69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (14 page)

Nevertheless, Alan considered comparisons of the careers of Frank Harris and Baron Corvo instructive. Harris, Alan was convinced, proved that those afflicted with a bourgeois mentality read books on the basis of who the author was rather than what they wrote. Following Hegel, this was a vice that my companion viewed as more common among critics than the general public. Both men saw the latter as being more generous in their outlook and attitudes. Harris was a literary success as long as he was able to make a go of his society marriage, an alliance to which he’d also hitched his ambition to become the English Bismarck. Inevitably, Harris attached himself to the wrong members of the Conservative Party. Kingsmill correctly characterises his subject’s views as those of a Tory anarchist and Harris got no further in politics than various other reactionary scribblers who posed as men of action. Although a sad skunk like Ernst Jünger was both younger than Harris and to the right of him politically, it is not simply coincidence that the ‘intellectual’ Führer of national bolshevism has been insightfully described as a Prussian anarchist.

By the time Alan got around to discussing this with me, we were buying a pint of milk in the Co-op Superstore in Kittybrewster. As we rolled through the check-out the conversation moved on to the fifth volume of
My Life and Loves
by Frank Harris. Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris had acquired the rights to this book from the author’s widow for a considerable sum. Alexander Trocchi was employed to rewrite what there was and construct the rest of the book. Sixty-five per cent of the final text was original prose by Trocchi and the rest notes by Harris worked up into a publishable form. Trocchi completed the book in ten days and since he considered Harris bombastic, used it as an opportunity to lampoon and parody the Tory anarchist. The result was good enough to fool all the literary experts who’d gone over the book in the five years before the hoax was revealed. Alan considered this faked autobiography to be the best of Trocchi’s porn novels and the only work ‘by’ Harris that he would even consider recommending to a friend. It certainly bettered Kingsmill’s biography in giving a truly fictional portrait of the man.

However, Alan did not consider
My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume
to be Trocchi’s best literary hoax, despite greatly appreciating the fact that this activist hipster had notched up seven porn books against only two ‘serious’ novels. Trocchi created his best fakes in the 60s, when he turned to book dealing as a means of supporting his smack habit. Since by this time there was a demand for his ‘original’ manuscripts, Trocchi met it by copying out his already published books in longhand. Alan thought this was an excellent jape and it helped him forgive if not entirely overlook the lapses into conventional literary tropes in Trocchi’s porn books. According to Alan, Trocchi was at his best in
Cain’s Book
and the faked final volume of
My Life and Loves.
In
Cain’s Book
Trocchi had expended a great deal of effort and created a genuinely experimental work of literature, whereas the Frank Harris hoax rocked because it was as badly written and sloppy as the gibberings of any other hack pornographer. Working for money, Trocchi had achieved the genuine pulp writer’s trance, something infinitely superior to the automatic writing of the surrealists.

As he drove me to the Safeway on King Street, Alan was ranting about
Thongs
, another of Trocchi’s dirty books.
Thongs
was set in Glasgow and at its worst came across as the last gasp of the proletarian novel. Trocchi’s depictions of razor kings and Gorbals slums substituted the rhetoric of realism for the strange alchemy of the word and in this fashion patronised the working class. As the story progressed, it degenerated into a litany featuring all the usual claptrap about secret societies dedicated to dominance and submission. Alan insisted that if one really had to read this type of crap it was much better to stick to
The Story of O. Thongs
reveals Trocchi himself as a masochist, not because of his loving descriptions of cunnilingus or the fact that his narrator ultimately submits quite willingly to being crucified, but because enough craft has gone into the prose to exorcise the repetitious frenzy so beloved by sadists. Masochists of Trocchi’s type are drawn towards art with its frozen tableaux, the sadist prefers the banality of the truly pornographic.

Alan bought some chocolate biscuits in Safeway and got very angry when I said we couldn’t go across the street to my bedsit for refreshments. I was embarrassed, my pad was overflowing with the books Alan had been off-loading. At the time of the incidents I am relating I didn’t have Alan’s old Trocchi books but they are before me now and as literary remains they really are very instructive.

Although Alan didn’t like to admit it, he’d spent the late 70s reading through much of the John Calder backlist. This had led him from Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi on to French writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon and Nathalie Sarraute. It therefore isn’t surprising that his copy of
Cain’s Book
was a British first edition hardback published by John Calder in 1963 and purchased by Alan 15 years later when he was still that mythical beast, ‘a teenager’. Alan’s copy of
Young Adam
, also purchased secondhand in the late 70s was a Pan paperback with a classic 60s cover. His copies of Trocchi’s porn books demonstrated that his interest in this writer was perhaps more tenacious than he cared to admit. There were Olympia Press editions of
My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume
and
Helen and Desire
, that had been acquired secondhand in the early 80s. Alan had purchased a paperback copy of
Sappho of Lesbos
when it was reissued by Star in 1986. The copies of
The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis
,
School For Sin
and
White Thighs
were paperback reissues put out by the American porn publisher Masquerade Books in the early 1990s.
Thongs
had proved even more elusive, Alan had to wait until Blast Books reissued it in 1994 to obtain his own copy, although he’d read it in the British Library some time in the 1980s. Alan also brandished a copy of
Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader
, edited by Andrew Murray Scott and put out by Polygon Books in 1991. Although he possessed a number of the books Trocchi had translated, Alan didn’t own a copy of the poetry collection
Man At Leisure
and professed himself uninterested in Trocchi’s verse.

After much arguing I got my way and rather than going to my pad for refreshments, Alan drove to Asda at the Bridge o’ Dee where we made good use of the customer café. By this time Alan was back onto the subject of
Thongs.
He insisted the description it contained of Glasgow as Scotland’s grey city was utterly misguided. Anyone who knew the whole of Scotland – and here it’s important to remember that Trocchi spent very little of his adult life in Scotland – realised that Aberdeen was the country’s grey city since it was built of grey granite. The materials used to build Glasgow were more varied than those on which Aberdeen had been founded. Given that Aberdeen is on the East Coast, Trocchi’s claim that Scotland’s West-Coast towns are grey and Glasgow the greyest of the lot becomes even more ridiculous. On the evidence of
Thongs
alone, Trocchi’s knowledge of Scotland was no more convincing than his sentimental picture of the Gorbals. Alan therefore considered it bizarre that Trocchi’s London publisher John Calder singled out this section of
Thongs
as exhibiting literary merit in an essay he contributed to a special number of the
Edinburgh Review
dedicated to the writer.

After downing a cuppa we whizzed around Asda and Alan picked up a couple of ready meals before we hotfooted it to the Bridge o’ Dee Sainsbury’s. It was at this point that Alan linked his discussion of Trocchi back to
The Biography of Thomas Lang
by mentioning that Trocchi’s father had been a concert pianist. It is alleged that Trocchi had relatives who were high up in the Vatican and regardless of whether this is true, the influence of this institution was on open display in
Thongs.
The secret society described in the book with its Holy Pain Father, Pain Cardinals, Grand Painmasters and beneath them ordinary Painmasters and Painmistresses, is clearly modelled on the Catholic Church. Alan thought that by inverting the religious superstitions of his family, Trocchi ended up reproducing the very thing he wished to destroy. The exercise was every bit as futile and reactionary as the so-called Black Masses of Satanists. Indeed, the Vatican was more likely to be damaged by over-fervent converts than Trocchi. In relation to this, Alan specifically mentioned the distasteful sexualised descriptions of a five-year-old prince in Frederick Rolfe’s pathetic fantasy
Hadrian the Seventh.

Returning to the main thrust of his argument, Alan broached the nature of the relationship between
Thongs
and
Young Adam.
Both books featured characters rejoicing in the surname Gault. In
Thongs
the razor king John Gault is known as the werewolf of the Gorbals. In
Young Adam
, Leslie Gault, an older male character is impotent and the surname is mentioned only once in the entire narrative. For all its faults, Alan insisted that
Thongs
was of some interest when read alongside Trocchi’s two literary books. There was even a curious almost stream-of-consciousness passage in the novel when the female narrator is raped and imprisoned in a brothel. Because
Thongs
is a very uneven and unsatisfactory work, it is a useful tool for anyone wanting to unpack Trocchi’s artfully crafted depiction of proletarian Glasgow in
Young Adam.

While purchasing sour-cream Pringles in Sainsbury’s, Alan insisted that since Trocchi was for a time a member of the Situationist International, it made perfect sense to read his work dialectically,
Thongs
rubbing up against and ultimately sabotaging
Young Adam
and even
Cain’s Book.
Trocchi, like many other members of the SI, appeared to come from the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie. Alan insisted that the fact that Guy Debord and Alex Trocchi were rebelling against their privileged backgrounds in no way negated the fruits of that revolt and it was thus more than simply unfortunate that many of those in the media appeared unable to distinguish the Situationist International’s Hegelian Marxism from mere anarchism. While Trocchi was not as rigorous as Debord in elaborating his theoretical positions, those who had not encountered left-communism in all its originality nor understood the nature of its break with the Third International would never grasp the political background to Trocchi’s work, nor the ways in which he was driven to continually reforge the passage between theory and practice.

Alan off-loaded his collection of political books and journals several years before I met him and when he moved on to topics of this type I often found it difficult to follow him. Jacques Camatte was one of the pivotal theorists in this area as far as Alan was concerned, and while I have managed to obtain a number of works by this writer in translation much of the material can only be read in either French or Italian. I have never succeeded in following the lines of argument that caused Camatte to turn from Bordiga’s brand of super-Leninism to a position where capital was viewed as having escaped human control and thus dominated a universal human class.
¹⁰
Since I am not really qualified to summarise the words that poured from Alan’s mouth as he drove from the Bridge o’ Dee to Bennachie, I shall omit any further description of them. However, it occurs to me that there is one other thing I need to record about Alan’s commentary on Trocchi. He considered it hilarious that in
My Life and Loves: Fifth Volume
there was a dig at Marx for having identified the proletarians rather than the bohemians as those who would enjoy true freedom.

Once we reached Bennachie, Alan announced that it was the most famous and popular mountain in north-east Scotland. He explained that this fact was easily accounted for. The graceful outline of the mountain; its standing comparatively alone, and being thus discernible and prominent from all points; the magnificent views to be obtained from its summits; and the easiness of access, all contributed to render Bennachie familiarly known even to those who are not given to mountain climbing. Situated in the Garioch, between the Don and the Gadie, its principal tops, from east to west are Mither Tap 1698 feet, Craig Shannoch 1600 feet, Oxen Craig 1733 feet, Watch Craig 1619 feet, Hermit Seat 1564 feet and Black Hill 1412 feet.

Since it rose 1000 feet above the surrounding countryside, Bennachie was visible from many of the sites I’d visited with Alan. It stood, black and brooding, dominating the landscape. Mither Tap, the second highest peak was actually the most prominent since the land fell away more sharply there than at Oxen Craig, which rose above it. While Alan can quite fairly be characterised as an ardent admirer of
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
, he considered the text deficient in that the only Bennachie peak visited was Mither Tap, and that by the sheerest route. We had decided to take a day off from testing the veracity of Callan’s work and so Dudley was left behind in the car while we explored the full extent of the mountain. Our first ascent was of Mither Tap since this is the most popular and most frequently visited of the peaks and the one we already knew. The distance between Mither Tap and Oxen Craig was about a mile and a quarter. At Oxen Craig the view was most extensive and although the day was not perfectly clear, we easily made out many distant mountain peaks. Lochnagar, Ben Avon, Beinn a’ Bhuird and Ben Rhinnes were all lightly covered in snow, while Mount Keen, Morven, Clochnaben, Mount Battock, Hill of Fare, Back of the Gabrach, Tap o’ Noth and many lesser hills were seen in the nearer distance. There was a brief shower once we reached Oxen Craig but it soon cleared.