Cain’s Book

ALMA CLASSICS LTD
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Cain’s Book
first published in US by Grove Atlantic in 1960

First published in Great Britain by John Calder (Publishers) in 1963

© Alexander Trocchi 1960

© Sally Childs 1992

This edition first published by Alma Classics Limited (previously Oneworld Classics Limited) in 2011

This new edition first published by Alma Classics Limited in 2012

Foreword © Tom McCarthy 2011

Introduction © Richard Seaver, 1992

Notes © Alma Classics, 2011

Cover image © Catriona Gray

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe

ISBN: 978-1-84749-265-4
eISBN: 978-1-84749-360-6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Foreword

Introduction

Cain’s Book

A Moveable Void

I remember reading
Cain’s Book
in my early twenties and being struck by an almost visceral awareness – the same kind of sensation you get when reading
Joyce or Burroughs for the first time – that this was momentous, important stuff. The prose seemed to affirm at every turn the presence of someone who, besides knowing how to write,
fundamentally understood and articulated what literature
is
: what it offers, what it withholds, what’s at stake in it. Digging out recently my old Calder edition, which I’m
delighted to see is now undergoing a timely re-release by Alma Classics, I found I wasn’t wrong.

“But nothing
happens
in
Cain’s Book
!” its detractors will complain. And they’d be right. One of the most striking characteristics of Trocchi’s
novel (even that label would, I’m sure, be contested by many) is its refusal of story. Narrative in the conventional sense is almost non-existent, and wilfully so. In one of his text’s
many self-reflective moments, Trocchi compares its progression to a landscape which is not only un-signposted but also, in its very innate formation, devoid of the “natural” contours
that we might expect a novel to follow: peaks and troughs, steady plot inclines rising to dramatic summits or climactic cliffs from which whole vistas open up, that kind of thing. Rather, it forms
an “endless tundra which is all there is to be explored”. Tundras are bleak, monotonous, quasi-repetitive, the same and not the same at the same time. He adds: “This is the
impasse which a serious man must enter and from which only the simple-minded can retreat.”
Must
enter: I’ll come back to this sense of obligation later.

But for now I want to stick with the landscape analogy, because it seems to me that Trocchi’s sensibility is totally
spatial
. Like Christopher Marlowe in
Doctor Faustus
or Herman Melville in
Moby Dick
, he’s mapping a whole cosmogony, intuiting his way towards an understanding of a social, poetic and metaphysical layout. That’s the real action
of
Cain’s Book
, its “plot”. To gain the vantage point necessary for this undertaking, Trocchi has to go out to the edge of things. Emily Dickinson often talks about
finding her place on the “circumference” – of the globe, of space itself, of life – a limit point from which she can look two ways, in and out. Trocchi is drawn to this
circumference, attracted by the view it offers. He finds it, in its most literal form, in a scow (or barge) moored off the edge of Manhattan, a spot from which he can peer back and see the
city’s celebrated skyline dim and hazy in the distance, “like a mirage in which one isn’t involved”. On the scow’s other side, the black water of the Hudson across
which he’s towed at irregular intervals by tugs, and the even blacker water of the Atlantic in which he’s occasionally deposited for long stretches, “tottering at the night edge
of a flat world” (space, for him, is always flat). The question then becomes: where’s that edge’s edge, the point beyond which you fall off? “I often wondered,” he
writes, “how far out a man could go without being obliterated.”

Trocchi is acutely aware that his sought-after observation post lies somewhere pretty close to the trip line of death – just past it even, by a couple of paces. This inherently unstable
set-up is, quite paradoxically, what keeps him steady, gives him purpose: “to be able to attain, by whatever means, the serenity of a vantage point ‘beyond’ death, to have such a
critical technique at one’s disposal – let me say that on my ability to attain that vantage point my own sanity has from time to time depended.” The label of nihilistic writer so
often attached to him is profoundly, not just superficially, accurate: he’s nihilistic not so much in the lay sense of having a gloomy outlook on life, but rather inasmuch as his entire
sensibility rests on an intimate relation with a space of annihilation, of becoming nothing.

What’s more (and here it gets really interesting), this space is also where writing itself – the act, the practice and the stuff, the matter – comes from. When Trocchi
describes the billowing Atlantic as “like a sheet of black ink”, it’s not just to be gratuitously poetic: the dark, void-filled liquid, for him, really is like what’s inside
his typewriter. Tied to Bronx Stake Boat Number 2 in what seems an interminable night, he spends his time re-reading notes whose logic is entirely circular: “If I write: it is important to
keep writing, it is to keep me writing.” The other author who immediately springs to mind here is Maurice Blanchot, that writer of infinite night, darkness and disappearance; and in fact some
of Trocchi’s lines could have been written by Blanchot – not least the one in which he tells us that “the great urgency for literature is that it should once and for all
accomplish its own dying”. But where Blanchot’s ponderings on literature and the right to death are abstract, Trocchi has willed them into material form off New York harbour, given them
concrete embodiment, a
mise-en-scène
: ensconced in what he describes as the “floating coffin” of his scow, with “the emptiness of the night beyond the walls... the
trackless water”, he lays out before us, in one of the most brilliantly pared-down passages of the whole book, “a chair, a typewriter, a table, a single bed, a coal stove, a dresser, a
cupboard, a man in a little wooden shack, two miles from the nearest land”. Like a tracker dog, he’s hunted down literature’s ground zero, its primal scene, and set his store up
there: here it is, here I am.

When he’s not immersed in the black liquid, he’s injecting it into himself in the form of heroin. Heroin is an essential weapon in Trocchi’s nihilistic armoury: “There is
no more systematic nihilism,” he writes, “than that of the junky in America.” If Paris was a moveable feast for Hemingway, junk, for Trocchi, is a moveable void: taking that void
around the city with him, in him, he ensures that he inhabits negative space constantly. This is his poetic project and it’s also the way his whole perception system works at its most basic
level (the two are the same). I can’t stress enough how utterly
negative
Trocchi’s negative space is. It’s negative in the strict chemical or photographic sense of the
word. An early sequence in
Cain’s Book
takes us through a kind of Proust moment of perception and recall in which Trocchi, watching a man urinating in an alley, becomes

Edge again. The sequence kicks off a long analepsis to an Edinburgh pub, then the image of a blade cutting the outline of a woman’s body into wood – a loop whose
eventual folding-back into the present dictates that Trocchi take the man back to his scow and sleep with him. But their sex doesn’t respond to a need which is, properly speaking, sexual:
rather, it fulfils the requirements of the perception-memory tip he’s launched himself on. Just prior to the seduction, Trocchi tells us:

This is Phenomenology in action: what drives him is a longing for the world to unpack and reveal itself before us, to take form and resolution, like an image looming into view
from murky liquid in a darkroom.

Finally, that notion of obligation I was talking about earlier.
Cain’s Book
is shot through with a sense of mission. Trocchi has a task, an almost military duty to attend to.
Several times he talks about being confronted by the “enemy”, against whose charges fixing gives him an instant “Castle Keep”, an enclave from which he can hold out: against
his age, morality, stupidity, capitalism’s work ethic, the lot (as his friend and occasional fixing partner Burroughs would say, “the whole tamale”). Writing finds another role in
this battle. As he divvies up his scores with them, Trocchi, intriguingly, lectures his fellow junkies on the contemporary importance of the diarist and exhorts them “to accept, to endure, to
record” (although whether they’re roused into Pepys-like diligence by his exhortations is doubtful). In the select moments when he references other writers directly, he invokes
Beckett’s aesthetic of endurance and bearing witness and Joyce’s strategy of silence, exile and cunning. As with Joyce’s writing, there’s a real sense that Trocchi’s
lays out a project which is at once political, personal and aesthetic. You can’t separate these strata in his work. His goal has always been “to strike permanently against uncreative
work... to explore and modify my great contempt”. Although lots of commentators try to “reclaim” Trocchi from literature, set him aside from its canon, for me statements like this
place him firmly within a tradition running from Céline to Houellebecq, and in fact right back to Juvenal: like them, Trocchi is writing against his time, against all time, against history.
“I felt my thoughts were the ravings of a man mad out of his mind to have been placed in history at all,” he rages, full to bursting with his mission, “having to act, having to
consider, a victim of the fixed insquint.”

What he’s aiming for, his ultimate goal, in one sense, is the archetypal tragic moment and the transcendence that this moment offers. “The problem,” he decides near
Cain’s Book
’s end, “has always been to fuse the fragments of eternity, more precisely, to attain from time to time the absolute serenity of timelessness.” Yet at
the same time he rejects the very aesthetic mode (tragedy) that would allow this absolute serenity and timelessness to happen – as he has already told his fellow junkies, it’s
“the death of tragedy which made the diarist more than ever necessary”. To put it in a nutshell, he’s a Modernist. And what we’re ultimately encountering in
Cain’s
Book
is the Modernist quandary that turns around failure of tragedy – the same quandary articulated by the work of Eliot, Conrad or Faulkner: I want the transcendental tragic moment, but
I can’t believe in tragedy any more, therefore my writing will both self-frustrate
and
form the record of that experience of self-frustration. This paradox is what gives
Cain’s Book
its final, brilliant ending, in which Trocchi first recognizes the inadequacy of art and literature in actually “accomplishing” anything, muttering
dismissively, “such concepts I sometimes read about, but they have nothing in intimacy with what I am doing, exposing, obscuring” – then immediately, compelled as always, carries
on producing work, showing us, again, the scene of writing: the typewriter, the half-written page. “Only at the end,” he writes, “I am still sitting here, writing, with the
feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still...” And he lets us know that as soon as he’s finished the paragraph he’s going to go into the next room and
dose himself up with drugs. Eventually, as we know, the writing itself would slip away, until only the void was left. This was probably distressing to those who knew and loved him; but, given the
trajectory he’s cast himself along, it seems “correct”, the ending that his work, in its extraordinary honesty, demands.