Table Of Content

ACPL ITEM DISCARDED BOO ALEXAN DE R*TROCCHI INTERNATIONAL WRITERS HELENE CIXOUS (•Not available in USA) Angst* ELSPETH DAVIE SAMUEL BECKETT (Nobel The Spark Prize 1969)* Creating a Scene More Pricks than Kicks Murphy MARGIAD EVANS Wan Country Dance Imagination Dead Imagine Autobiography First Love A Ray of Darkness Mercier and Camier Four Novellas MARGUERITE DURAS Molloy The Little Horses of Tarquinia Malone Dies The Sailor from Gibraltar* The Unnamable The Square* Beckett Trilogy Moderato Cantabile* Texts for Nothing The Duras Trilogy (The Square, How It Is Ten-Thirty on a Summer’s No’s Knife Night, The Afternoon of Six Residua M. Andesmas)* For to End Yet Again Whole Days in the Trees All Strange Away Company LOUIS RENE DES FORETS III Seen III Said The Children’s Room Disjecta Worstward Ho DAVID GALLOWAY Collected Shorter Prose 1945-80 Melody Jones Collected Poems 1930-78 A Family Album Stirrings Still (Limited Edition) Lamaar Ransom, Private Eye Nohow On As The Story Was Told SADEGH HEDAYAT* Blind Owl NIKOLAI BOKOV (Nikto) Nobody J M HENEGAN Pulse JOHAN BORGEN The Red Mist AIDAN HIGGINS Lillelord* Asylum and Other Stories Langrishe, Go Down JORGE LOUIS BORGES Images of Africa Fictions* Balcony of Europe Scenes from a Receding Past NICHOLAS BORN The Deception* TREVOR HOYLE The Man Who Travelled on MICHAEL BRODSKY Motorways Detour* Vail ALAN BROWN P J KAVANAGH A Wind up the Willow People and Weather (in New Writing & Writers 14 and 15) MICHEL BUTOR Only By Mistake Passing Time WYNDHAM LEWIS JOYCE CARY The Childermass Herself Surprised Monstre Gai Malign Fiesta LOUIS-FERDINAND CELINE * Blasting and Bombardiering (auto- Journey to the End of the Night biography) Death on Credit Cains Book wov i a 7001 Alexander Trocchi JOHN CALDER PUBLISHER LONDON • PARIS • NEW YORK This edition first published in Great Britain in 1992 by Calder Publications Ltd. Reprinted by John Calder Publisher 1998. First published in Great Britain in 1963 by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. and in 1966 as a Jupiter Book by Calder and Boyars, Ltd. Copyright © by Alexander Trocchi 1960 Copyright © Sally Childs 1992 All Rights Reserved British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available on application. ISBN: 0-7145-4233-4 Any paperback edition of this book whether published simultaneously with, or subsequent to, the hardback edition is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherw ise disposed of without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior consent of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. Printed and bound in Canada by Webcom Limited For Lyn Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780714542331 Foreword Alexander Trocchi was a leg- endary figure in his lifetime: “a Viking,” as one who knew him in Paris in the 1950s recalled. He was seen as a man of towering literary genius, fated to cut a swath through the world. The only question was which direction he might choose. In the fifties he kept company with writers as aus- tere as Beckett and with revolutionaries as shadowy as Guy Debord, as well as with husders straddling the line between art and crime. In the sixties he announced himself a “cos- monaut of inner space” and positioned himself at the cen- ter of an international combine of the avant-garde, the “underground,” the “new culture”; with real force and pas- sion he called for an “Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds.” Always—whether in Paris or London, New York or Venice, California—people of all sorts were powerfully drawn to him, to his keening vitality, to the promises of Vll Greil Marcus Vlll adventure, risk, and victory he seemed to scatter like gifts to those less rich in spirit—like alms to the poor. But when Trocchi died in London in 1984—he was 59; he died of pneumonia, following an operation the previous year for lung cancer—he left behind a very conventional bohemian legend. He had been a heroin addict for almost thirty years, unrepentant and proud, and all around him was wreckage: his second wife, an addict in his steps, dead young, long before him (reaching the nadir of the bohemian cliche, Trocchi had once sent her out into the streets of Las Vegas to whore for their junk); his eldest son, dead; his youngest son, who would kill himself a few months after his father’s death. Across the map of Trocchi’s life were friends and acolytes who died young or who cul- tivated their own addictions. And, of course, there was the wreckage of Trocchi’s own writing, almost all behind him by the end of the 1950s: from the pornography published in Paris under the name “Frances Lengel” to the lonely Cain's Book, an autobiographical novel in the form of a junkie’s journal. Cain's Book was celebrated upon publication in 1960 in New \ork, banned and burned in Great Britain in 1963 as likely to corrupt and deprave. That was all. For the next quarter century Trocchi pursued a thou- sand schemes for a little money, a litde notoriety, living off the question of what might have been. In the matrix of the bohemian legend there is nothing so romantic as turning one’s back on the field the moment everyone believes the prize is yours; in that sense, in the sense of rules that were not of his making but for which he settled, Trocchi’s life was a cheap triumph.