Magic Bus

by Rory Maclean

  ‘“America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel,”’ Kalkan quotes from memory, nodding with new enthusiasm.

  ‘I didn’t know young Turks had even heard of the Beats,’ I say with sharp delight.

  ‘Come on. Ginsberg’s poetry emboldened dozens of our best writers: Can Yücel, Ece Ayhan, Cemal Süreyya. Dylan inspired Erkin Koray, the father of Turkish protest music. Joan Baez played a concert here. Their example gave us courage to voice our dissent,’ he insists, thinking of Turkey’s decade of rapacious military dictatorship. ‘In those hard years, words and lyrics were a vital social and intellectual resource.’

  ‘As they were in the West,’ I say, leaning forward and shifting my chair on the stones, indulging our shared passion. ‘People really believed that music could change the world.’

  ‘At times, dreams are as important as bread.’

  Over salted slivers of anchovy flecked with garlic and thyme, I tell Kalkan about the Grand Tourists, precursors of the Intrepids. After the Napoleonic Wars, young Englishmen, for the most part wealthy Romantics, travelled in their numbers to Rome and Greece, then the crossroads of classical and contemporary culture. On horseback, by bone-rattling carriage and in the shadow of the Pantheon, their formative experiences established the concept of travel as an adventure of the self as well as a means of gathering knowledge. Like the hippies who followed them a century and a half later, the Grand Tourists looked abroad for models for political reform and a free-love alternative to Christianity. Both groups aimed to learn and extract pleasure from ‘the foreign’. Most of all, they travelled to be transformed.

  ‘The Grand Tourists changed Regency society like the sixties changed the West,’ I tell him. ‘The counterculture searched for a meaning of life outside the old institutions. Are you saying the travellers changed Turkey too?’

  This is my first chance to examine the effect of the Intrepids on the peoples along the trail.

  ‘We saw hippies as revolutionaries,’ replies Kalkan. ‘They travelled without money, rejected materialism, cut their relationship with career and government. Their objective was to know themselves.’

  ‘But most critics think they were naive and cultish,’ I say, at once envious and wary of their search for themselves. ‘Flower Power can be seen as sentimental Romanticism.’

  ‘Their liberal values were innocent,’ he tells me, ‘and they spread in a soft way throughout Turkish society. Our women began to feel they had the freedom to act as they wished. Young villagers re-evaluated their culture because of hippies’ love of native clothing. They showed that there was a way of finding peaceful solutions to problems. They helped us to see that the world belongs to the people: wherever you put your feet is home.’

  ‘Many of them were stoned out of their heads.’

  ‘But all of them had flowers in their hair. Philosophical flowers,’ he nods, lifting his hands as he talks, as if balancing ideas. ‘And their greatest effect was after their journey.’

  ‘On America and Europe?’

  ‘Europe used to be just one colour: white. It used to have one religion: Christianity. The West believed that world history began with Greece and Rome. As you say, the hippies were curious for different cultures. From us, they learnt that Mesopotamia – here in Turkey and the Middle East – was the mother of all civilization. They carried home with them a kilim woven from different beliefs: threads of Islam, sky-blue of Buddhist prayer flags, silver from Hindu temple bells.’

  ‘Like the Romantics and neo-classicism,’ I point out. ‘The frontier of the exotic was simply pushed further east, the imaginative potency of Italy replaced by India. Asia was the new touchstone of the ancient.’

  ‘Their travels made Europe aware of colour, of our common heritage. In a way, humanity was reborn.’

  Kalkan laughs once more, perhaps at himself, perhaps at adolescent ideals, and runs his hands over his close-cropped, ink-black hair.

  ‘For me, it was because of the hippies – not Silk Road traders or colonists – that most Westerners discovered the East.’

  A nightingale sings in the cedars and the evening’s mist rises from the strait. Waves of cool air flow around us heavy with the scent of honeysuckle and judas blossoms. Green leaves rustle behind a wooden railing. A sleek, stray cat slips behind the pots and across the top of a wall. In the old Greek house, Kalkan’s mother serves us yoghurt soup with mint. Afterwards, we return to the garden for tea and more conversation by the pale light of stars.

  Some time after midnight I complete my first notebook and thank Kalkan for his time. He dips his boxer’s head and thanks me for indulging his memories of flowers and fireworks. He jots down the names of friends in Ankara and Cappadocia who might be willing to help me. We shake hands at the door. I hesitate before turning away.

  ‘How did other Turks – apart from young liberals like yourself – take to the first travellers?’ I ask him. I knew that many single hitchhikers were raped and at least one German couple murdered along the road. I think of the bombs which have rocked Mediterranean resorts in recent months.

  ‘For twenty-seven centuries, Istanbul hungered for new ideas,’ he answers me.

  In the year Ginsberg published Howl, cosmopolitan Istanbul had a population of one million: Armenians, Greeks, Jews, the sons of old Byzantine families and daughters of Ottoman households.

  ‘But today the dağli – the villagers from the mountains – do not welcome change.’

  Turkey’s years of political turmoil ended in 1983 when prime minister Turgut Özal, a former World Bank economist, liberalized the economy and stimulated a business and tourism boom. The city’s population grew tenfold, the vast majority of new residents migrants from rural Anatolia. But many of the incomers – despite the influence of travellers, television and work in Germany – remained rooted in an earlier century. An angry minority grew embittered by their country’s race to become Western.

  ‘The dağli are scared, by the size of the city, by liberal society, by America’s ways. They retreat into insular communities. They don’t want reform. Kalkan fixes his eyes on me. ‘They fight to survive.’

  I walk down the uneven streets. A line of late-night washing drifts in a roofless ruin. I cross the Golden Horn at Galata Bridge, still bristling with fishing rods despite the hour, and climb into a hilly neighbourhood of stepped streets and Maritime pines cradled in the Bosphorus’s arms. As I walk, I think of the Grand Tourists and the first Intrepids, about the sixties impulse to reinvent the world and today’s anxious acceptance of one’s place in it. Law students play backgammon under the vines. A yawning, veiled woman pushes a wakeful child on a swing. A sleepless mussel-seller mops his neck with a cloth.

  Istanbul touches me in the fluid Arabic script of its Iznik tiles, in its expressways built over Roman roads, in a lamb feeding on the grass precincts of a mosque. Yet for all its richness, I’m pursued by a gnawing hollowness of heart. Part of my attraction to the sixties is that era’s reverence for immediacy, for self-surprise, for the imperative to Be Here Now. Most of the time, I find it hard to seize the moment, to live every act as if it were my last. I reflect on the day, simplifying and eliminating experiences to understand exactly what stirred me, and recognize how shaken I am by the chance meeting with the dippy, weeping hippie. I worry that I lost an opportunity by letting her go.

  At that moment, a flash of light catches my eye. I look up, realizing in an instant that I want to see her line of candle flames sweep across the inky sky. Instead I watch the landing lights of a descending aircraft.

  I buy a kebab and crash out in my room.

  3. The Times They are a-Changin’

  The beginnings are easy to trace.

  First, On the Road with Jack Kerouac, his soul stripped naked, his body hungry for release, his heart ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’.

  Next, in New York on Bleeker Street at the Mills Hotel, where Allen Ginsberg, aged twenty-four, is ‘blowing Jack�
�, coming out of the conformist 1950s and into the rebellious, hopeful decade.

  Then, on MacDougal at the Rienzi and the Gaslight with bongo-beaters and wide-eyed runaways in turtlenecks reading frayed copies of Kierkegaard and asking, ‘Like, where do we go from here?’ Their parents survived the Depression, came home from Normandy and Guam, took shelter in materialism and suburbia.

  Now, poets like Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti reject the spiritual emptiness of their unexamined lives, plead for the resurrection of America’s soul, rail against the ‘concrete continent, spaced with bland billboards, illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness’.

  ‘Beyond all laws, it is our stunted consciousness that imprisons us, and we suffer from a consequent hunger of the spirit,’ writes novelist John Clellon Holmes, friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg. ‘How are we to break out of this prison? How do we let the spirit prosper so that the blistered desert we are making of the world can flower again?’

  The new generation sets out to change the world by changing itself, and not only in rich, post-war America. On the Mersey and in London, bomb-blitzed and ration-grey, down at Canning Dock and Wardour Street, ravers and hipsters begin the transformation. The Quarry Men play the Cavern Club. The Who grind out ‘My Generation’ at the Marquee. Mods make five-bob deals at the Flamingo. Michael Horovitz launches New Departures ‘to make poetry and to realize visions in the way Blake realized his Jerusalem’. On Eel Pie Island in the Thames – once a Victorian pleasure garden – sixteen-year-old girls listen to John Mayall, buy the International Times at the Barmy Arms, then hurry home to finish their homework.

  Teenagers are hacked off with the tired old ways and days. Economic prosperity and the welfare state have liberated them. They’re casual about jobs, passionate about ideas, hungry for innovation. At Better Books on Charing Cross Road and on the BBC, they tune into Ginsberg chanting about ‘angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection’:

  World world world

  I sit in my room

  imagine the future

  sunlight falls on Paris…

  Trafalgar’s fountains splash

  on noon-warmed pigeons…

  gold dolphins leaping

  thru Mediterranean rainbow

  White smoke and steam in Andes

  Asia’s rivers glittering…

  London re-creates itself as a city of and for the young. East End boys sport winklepickers and drainpipe jeans. Capital punishment is suspended. National Service ends. Marianne Faithful, singer and girlfriend of Mick Jagger, writes about never renouncing youthful hedonism in favour of the insane world of adulthood. In art schools and at the 2-Is coffee bar, from dole-poor Notting Hill to hip Chelsea, kids abandon their parents’ Kingdom Come of postponed pleasure to catch hold of the living, transient world. They sing love songs and never doubt the reach of their grasp. Their decade unfolds with a feeling, ‘out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing,’ as writes Tom Wolfe. A feeling that it is ‘very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world’. Kids who face no unemployment, who fear no hunger, who have the chance to imagine no boundaries; a footloose generation devoted to the acquisition of experience and self-knowledge.

  At home in Minnesota, Dylan reads Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues. ‘It blew my mind,’ he says, ‘because it was the first poetry which spoke my own language.’ That same year, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brings his simple form of meditation from the Himalayas to the West. In Arizona the next spring, campaigner Margaret Sanger witnesses her dream become reality, the approval of the birth-control pill. Three months later, John, Paul, George and Ringo, appearing as the Beatles for the first time, play ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ at the Indra Club in Hamburg.

  In Turkey, the new, searching consciousness awakes when Erkin Koray sings his first protest song. In Tehran, the women’s magazine Zan-e Rooz rejoices in youth by launching a Miss Iran competition. In Afghanistan, the country’s first democratic constitution establishes basic liberties, permitting student demonstrations and giving rise to thirty-three independent publications.

  In India, young people embrace political and spiritual regeneration as well as rock ‘n’ roll. Nehru’s socialist democracy champions an alternative Third Way that is neither dictatorial Soviet egalitarianism nor cold-hearted American capitalism. The caste system is reformed and feudal estates are discarded along with imperial subjugation. A generation adopts the Nehru jacket to celebrate the triumph of self-determination over colonialism.

  In Nepal, the beginning is marked with the completion of the first road from the outside world to nirvana, in the same year that Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East is published in English. Two years later, the first Boeing 707 Clipper Jet lifts off from New York for Europe, doubling speed and halving fares across the Atlantic.

  In 1960, Kennedy is elected, the first US president to be born in the twentieth century. This virile, attractive leader articulates the lofty values and poignant ambitions of the utopian revolution, heralding the opening of the New Frontier. At his inaugural address, he proclaims, ‘Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike that the torch has been passed to a new generation.’ His brother Bobby helps to shine its light beyond America’s shores. ‘There is discrimination in this world, and slavery, and slaughter and starvation,’ he says. ‘The answer is to rely upon youth – not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity.’

  Kids. Their decade begins all over Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’: on the Alabama bus where Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white passenger; at the first Greensboro Civil Rights sit-in when four black freshmen sing ‘We Shall Overcome’; in Washington with the first $5 donation to the National Organization for Women; in Greenwich Village at the gay Stonewall Inn; off Sunset Boulevard where novelist Aldous Huxley flings open the Doors of Perception on his first mescaline trip; on damp, impassioned Aldermaston CND marches; among the Paris Left Bank duffelcoat clique listening to Moustaki’s Métèque; in dreamin’ California when restless pioneer Ken Kesey fires up his psychedelic school bus; and, of course, in the music.

  ‘His voice is crude, his appearance scruffy and as a performer he lacks all traces of a professional,’ writes Village Voice of an early Dylan performance. ‘But one brief listening to the emotional understatement in his voice emphasizes the power of his lyrics and his genuine concern for the state of the world.’

  Dylan sings ‘The Times They are a-Changin” at Newport. Peter, Paul and Mary record ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. Ray Charles instructs, ‘Hit the Road, Jack’. On both sides of the Atlantic, lyrics inspire, guide – or in some cases misguide – the search for a new way of living.

  Roger McGuinn of the Byrds speaks of the camaraderie between musicians as ‘a sort of international code going back and forth through records’. In a Manhattan coffeehouse, Dylan writes ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, its melody derived from a black spiritual ‘No More Auction Block for Me’. His ‘Talkin’ New York’ inspires Pete Townsend’s ‘My Generation’. After living in India, Jorma Kaukonen, Jefferson Airplane’s lead guitarist, brings Asian tonality to psychedelic music. Dylan’s ability to write profound songs that huge crowds can sing encourages John Lennon to pen ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Keith Richards derives the riff of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ from Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’. When Ginsberg first hears ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, he shocks his New York confrères by jumping to his feet to dance. Music and literature chronicle the generation’s desire to love one another and all mankind.

  ‘Our goal was not only the East, or rather the East was not only a country and something geographical,’ writes Hesse in Journey to the East, ‘but it was the home and youth of the soul, it was everywhere and nowhere, it was the union of all times.’

  4. I Saw Her Standing There

&n
bsp; I’m transcribing my notes, laptop surrounded by breakfast plates of honeydew melon, sweet cucumber and saffron-yolk eggs. To ease my labour, there’s cherry nectar, tasting sugary and round on the back of the tongue, plus waisted glasses of strong, black Turkish tea. My binder is propped open by a chipped saucer of oregano olives so earthy that I’m tempted to spit the stones on to the grubby floor.

  Modern Istanbul’s complex geography renders it all but un-mappable: three dozen districts swelling over seven hills, no single centre, fingered by water, jumbled in time. Age dilutes its fluidity. I can’t keep a grip on its currents of slippery politics, of chaotic transport, of residents drawn together to argue, talk and trade. Its light is maritime, a sea lies over each shoulder, yet the city is 2,000 miles from any ocean. A ten-minute stroll takes me from a sleepy Greek fishing village to a Hapsburg cul-de-sac reminiscent of a Klimt painting. Across the horizon surge waves of new world tower blocks. In the expanding spiral of my wandering, I find its anarchic streets, its shifting colours, its millions of voices, its dreams of a legendary past at once foreign and familiar.

  I’m at the Pudding Shop, the first meeting point on the trail. In 1957, two brothers from the Black Sea, Namik and Idris Çolpan, opened the Lâle Pastanesi across from Istanbul’s Blue Mosque. For a couple of years, well-to-do Turks stopped by for frothy black kahve and honey-soaked baklava topped with green pistachios. Then, the tiny, open-fronted patisserie attracted the attention of the early overlanders, both because of its central location and their sugar-craving munchies. Overnight, the travellers made the Lâle their place, renaming it the Pudding Shop. Outside its door, London double-deckers and fried-out Kombis parked along the Hippodrome. Pop music played in its garden. The well-to-do Turks stood outside, their mouths agape, watching their sons and nephews – among them Ersin Kalkan – drink coffee with paradise-bound freaks in Apache headbands and paisley waistcoats.