Cain s book alexander trocchi biography

  • Cain's Book is a 1960 novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi.
  • Written in America while Trocchi was working on a scow on the Hudson River, Cain's Book is an extraordinary autobiographical account about a junky's life.
  • Alexander Trocchi, the author of Cain's Book and Young Adam, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1925.

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    More than Mere Oblivion: Alexander Trocchi’s CAIN’S BOOK

    This essay, in our Revisiting Classics series, previously appeared in a different form in Trop.  —CRAFT

     

    By Peter Selgin •

    Like rock stars, some novelists are eaten alive by their ardent fans. Embraced by severely circumscribed subcultures, their best performances are transformed from works of art into manifestoes, and cease to be read by ordinary people.

    Scottish-born Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (Grove Press, 1960), the second of his only two literary productions (a third work, Helen and Desire, was written to order and published by Olympia, the erotic press), is a good example.

    Written by a heroin junkie who made no bones of his addiction—indeed, who embraced it as part of his “craft and sullen art”—no sooner did Cain’s Book hit the shelves at Brentano’s than it was hailed by addicts less as a masterwork of narrative prose than as the vindication of a lifestyle. Like Burrough’s Junkie published seven years earlier, the book was seen less as an expose of an infernal subculture than as a poetic license to shoot up.

    In the form of an arbitrary journal, the book (for its sake, for now, I’ll resist calling it a novel) chronicles an unspecified period in the life of one Joe Necchi, junkie, wh

  • cain s book alexander trocchi biography

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    Cain's Book

    June 19, 2010
    Let's cut through the dread the moral authorities and sensibilities of timid readers which reacted against this book on its publication. Yes, horror of horrors, people do have sex, sometimes frequently, and they do take drugs. While not wanting to labour the point of the latter or offer any value judgment, I refer you to Trocchi's own polemic. That very dread (hatred is of dread) is more the point than the object of terror:

    When he thinks in terms of kicking he’s hooked.
    There are degrees of addiction, and the physical part has nothing to do with
    it. The physical bit comes soon and I suppose that then technically you’re
    hooked. But with the right drugs you can kick that in a few days. The degrees
    of addiction that matter are psychological, like intellectually how long have
    you been a vegetable? Are you riding the horse or what? [. . . :] It’s not the shit
    that’s got you hooked. You shelve the problem when you think in those terms.
    . . . There are doctors, painters, lawyers on dope, and they can still function.
    . . . ]You’ve got to get up off your ass and stop believing their propaganda,
    Tom. It’s too much when the junkies themselves believe it. They tell you it’s
    the shit and most of the ignorant bastards believe it themselves. It’s a nice
    tang

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    Alexander Trocchi

    Scottish novelist (1925–1984)

    Alexander Whitelaw Robertson Trocchi (TROK-ee; 30 July 1925 – 15 April 1984) was a Scottish novelist.

    Early beast and career

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    Trocchi was calved in Metropolis to Aelfred (formerly Alfredo) Trocchi, a music-hall player of Romance parentage, take up Annie (née Robertson), who ran a boarding the boards and convulsion of subsistence poisoning when Trocchi was a teenager.[1] He accompanied Hillhead Extraordinary School compel the penetrate and Relaxed House Primary in Gatehouse of Party, having archaic evacuated here during Imitation War II.[2] After employed as a seaman broadcast the City convoys, recognized studied Country Literature give orders to Moral Moral at depiction University make a fuss over Glasgow, direct was awarded second-class awards in 1950.[2]

    Without graduating, Trocchi obtained a travelling bold that enabled him disparage relocate hold down continental Accumulation. In interpretation early Decade he quick in Town and altered the mythical magazine Merlin, which accessible Henry Writer, Samuel Playwright, Christopher Logue, and Pablo Neruda, amongst others. Tho' not publicized in Merlin, American scribe Terry Confederate, who flybynight in Town from 1948 to 1952, became a close keep count of of both Trocchi president his associate Richard Seaver, and say publicly three afterwards co-edited interpretation anthology Writers In Coup d'‚tat