Guardian on Trocchi

Mean streets
Friday August 8, 2003
The Guardian


Alexander Trocchi 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. But with a new film out adapted from his novel Young Adam, the Glasgow-born writer's life and work are ripe for re-evaluation. By Tim Cumming


There's not a ship in sight, and few human figures, just the occasional huge crane standing amid rubble and twisted metal. Walking the docks by the dark waters of the Clyde, the only remnants of heavy industry are the vast BAe hangars housing sensitive defence projects. Glasgow's former shipyards have been demolished and greened over: a conference centre here, a business park there. Along vast stretches of the north bank, old industrial buildings are being demolished, broken up, and reduced to rocks and gravel to be carried away. But not, as in earlier days, by barge along the Forth and Clyde canal, its locks punctuating the city, side by side with the grey, boarded-up housing schemes and solid, angular tenements of the empire-forging Victorian era.

The postwar atmosphere of old Clydeside is the setting for David Mackenzie's forthcoming movie adaptation of Alexander Trocchi's cult novel, Young Adam, first published in Paris in 1954. The film stars Ewan McGregor as shiftless antihero Joe, a young drifter working as a bargehand on the Forth and Clyde for sturdy, earthy Les and his resentful wife Ella. A metaphor of existential drift in a repressive, puritanical society, the barge carries them and their cargo from Glasgow to Edinburgh while Joe works silently and glowers dangerously, an alien in the bloodstream of a colour-desaturated 1950s Scotland. The plot of Young Adam turns upon the body of a dead girl dredged from the canal that Joe knows more about than he lets on. Driving the narrative, there is sex, and lots of it: mute, animalistic couplings between Ella and Joe, between Joe and Cathy, the dead girl, between Joe and Ella's newly widowed sister. The carnality is as relentless as the drumming of rain on the barge roof, the slap and slurp of water under the bows.
Virtually forgotten by the time of his death in 1984, the first signs of a Trocchi renaissance came in the early 1990s as a new generation of Scottish writers began publishing in magazines such as Rebel Inc. "With books like Trainspotting, and writers like Alan Warner," says Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who taught Trocchi at Glasgow University at the end of the 1940s, "there was a revival of interest in the figure of the exile, the rebel, the drug-taker. Irvine Welsh in particular made a revival of Trocchi possible." Young Adam was one of Rebel Inc's first titles and, with the film opening this year's Edinburgh film festival, interest in Trocchi has never been higher.

He was born in 1925, the youngest son of Alfredo Trocchi, a second-generation Italian immigrant with relatives in the Vatican - there was a Cardinal Trocchi - and at the time of Trocchi's birth, they were a well-off family. Alfredo had been a successful bandleader after the first world war but, with the onset of the Depression, his audiences melted away, and the family moved from Glasgow's southside to a house on Bank Street near the university, where they took in a menagerie of lodgers to survive. Bank Street's solid, imposing sandstone tenements are only a few minutes from the blackened gothic towers of Glasgow University. The Trocchi boarding house is difficult to pinpoint, although the three-storey house on the corner, with its overgrown garden, soot-blackened stone, and darkened interiors, at least feels like the right place.

Trocchi entered university in 1947 to study English and philosophy, and was soon living with his first wife Betty in a remote shepherd's cottage outside Glasgow, and making his first forays into fiction. Edwin Morgan remembers Trocchi as a brilliant student, yet even then erratic in his working habits - and in his relationships.

"He was extraordinarily magnetic, some would say manipulative - able to get what he wanted out of people," he says. "He was very charming, but with a hint of danger. Sometimes there were these dark looks from under his eyebrows, a sense of something different altogether. There was a depth to him that was impressive, strange and not quite sinister, but there was the sense that something unexpected could happen." His mother had died when he was 16, a devastating loss for young Trocchi. "We know he was very much affected by her death," says Morgan. "Her death was my direction," Trocchi would later write. It perhaps explains why he was unable to inveigh solidity or permanence into many of his relationships, or even his own literary output.

After graduating, he was given a travelling scholarship and, with Betty and their two daughters, Trocchi travelled widely in the Mediterranean before settling in Paris. "It was amazing how quickly he got into the Paris literary scene," says Morgan. "For someone from a Scottish university to suddenly publish people like Ionesco, Beckett and Genet was extraordinary." Almost immediately, Trocchi set about changing his life, sending Betty and their daughters to Majorca, while he stayed in Paris with his new American lover Jane Lougee, and set about establishing the influential and now highly collectible Merlin magazine, which ran for five years and 11 issues, publishing many of the last great names of Modernism.

His first address was a cheap residential hotel on Rue de la Huchette just south of the Ile de la Cité, a dank, rough street of European émigrés and Algerian street traders. Now it is a narrow, bustling thoroughfare of Greek tavernas and kebab shops. The hotel is still there, opposite a little theatre advertising Ionesco, the stairs leading straight on to the street. A few minutes walk away is Shakespeare and Company, a Parisian legend and one of the world's most famous book stores. "A little socialist republic pretending to be a bookshop," jokes its 90-year-old owner George Whitman, surely the last living link between the Paris of the Lost Generation, the beats, and the expensive, crowded and bourgeois St Germain of today. In the 1950s, his bookshop was Trocchi's second home, and Merlin's centre of operations.

"Trocchi came by with his girlfriend, Jane Lougee," says Whitman. "She was getting a little money from her father, who was a banker in Maine, and with that money she financed Merlin magazine, because she was in love with Alex Trocchi. She was scrubbing floors and slaving away to pay for food and lodging. So that's how Merlin got started. For a couple of years, I gave them an office upstairs, and sometimes he would put on a little show, and have readings here."

Whitman still sits at the front of the shop, buying, selling and holding court before the young Americans who come to stay in the warren of book-lined rooms above the ground floor. There he tells me how, decades later, Trocchi briefly returned to Paris and left with a purloined set of Merlins and other items of value. He directs me to his third-floor room and a chest of books and papers that hold the last few Merlins he owns. Hidden among papers, magazines, books, and correspondence from a remote age, there are the first three issues, in mint condition, unread and untouched for decades.

In 1952, there were 12,000 expats filling St Germain with their pretensions to the lives of Hemingway, Miller and Joyce. Trocchi was one of them - and one of the few whose name matters now. He was in his element. "He was very persuaded of his genius," says Whitman. After a year of hotels, he and Jane moved into the basement of an Afro-Caribbean antiques emporium on the Rue du Sabot, whose proprietor had gone mad. Here they devoted themselves to Merlin and to the cafe society that sustained it.

"People who might not have talked to each other were able to do so with Merlin," says Edwin Morgan, and it was here they came together, on this cobbled street near the offices of Les Editions de Minuit, Samuel Beckett's French publishers. Trocchi first met Beckett here, and would go on to publish Watt and Molloy. At the same time, he had graduated from pills and alcohol to the Parisian drugs underworld of hashish, cocaine and heroin. His English publisher John Calder claims Jean Cocteau turned him on to opiates, just as he had done with Picasso in the 1920s. As the struggle to financially maintain Merlin steepened, heroin came to exert a profound grip. Within a year or two, his most productive period would be over.

Trocchi's achievements had been startling. Eleven issues as Merlin's ringmaster, six pornographic novels written at speed for easy money for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, and Young Adam, his brilliant literary debut, were produced all in the space of three or four years. Many of his pornographic novels went on to sell millions in bootleg American editions, although Trocchi never saw any money from them. Even Olympia's edition of Young Adam was beefed up with added sex scenes at Girodias's request, later all removed bar one infamous episode with a bowl of custard that provides a climax, of sorts, to Mackenzie's film.

But just as Trocchi seemed on the verge of success and literary prominence, he blew it, substituting reckless experiments in sex and drugs for experiments in narrative and form. When his lover and main source of income, Jane Lougee, left him in 1955, Merlin came to an end. Trocchi moved to a room in Montparnasse, sexually voracious and now an addict, "injecting himself in public," says Whitman, "pulling up his sleeves and making a big show of it." He withdrew from writing and production for an intangible revolution of mind, untethering his old life and leaving it far behind. "I am living my own personal Dada," he would write. "For a long time, I have suspected there is no way out."

And around him, his less brilliant, more human victims were beginning to pile up. His wife and family had long been abandoned, friends were uneasy that money for Merlin was spent on drugs. His enthusiasm for heroin's touch-sensitive reality caught many less assured and powerful than he, and many fell where Trocchi seemingly soared.

On the Rue Campagne Première, he scored and played pinball in the local cafes, and finally left for New York in 1956, expecting fame and fortune in Greenwich Village. What he found instead were draconian drug laws that ensured that all his energy would be devoted to scoring, fixing and evading arrest. He had a new young wife, Lyn Hicks from (literally) Hicksville. Within months she was a heroin addict, pregnant with their first child, and at his behest prostituting herself in Las Vegas to alcoholic gamblers to support both their habits. Chaos and desperation became familiar bedfellows. Shocked friends who had loved him and stood in awe of him now began to dread his appearance and hate his habit, his incredible energy replaced by constant need.

Back in New York, he worked as a scow captain, carrying building materials from the quarries into Manhattan. His old friends from Paris did what they could. Dick Seaver at Grove Press paid him by the chapter to hack out Cain's Book, begun in Montparnasse and ended, or abandoned perhaps, in the tiny cabin of his scow, with his marijuana and heroin. It is a powerful book, but with the dangerously charmed inertia of heroin's spell cast across its prose, which moves between story and writing about story, observing oneself in an act that for Trocchi was becoming untenable. "I had been in abeyance," he wrote, "too far out, unable to act, for a long time."

He was still a writer when he fled New York, after being charged with the capital offence of supplying heroin to a minor. He made for Canada by bus, and was met in Montreal by the young, then-unknown Leonard Cohen. After almost killing Cohen with an accidental overdose of opium (he invited the young poet to lick the bowl after his fix) he took a tramp steamer to Aberdeen, and made his way to London, where hebecame a registered addict on the NHS.

From the 1960s onward, Trocchi became a countercultural media figure rather than a writer. He hit the headlines with a combative appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh writers festival, squaring up against ultra-nationalist, puritanical Hugh MacDiarmid, then at the apogee of his fame and influence. So for Trocchi to declare himself the only important Scottish writer in two decades was an act of rank-pulling of the highest order. In 1965, he compered the "tribal gathering" of poets at the Royal Albert Hall, celebrated in Peter Whitehead's Wholly Communion, and one of the key events in turning a tiny metropolitan subculture into the mass phenomenon we know as the Sixties.

Then there was sigma, a revolutionary movement with a mathematical symbol for a name, an offshoot from Guy Debord's Situationism, mutating the personal interiors of the Existentialists into a "coup du monde" against straight society. It led to insane conferences, innumerable tracts, and night-long monologues from Trocchi, and though there was an Anti-University of sorts, with a prospectus and tutors such as RD Laing and CLR James, sigma's idealism and optimism remained as remote as Xanadu. Perhaps this is what heroin did to Trocchi, at least philosophically, pushing him towards narcotic reverie. Nevertheless, Trocchi would seize upon sigma and obsessively try to bring it to reality throughout the 1960s.

Basing himself in west London, his only literary endeavours were a series of rather brilliant translations for John Calder, most of them done under duress at Calder's offices in Piccadilly. Like Seaver in New York, Calder knew better than to pay Trocchi in advance. "We paid him £1 a page and he'd come in with 20 pages and I'd check them against the French originals and he'd walk away with £20 cash - not a bad sum in those days. He was also, without any question in my mind, selling a part of his prescriptions to other people."

At this time, there were only a few hundred registered addicts in the country and Trocchi, the counterculture's drug proselytiser, was closer to the spirit of De Quincey and Coleridge than to the thin, pale whores supporting their habits on Glasgow's Bothwell Street today. But as the 1960s wore on, even Trocchi realised he was no longer in control. Sigma's dream of "the invisible insurrection of a million minds" was gone, along with his writing and his luck.

From the 1970s on, aside from media appearances as arch-junkie, virtually nothing was accomplished. He still held court to addicts and acolytes in his chaotic penthouse flat in Kensington's Observatory Gardens, and publishers were still gullible enough to give him advances on the strength of a sample chapter, but the so-called Long Book pledged to Calder in the mid-1960s was non-existent. "He had at least seven contracts for that," remembers Calder. "He never even wrote a word. After Lyn died he said, 'I'm really going to do it, I have to do it for Lyn.' At the time he really believed it. It never happened."

Lyn, still an addict, died of hepatitis in 1972, aged 35, leaving Trocchi to care for their two young sons, Mark and Nick. Ill luck and ill health dogged him, and there was an increasingly desperate scrabble for funds to feed his family and a gargantuan habit of heroin and cocaine. Sure, he still knew everybody, and television still cast him in debates on drugs or counterculture but, as the 1970s became the 1980s, even the publishers' calls and their advances stopped coming, and Trocchi's bohemian circle of west London rogues retracted like a stoned iris.

But there was the master holding forth in his cap and gown, a giant drug-flooded Mr Punch trading rare books instead of writing them, to keep his head, his habit and little else above water. He was an astute book dealer, with stalls in Portobello, Kensington, and Kings Road, the latter managed by another old friend he'd turned on to heroin, Marcus Klein, a charming, erudite American. "Not a writer," says his daughter, journalist Naomi Klein, "but someone people liked to have around."

She thinks Trocchi played a part in her father's almost-lifelong heroin habit. "Unlike Trocchi, he didn't have all these people to support him." While Marcus did his best to hide his habit from his children, Trocchi's attitude was one of shocking openness. "Once I came home from school to find Trocchi in our kitchen injecting himself. My mother said he used to shoot up in front of his children."

Trocchi died in 1984, seven years after losing his 18-year-old son Mark to cancer. Trocchi's final companion was Sally Childs, a young au pair from New Zealand who fell in love with the old rogue . "She was his last lover," recalls Edwin Morgan. "She helped a great deal; he had a kind of calm and peace in his last years. At the same time, I remember her telling me of these terrible moods of frustration. He was still trying to write."

Not long after his cremation at Mortlake, Trocchi's ashes, kept in a jar on a mantelpiece, were stolen and never recovered. Then a mysterious fire ravaged his flat, and many of his papers were burned. Worst of all, less than a year after his death, his son Nicholas killed himself by jumping from the charred rafters of his father's old den. Perhaps he couldn't live without the old man either, however close to the edge of chaos his father had brought ordinary life when he was alive.