Cain’s Book Read Free

sense that a Joyce or a Gertrude Stein understood it, experimentation as an end in
itself, seemed to us impossible.
    The first issues of
Merlin
could not have exceeded sixty-four pages, but each bore the weight of the early Cold War world on its meagre shoulders.
    In this context, Trocchi struck me, and I believe all of us, as the most talented and prepossessing writer on the scene; the one who, had a straw poll been taken, would have been voted most
likely to become our generation’s Joyce or Hemingway or – more likely – Orwell. Compared with Trocchi, who was only a year or two older than most of us, we were babes in the
woods, fumbling towards knowledge or the hope of knowledge. He on the contrary was sure of himself, and his writing reflected it. He had already been married and divorced, was the father of two
beautiful (albeit abandoned) daughters. He had already published stories and poems and was putting the finishing touches to his first novel,
Young Adam
, in which several British and
American houses had expressed interest. That existentialist novel, as grim as the times in which it was written, was an exceptional first work, written from the same viewpoint and suffused with the
same fervour that motivated
Merlin
: man is alone, and though he may not be responsible for what Fate has meted out to him, that does not mean that responsibility can be sloughed off like
some reptilian skin.
    During those
Merlin
years I was as close to Trocchi as I have ever been to any friend or colleague. We talked endlessly about every subject, serious or frivolous; we sweated the
publication of the magazine, always short of funds; we launched an ambitious and monetarily mad book-publication venture. We worked together closely, and always in harmony.
    Why then, rereading
Cain’s Book
thirty-plus years after its original American publication, do I have such a feeling of pleasure on the one hand and anger on the other?
    Explanation of the pleasure is easy. In 1960, Norman Mailer, never a pushover for compliments to competitors, wrote of
Cain’s Book:
“It is true, it has art, it is brave. I
would not be surprised if it is still talked about in twenty years.” How does it stand up, not two but three decades later? How many books can withstand the erosion of time, the weight of
their own shortcomings, the change of interests and sensibilities, the ever-evolving political realities?
Cain’s Book
does stand up, amazingly well. The prose is taut and still
fresh; the metaphors are striking and accurate. One can open the book to almost any page:
    Fay’s face was more reserved. Swinish? More like a pug than a pig. Her untidy dark hair tumbled into her big fur collar. A yellow female pigdog, her face in its warm
     nest beginning to stir with knowing.
    But the inauthenticity was in the words, clinging to them like barnacles to a ship’s hull, a growing impediment.
    Tom Tear... was leaning backwards against the wall and his soft black eyelashes stirred like a clot of moving insects at his eyes. His face had the look of smoke and ashes,
     like a bombed city.
    Jody loved cakes. She loved cakes and horse and all the varieties of soda pop. I knew what she meant. Some things surprised me at first, the way for example she stood for
     hours like a bird in the middle of the room with her head tucked in at her breast and her arms like drooping wings. At first this grated on me, for it meant the presence of an element
     unresolved in the absolute stability created by the heroin. She swayed as she stood, dangerous as Pisa.
    Other qualities: Trocchi has dealt with the tough subject of drugs and the junkie life with rare truth and candour. There is no romanticism here – although several
reviewers have likened
Cain’s Book
to De Quincey and Baudelaire – the addict aware that he is “the loneliest man in the world”. Honesty toward oneself is the
linchpin of this clearly autobiographical work: Trocchi/Necchi isolated from the world; the