Alexander Trocchi, born 1925, is the transgressive forefather of Glasgow’s literary history, but his influence is difficult to capture. Trocchi’s popularity has ebbed and flowed as a result of his often questionable depictions of morality, modern society and drug addiction. Unlike other Glaswegian authors, he saw Glasgow as a “sprawling grey city”, an insight which emerged from his vagrant, nomadic lifestyle.
Trocchi attended the University of Glasgow in 1942 but left academia to become a leading seaman in the Royal Navy. Following WWII, Trocchi returned to the university in 1946 to study English and moral philosophy, where he met and maintained contact with former Poet Laureate of Glasgow, Edwin Morgan. Morgan saw Trocchi as a man operating on two sides of the publishing industry, dividing his work into the underground literature of Young Adam (1954) and Cain’s Book (1960) and the overground, being the six mainstream erotic fictions published between these novels under the pseudonym, Frances Lengel.
Winning the university’s Kemsley Travelling Scholarship, Trocchi relocated to Paris and became editor of avant garde literary magazine, Merlin. Paris was deeply foundational to Trocchi. Not only did he publish many icons of modernism including Beckett, Sartre and Genet but also found himself at the heart of the Situationist International and befriending Marxist theorist, Guy Debord. The pair would regularly undertake Debord’s famous dérives; a drifting walk through urban areas to deeper understand the hidden psychogeographical ties between a person and their environment. Trocchi wanted to understand human desire, the psyche and the influence of drugs on the brain. He would experiment with various drugs, culminating in a lifelong heroin habit.
Struggling for money, Trocchi found a benefactor in Maurice Giordias, owner of controversial publishing house, Olympia Press. Giordias would allow writers full autonomy with their novels so long as they contained a sex scene every six pages. Trocchi would write seven books for Olympia, including the aforementioned Young Adam (later editions removed the sex scenes at Trocchi’s request) and his best seller, Helen and Desire. Unlike his later work, Helen and Desire follows a clear narrative structure where the titular Helen uses her body as a means of getting what she wants. The book can be an enjoyable picaresque, one in which we see how the overarching themes of control and suppression shape a person's life and personality. What could have been an interesting coming-of-age character study is, however, often difficult to take seriously by the nauseatingly frequent pornographic material.
By using a pseudonym, Trocchi distanced himself from his erotic works and, as they were commercial successes, it could be argued he simply delivered what the people wanted. But the exploitation of women and their bodies was a very real facet of Trocchi’s life. He was renown for turning people onto heroin, including his second wife, Lyn, whom Trocchi would force into prostitution to supplement his habit. These books and deplorable acts of control are what confine Trocchi to the sidelines of Glaswegian culture. However, Trocchi was always aware of who he was.
From his descriptions of heroin use in Cain’s Book, we know that Trocchi used heroin to escape the real world and, no doubt, his own actions. His narrator, Joe Necchi observes, “The mind under heroin evades perception as it does ordinarily; one is aware only of contents [...] the perceiving turns inward, the eyelids droop, the blood is aware of itself”. Necchi’s Glaswegian upbringing, appetite for hard drugs and existential worldview depict him as a personification of Trocchi himself. The poignancy of what Trocchi wrote shows he grasped the immensity of his own selfish desires but, like with his former pseudonym, he uses Necchi as a scapegoat.
In an essay for the Edinburgh Review in 1985, Edwin Morgan believes Trocchi was constantly at odds with Scottish attitudes of the time, which he often regarded as too parochial. Trocchi’s goal was to debase social convention, which is why his work found a home within the lines of Parisian existentialism and American beatnik literature more than within those of the Glaswegian literary tradition.
When Alasdair Gray writes so eloquently about the stories and histories that need to be told about “magnificent” Glasgow, this could almost be taken as a swipe at boorish existentialists, like Trocchi, too quick to wallow in their own misery. Likewise, James Kelman’s unashamed use of Scots dialect and gallows humour is at odds with Trocchi’s nihilistic realism. While his brutal writing helped shape the careers of these writers, Trocchi represents more than just his hometown. He didn’t want to reflect the reality of Glasgwegian life, he wanted to reflect the world through the life of a Glasgwegian. By trying to distance himself from the real world, through drugs and philosophy, he actually gave us the most intimate portrayal of what it means to be Glaswegian; belligerent and charming, intelligent and overlooked, while toeing the line between hedonism and tragedy.
Article originally published on March 28th via GUM and available here.
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