Cain’s Book

by Alexander Trocchi

  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

  Cain’s Book

  ...Their corruption is so dangerous, so active, that they have no other aim in printing their monstrous works than to extend beyond their own lives the sum total of their crimes; they can commit no more, but their accursed writings will lead others to do so, and this comforting thought which they carry with them to the tomb consoles them for the obligation death imposes on them of renouncing this life.

  – D.-A.F. de Sade

  MY SCOW IS TIED UP in the canal at Flushing, NY, alongside the landing stage of the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation. It is now just after five in the afternoon. Today at this time it is still afternoon, and the sun, striking the cinder blocks of the main building of the works, has turned them pink. The motor cranes and the decks of the other scows tied up round about are deserted.

  Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix.

  I stood the needle and the eye-dropper in a glass of cold water and lay down on the bunk. I felt giddy almost at once. It’s good shit, not like some of the stuff we’ve been getting lately. I had to be careful. Two of the workmen in wide blue dungarees and wearing baseball caps were still hanging about. From time to time they crossed my catwalk. They were inquisitive. They had heard the noise of the typewriter during the afternoon and that was sufficient to arouse their curiosity. It’s not usual for a scow captain to carry a typewriter. They lingered for a while, talking, just outside the cabin. Then, a few minutes before five, I heard them climb back onto the dock and walk away.

  Lying on the bunk, alert to the sudden silence that has come over the canal, I hear the buzz of a fly and notice it is worrying the dry corpse of another fly, which is half-gouged into the plank of the wall. I wonder about it and then my attention wanders. A few minutes have passed. I hear it buzz again and see that it is still at its work, whatever it is, settled on the rigid jutting legs of the corpse. The legs grow out of the black spot like a minute sprout of eyelashes. The live fly is busy. I wonder if it is blood it wants, if flies like wolves or rats will eat off their own kind.

  – Cain at his orisons, Narcissus at his mirror.

  The mind under heroin evades perception as it does ordinarily; one is aware only of contents. But that whole way of posing the question, of dividing the mind from what it’s aware of, is fruitless. Nor is it that the objects of perception are intrusive in an electric way as they are under mescalin or lysergic acid, nor that things strike one with more intensity or in a more enchanted or detailed way as I have sometimes experienced under marijuana; it is that the perceiving turns inwards, the eyelids droop, the blood is aware of itself, a slow phosphorescence in all the fabric of flesh and nerve and bone; it is that the organism has a sense of being intact and unbrittle, and, above all, inviolable. For the attitude born of this sense of inviolability some Americans have used the word “cool”.

  It is evening now, the temperature has fallen, objects are growing together in the dim light of the cabin. In a few moments I shall get up and light my kerosene lamps.

  – What the hell am I doing here?

  At certain moments I find myself looking on my whole life as leading up to the present moment, the present being all I have to affirm. It’s somehow undignified to speak of the past or to think about the future. I don’t seriously occupy myself with the question in the “here-and-now”, lying on my bunk and, under the influence of heroin, inviolable. That is one of the virtues of the drug, that it empties such questions of all anguish, transports them to another region, a painless theoretical region, a play region, surprising, fertile and unmoral. One is no longer grotesquely involved in the becoming. One simply is. I remember saying to Sebastian before he returned to Europe with his new wife that it was imperative to know what it was to be a vegetable, as well.

  ...the illusory sense of adequacy induced in a man by the drug. Illusory? Can a... “datum” be false? Inadequate? In relation to what? The facts? What facts? Marxian facts? Freudian facts? Mendelian1 facts? More and more I found it necessary to suspend such facts, to exist simply in abeyance, to give up (if you will) and come naked to apprehension.

  It’s not possible to come quite naked to apprehension and for the past year I have found it difficult to sustain even an approximate attitude without shit, horse, heroin. Details, impressionistic, lyrical. I became fascinated by the minute-to-minute sensations, and when I reflected, I did so repetitively and exhaustingly (often under marijuana) on the meaningless texture of the present moment, the cries of gulls, a floating spar, a shaft of sunlight, and it wasn’t long before the sense of being alone overtook me and drained me of all hope of ever entering the city with its complicated relations, its plexus of outrageous purpose.

  – The facts. Stick to the facts. A fine empirical principle, but below the level of language the facts slide away like a lava. Neither was there ever a simple act; in retrospect I couldn’t isolate such a thing. Even while I lived in my act, at each phase, after the decidings, it unfolded spontaneously, and frighteningly, and dangerously, at times like a disease run riot, at times like the growing morning sunlight, and if I find it difficult to remember and express, and difficult to express and remember, if sometimes words leap up, sudden, unnatural, squint and jingling skeletons from the page, accusing me and amusing me with their obscene shakes and making the world mad; I suppose it is because they take a kind of ancestral revenge upon me who at each moment is ready to marshal them again for death or resurrection. 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. It’s a fact that in the America I found nothing was ever in abeyance. Things moved or they were subversive. I suppose it was to escape this without going away, to retreat into abeyance, that I soon came to be on a river scow. (Alternatives: prison, madhouse, morgue.)

  I get up off the bunk and return to the table where I light an oil lamp. When I have adjusted the wick, I find myself fumbling again amongst the pile of notes, extracting a certain page. I hold it close to the lamp and read:

  – Time on the scows...

  Day and night soon became for me merely light and dark, daylight or oil lamp, and often the lamp became pale and transparent in the long dawns. It was the warmth of the sun that came on my cheek and on my hand through the wi
ndow which made me get up and go outside and find the sun already far overhead and the skyscrapers of Manhattan suddenly and impressively and irrelevantly there in a haze of heat. And as for that irrelevance... I often wondered how far out a man could go without being obliterated. It’s an oblique way to look at Manhattan, seeing it islanded there for days on end across the buffering water like a little mirage in which one isn’t involved, for at times I knew it objectively and with anxiety as a nexus of hard fact, as my very condition. Sometimes it was like trumpets, that architecture.

  I find myself squirting a thin stream of water from the eye-dropper through the number 26 needle into the air, cooking up another fix, prodding the hardened cotton in the bubbling spoon... just a small fix, I feel, would recreate the strewn ramparts of Jericho.

  Tout ce qu’on fait dans la vie, même l’amour, on le fait dans le train express qui roule vers la mort. Fumer l’opium, c’est quitter le train en marche; c’est s’occuper d’autre chose que de la vie, de la mort.

  – Cocteau2

  AT 33RD STREET is Pier 72. At the waterfront there are few buildings and they are low. The city is in the background. It has diners at its edge, boxcars abandoned and stored, rails amongst grass and gravel, vacant lots. The trucks of moving and storage companies are parked and shunted under the tunnels of an area of broad deserted shadows, useful for murder or rape. The wharves jut forward into the Hudson River like the stunted uneven teeth of a prehistoric jaw. The George Washington Bridge is in the north. After eight, when the diners close, the dockside streets are fairly deserted. In winter the lights under the elevated roadway shine as in a vast and dingy shed, dimly reflecting its own emptiness. An occasional car moves in from the dark side of the crosstown streets, turns into the feebly lit dockyard area, travels ten or twenty blocks south, and then moves out, outwards again into the city. Walk three blocks east to 9th Avenue and the lights get brighter. A woman bawls her husband’s affairs to a neighbour in the street from the window in which she leans thirty feet above your head as you walk along.