’t been funny for years. 
Tell us about the Algonquin Club?
I wasn’t there very often, it cost too much. 

[And Zack speaks in the voice of the young Sylvia, unpublished, all out of hope…]

Henry Holt rejected my book last night with the most equivocal of letters…
Jesus keep going, for heaven’s sake! – Tell me about the twenties, Mrs Parker?
Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said ‘You’re all a lost generation’ and we all said ‘Whee! We’re lost!’ 
I have forty unattackable poems. What a writer I might have been…
I promise you Sylvia, that letter will come, the sun will shine, you will have your high moments!
People in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.
I haven’t worked at all. Not one tenth hard enough.
A writer is a worker, no different from other kinds of workers. He has no right to look down. I wish I could write something that would make a lot of money.
As it happens, a Hollywood studio has bought my epic poem, Mrs Parker. I don’t expect it’ll ever get made. 
I can’t talk about Hollywood. A horror to me when I was there, a horror to look back on. Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side window was a wonderfully slinky mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white suede glove wrinkled about the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.
Fitzgerald went to Hollywood, right?
It was terrible about Scott. The director who put a finger in his face and complained ‘Pay you? Why, you ought to pay us.’ When he died no one went to the funeral, not a single soul, or even sent a flower. I said ‘Poor son of a bitch,’ a quote right out of Gatsby, and everyone thought it was another wisecrack. It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes. (to Sylvia) I’m not being a wise-cracker. You know I’m not, don’t you honey?
I have my own dream, not the American dream.

[Dorothy reads a poem for the last time, and is gone. Then Sylvia starts to remember something - Max wonders what’s wrong - ]

You all right there, Miss Plath?

(in bliss, remembering) Seated at the typewriter, I saw the light-blue shirt of the mailman going into the front walk of the – millionaires next door, so I ran downstairs. One letter stuck up out of the mailbox and I saw – The New Yorker – on the left corner in dark print. My eyes dazed over. I ripped the letter from the box. It felt shockingly – hopefully – thin. The black thick print of Howard Moss’s letter banged into my brain: ‘Dear Miss Plath, I say Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor seems to me a marvelous poem and I’m happy to say we’re taking it for The New Yorker…’

[Sylvia reads ‘Lady Lazarus’ to the empty bar, then she and her work are gone.]

***

[Now Ashling rushes in panicked, and runs to the window -]

It was the children, it was the children! The Flags are mad! They’re coming down from the Fair! They burned the Hospital Nightclub, they burned the Library Bistro! They’re putting the Schoolhouse Casino to the flames! They want to send us all to the Festival! The children, it was the children!

What do you mean it was the children?

The children knew all the books by heart! They started reciting poems when the books were burning, the children had learned all the poems by heart, because we told them not to – because we told them not to! – so they did because they’re children! Our beautiful children! All hell broke loose and the Flags are really really mad!

[ZACK bursts in, wearing big headphones, menacingly]

What poems, Miss Ash? I can’t hear any poems…
They couldn’t help it, Zack, we didn’t know they’d learned the poems, they must have done it in the night-time!
Is that a poem now? I can’t hear you…
I know some poems by heart if it helps…
You ought to get the hell out, Max, look they’re coming down Main Street, they’ve all got headphones!
Let’s show Zack a poem –
I don’t know any poems any more!
I do, Ashling, I’ll say it, you do the actions!
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

[ASHLING starts to mime the Frost poem]

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Stop that, stop that, it makes no sense!
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth…

[ZACK pulls out a blindfold and binds his eyes so he can neither hear nor see, as 
MAX recites and ASHLING mimes another poem]

I can’t hear you, I can’t see you! I’m free, I’m free!
Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

[ZACK, blindfold and deaf, goes to a drawer behind the bar and takes out a gun. 
MAX and ASHLING drop behind the bar in fright, as ZACK moves around 
threateningly, armed, blind, deaf, confused, crying out the only song he knows]

‘Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free - that’s classified!
‘Tis a gift to come down where – where? - that’s classified!
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
‘Twill be – that’s classified!

[ZACK goes still as the music returns, overwhelming all of them. Now the last 
embers of the books drift through, all sorts of poets, a mad cavalcade of 
identities. The bell rings and ZACK goes in a trance to the open mic, as 
MISTRESS ANNE BRADSTREET]

My Dear Son Simon Bradstreet… you once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more…

[ASHLING rises from behind the bar and goes to the open mic. MAX emerges too]

Mistress Anne Bradstreet, born Northampton, England, dies North Andover, Massachusetts… Wait, how do I know that?
Never let Satan prevail against me… Wickedness comes to its height by degrees…

[ANNE goes. ASHLING is JOHN ROLLIN RIDGE]

There was no refuge, no shade and no water. Our friends would not 
have known us…
John Rollin Ridge, of the Cherokee Nation…
At last we reached Hangtown, at the western foot of the mountains.
First Native American writer, born New Echota, now Georgia…
Thousands were already digging, at every little hole for six miles, up and down the creek. There was not a solitary place to dig. Every claim was taken up. I never saw such a game in my life.
Also known as Yellow Bird, dies in California, age forty... I have no idea how I know that. 
Mining is the hardest work that ever human being performed. Miners are obliged to rest for days at a time, and while they’re resting their money is passing into other hands.

[As JOHN exits, ZACK returns as HART CRANE]

I am concerned with the future of America! The Brooklyn Bridge! 
Hart Crane, born Garrettsville Ohio…
The matchless symbol of its destiny! As the particular view of the bridge’s span from my window on Columbia Heights inspired the form of the entire poem!
Dies in the Gulf of Mexico…
I'm sailing for New York on the Orizaba from Vera Cruz on 24th! Goodbye everybody!
Don’t board that ship, Hart Crane!

[HART exits, ASHLING returns as LANGSTON HUGHES]

I know very little to tell you about the Blues.
Langston Hughes, born Joplin Missouri…
I once wrote a Blues for Bessie Smith and never did anything with it. It’s nothing unusual but I’m sending it to you. If you see her ask her if she likes it.
Dies Stuyvesant Hospital, East Village, New York…
I'm going to read some of my poems at the Penguin Club, some downtown white place, on Thursday. First time I ever did such a thing but I might like it. Hated to turn down their invitation.

[ZACK returns as ALLEN GINSBERG]

On codeine on the bus up to Veracruz…
Allen Ginsberg…
A heavenly file of female saints ascending a starry gold stairway winding up into the sky…thousands of little saints in blue hoods with round sweet smiling faces looking out directly at me the beholder – Salvation!
Born Newark New Jersey.
The weight of the world is love…
When I build my jail I’m going to put all the good people in and leave the bad ones out. Surely then the world would be amusing. 
I’d like to write a monstrous and golden poem about the fall of America…if poetry can be made of ashcans why not headlines and politics? It’s strangely up to us to save the USA…
Dies, New York New York.

[ALLEN exits. ASHLING returns as GWENDOLYN BROOKS]

623 East 63rd Street. There was a good deal of life in the raw all about me, I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. 
Gwendolyn Brooks, born Topeka Kansas.
A writer should have as much education as she can manage. I urge those children who ask me How do you become a writer? Stay in school, of course! and read as much as possible. The books afforded by today’s schoolhouse are not sufficient. A writer needs to read almost more than her eyes can bear, to know what is going 
on, and what has gone on.
Dies December, 2000, Chicago, Illinois.

[ZACK returns, both he and ASHLING now speak as WALT WHITMAN]

My own New York, not only the New World’s but the world’s city! It was a happy thought to build the Hudson river railroad right along the shore. The river at night has its special beauties.
Walt Whitman, born West Hills New York.
I like to watch the tow-boats, with their twinkling lamps, and hear the husky panting of the steamers, or catch the schooners’ shadowy forms, like phantoms, white, silent, indefinite out there. The Hudson of a clear moonlight night!
I never could explain why I love anybody, or anything.
I'd been to the opera that night, and was walking down Broadway on my way to Brooklyn, when I heard loud cries of the newsboys… Fort Sumter, firing on the flag at Charleston…
One of us read the telegram aloud, while all listened silently. I can almost see them now, under the lamps at midnight... 
A cautious official predicted it would blow over in ‘sixty days’.
Secession War? Union War? Whatever, it’s even yet too near us.
The dream of humanity, the vaunted Union we thought so strong – it seems already smashed like a china plate. Those white palaces – the dome-crowned Capitol there on the hill – shall they be left or destroyed first?
I stayed a long time by the bedside of a new patient, a young Baltimorean, very feeble, right leg amputated, a great deal of morphine. Very intelligent, well bred – held on to my hand, put it by his face, not willing to let me leave. He says to me suddenly, ‘I hardly think you know who I am – I don’t wish to impose upon you – I’m a rebel soldier.’ I said it made no difference.
In an adjoining ward I found his brother, a Union soldier, Sixth Maryland infantry, wounded at Petersburg, suffered much. Both fought on their respective sides. Each died for his cause.

I must mention a strange scene at the Capitol, the morning of Saturday last. The day just dawned but in half-darkness, everything dim, leaden, and soaking, the members nervous, exhausted, some  half-asleep. The gaslight produced an unearthly effect…
The poor little sleepy, stumbling pages, the smell of the hall, the grandeur of the hall itself, with vast shadows up toward the panels and spaces over the galleries… 
In the midst of this, with the suddenness of a thunderbolt burst one of the most angry and crashing storms of rain and hail ever heard. It beat like a deluge on the heavy glass roof of the hall, and the wind howled and roared. 
The nervous and sleeping Representatives were thrown into confusion, awakened with fear, some started for the doors, some looked up to the roof!
But it was over almost as soon as the men were awake. They recovered themselves, the storm raged on, beating, dashing… 
But the House went ahead with its business then, I think, as calmly as at any time in its career.
Dies, 1892, Camden New Jersey.

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself, 
I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
I concentrate toward them that are nigh,
I wait on the door-slab.
WHO HAS DONE HIS DAY’S WORK?
Who will soonest be through with his supper?
WHO WISHES TO WALK WITH ME?
Will you speak before I am gone? 
Will you prove already too late?

[The music fades, all is quiet. ASHLING and ZACK depart together, leaving MAX alone]

Don’t go… don't go... I dreamed that I knew nothing. Then I dreamed that I knew everything. And the poets of America were passing through for the last time, and there was a County Fair, and an overwhelming stench of meat, and a woman tied to a rope that went away over the hills...

[We hear the sounds of children’s voices reciting well-known American poems]

[Fade to darkness]

for all my friends in the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble.

See you soon xxx

***