Most of the speakers published their talks
online shortly after the event and I’ve added links to these where possible.
Home and McCarthy later went on to develop their texts into introductory essays
for the most recent editions of Young Adam (Alma, 2010) and Cain’s Book (Alma, 2010). Even if you know
the novels both of these editions are worth checking out. In his talk Home spoke
about his mother and about Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain’s
Film (1969). His essay ‘A Walk on Gilded
Splinters’ that appeared in Iain Sinclair’s London:
City of Disappearances built on this. Interested readers should also seek
out his 2005 novel Tainted Love.
I’ve tightened up the text a bit here and
there but otherwise it’s taken verbatim from the notebook I was keeping at the
time. I would like to say that my odd use of tense and fragmented syntax was
done in homage to Trocchi but this was not the case. I wrote this at speed, on
a train, very late at night.
Alexander Trocchi at The Three Kings, Clerkenwell 12 October 2006.
A night of readings and criticism organised by radical publishers Social
Disease. Although by all accounts this event didn’t draw the impressive
numbers seen at their last B.S. Johnson event, the line-up of speakers was
excellent and the venue - a dimly lit upper pub room - was perfect setting for
the evening's tales of drugs, sex and dangerous writing.
First up was poet Michael Horovitz who by candlelight read from
Trocchi’s first novel, Young Adam (1954). He highlighted the novel’s
debt to Beckett, praised its intense lyricism but also commented on its obvious
shortcomings. Young Adam denies of any kind of distinctive voice to the
character of Ella, being a particularly problematic aspect. Horovitz also
talked about Trocchi’s role in the 1965 Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall,
and it was this image of him as an organiser and networker which was to persist
during the evening
Author and activist Stewart Home spoke next and illustrated the
dizzying extent of Trocchi’s connections amongst the international
counterculture. Home touched on the idea of Trocchi as an artist of
disappearance and turned the lack of projection equipment to his advantage. The
inability to screen Jamie Wadhawan’s Cain’s Film was read by
Home as an appropriate symbol of Trocchi's own traceless nature.
Home commented that Trocchi main talent was that of drawing people into
his circle. This mesmeric quality was central to Dennis Brown’s contribution to the evening. Brown
acted as Trocchi’s literary assistant in the later, largely undocumented period
of the author's life. Brown painted a picture of a man who on the surface
appeared quiet, introverted and content to sit in a bookish corner with beer
and a whiskey chaser. However Brown described how, once the talk began flowing,
this appearance gave way to tales of Parisian decadence, sigmatic revolution,
and - to those who were so inclined - the promise of a fix in the presence of a
master junkie.
Trocchi obviously had a major influence on Brown, but he was also quick
to point out the damaging and debilitating effects of his friend's drug
addiction. The image of Trocchi sitting alone and motionless in the corner of a
bar offered a significant counterpoint to the image of a galvanizing activist
and artist conveyed by Home. These two perspectives came together in the final
talk of the night from author Tom McCarthy. He read a fascinating paper
focusing on Cain’s Book (1960), Trocchi’s account of heroin addiction in
New York. McCarthy placed particular emphasis on the moments in the text where
writing itself becomes the subject. From here McCarthy argued that rather than
being merely a graphic diary of drug abuse, Cain's Book offered insights
into what he called the "primal scene of writing"; a record of
writing as process. Heroin does not produce this vision but instead works as a
correlative in the text to Trocchi’s movement to the edge of language. The text
narrates and investigates the movement of individuals towards a series of
personal and communicative extremes.
What emerged out of the evening was an image of Trocchi as a distinctive
but limited voice in post-war literature. However, as was suggested by the
biographical insights provided and the analytic perspectives applied, there
exists within Trocchi’s writing a wilful sense of self-destruction. Trocchi
consistently seems to activate a process of obliteration or disappearance. That
he is now being celebrated by small, secretive groups meeting in backrooms
suggests that to some degree Trocchi succeeded in his bid to escape from
history.
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