Ah, Alex
Trocchi. Alexander Trocchi. Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi, proud sporter of a Three Stooges haircut. What can you
write about Scotland’s premiere outlaw smackheid enfant terrible that hasn’t
been written already? Well, I suppose you could write that he was a fine,
upstanding gentleman, a great father and husband, and that his literary legacy far
outweighs his creepy reputation as a smack-shooting, wife-pimping scumbag who
turned women (including Marianne Faithfull) onto heroin. You could say all that
stuff which has never been said before. It has, of course, never been said
before because it’s all a total and utter lie.
I am always ambivalent about the Italian-roots Scottish ‘iconic’ literary figure.
On the one hand, I regard him as a nihilistic piece of shit who dragged others
down with him, which is the real shame. On the other hand, I regard him as a
nihilistic piece of shit who dragged others down with him, which is the real
shame. (I meant to write that last sentence twice - think about it...) On yet another hand, which is possible if you’re a mutant Chernobyl
radiation survivor with three hands, you can regard him as somebody who
initially showed literary promise, creating, in Merlin, a brilliant literary
mag, and who wrote a couple of good books – Young Adam and Cain’s Book. Apart from that...
He also wrote a load of wacky tacky porno hackery for Maurice Girodias to pimp out under his legendary Olympia Press imprint. Whatever you think of the horribly self-and-others-destructive nutty cunt, if you have even a passing interest in Scottish literature you probably will have some sort of opinion of him. Mine is negative, in case you haven’t gathered. Chuckling. But whilst researching other, more interesting people online, I found a few odds and sods relating the odd sod who was apparently only interested in lesbianism and sodomy. And heroin, of course. I just thought I’d share a few titbits here; make of them what you will. Yer welcome/I’m sorry. Choose yer own last coda for this paragraph, dependent on your whims and views.
In
the late 50s and early 60s, Trocchi, after moving from Scotland to Paris, moved
once again to live in various areas of America. One of them was New York, which
would provide him with the autobiographical material for Cain’s Book, which was
published by Grove Press in 1960 in America. The author was so wasted on smack
he missed his own launch party. Genius. At this point he was pimping out his
unfortunate wife Lyn for money for drugs. He got captured by the feds for forgery and for supplying drugs, and they wanted him to squeal on his associates. Not wanting
to do this, cos he was a proud and honourable man, Trocchi took off
for Canada in 1961, to liaise with the famous singer and poet Leonard Cohen.
From the American newspaper The Record of Thursday, June 8th, 1961:
So
he was already doing very well not even halfway into his third decade on the
planet. The first time he met Trocchi, Leonard Cohen was nearly inadvertently
killed by the man, which he recounts here, in a humourous-cum-horrifyingly-dangerous
drug story:
Cohen put Trocchi on a boat out of the country and helped him escape. Still,
that extremely dangerous initial encounter can’t have fazed the nervously and ruefully chuckling Cohen much, because he and Trocchi maintained a lifelong friendship
after it, with the Canadian poet even writing a poem about the Scottish junkie
who nearly killed him:
ALEXANDER TROCCHI, PUBLIC JUNKIE, PRIE POUR NOUS
Who is purer more simple than you? Priests play poker with the burghers, police in underwear leave crime at the office, our poets work bankers’ hours retire to wives and fame-reports. The spike flashes in your blood permanent as a silver lighthouse.
I’m apt to loaf in a coma of newspapers, avoid the second-hand bodies which cried to be catalogued. I dream I’m a divine right Prime Minister, I abandon plans for bloodshed in Canada, I accept an O.B.E.
Under hard lights with doctor’s instruments you are at work in the bathrooms of the city, changing the Law.
I tend to get distracted by hydrogen bombs, by Uncle’s disapproval of my treachery to the men’s clothing industry. I find myself believing public clocks, taking advice from the Dachau generation. The spike hunts constant as a compass You smile like a Navajo discovering American oil on his official slum wilderness, a surprise every half hour,
I’m afraid I sometimes forget my lady’s pretty little blonde package is an amateur time-bomb set to fizzle in my middle-age. I forget the Ice Cap, the pea-minds, the heaps of expensive teeth.
You don a false nose line up twice for the Demerol dole; you step out of a tourist group shoot yourself on the steps of the White House you try to shoot the big arms of the Lincoln Memorial; through a flaw in their lead houses you spy on scientists, stumble on a cure for scabies; you drop pamphlets from a stolen jet: ” The Truth about Junk”; you pirate a national tv commercial shove your face against the window of the living-room insist that healthy skin is grey.
A little blood in the sink Red cog-wheels shaken from your arm punctured inflamed like a road map showing cities over 10,000 pop. Your arms tell me you have been reaching into the coke machine for strawberries, you have been humping the thorny crucifix you have been piloting Mickey Mouse balloons through the briar patch, you have been digging for grins in the tooth-pile.
Bonnie Queen Alex Eludes Montreal Hounds Famous Local Love Scribe Implicated
You purity drives me to work. I must get back to lust and microscopes, experiments in embalming, resume the census of my address book.
You leave behind a fanatic to answer R.C.M.P. questions
Anyway.
Jumping forward to 1963, away from nearly overdosing Canadian wordslingers. Upon the publication of Cain's Book in the UK, a
brief piece in The Observer from Sunday, February 25th, 1963, finds
him saying he regards drugs as a “major influence.” No shit. By that point in
his life they were the major
influence in his life, and, sadly, it would never get any better:
Timewarping
(“it’s just a jump to the left!”) again to 1963, various newspaper clippings
discuss Trocchi’s attention-seeking, oddly narcissistic appearance on the American
news programme (guess his legal hassles got sorted out somehow) Chet Huntley Reporting,
where he shot up on-camera. Joy. What a credit to Scotland. The reports here are all relatively similar, discussing the show later on that night (Tuesday, March 12th, 1963):
Bonus
points to this one, from the Indiana Gazette, for the mention on the same page of a programme starring
William Shatner as a ‘Swedish immigrant.’ The mind boggles and recoils in faux-Scandinavian thespian horror:
I
often encountered this last one here below, word for word, as it was obviously syndicated round the
United States. The last line, “You’re left to make up your own mind about its
worth” could easily apply to much of Trocchi’s legacy in itself:
Wednesday, March 13th, the
day after, and it’s a slightly pearls-clutching post-match analysis of the
differences in UK andUSA drug policies. The numbers of junkies mentioned in
the UK are vanishingly small, nowhere near today’s numbers. Scotland is
mentioned nowhere, of course, and, in a then-contemporary irony, one of the
doctors on the show, a Grenville Larimore (which sounds like a cocktail name),
notes that, compared to the USA, England’s people have no problem in “integrating
minorities…subject to social stresses which exist in the U.S.” Nothing else
need be said:
Friday,
March 22nd, 1963, finds The Guardian, apparently having missed the
stateside telly-shot smack flap, reviewing Cain’s Book. They’re not hugely enamoured
of it. He’s just such a nihilist anarchist innerspace-cadet existentialist
rebel, and those square cats in the stuffy middle-class London
chatterati press just can’t dig where he’s at, maaaaan:
A
schedule from The Ottawa Journal of Saturday, April 27th, 1963, shows that
Trocchi appeared on a show called Take Thirty (a magazine show originally for
women, then later for more general viewing – fuck knows), which he probably
took to mean valium. Nancy Bacall (no idea if she was any relation Lauren) was
probably jealous of the Chet Huntley ratings and hoped her Scottish guest would
shoot up into his cock or something. I don’t think he did. Even the laid-back
Canadians would not have stood for that. "Take off, you junkie hoser!"
On the same show, Alan Telfer, of the
Canadian Electrical Standards Association, demonstrated how to safely make an
electric chair for elderly relatives you couldn’t be bothered looking after
anymore. This clipping also gets a very (dis)honourable mention for having a mention of The
Defenders (about people getting defended in court, I would imagine – clue’s in
the title) having Dennis Hopper as a teenaged Nazi. My mouth is watering. I
have heard of this before. Remind me to go look it up after I finished writing
this. Imagine a Hopper-Trocchi druggie standoff. Who would be left standing?
Neither. They’d both be on the floor at the end in a pile of their own (or
somebody else’s) puke. “DON’T YOU FUCKING PUKE ON ME!!” (Laughing here)
(Dammit.
Can’t find the Hopper neo-Nazi show anywhere. Oh well. Now I can’t fuckin’ look
at it.)
Anyway.
Friday, May 23rd, 1963, finds The Guardian advertising Cain's Book, despite having somewhat dismissed it a couple of months earlier. Would call them hypocrites, but, of course, ad revenue is king here. John Calder, the publisher, must be a forgiving bugger. The ad notes that "Trocchi's TV appearances have earned him an enormous personal following." Aye, amongst law enforcement agencies, or junkies looking to cop, or dealers he owes money to, or angry dads whose daughters he has turned onto drugs:
In a short Guardian article of Wednesday, June 26th, 1963, writer Jim Burns wanks...eh...waxes lyrical about the seditious literary joys to be found in spunkrags. Fine literary periodicals like Nugget, Swank and Rogue allowed him the underground-expository joys of being able to read Trocchi and William S Burroughs and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and James Baldwin and Harlan Ellison long before they were published in the UK. He only reads them for the articles. Honestly. And the big tits and bushy fanny. Apparently the Chicago-based Nugget (I don't want to fucking know how they got the name; maybe they weren't allowed to use 'Shitcago,' which I always thought would be a great bouncy-titty Windy City scatmag moniker, because of police pressure) editor's name was 'Seymour Krim.' Aye right. Misspelled 'Quim' there, unless he was making a humourous play on being some sort of poetry-and-porn-pimping criminal. Anything's possible, and this is actually a great, funny article. We should have a Burns Night where we just discuss and toast old pokerstroker spurts illustrated splatmags in (dis)honour of the author here:
Sunday, September 8th, 1963. A San Francisco Examiner review of the newly-published anthology Writers In Revolt, which includes editors Trocchi, Terry Southern (always mean to look up more about him) and Richard Seaver (no idea) snottily sniffs and snuffles and snorts at the 'revolting' anthology. The smelling salts-wielding cynical Examiner examiner Daniel J, Langton wishes a case of Jackie Collinsitis on the scumskull writers bespoiling the book's unhallowed pages (doubt they took out adverts with that paper!):
Friday, September 20th, 1963. Another review of Writers In Revolt, and Howell Pearre (where the Hell do they get these names?) digs it much more, man. He's a hep cat. Literary unknowns like Charles Baudelaire and Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre get a mention here. Whatever happened to those testy, no-skygod-cursing French guys? Any of them ever make it past Gallic shores?
December 29th, 1963, and Philadelphia Inquirer writer Louise Vanett finally gets around to reviewing Writers In Revolt, a mere three months after everybody else got finished with it. Maybe she was in revolt against reading fast, or writing a quick review. Maybe she was grieving after JFK got blown away, what more do I have to say? She says the book's hook is that it is "a plea to the public to shed its apathy." Aye right. The public would be apathetic if it could be bothered to be so:
Sunday, June 6th, 1965 (guess 1964 was skipped cos nothing interesting happened that year), and we have an ad in The Observer for the (in)famous, clumsily-titled Poets of the World/Poets of Our Time (World Poets of Our Time would have encompassed both strands they were looking for)(not a good word-omen for the event) at the Albert Hall in London. Trocchi was the compere, and people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti (a genuinely cool and interesting anarchist character, and a good poet) and Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and some other no-hopers starred. Seen figures of 5,000 and 7,000 attendees mentioned; suffice to say it was a sell-out. Well, maybe it wasn't a sell-out to the man, maaaaan, you know, I meant a groovy sell-out seats-wise, to a nice tidy profit, lay that deadhead bread on me daddio and don't bum me out asking to get in on the guest list, there will be no heavy trips here....
You can watch a doc about the event here, if you're so inclined. Apparently this kicked off the psychedelic 60s in the UK. Wish it had kicked it off a cliff. Sitting in a hash-and-incense-stinking building with thousands of body odour-clouded proto-hippies listening to Ginsberg ommmming away his annoying baldy beardy Muppet pish...you couldn't have kept me far enough away from the event. Not that you would have had to, mind you, cos I wouldn't even be born for a few more years. Bonus pesetas for the doc title, Wholly Communion: gas of a pun title to confuse the rectangles...sorry...squares:
Sunday, June 13th, 1965 sees a review of the Albert Hell in The Daily Advertiser. The unnamed American reviewer rips the pish a bit. Good. Only sensible thing to do, under the circumstances. They also score a bonus point for misspelling the Beat Poet's last name. Bet Ginsberg ommmed them tae fuck for that strictly uncool nowheresville bad karma, man:
An entertainingly funny article in The Guardian of Friday, September 10th, 1965, brings us the quixotic quest of journalist Terry Coleman's attempt to gain an interview with William S Burroughs via third man Jim Haynes. Haynes was the American import who ran the infamous Rhino Bookshop in Edinburgh, stocker of Beat publications during the 1950s in Edinburgh. Trocchi pokes his large roaming nose in here and there, being all cryptic and junkyesque:
And that, as they say, readers and readerettes, is it, at least for the snipped clippings portion of the programme. I will leave you with two things. The first is boring footage of Trocchi and random faceless, nameless others in Brazier's Park in 1964 (ah, maybe this is why there are no entries for that year in the media for him: he was poncing about, or nodding out, on lawns), included in case you have trouble falling asleep:
In case you were wondering what that was in aid of, well, here's a link with an explanation, cos I can't be bothered explaining or even paraphrasing it. It's not like I'm getting paid for this irreverent fuckaboot, after all, and you lazily yawning reader spoonfed bastirts can do some of the heavy lifting yourself for a change:
As a parting shot, I will leave you with something to watch: The Beat Generation by The Comic Strip, the 80s comic troupe that brought us the brilliance of, well The Comic Strip Presents (fave episode is Eddie Monsoon, A Life?: "I dunno where the fuck I am. Give me another Scotch you bastards!"), and The Young Ones. This episode, which I have gone to the trouble of uploading for those "Electricity is the Devil's work!" technophobes amongst you who don't have a VPN and can't get it on Youtube, is a brilliant and hilarious pisstake of the often-ludicrous excesses of the Beats. Cos after all, there was some interesting stuff came out of that time and place...but a whole helluva lot more of it was just ludicrous, pompous, Buddhism-preaching, drug-worshipping shite.
Fuck it.There's a helluva lot more I could say here, but I am keeping this relatively light. Cos after all, laughter is the only true medicine in this disgusting modern world. Well, that and penicillin, and Covid jags (Troochi would have found his true metier as somebody injecting Covid patients, with his apparent skill at finding veins - "Old Alex could find a vein in a mummy," as Burroughs twitch-face-coughed), and well, shit, any other amount of medicines - but you know what I mean. So dig the fuck into The Beat Generation, have a laugh, and forget about druggie chic. Cos you sure as Hell know where the fuck it's a gateway drug to: reading bad nihilist opiate literature and thinking you're cool. Ya bas.
Now I need to get back to trying to find that Dennis Hopper show The Defenders...a challenge...magic! :)
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