lord junk himself

lord junk himself

By Denis Browne.

“To a fellow conspirator” – meeting Alex Trocchi

I doubt that the winter of ’78 was a particularly good time for anyone, apart from the ayatollahs and their heroin-smuggling secular counterparts. It was certainly a shit time for me. In the course of a few months my life had gone into freefall, splitting up with my partner and best drug-buddy, losing my flat and facing the consequences of a raging heroin habit which had been abruptly curtailed by my suppliers’ return to Singapore.

I felt like a beached shipwreck survivor, picking seaweed from my hair as I surveyed the debris of my life. I knew that I needed to clean up, but the heroin ache just wouldn’t let me be. Family and friends oscillated between desires to help me get on my feet again, and an equally strong feeling of needing to keep the addict and his attendant chaos at arm’s length. Thus it was quite a surprise when my Aunt Rita rang me, saying there was someone I might possibly be interested in meeting. She and my Uncle Bill ran a downstairs bar-cum-club in Kensington Church Street, the New Lindsay Club. They’d both been on the stage in the ’30’s and after the war had opened the Lindsay Theatre Club in Notting Hill, which eventually fell prey to developers in the Fifties. By the sound of it, the theatre club had carried considerable repute. The New Lindsay, however was no more than a large cellar, reached by narrow stairs. Then you’d have to make your way through a crowd of serious drinkers arranged around the pool table. Beyond that was the bar, where my Uncle held court in the traditional “Mine Host” position at the end of the bar. His theatrical forte had been dissolute 18th century noblemen, and he still liked to affect a raffish appearance. His white hair oiled back, a white cravat with gold pin at his throat, and a waistcoat — of a similar red hue to his face — festooned with fob chains and a gold watch.

Every night they’d travel in from Streatham by cab, usually bringing some of their dogs and parrots with them, re-create their little bit of pre-war London for the evening, before being swept home long after decent Fifties’ folk were abed. Indeed it had seemed a strange and magical place whenever I went there with my parents, who regarded it as very occasional fun but definitely risque. Bill and Rita maintained their little cocoon of old-school values, drink and cuisine. Their gods were Ellen Terry, Winston Churchill, Marlene Dietrich and, above all, the Royal Family. To them, the New Lindsay was still the height of sophistication, recalling a world where one went out to dinner, caught a show in the West End, and then impressed one’s friends with a couple of drinks in a little club one just happened to know about. But by ’78 the place was basically an after-hours drinking dive, populated by Earls Court transients and Kensington marginals.

Where Uncle Bill was an easygoing raconteur, Rita was renowned for her sharp tongue and uncompromising views. The club had been a convenient last resort when I was strung out and needed to cash a cheque, so she wasn’t short of an opinion on her dissolute nephew — “I just can’t think of anything more completely and utterly selfish than people taking drugs. And when did you last have a proper meal? Your poor mother…” and so on.

“You aren’t doing anything, are you?” she announced, rather than asked when she rang. “You’re always talking about doing some writing. Well, there’s a new member at the club — very quiet chap, just comes in for a couple of drinks and reads his book quietly, Lord! We could do with a few more like him — anyway, Bill got talking to him and it turns out he’s a writer, so we mentioned our nephew with the English degree…” This all sounded very vague, and didn’t seem to be going anywhere as Rita rambled on. It didn’t sound promising. Maybe the guy had once had an article in Readers Digest. Eventually Rita had to pause for breath, and I tried to sound interested as I enquired, “So, do you know his name?” “Well, it’s a foreign sort of name, dear — Italian, I suppose — he’s called Alex Trocchi,”

It’s hard to describe the impact this had, mainly due to its total incongruity. My most upright uptight relative was going to introduce me to Sigma supremo, the coolest of the Beats, Lord Junk himself, Alex Trocchi of “interzone A”, as I’d first encountered him in the 60’s underground press, hanging out with cool dangerous people like Burroughs, Ginsberg and Michael X. Then, a couple of years later, when my personal habits had started to coincide with Alex’s tastes, I discovered Cain’s Book, mainly because I’d read just about all the William Burroughs books I could get my hands on. As I read the book, alternating lines of coke and smack at the end of each chapter, I had a feeling of homecoming almost. This was much closer to my thinking and junkscene than Burroughs’ Martian insects and cut-ups. The descriptions of shooting up on the scows in NY caught the rhythm and vibe of smack perfectly for me. Thus, it was very tempting to interpret Rita’s call as some kind of divine reassurance that it was OK to do junk and perpetuate my addict/artist fantasies. Not only was this potentially a great literary connection, but hopefully I’d now be rescued from my fallen state of scuffling around for 10 Pound deals of the brown Persian gear which was rising like a narcotic tide that winter. Some of these things did happen, and I was to be thwarted in others.

“Oh, I think I’ve heard of him,” I said, trying to hide my excitement. Deceit is never far away in the addict’s life: in addition to my first rush of enthusiasm, I instantly perceived the grim irony of the relative trying to help me back on to the straight and narrow doing exactly the opposite, and also foresaw a lot of potential danger in a scene where such totally opposite worlds intersected.
“Well, he said he’d drop in tomorrow lunchtime to give Bill one of his books. Why don’t you come along then?”
I made the right noises, while thinking, “Jeez, I hope it’s not Cain’s Book…”

I set off for Kensington the next afternoon, genuinely excited at meeting someone I’d been fascinated by for a while, but also unable to stop myself imagining all kinds of narcotic excitement ahead. When I arrived the Club was quieter than usual. I found my Uncle in his usual place, holding a slim, white-jacketed book, with furrowed brows.

“Modern poetry, eh? Can’t say I understand it. Don’t think I could show it to Rita, though,” he said, passing me the book. I looked at it, Man at Leisure: Poems by Alexander Trocchi — although for me it’ll always be “Man at lee-zhure”, the way Alex said it.
“So is he here then?”, I asked, peering round the dimly-lit and near-deserted club.
My uncle put the book aside with relief, and motioned to the gloomy area at the opposite end of the club to the pool table. I walked past the bar, and then noticed someone sitting alone at the furthest table, reading intently, occasionally reaching for one of the drinks — a pint and a whisky chaser, as always — at his side. Alex looked up. I was immediately struck by the formidable Roman nose and hairstyle (“Like Julius Caesar, man”, he’d tell the barber), the hooded eyes that could spark into life so quickly, and the thin lips where a smile would flicker subversively, somewhere between Marlon Brando and Thomas de Quincey.

I realised my uncle was at my side, making a laboured intro about his nephew who’s interested in writing. Just as he was about to leave us, he turned to Alex, “Thanks, very — er, interesting — but I’m not really one for poetry” as he placed Man at Leisure on the table between us. As we discussed Cain’s Book, Alex realised that my appreciation of his work was more than literary. Soon I was swept away in a series of anecdotes of Sigma, smoking opium with Jean Cocteau in Paris, being on the run from the cops and the Mafia in the States, Michael X, the 60s scene, the proposed Invisible Insurrection. Everything had looked so hopeful, but then, as he put it “Everybody started dying.” This had a very personal significance to Alex and his immediate family, way beyond the lost Jimi and Janis icons, and was my first indication that experience had changed Alex from let’s-all-get-together 60s activism to a much more withdrawn, reflective and personal scene.

“So what are you working on now?” I asked innocently, after returning from the bar with more drinks. Alex shifted, slightly uncomfortably. “Och, various things”, before digressing into tales of rip-off US Mafia publishing pirates, wannabe Dutch film-makers and their inept Young Adam project. It was a tale I would become familiar with as the years went by with no new material.

Just as Alex was no longer the firebrand activist I’d expected, nor was he the voracious smack-fiend I’d been hoping for. He had his own secure personal scene, but kept it very discreet and cautious, for good reason, as I was to find out. He was sympathetic to my riches-to-rags junk story and the hassles of the lower end of the scene, but wary of involvement. Anyway, it turned out that Sunday was always Methadone Day.
“Sorry, I can’t turn you on today, old man. Why don’t you meet me here next week, and you can come back for a hit and I’ll show you some of my stuff.”
Great! I tried to sound cool as we prepared to leave the bar. As we left, Alex casually thrust the slim volume my uncle had rejected into my hand, “Eh, you might as well have this,” he said, casually, “Give me a call next week.”

We emerged on to a bleak and wet Kensington Church St and went in separate directions. As I waited for the bus on the High Street, I opened the book and read the dedication — “To Denis, a fellow-conspirator, from Alexander Trocchi.”

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a moveable void: tom mccarthy on alex trocchi’s cain’s book

a moveable void: tom mccarthy on alex trocchi’s cain’s book

“The label of nihilistic writer so often attached to him is profoundly, not just superficially, accurate: he’s nihilistic not so much in the lay sense of having a gloomy outlook on life, but rather inasmuch as his entire sensibility rests on an intimate relation with a space of annihilation, of becoming nothing”

The following is a transcript of the talk McCarthy gave at 3:AM’s Trocchi event held in Clerkenwell last week. For Denis Browne‘s see here.

I remember reading Cain’s Book in my early twenties and being struck by an almost visceral awareness — the same kind of sensation you get when reading Joyce or Burroughs for the first time — that this was momentous, important stuff. The prose seemed to affirm at every turn the presence of someone who, besides knowing how to write, fundamentally understood and articulated what literature is: what it offers, what it withholds, what’s at stake in it. When I was invited to come and talk tonight, I dug out my old Calder copy, and found I hadn’t been wrong.

One of the most striking characteristics of Cain’s Book is its refusal of story. Narrative in the conventional sense is almost non-existent, and wilfully so. In one of the novel’s many self-reflective moments, Trocchi compares his text’s progression to a landscape which is not only un-signposted but also, in its very innate formation, devoid of the ‘natural’ narrative contours which we might expect a book to follow: peaks and troughs, steady plot inclines rising to dramatic summits or climactic cliffs from which whole vistas open up, that kind of thing. Rather, it forms an ‘endless tundra which is all there is to be explored.’ Tundras are bleak, monotonous, quasi-repetitive, the same and not the same at the same time. He adds: ‘This is the impasse which a serious man must enter and from which only the simple-minded can retreat.’ Must enter: I’ll come back to this sense of obligation later.

But for now I want to stick with the landscape analogy, because it seems to me that Trocchi’s sensibility is totally spatial. Like Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus or Herman Melville in Moby Dick, he’s mapping a whole cosmogony, intuiting his way towards an understanding of a social, poetic and metaphysical layout. That’s the real action of Cain’s Book, its ‘plot’. To gain the vantage point necessary for this undertaking, he has to go out to the edge of things. Emily Dickinson often talks about finding her place on the ‘circumference’ — of the globe, of space itself, of life — a limit-point from which she can look two ways, in and out. Trocchi is drawn to this circumference, attracted by the view it offers. He finds it, in its most literal form, in a scow (or barge) moored off the edge of Manhattan, a spot from which he can peer back and see the city’s celebrated skyline dim and hazy in the distance, ‘like a mirage in which one isn’t involved.’ On the scow’s other side, the black water of the Hudson across which he’s towed at irregular intervals by tugs, and the even blacker water of the Atlantic in which he’s occasionally deposited for long stretches, ‘tottering at the night edge of a flat world’ (space, for him, is always flat). The question then becomes: Where’s that edge’s edge, the point beyond which you fall off? ‘I often wondered,’ he writes, ‘how far out a man could go without being obliterated.’

Trocchi is acutely aware that his sought-after observation post lies somewhere pretty close to the trip-line of death — just past it even, by a couple of paces. This agonisingly nerve-wracking set-up is, quite paradoxically, what keeps him steady, gives him purpose: ‘to be able to attain, by whatever means, the serenity of a vantage point ‘beyond’ death, to have such a critical technique at one’s disposal — let me say that on my ability to attain that vantage point my own sanity has from time to time depended.’ The label of nihilistic writer so often attached to him is profoundly, not just superficially, accurate: he’s nihilistic not so much in the lay sense of having a gloomy outlook on life, but rather inasmuch as his entire sensibility rests on an intimate relation with a space of annihilation, of becoming nothing.

What’s more (and here it gets really interesting), this space is also where writing itself — the act, the practise and the stuff, the matter — comes from. When he describes the billowing Atlantic as ‘like a sheet of black ink’, it’s not just to be gratuitously poetic: the dark, void-filled liquid, for him, really is like what’s inside his typewriter. Tied to Bronx Stakeboat Number 2 in what seems an interminable night, he spends his time re-reading notes whose logic is entirely circular: ‘If I write: it is important to keep writing, it is to keep me writing.’ The other author who immediately springs to mind here is Maurice Blanchot, that writer of infinite night, darkness and disappearance, and in fact some of Trocchi’s lines could have been written by Blanchot, not least the one in which he tells us that ‘the great urgency for literature is that it should once and for all accomplish its own dying.’ But where Blanchot’s ponderings on literature and the right to death are abstract, Trocchi has willed them into material form off New York harbour, given them concrete embodiment, a mise en scene: ensconced in what he describes as the ‘floating coffin’ of his scow, with ‘the emptiness of the night beyond the walls… the trackless water,’ he lays out before us, in one of the most brilliantly pared-down passages of the whole book, ‘a chair, a typewriter, a table, a single bed, a coal stove, a dresser, a cupboard, a man in a little wooden shack, two miles from the nearest land.’ Like a tracker dog, he’s hunted down literature’s ground zero, its primal scene, and set his store up there: Here it is, Here I am.

When he’s not immersed in the black liquid, he’s injecting it into himself in the form of heroin. Heroin is an essential weapon in Trocchi’s nihilistic armoury: ‘There is no more systematic nihilism,’ he writes, ‘than that of the junky in America’. If Paris was a moveable feast for Hemingway, junk, for Trocchi, is a moveable void: taking that void around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic level (the two are the same). I can’t stress enough how utterly negative Trocchi’s negative space is. It’s negative in the strict chemical or photographic sense of the word. An early sequence in Cain’s Book takes us through a kind of Proust-moment of perception and recall in which Trocchi, watching a man urinating in an alley, becomes

‘like a piece of sensitive photographic paper, waiting passively to feel the shock of impression. And then I was quivering like a leaf, more precisely like a mute hunk of appetitional plasm, a kind of sponge in which the business of being excited was going on, run through by a series of external stimuli: the lane, the man, the pale light, the lash of silver — at the ecstatic edge of something to be seen.’

Edge again. The sequence kicks off a long analepsis to an Edinburgh pub, then the image of a blade cutting the outline of a woman’s body into wood — a loop whose eventual folding back into the present dictates that Trocchi take the man back to his scow and sleep with him. But their sex doesn’t respond to a need which is, properly speaking, sexual: rather, it fulfils the requirements of the perception-memory tip he’s launched himself on. Just prior to the seduction, Trocchi tells us:

‘I experienced a sly female lust to be impregnated by, beyond words and in a mystical way to confound myself with, not the man necessarily, though that was part of the possibility, but the secrecy of his gesture.’

This is Phenomenology in action: what drives him is a longing for the world to unpack itself before us, to take form and resolution, like an image looming into view from murky liquid in a dark room.

Finally, that notion of obligation I was talking about earlier. Cain’s Book is shot through with a sense of mission. Trocchi has a task, an almost military duty to attend to. Several times he talks about being confronted by the ‘enemy’, against whose charges fixing gives him an instant ‘Castle Keep’, an enclave from which he can hold out: against his age, morality, stupidity, capitalism’s work ethic, the lot (as Burroughs would say, ‘the whole tamale’). Writing finds another role in this battle. As he divvies up his scores with them, Trocchi, intriguingly, lectures his fellow junkies on the contemporary importance of the diarist and exhorts them ‘to accept, to endure, to record’ (although whether they’re roused into Pepys-like diligence by his exhortations is doubtful). In the select moments when he references other writers directly, he invokes Beckett’s aesthetic of endurance and bearing witness and Joyce’s strategy of cunning, exile and silence. As with Joyce’s writing, there’s a real sense that Trocchi’s lays out a project which is at once political, personal and aesthetic. You can’t separate these strata in his work. His goal has always been ‘to strike permanently against uncreative work… to explore and modify my great contempt.’ Although lots of commentators try to ‘reclaim’ Trocchi from literature, set him aside from its canon, for me statements like this place him firmly within a tradition running from Celine to Houellebecq: like them, Trocchi is writing against his time, against all time, against history. ‘I felt my thoughts were the ravings of a man mad out of his mind to have been placed in history at all’ he rages, full to bursting with his mission, ‘having to act, having to consider, a victim of the fixed insquint.’

What he’s aiming for, his ultimate goal, in one sense, is the archetypal tragic moment and the transcendence that this moment offers. ‘The problem,’ he decides near Cain’s Book‘s end, ‘has always been to fuse the fragments of eternity, more precisely, to attain from time to time the absolute serenity of timelessness.’ Yet at the same time he rejects the very aesthetic mode (tragedy) that would allow this absolute serenity and timelessness to happen — as he has already told his fellow junkies, it’s ‘the death of tragedy which made the diarist more than ever necessary.’ Basically, he’s a Modernist: classically, essentially. And what we’re ultimately encountering in Cain’s Book is the Modernist quandary that turns around failure of tragedy — the same quandary articulated by the work of Eliot, Conrad or Faulkner. I want the transcendental tragic moment, but I can’t believe in tragedy anymore, therefore my writing will both self-frustrate and form the record of that experience of self-frustration. This paradox is what gives Cain’s Book its final, brilliant ending, in which Trocchi first recognises the inadequacy of art and literature in actually ‘accomplishing’ anything, muttering dismissively ‘such concepts I sometimes read about, but they have nothing in intimacy with what I am doing, exposing, obscuring’ — then immediately, compelled as always, carries on producing work, showing us, again, the scene of writing: the typewriter, the half-written page. ‘Only at the end,’ he writes, ‘I am still sitting here, writing, with the feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still…’ And he lets us know that as soon as he’s finished the paragraph he’s going to go into the next room and take drugs. Eventually, as we know, the writing itself would slip away, until only the void was left. This was probably distressing to those who knew and loved him; but, given the trajectory he’s cast himself along, it seems ‘correct’, the ending that his work, in its extraordinary honesty, demands.

Finally finally: I think Trocchi is important, more so now than ever. We’re living in a time when the very ‘uncreative work’ against which he permanently struck is dominating culture, especially in the field of publishing. All too often, pliant authors are content to serve as little more than copywriters advertising neoliberal concerns, churning out middle-market copy for conglomerates, and all too often broadsheets who rely on these conglomerates for revenue try to persuade us that this copy is literature. Well it’s not; and Cain’s Book is. It’s a book in which the very possibility of literature booms and resonates, or (to use another metaphor) rushes and gurgles like so much black water under a hull two miles from land: literature’s possibility and, of course, its impossibility.

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ALEXANDER TROCCHI

ALEXANDER TROCCHI

...Alexander Trocchi, Scottish born writer, poet, translator and author of 'Young Adam' and 'Cain's Book', was the smack-addled icon of beat literature, whose writings have been eclipsed by a lurid life of porn, pimping and dissolution in New York, Paris and London.

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts."

Documentary on Alexander Trocchi (1925 - 84), Scottish born writer, poet, translator and author of 'Young Adam' and 'Cain's Book'. Directed by Jamie Wadhawan. Featuring William S. Burroughs, Davy Graham and R.D. Laing.

Alexander Trocchi - A Life in Pieces - Part 1/2

Cain's Book is a 1960 novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi. A roman à clef, it details the life of Joe Necchi, a heroin addict and writer, who is living and working on a scow on the Hudson River in New York. Cain's Book was released to acclaim in the USA, but when it was published in the UK by John Calder it provoked an outcry and was the subject of an obscenity trial brought by Sheffield City Council due to its depiction of drug abuse and its sexual descriptions (not to mention the frequent use of the word cunt).

Plot

 

The book alternates between Necchi/Trocchi's attempts to score and flashbacks to his experiences as a child in Glasgow, and later as a young man in London and Paris. It is also an account of what it means to be a junky and an outsider from society. On occasion it can descend into ranting about the hypocrisy and stupidity of drug prohibition and the general inequities of the world. It describes with an eye for detail the rituals of heroin, the cooking up and the search for a suitable vein.

It gets more and more fragmented as it draws to a close with Trocchi realizing that he is incapable of a maintaining a conventional narrative. In being consumed with his addiction, Trocchi strives to document his alienation and his desire to use his creativity against the existentialist fear of being washed away by history with no sign of his life remaining.

"When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I was tomorrow is where I am today, where I would be yesterday. I have a horror of committing fraud. It is all very difficult, the past even more than the future, for the latter is at least probable, calculable, while the former is beyond the range of experiment. The past is always a lie clung to by an odour of ancestors."

 

Analysis

 

The title of the book gives a clear indication of Trocchi's intentions. He casts himself as beyond society, above laws and morals and wars and guilt. He did not see himself as just a junky but rather a crusader, the mind-expanding quality of drugs, as he saw it, outweighed any other argument against them. But as Trocchi's later life was to show, his own addiction prevented him from finishing his follow-up to Cain's Book before his death.

Publishing history

Cain's Book was released to acclaim in the USA, but when it was published in the UK by John Calder it provoked an outcry and was the subject of an obscenity trial brought by Sheffield City Council due to its depiction of drug abuse and its sexual descriptions (not to mention the frequent use of the word cunt).

The 1993 Grove Press reprint edition features a foreword by Greil Marcus and an introduction by Richard Seaver.

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Between the Tundra and the Ocean With Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Trocchi

by Andrew Hodgson

Much is written of Alexander Trocchi’s “profound nihilism”. It is often argued that in his rejection and modification of language and narrative; work and reality (through taking heroin): he “willed death”; “willed to nothingness”. In his “serious novels” Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960) amongst the detachment from other people; death; productive work; environment and the running maxims of disintegration of everything within and without the text; a nihilistic bent seems clear. But to reduce Trocchi to “disintegratory nihilist” seems to limit interpretation of his texts to type: the etchings of a death-wish junkie. I here set out to question this limitation.

Trocchi is shrouded in a vague anecdotal mythology. Born in Glasgow in 1925 and dying of pneumonia in London in 1984: the accepted narrative runs that he was a promising, brilliant writer and thinker in youth before falling into a morass of heroin and incoherency later on. Where once he was regarded as “the most prepossessing and talented writer on the scene”; destined to become his “generation’s Joyce” he became a hollow figure concerned only with the “ultra-hip”; the term in this context describes Trocchi pimping out his own wife. It appears he shifted from explorer and interpreter of sub-culture to being imprisoned by it. Around the time of Cain’s Book he began to no longer strive to create but consume. It would be a model Trocchi himself would agree with; from brother Adam to brother Cain. The two novels bookending some kind of irredeemable moment when he was made or made himself “a monster”. The legends that surround Trocchi as Cain are horrifying and unreal yet apparently true, getting everyone and anyone addicted to heroin, begging and stealing from friends; these could be termed the actions of a self-professed monster. But to put this all down to heroin seems to limit Trocchi’s inhumanity, he did after all abandon a wife and two young daughters to move to Paris to write Young Adam, and so perhaps this fall from grace is insincere; indeed a myth. His behaviour from Adam to Cain appears relatively unchanged; and so whether it is a nihilist or something else he spent his life becoming it certainly can’t be essentially termed a junkie. Even in Cain’s Book, Trocchi’s projection on the page seems outside the hell of junkie life, away from the busts, overdoses, deaths, addiction; his habit seems almost leisurely. As he drifts, just off the milieu; observing.

It is this calm and distant tone that makes me question the generic sorting of Trocchi into a tradition with the hallucinatory histrionics of Burroughs and “CHOOSE COKE”. Trocchi is more in the vein of Thomas De Quincey. Like De Quincey, Trocchi’s “inner-spacewalks” sapped him of whatever spark it was that his contemporaries so admired. Both quickly lost the will or ability to write. The parallels between Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Cain’s Book of a writer straddling the realms of coherence and incoherence are apparent. Yet the borderlands they inhabit are starkly different.

While De Quincey establishes a cosy norm to be usurped, the drifting scow of Cain’s Book speaks of total detachment from the phenomenal world; a detachment apparent as early as Young Adam. The novel begins with the rejection of an authentic “I”; like Beckett’s godless Cartesian non-cogito; the “I” for Trocchi can point to a space. In the form sketched here:

If a wall little by little exhibited cracks that might be taken to be the shape of the words “I am dying,” we might read the series of marks as words forming an intelligible sentence and yet not on that account suppose that the “I” refers to a person […] Certainly, we may see them simply as cracks that resemble writing and not take them to have meaning or to refer to anyone. Or we may, on the contrary read a message in them, and this would mean that we think the wall is speaking or that a spirit is using the wall in an attempt to communicate something to us.

From this we might better understand the “I” of Trocchi’s narratives as “arbitrary” and containing “its own inadequacy and its own contradiction”. It is a single crack in the façade of Young Adam’s fiction through which Trocchi “the spirit” communicates with us. This “I” here does not indicate a cogito inherent in the text but lack of it. It is the arbitrary subject of drift amongst the labyrinth of black lines on white paper; urban object on blank land, a paradoxical meeting of Trocchi’s self and his protagonist’s non-self; it is an idealist’s detachment from commodification of the novel. As Trocchi writes:

There was no intimate connection between my eye and a plant on the windowsill or between my eye and the woman to whom I was about to make love

In the act of observing Joe Taylor (Alex Trocchi) objectifies the phenomenal universe and though feeling its “hypnotising” force, feels a distance between the observer and the flatness of the distant objects; the flatness of the ink on the page; a two dimensional reality.

The flatness of Trocchi’s reality creates an ambiguous sense of confusion by his second “serious” novel. In Cain’s Book the slippage between author and protagonist has advanced to a state of total aporia; slipping between fact and fiction; space and time. In his own words, Trocchi is

stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, night journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, triumphs and defeats.

Though his assertion of this as an adopted aesthetic seems itself constructed. Trocchi is at the striking point of Situationist drifting yet it seems not developed by his heroin use but a by-product; what had for others been an adopted aesthetic has become Alexander Trocchi’s entire schema of perception. Here the space created by self-contradiction in Trocchi’s narratives; the “I” of his writing is not pointing to a void, or the inauthenticity of any reality whatsoever, but the hallucinatory delirium of the flowing together of “Scots” Alex and his narrator “Scots” Joe; the melting together of factual and fictional experience. For example in Cain’s Book:

I spoke of her thick white legs and I was aware of being inexact at the time, for of course she was wearing jeans. As she hung up the clothes she stood on the balls of her feet, foot, I should say, for she had only one leg.

This passage would not seem alien if present in Beckett’s First Love or any of his ‘Texts for Nothing’; however it does not point to a nothing at the heart of the text; it is not an oblique mirror. It is mimetic of the thoughts of a long-term heroin user. Of the aforementioned slippage between subjects; times; places; people; far from nothing it indicates a fractured everything. In this episode of Cain’s Book protagonist Necchi notices the two-legged-one-legged-woman alone on her scow as her husband goes off to the city. He heads over to her barge tied up alongside his and a dozen or so others and, it is implied, has sex with her. Soon after she disappears off back to her “folks’ house”, as if with his potency Necchi has awoken in her a dissatisfaction with her life on the barges. This situation is directly lifted from Trocchi’s own life; as he recounts to Allen Ginsburg some years later:

AT: Do you remember Mel Sabrum (?)

AG: The name I remember.

AT: He had this one-legged girl? Beautiful! -That’s the one-legged girl I refer to in Cain’s Book

AG: Ah ha.

AT: Oh, she was beautiful. I fell in love with her, you know..But, shit, we went to bed and I couldn’t get a fuckin’ hard-on! Now if I had got a hard-on that night, my whole life maybe would have been changed (and so would hers). But not being able to get it up? I suppose I couldn’t because I felt like I was betraying Mel.

And then about 6 months later she was dead

AG: Of what?

AT: Overdose.
And six months later Mel gave himself an overdose in the bath, Brooklyn, his mother’s flat

AG: Suicide?

AT: Yeah..Mel did it absolutely consciously.

I loved that lady..

International Poetry Congress, London, 1965. Top Left: Barbara Rubiin. Back row L-R: Adrian Mitchell, Anselm Hollo, Marcus Field, Michael Horovitz, Ernst Jandl.
Front row: Harry Fainlight, Alex Troicchi, Allen Ginsberg, John Esam, Dan Richter. Photograph by John Hopkins

Trocchi’s detachment is unsettling; love, death, friendship at once fictional and real has lost the gravitas of experience or tragedy and devolved into passing anecdote. The mood flowing through this long warbling tapescript is confused; impotent in more ways than one. While Ginsburg seems intrigued and pitiful of Trocchi, Peter Orlovsky also present ridicules him. Perhaps Orlovsky believes Trocchi in his state of utter impotence in 1979 when this conversation took place had received his just desserts. Considering in his prime Trocchi not only was a great proponent of heroin as a pinnacle of unproductive creativity, getting many people around him hooked (it is said he taught William S Burroughs how to inject…), but he was also their drug dealer.  Depending on your interpretation he is at once the instigator and supporter of these figures’ (including his wives, children, Mel Sabrum and “his one-legged girl”) transcendental escape; and/or their misery and death. Trocchi has appropriated and absorbed these people’s lives and deaths and regurgitated them into fiction; of reality he “drank and regurgitated, drank and regurgitated”. In swapping one for the other and vice versa and treating both with the same passing detachment the line between fiction and reality has not blurred, but disintegrated. They have become opaque, flat. Again, life and death; fiction and reality, all have become anecdotal. And literature too, everything Joe Necchi experiences is “like something out of Kafka”, or Beckett, his boat even, on which he writes, shoots up and drifts is the “Samuel B. Molroy”. Both Trocchi’s life and writing is intertextual; a malformed meeting of fiction and fact; neither concrete; neither authentic. Trocchi states that he is not writing fiction but “writing reality”:

I’m all the time aware it’s reality and not literature I’m engaged in

The act of writing for Trocchi is a spiralling saturating cannibalising diegesis.

In his talk cum 3:AM article cum Alma reprint of Cain’s Book intro Tom McCarthy pinpoints Trocchi’s writing as between two points, a “white tundra” and a “black ocean”. McCarthy implies that the black ocean is the void of ink; heroin; nothingness, and the white tundra is the spatial nothingness of the city. In this interpretation Trocchi is writing for nothingness; injecting for nothingness. He “wills to death”; straddling the precipice of existence; peering into both sides. However the act of writing, and Trocchi’s perception of heroin use as “another creative avenue”, strikes me as certainly productive; accumulative. If the white skin; the white page is a soulless void, then the heroin; the black ink is there to fill it. As John Cage states in his Lecture on Nothing, “what we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking”. As Orlovsky says in their conversation, Trocchi cannot stop talking; he is caught in this paradox. He drifts between noise and silence; something and nothing; a vague ghost trapped amongst objects. The void that Trocchi strives to fill is not exterior, McCarthy rightly places it within him. It is interthoracic; within the belly of the monster. As Trocchi writes in Cain’s Book: “a man who knows, speaks not; a man who speaks, knows not.” In writing at all, Trocchi is not writing to the edge of death but from it. He is productively searching for something. Trocchi is not writing towards nothingness; he is writing to attempt to edify something.

Before Trocchi’s forced resignation in 1963 from the Situationist International; Guy Debord thought of him as one of the finest representations of a drifter.

He’d bring me to a spot he’d found, and the place would begin to live. Some old, forgotten part of London. Then he’d reach back for a story, or a piece of history, as if he’d been born there … the flowerings of consciousness, the sudden comings together of space and architecture, knowledge and social interaction.

The drift is “to totality what psychoanalysis is to language”, it is the détournement of the Baudelairean flaneur and, again, Thomas De Quincey’s attempts to find “the north-west passage” in London. It is to treat the city as a found object, to be a detached traveller in the grime of the authentic proletarian milieu. And, as Guy Debord says, Alexander Trocchi was one of the best. This view of Trocchi as recuperator of the phenomenal world, set apart like De Quincey, by writing and opium consumption, provides a mode for understanding Trocchi beyond nihilism.

In Cain’s Book while Trocchi is boldly stating “there is no story to tell” and injecting his page-projection Joe Necchi with heaps of skag; below all that sliding away “like lava”; like facts below language; is what Trocchi styles becoming. Though the term in this context feels; rather than a constantly renewed being, more like being being perpetually pulled out from under him. In this it becomes apparent that the spatiotemporal soup his narrators slip through is not only the product of his search for situations to devour but mimetic of the fuddled narrative bent of a delirious mind. The phenomenal universe of Cain’s Book slips through Trocchi’s memories; through time and space. It devours and employs for narrative gain everything; New York; London; Glasgow; Paris; Hull—it takes the sum of his human interactions and in fictionalising them renders them devoid of real human contact. Time and again he laments with the refrain; “and with the ovens of Auschwitz scarcely cold”. Trocchi is carving up the past, present and future and regurgitating it into his own “eternally living will and testament”. Trocchi is not trying to disintegrate himself; he is attempting to disintegrate history. As the drifter he treats the universe, places, things and people, as found objects from which detached he harvests experiences; situations. It is in this Trocchi himself could be said to be inauthentically “I”; like Joe Taylor in Young Adam on the barge he isn’t a bargeman; he is just doing a bit of passing work; like the Situationist drifters of the down trodden quarters of Paris he is again, just a visitor. He is gaming. To think of “I” pointing to an essential humanity is to place it within the phenomenal universe, however Trocchi’s narrators and Trocchi himself is just passing through, he escapes interrelating objectification. In his detached harvesting of experience he is essentially a Situationist. And in regurgitating reality as inconsequential anecdote creates a field of confused interrelation below the concrete; he reduces the world to Tartarus. Trocchi’s writing does not dissolve like heroin in the spoon but eternalises his self as mixed up in a schizophrenic broken jigsaw universe; a chaotic world devoid of human authenticity. He attempts to break up his self and history and the real and wrap it up in the pages of his two “serious” novels. In his failed attempts to achieve ekstasis through writing and heroin, like the folly of Parc Monceau; his texts “unite in a single space all times and all places”. Trocchi is perpetually in the act of self-historicising and these novels are Trocchi’s forever “living will and testament”. He is again caught in the paradox of silence and noise, he desires to both disintegrate history and eternalise that disintegration.

To look back at the Ginsburg/Orlovsky tapescript

Peter Orlovsky: And you’d be talking all the time!

AT: What’s that?

Peter Orlovsky: Your lips are moving all the time..your tongue is up to your nose, your eyes are popping out your face.

AT: Well dammit, they should be! I don’t see you very often. Look, I’ve got things to talk to you about Allen, I really have, serious things, I mean really serious things..

Orlovsky conjures an image of Trocchi as Cain; this monster of noise overwhelming the silence of the exterior with his interior vitriol. It seems here whether Trocchi wished to disintegrate history or contribute to it, it has expanded around him; engulfed him. In his attempts to ingratiate himself with a newly fractured history he has inadvertently disintegrated his self. Like De Quincey, in striving to utilise opium as a tool of potent creativity he has rendered himself impotent. In Cain’s Book he writes that he would need a “new language” to communicate what Philip Toynbee called the hallucinatory new real world post-war. But like Fay in Cain’s Book in utilising heroin he does not will to nothing, but falls into the void within heroin magnifies. A more fitting “living will and testament” is perhaps Fay’s utterance towards the end of that book, “Dbaeioug eukuh…”; an incoherent mumble. Heroin has failed to materialise its artistic merits assigned; it seems more like Trocchi disguises his addiction as art, as Necchi hides his track marks by pretending to be an artist who paints with blood.

In his 1963 essay “Technique du coup du monde” in Situationiste International #8 Trocchi sets out a plan for a kind of potlatch city. A “spontaneous university” that; through requisitioning education would erupt into a new kind of urban object; it was his stab at unitary urbanism. He claims in the essay that by will of human unified individuality; “a million creative minds”; a new kind of modernity may be achieved outside commodity. By 1964; after his ejection from the SI; he came again to the idea in an essay on his new movement Sigma. In this he employs his “spontaneous university” concept in an utterly different manner; Sigma would function more as an eternally self-perpetuating literary agency co-op. Sigma the name itself implying that which it signifies is something eternal. Potlatch has been replaced here by the utilisation of celebrity and wealth to open up centres of teaching and interview and publication; for the sale and proliferation of his and other members’ products. His “spontaneous university” has moved from creative “invisible revolution” to a business model; he himself has commodified the concept. This shift correlates to that between Young Adam and Cain’s Book, and perhaps a wider shift in art. From agitprop to agency. For Trocchi from detached drifting to self-historicising in a mashed up pseudo-reality; the shift from creation to consumption; recreational to addiction.

Alexander Trocchi and his works seem caught in the inertia of addiction; not only to heroin but to literariness. Between the blank page and the heroin needle Trocchi is imprisoned. He is not detached but isolated. His drifting is not an aesthetic, it is a necessity. In this sense it is hard to see Trocchi as a nihilist; he appears to us as a ghost; a vaguely sketched outline of the post-war writer. He inhabits a hallucinatory reality; the world submerged in haze and chaos; he drifts in Tartarus, where both the real world and literature has disintegrated into the anecdotal. Rather than meet the ambiguous space he inhabits, the dosshouses, the rundown neighbourhoods, the scenes of death and decay; he attempts to escape them. In his detachment he refuses to interact and interpret them and thus relinquishes any claim to involved discourse with them. Alexander Trocchi is not a nihilist, he is the victim of a society that has shunned him. Due to his heroin use he has not detached himself from reality; but reality has detached itself from him. For Trocchi life and death; reality and fiction is one, a pile of ripped up jigsaw pieces. He does not straddle the tundra and the ocean; peering into both. The tundra and the ocean are his cell walls; his writing the ever quieter assertion of his freedom.

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An Encounter with William Burroughs at Alexander Trocchi’s Bookshop

by Robin Marchesi

I met William Burroughs on two occasions. 

The first time was in the 70s in Chelsea London.

In those days the Kings Road Chelsea was at the forefront of the new “Antique Markets” springing up in London. 

It was a fashionable novelty to have a “stall” displaying your particular speciality. 

The most exclusive of these was an emporium called Antiquarius.

The stalls were expensive and so were the items on display. 

However, one large area in the bottom right hand corner let its first-class flavor down. 

It was chaotic piles of books stacked on precarious-looking shelves or just on the floor. 

At the back was a small office. 

A white-haired, long-coated, chain-smoking American by the name of Dennis worked there.

I watched it from a distance, although over the months we got on nodding and then talking terms. It was a time in my life where anarchy was paramount and anything went. Dennis got a sense of this and I had an idea that we were, in our own ways, up to the same thing.

Alex Trocchi, the thick-set, chisel-featured man who used to use the office was his boss. 

He was an infrequent visitor and at 25 years old I had no idea of his reputation. 

Several years later just before he died I got to know Trocchi much better.

He told me at that time how this stall made money.

Dennis would get a keen client, Alex would type out a piece of his very good poetry or several pages from say Cain’s Book. The customer, mesmerised, would buy, thinking them unique parts of an original manuscript, at an extortionate price.

I once entered Antiquarius to find Dennis and Trocchi standing, smoking, with a well-lined, stooped bald man. 

I nodded.

“Hi Robin,” drawled Dennis.

I was a little surprised at his ebullience and went over to shake his hand. Trocchi, whom I had met a couple of times, smiled wryly.

“This is William,” he said, pointing at the wraith-like figure at his side.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

He barely moved his hand but I shook it anyway. As I did so he looked at me in the eye. It was a cold stare and having completed his evaluation said directly: “You look like a guy who should never let them know who you are.”

“Why do you say that?” I mumbled, looking nervously over my shoulder. 

He just grinned and turned to Trocchi simultaneously, as if I was no longer there.

Dennis winked and I moved on.

Six years later I saw him at an art opening in New York’s Soho and went over. I reminded him of our first encounter. At first he didn’t quite remember but smiled and spoke affectionately of Trocchi.

“But you know,” he said to me. “I wasn’t really meant to be in England at that time, so I don’t recall any of those meetings.” 

He winked boyishly and was gone.

Written by Robin Marchesi and published by RealityStudio on 6 May 2010. The image of Alexander Trocchi at Morden Tower is from MT’s Flickr stream.