In 1991 a young Scottish critic, aptly named Andrew Murray Scott, published a biography of Alexander Trocchi entitled The Making of a Monster. The book, though riddled with errors of fact and interpretation, nonetheless came as a shock. It reminded me forcibly that Trocchi, who when I first met him was as close to a definition of “life force” as I had ever encountered, was not only dead but virtually forgotten. The man whom William Burroughs had rightly touted as “a unique and pivotal figure in the literary world of the 1950s and 1960s” was, by the time of his death in 1984, hardly remembered even in his native Scotland.
The book was also a graphic shock, for staring out of the dust jacket was a superb photograph of Trocchi: the tousled hair; the thin, angular face with its strong chin and prominent nose; the broad, seemingly guileless smile. But it was the eyes that revealed – or at least suggested – the monster: they smiled, too, but only to seduce, to charm, to cajole and, yes, to con. It is the Trocchi I knew in Paris in the 1950s, then later in New York where he lived and wrote Cain’s Book. It is the Trocchi who describes himself in that “novel”:
I also am tall. I was wearing my heavy white seaman’s jersey with a high polo neck, and I sensed that the angularity of my face – big nose, high cheekbones, sunken eyes – was softened by the shadows and smoothed – the effect of the drug – out of its habitual nervousness.
I met Trocchi just after he had brought out the first issue of an English-language magazine published in Paris, intriguingly entitled Merlin. There were half a dozen writers and poets involved – English, American, Canadian, South African – and I became one of them. Ranging in age from our early to mid-twenties, we were all, despite the disparity of our geographies and backgrounds, deadly serious about Literature and Life. Of course we were in Paris for reasons partly romantic, but we differed from the so-called Lost Generation in several respects: Paris may have been our mistress, but the political realities of the time were our master. This was the dawn of the Atomic Era, and the Cold War was upon us: the world was divided into camps no longer armed with simple guns but with the weapons of the apocalypse. Richard Nixon was in Washington, and so was Joe McCarthy, whose unofficial envoys, Cohn and Schine, came rampaging through Europe sowing fear and distrust. Stalin was paranoid, but not, it seemed to us, without some reason. And the first of those seemingly endless wars, Korea, was in full swing, bleeding America of more than its GIs’ blood.
There was no way we could remain neutral, for neutrality was the death of the soul. In the debate between Camus and Sartre that rent the European literary establishment in those days, we clearly sided with the political scrapper over the detached philosopher, the engagé over the non-engagé. We were not just different from our Paris-based elders who had filled the cafés of Montparnasse in the Twenties, we were the extreme opposite: pure literature in the sense that a Joyce or a Gertrude Stein understood it, experimentation as an end in itself, seemed to us impossible.
The first issues of Merlin could not have exceeded sixty-four pages, but each bore the weight of the early Cold War world on its meagre shoulders.
In this context, Trocchi struck me, and I believe all of us, as the most talented and prepossessing writer on the scene; the one who, had a straw poll been taken, would have been voted most likely to become our generation’s Joyce or Hemingway or – more likely – Orwell. Compared with Trocchi, who was only a year or two older than most of us, we were babes in the woods, fumbling towards knowledge or the hope of knowledge. He on the contrary was sure of himself, and his writing reflected it. He had already been married and divorced, was the father of two beautiful (albeit abandoned) daughters. He had already published stories and poems and was putting the finishing touches to his first novel, Young Adam, in which several British and American houses had expressed interest. That existentialist novel, as grim as the times in which it was written, was an exceptional first work, written from the same viewpoint and suffused with the same fervour that motivated Merlin: man is alone, and though he may not be responsible for what Fate has meted out to him, that does not mean that responsibility can be sloughed off like some reptilian skin.
During those Merlin years I was as close to Trocchi as I have ever been to any friend or colleague. We talked endlessly about every subject, serious or frivolous; we sweated the publication of the magazine, always short of funds; we launched an ambitious and monetarily mad book-publication venture. We worked together closely, and always in harmony.
Why then, rereading Cain’s Book thirty-plus years after its original American publication, do I have such a feeling of pleasure on the one hand and anger on the other?
Explanation of the pleasure is easy. In 1960, Norman Mailer, never a pushover for compliments to competitors, wrote of Cain’s Book: “It is true, it has art, it is brave. I would not be surprised if it is still talked about in twenty years.” How does it stand up, not two but three decades later? How many books can withstand the erosion of time, the weight of their own shortcomings, the change of interests and sensibilities, the ever-evolving political realities? Cain’s Book does stand up, amazingly well. The prose is taut and still fresh; the metaphors are striking and accurate. One can open the book to almost any page:
Fay’s face was more reserved. Swinish? More like a pug than a pig. Her untidy dark hair tumbled into her big fur collar. A yellow female pigdog, her face in its warm nest beginning to stir with knowing.
But the inauthenticity was in the words, clinging to them like barnacles to a ship’s hull, a growing impediment.
Tom Tear... was leaning backwards against the wall and his soft black eyelashes stirred like a clot of moving insects at his eyes. His face had the look of smoke and ashes, like a bombed city.
Jody loved cakes. She loved cakes and horse and all the varieties of soda pop. I knew what she meant. Some things surprised me at first, the way for example she stood for hours like a bird in the middle of the room with her head tucked in at her breast and her arms like drooping wings. At first this grated on me, for it meant the presence of an element unresolved in the absolute stability created by the heroin. She swayed as she stood, dangerous as Pisa.
Other qualities: Trocchi has dealt with the tough subject of drugs and the junkie life with rare truth and candour. There is no romanticism here – although several reviewers have likened Cain’s Book to De Quincey and Baudelaire – the addict aware that he is “the loneliest man in the world”. Honesty toward oneself is the linchpin of this clearly autobiographical work: Trocchi/Necchi isolated from the world; the outsider by choice but now, through drugs, by necessity; Cain, the violent and inviolable; the mole who burrows beneath the surface of the “normal” world, like Sade, the eternal homme révolté, yet as harsh and unrelenting about himself as he is about the bourgeois society he detests.
Only the proselytizing strikes me today as heavier and more obvious than I had remembered it, but thirty years ago I had argued to edit out some if not much of it, and lost. An editor’s role is to suggest, not dictate, and the soapbox was very much an element in Trocchi’s existence in 1960, as he railed against the world he had chosen and battled the authorities to keep out of jail. In fact, I suspect it was the battle itself that Trocchi relished, for it constantly resituated him in his self-proclaimed role of underground man, of bold warrior against misguided authority, a latter-day Sade who was convinced that the blind laws and callow mores of the day were not only hypocritical but directed specifically against him.
The parallel with Sade is more than superficial. Like the “divine Marquis”, Trocchi used his “malady” – drugs – to forge a work of art. True, his meaningful opus is painfully thin compared to the massive legacy of Donatien-Alphonse, but in contrast to sexual obsession, drugs debilitate, render the user remote both in time and space, and are ultimately lethal, not only to himself but to those around him, as Trocchi’s life all too sadly attests. Sade’s sexual fantasies, coupled with his constant rage against society, goaded him to greater and greater eloquence and provocation. Trocchi’s increasing immersion into the world of drugs – which he explained, using historical and literary precedents, as both wilful and necessary to his artistic and personal fulfilment – withered his exceptional creative gifts. And they were exceptional: I remember vividly first reading the then incomplete manuscript of Young Adam, and marvelling at both style and content, at the ease with which the sentences and paragraphs rolled from Trocchi’s battered typewriter. The creator and self-critic were in perfect harmony, and the author’s assurance contained not a whit of arrogance. That talent was also manifest in those days in Trocchi’s writings and manifestos in Merlin, and even in the work-for-hire novels he produced with amazing speed for Maurice Girodias’s burgeoning Olympia Press.
What a change, then, when ten years later, as the editor at Grove Press working on what was to become Cain’s Book – the tentative title for which, by the way, was “Notes towards the Making of the Monster” – I witnessed the painful effort with which each page, each paragraph, each sentence was wrested onto the blank page. Since money was Trocchi’s daily obsession, and he had spent twice over the advance the contract called for, we had reached an agreement – echoing the opening pages of a novel both Trocchi and I admired perhaps above all others, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy – whereby Trocchi was given further small “advances” only as he turned in fresh pages. By then nothing came easy to Trocchi: he who in his ringing statements in the early issues of Merlin had set out to influence, if not to change the world (he was too canny to believe a literary magazine could actually change the world), now spent his waking hours hustling money in order to score – in itself a full-time job – while at the same time dodging the evil forces of the law. Drugs not only set the user apart from society, but in Trocchi’s view set him on the high moral ground where all is permitted and all excused. Whether one agrees with the premise – and I speak not only of drugs-as-truth but of any moral or immoral equivalent – the fact remains that Cain’s Book documents a life, and a view, with rare power and insight.
James Campbell, a Scottish critic who confesses to the youthful and abiding influence of Cain’s Book on his own life and view of the world, wrote recently in London Magazine that Cain’s Book is not a “masterpiece” but a “mastercrime”, a “book to give to minors, a book to corrupt young people”. For there is no question that Trocchi set out if not to corrupt then certainly to shock, precisely as Sade had two centuries before him. His is an insidious message: play is more important than work; drugs are mind-expanding, ergo a positive force; laws are made and meant to be flouted; morals and mores are so much claptrap (this from a man who not only turned his new young American wife on to heroin but also reputedly put her out on the streets of Las Vegas as a hooker a scant six months after their marriage, a man who clearly practised what he preached).
“I am outside your world,” Trocchi wrote to a friend in the 1960s, not long after he had forsaken St-Germain-des-Prés for Greenwich Village, “and am no longer governed by your laws.” The problem was – and in his heart of hearts he knew this – in coming to America in the late 1950s Trocchi was consciously entering enemy territory, a climate far more hostile towards drugs than almost any other place on earth he might have chosen. However outside the law he was in his mind, the laws did exist and, as events proved, he could not avoid them. When he fled the country in 1961, wearing, it should be noted for the record, not one but two of George Plimpton’s suits (and therein lies a whole other tale), it was with the threat of a death penalty hanging over his head, and his wife languishing in a stateside prison. Once I asked him whether this constant threat, this need forever to spend his day looking over his shoulder, was not utterly wearing, debilitating. “Not at all, Dick,” he said convincingly, in his seductive, lilting Scottish accent, “on the contrary it’s exhilarating to beat the bastards at their own dirty little game.” Did he really believe that? Maybe in the short run; certainly not in the long.
When I wrote of Trocchi ten years or so ago, and expressed regret at what I felt, in the context of his great talent, was an unfulfilled promise, I received a scathing letter taking me to task for my arrogance. Who was I to pass judgement on him? How dare I express anger at what he did – or did not do – with his life? And of course he was right.
My anger, I realized, stemmed from my memory of that earlier Trocchi, my brother, of what he promised versus what he gave. I was angry at the junk that destroyed him – for destroy him it did. I was angry at the thought of the books he could have written and did not. To which Trocchi, again, would reply that it was not junk that destroyed him. Junk was but a tool, freely chosen and fully justified. It is a conversation we had had many times before, but, like the believer and the atheist, we had long since ceased to have any common ground for an unimpassioned discussion.
And yet, putting all this aside, and rereading Cain’s Book once again after all these years, there is no doubt of its importance. With William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, it ranks as one of the best works to deal seriously and honestly with the subject of drugs. And as in the case of Burroughs’s masterpiece, what some critics at the time of first publication attacked as its “formlessness” emerges as an integral and essential element of its enduring value. It is a book not to be taken lightly. It has, as James Campbell notes,
been banned, burnt, prosecuted, refused by book distributors everywhere, condemned for its loving descriptions of heroin use and coarse sexual content... Cain’s Book is more than a novel: it is a way of life. The book is autobiography and fiction at once, the journal of a fiend, a stage-by-stage account of the junkie’s odyssey in New York, an examination of the mind under the influence, a rude gesture in the face of sexual propriety, a commentary on literary processes and critical practices, a chart for the exploration of inner space.
“There is no more systematic nihilism than the junkie in America,” wrote the Scotsman Trocchi. In fact, as a description of that life, and that stance, Cain’s Book is without peer in contemporary literature.
– Richard Seaver, 1992