Authors: Alexander Trocchi
Cain’s Book (25 page)
“How do you know that?”
“I ast a man after,” Fay said. “They was standin’ outside that bar, all the bums cheerin’ the heat on. They didn’t get Ettie either. She left five minutes
before they came.”
Fay sat through it all, her knees bare, in her fur coat, on the WC between the second and third landings, amongst the spiders and the dust under the unshaded fifteen-watt electric light bulb,
battling her chronic constipation. She didn’t risk a move in case they had a man on the street but she unscrewed the bulb and sat in the dark as they came down with the others.
“It was Fink,” Fay said. “He tried to bum a fix offa Geo in Sheridan Square before we all went to Tom’s. Geo told him to fuck off. We shouldn’t have gone there
after that. But Tom had a meet with Ettie.”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“I phoned your office.”
“I’m glad you found me. Christ! I nearly went in last night. I could have been there!”
Fay was fiddling around in the tin basin where the dirty dishes were. She came out with a teaspoon.
“You got your works, Joe?”
I gave her the spike and dropper. “I’ll leave you a taste,” she said. “That creepin’ bastard Fink! He gets so much for what they call ‘makin’ a
case’... someone’s goin’ to slip him a hotshot...”
“I’ll clean it,” I said, accepting the spike from her when she was finished. I tightened the tie about my arm and watched the veins rise up, a blue network in which the pale
liquid would presently move like a mute caress to my brain.
I
N EARLY LIFE
sensations like metaphysical burglars burst forcibly in(to) the living. In early life things strike with the
magic of their existence. The creative moment comes out of the past with some of that magic unimpaired; involvement in it is impossible for an attitude of compromise. Nevertheless it is not the
power to abstract that is invalid, but the unquestioning acceptance of conventional abstractions which stand in the way of raw memory, of the existential... all such barriers to the gradual
refinement of the central nervous system.
It is not a question simply of allowing the volcano to erupt. A burnt backside is not going to help anyone. And the ovens of Auschwitz are scarcely cold. When the spirit of play dies there is
only murder.
Play.
Homo ludens.
43
Playing pinball for example in a café called le Grap d’Or.
– In the pinball machine an absolute and peculiar order reigns. No scepticism is possible for the man who by a series of sharp and slight dunts tries to control the
machine. It became for me a ritual act, symbolizing a cosmic event. Man is serious at play. Tension, elation, frivolity, ecstasy, confirming the supra-logical nature of the human situation.
Apart from jazz – probably the most vigorous and yea-saying protest of
homo ludens
in the modern world – the pinball machine seemed to me to be America’s greatest
contribution to culture; it rang with contemporaneity. It symbolized the rigid structural “soul” that threatened to crystallize in history, reducing man to historicity, the great
mechanic monolith imposed by mass mind; it symbolized it and reduced it to nothing. The slick electric shiftings of the pinball machine, the electronic brain, the symbolical transposition of
the modern Fact into the realm of play. (The distinction between the French and the American attitude towards the “tilt” [“teelt”]; in America, and England, I have been
upbraided for trying to beat the mechanism by skilful tilting; in Paris, that is the whole point.)
Man is forgetting how to play. Yes, we have taught the mass that work is sacred, hard work. Now that the man of the mass is coming into his own he threatens to reimpose the belief we imposed
on him. The men of no tradition “dropped into history through a trapdoor” in a short space of 150 years were never taught to play, were never told that their work was
“sacred” only in the sense that it enabled their masters to play.
The beauty of cricket. The vulgarity of professionalism. The anthropological treason of those who treat culture “seriously”, who think in terms of educating the mass instead of
teaching man how to play. The callow, learned jackanapes who trail round art exhibitions looking for they know not what in another’s bright turd. How soon Dada was mummified by its
inclusion in the histories.
Many of the poets and painters in Paris in the early Fifties played pinball; few, unfortunately, without feelings of guilt.
Art as the way, symbol, indirect, transcendence.
Her hands the texture of dried prunes – my mother used a green block of cosmetic called “Snowfire” to take the chapped look out of them, but they were never
long enough out of water for it to make any difference. Including the lodgers, she had to launder for twelve people, and cook for them, and clean up their mess. It gave her great pleasure to read
about and to see pictures of the Queen.
“What’s wrong, Joe?” she said to me.
“Nothing,” I replied.
Hard work never hurt anyone, I was told, but it killed my mother.
The Industrial Revolution brought in its wake Five Year Plans and possibly something more than lip-service to uncreative work. My natural aversion to such work in the land of the industrious
Scot caused me, forcedly, to dissimulate. The fact of my Italian ancestry – the name of my great countryman, Machiavelli, was used in Scotland almost solely as an opprobrious epithet –
made the mask inevitable. Later I whispered eagerly the words of Stephen Dedalus: “silence, exile, cunning,”
44
but at the time all that was
possible was silence, cunning. Meanwhile I preferred brushing my mother’s hair to make it beautiful to breaking sticks, running errands. I came closest to her at night when I brushed her
hair. Alone with her in the kitchen I stood behind her chair on a box and brushed her hair until it glowed softly like burnished copper. I never knew my mother when she was young and, they said,
beautiful, and sometimes when I passed my hand over her hair I was invaded by a sense of outrage that she was not young and beautiful to have me.
Whenever I contemplated our poverty and how it situated me, apparently at the edge of an uncrossable gulf at whose far side strolled those fortunate few who lived their lives in well-mannered
leisure, I felt like a tent pegged down in a high wind. Sermons on the sanctity of hard work, and there were many such sermons, were offensive to me. I thought of my mother’s hands, and of
her poor bent body, and of her boundless admiration for the chief symbol of that class towards which all people of my acquaintance aspired, the class which did not work, the class of whose scorn my
father was afraid, thinking only of money as he did, because he did not have any, because each shilling was doled out to him until he was driven to pawn the spoons Mr Pitchimuthu from West Africa
had given her as a Xmas present in – ? – for getting over her shock of his eating raw eggs directly from the shell, of his frying sardines, more, expecting her to fry them for him, for
accepting him black as black coal into her house and allowing him to be known as “Sir” to her children, a politeness we children never thought twice of according. To some black men.
“I think I will have a yellow man next,” my mother said, and in spite of my father’s protest went ahead with her experiment in lodgers. I wonder now as I am suddenly overcome with
the past’s vast possibilities whether this could have had something to do with the citadel my father constructed in the bathroom, against comers, white, yellow and black. My father, the
Italian musician who, when he became unemployable, conducted a cold war no more (perhaps no less) idiotic than the cold war which has been going on since I was first informed men banded together in
military groups. I remember one interval of seven years when groups were not at cold war, a period during which “my” group was at war. And beyond the walls of my father’s house
all legal precedent seemed to be governed by that class which did not work. It was true more and more of them were beginning to work, even before the Second World War, and some of them even
believed that work was good for a man at the same time as they made no practical distinction between creative and mechanical work.
– “Why is work good, Mammie?”
“It wouldn’t be good to play all of the time, Joe.”
“I don’t see why not, Mammie.” Wishing as I brushed her brittle auburn-grey hair that she could play all of the time – from now on. “I don’t like
work.”
“Yes you do, Joe.”
“No I don’t. I hate it. I don’t like having to go to school. I wouldn’t go if it wouldn’t get you into trouble.”
“Yes you would, Joe. You like school once you get there. It’s getting up to go you don’t like.”
“Sometimes. I usually hate it. I hate school, Mammie.”
“You learn some nice things at school, Joe.”
“Mammie, why did Daddie sell the teaspoons; do you not think you should leave him for doing that?”
“No, I wouldn’t leave him for doing that, Joe,” and occasionally she would burst out crying and say: “If only he wouldn’t be such a wild bear! If only he would
leave me alone. If only he would go away and leave me alone!”
“Oh Mammie! You don’t want me to go away and leave you alone? You won’t go away and leave me alone, will you, Mammie!”
“No Joe! Don’t be silly, darling! It’s nothing... really! I just needed a good cry! Oh Joe...”
“And I won’t leave you ever, Mammie! I promise! You’ll always have me!”
“One day when you’re grown up and a man,” she said, holding me tightly to her.
Later I said: “You don’t really want Daddie to go away and not come back?”
“No, Joe, I’m all right now. You go to bed like a good boy. I’ll be all right. And I’m not far away here in the kitchen.”
My father came in.
“I’m going out,” he said. It sounded like an ultimatum.
“You went out last night, Louis,” my mother said. “I have nothing to give you.”
“I didn’t
ask
did I?”
“I gave you two shillings last night.”
“I didn’t ask you for any bloody money!”
“Don’t lose your temper, Louis.”
“I’m not losing my bloody temper! I didn’t ask you for any bloody money! We’ve never got any bloody money because you’re too bloody soft on them, the whole bloody
lot of them! Pitchimuthu with his bloody fried sardines and that old bloody cripple in the blue room! Kept me out of the bathroom all bloody day with their bloody carry on!”
“Louis, you just stop this! Stop it at once! Go on out if you must, but don’t begin that business all over again!”
“Always defending them. They can make a bloody pigsty of the whole place! You don’t care! You let’m do as they bloody well like! Well, not in this house! Not in my house they
bloody well won’t! I’ll tell the whole bloody lot of them to get to hell out of here!”
“No you won’t, Louis, you won’t!”
“Do as they bloody well like! Powder all over the bloody toilet seat! The damned dirt on their feet all trod into the bloody carpet! Did you see the carpet in the bloody hall today?
Can’t wipe their bloody feet!”
This, then, is the beginning, a tentative organization of a sea of ambiguous experience, a provisional dyke, an opening gambit.
Ending, I should not care to estimate what has been accomplished. In terms of art and literature? – such concepts I sometimes read about, but they have nothing in intimacy with what I am
doing, exposing, obscuring. Only at the end I am still sitting here, writing, with the feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still, and with a sense of my freedom and
responsibility, more or less cut off as I was before, with the intention as soon as I have finished this last paragraph to go into the next room and turn on. Later I shall phone those who have
kindly intimated their willingness to publish the document and tell them that it is ready now, or as ready as it ever will be, and I surprise myself at feeling relieved, as I once surprised Moira
at feeling relieved one New Year, knowing again that nothing is ending, and certainly not this.
New York, August 1959
Notes
1
.
Mendelian
: A reference to Gregor Mendel (1822–84), an Austrian botanist and monk whose theories of heredity are the basis for
the modern science of genetics.
2
.
Tout ce qu’on fait... Cocteau
: “Everything one does in life, even love, one does on the express train that rolls toward
death. Smoking opium is to leave the train; it is to care for something other than life, death” (French). From
Opium: Journal d’une désintoxication
(1930) by Jean
Cocteau (1889–1963).
3
.
ex nihilo nihil fit
: “Nothing comes from nothing” (Latin).
4
.
boost
: Steal.
5
.
dollies
: A slang term for methadone, a drug used as a substitute for heroin when treating addiction.
6
.
Don’t you suppose... Unamuno
: Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), a Spanish novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher.
7
.
Ave Caesar! Nunc civis romanus sum
: “Hail Caesar! Now I am a citizen of Rome” (Latin).
8
.
John Knox
: The leader of the Scottish Reformation and founder of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, John Knox
(
c.
1514–72), was noted for his austere, Calvinistic moral beliefs.
9
.
Espero
: “I hope so” (Spanish).
10
.
Cellini
: Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71), a Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith.
11
.
AMA
: American Medical Association.
12
.
GI Bill
: The popular name for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which provided unemployment payments and other
benefits for veterans of the Second World War.
13
.
Lucky Luciano’s
: Charles “Lucky” Luciano (1896–1962), a powerful New York gangster.
14
.
Chou En-Lai
: Another spelling of Zhou Enlai (1898–1976), the first premier of the People’s Republic of China.
15
.
the Tombs
: Popular name for the Manhattan Detention Complex, a prison in lower Manhattan built in 1838.
16
.
Miró
: Joan Miró (1893–1983), Catalan painter associated with Surrealism.
17
.
Reuben, Reuben, I Been Thinking
: A children’s song, published in 1871, by Harry Birch and William Gooch. It is otherwise
known as ‘Rachel and Reuben’.
18
.
Isthmian Lines
: A shipping company founded in the early twentieth century by the United States Steel Corporation.
19
.
Bothnian Gulf
: The northernmost part of the Baltic Sea, between Finland and Sweden.
20
.
King Haakon
: Haakon VII (1872–1957), the first king of Norway following that country’s independence from Sweden in
1905. He was a key figure in Norwegian resistance to the Nazi occupation during the Second World War.
21
.
dexies
: A slang term for Dexedrine, or amphetamine sulphate, a stimulant.
22
.
bennies
: Short for Benzedrine, another trade name for amphetamine.
23
.
Baron de Charlus... no convict is
: The Baron de Charlus is a homosexual character in Marcel Proust’s
À la
recherche du temps perdu
(
In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past
), published between 1913 and 1927. He enjoys the sadomasochistic services of young men procured for
him by the brothel-keeper Jupien.
24
.
L’Histoire d’O... literary prize
: An erotic novel by Pauline Réage (in reality the journalist Anne Desclos),
published in France in 1954. Although a ban was imposed by the French authorities and obscenity charges were brought against the publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the novel was awarded the Prix
des Deux Magots in 1955. It appeared in English in 1965 as
Story of O
, published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, who were Trocchi’s own publishers and for whom the
author had himself pseudonymously written a number of pornographic novels.
25
.
Horatio defending the bridge
: The Roman hero Horatius Cocles was said to have saved Rome from invasion in 500
BC
by defending the Sublician bridge across the Tiber against the forces of the Etruscans.
26
.
This time I know... Samuel Beckett
: From Beckett’s
Malone Dies
, published in French (as
Malone Muert
) in
1951 and in an English translation by the author in 1956. The second of Beckett’s Trilogy (which begins with
Molloy
and ends with
The Unnameable
), and famous for its
rejection of traditional narrative structure and experimental style,
Malone Dies
consists of the reflections of a dying man, Malone, who finally passes away at the end of the book.
27
.
el-train
: An abbreviation of “elevated” train. Much of New York’s elevated-train system had been dismantled by
the mid-twentieth century.
28
.
Gill’s Stations of the Cross
: In 1914 the British sculptor Eric Gill (1882–1940) produced fourteen relief carvings
representing the Stations of the Cross (i.e. the suffering and death of Jesus Christ) for Westminster Cathedral.
29
.
I Want to Be Happy
: An optimistic, light-hearted song by Vincent Youmans (1898–1946) and Irving Caesar (1895–1996),
originally from the Broadway musical
No, No, Nanette
(1925).
30
.
the perfect correlation of Leibniz’s clocks
: A reference to the “two-clock” theory of the philosopher Gottfried
Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz compared the relationship between the soul and the body to that between two perfectly synchronized clocks, which have no influence on each other but instead
owe their exact correlation to “pre-established harmony”, i.e. the work of a clockmaker (and, therefore, God). The narrator’s point here seems to be that just as the two
clocks appear to be closely interrelated but in fact are entirely independent of one another, the outward appearance of harmony in his personal relationships disguises the truth that he is
never able to make meaningful connections with others.
31
.
wen
: A protuberance on the skin such as a wart.
32
.
acker
: Slang term for an Egyptian piastre.
33
.
Dale Carnegie
: The author of many self-help books, including
How to Win Friends and Influence People
(1936).
34
.
Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?
: “What does he say?” (French).
35
.
Merde! Petit con!
: “Shit! Little cunt!” (French).
36
.
Dada
: A nihilistic, revolutionary and iconoclastic movement in the arts in the early twentieth century founded by the poet Tristan
Tzara (1896–1963).
37
.
pelf
: Stolen goods, material wealth (in a pejorative sense), or rubbish.
38
.
Dahlberg’s The Sorrows of Priapus
: Edward Dahlberg (1900–77) was an American novelist and critic.
The Sorrows of
Priapus
was published in 1957.
39
.
Mais tout de même... on se justifie
: “But all the same we justify ourselves badly, all the same we do badly when we
justify ourselves” (French).
40
.
Il vous faut construire les situations
: ¨You need to construct the situations” (French).
41
.
dies zeigt sich
: “This shows itself” (German).
42
.
Babbitt-forming
: A reference to the eponymous central character of
Babbitt
(1922), a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis
(1885–1951). “Babbitt” became a byword in the United States for bourgeois conformity and narrow-mindedness.
43
.
Homo ludens
: “Playing man” (Latin).
44
.
Stephen Dedalus... cunning
: In James Joyce’s autobiographical novel
A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man
(1916),
Stephen Dedalus (the author’s representative) rejects the Roman Catholic Church and Ireland, his fatherland, in favour of “silence, exile and cunning.”