ALEXANDER TROCCHI
Mick FARREN
Give the anarchist a cigarette, Pimlico edition, Random House, London, 2002, 0-7126-6732-6.
Quitter la page - Leave the page
Then, walking along Westbourne Park Road one day, I discovered a record store, but one with a stock close to revolutionary. No record by Cliff Richard or Cilla Black, no Beatles, not even any by Dylan, the Stones, the Yardbirds or the Animals. All this store appeared to carry was the cutting edge in jazz – John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Gil Evans, Eric Dolphy, McCoy Tyner – and spoken-word album by Malcolm X, Melvin Van Peebles and Lenny Bruce. Just to make matters more bizarre, the store was closed, even though it was three o´clock on a Wednesday afternoon, clearly indicating that whoever ran or owned the place had little regard for conventional business hour.
I told Alex about it and we scouted the place three more times before we finally discovered it open for business. On that first visit Alex, who must have been in funds, bought Gil Evans´ Into the Hot. I merely chatted with the guys behind the counter. Subsequent visits and chats finally revealed that the strange store was the result of a collaboration between two characters called Michael de Freitas and Alexander Trocchi. I had heard about both of these men previously, and how the two of them might have teamed up in this odd business venture presented a mystery that was unfortunately doomed never to be solved. Trocchi was a Glaswegian writer, with something of a reputation as the Scottish outpost of the beat generation. A couple of years earlier I had read his best-known novel Cain´s Book, and then his earlier work, Young Adam. At the time I was somewhat in awe of Alex Trocchi, he being the first fully fledged avant-garde author I had ever met. For added cachet, he was also a fully fledged heroin addict and dope-fiend buddy of William Burroughs. This was nothing, however, compared to the different kind of awe in which I held Michael de Freitas.. By all accounts, de Freitas was a bad man. …Over the years Michael would change his name from Michael de Freitas to Michael X, and finally to Michael Abdul Malik He would make a number of power-plays for leadership of London´s black militants, would found the Black House, would be the first individual jailed under the 1966 Race Relations Act and in the end would be hanged for murder in Trinidad. … Trocchi never spoke about how the partnership with Michael came about, although he did talk just about everything else. Trocchi was a tall Scotsman who bore a passing resemblance to Laurence Oliver and had made a name for himself in Paris in the early Fifties when he edited the literary magazine Merlin. He moved in a circle that included Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Robert Creeley, Eugene Ionesco and Pablo Neruda. By the time I met him, talking was, sadly, pretty much all he did. I have massive reservations as regards examining what might have been, but Alex Trocchi could well have been a great and significant writer, had he not resigned himself to heroin use as a substitute for creativity. By then he was already reduced to bolstering his self-respect by pontificating to young neophytes like myself. That was the difference between him and Burroughs. Where Bill was a writer who was addicted to heroin, Trocchi became an addict who, after an initial flash, never truly got round to writing with any power again. The distinction is a crucial, if cruel, one and needs to be remembered as the characters in this narrative become increasingly drug-soaked and even start defining themselves by their stimulant of choice.
One of the things Trocchi talked most about was a scheme that he called Project Sigma. The dozens of page of the Sigma proposal, complete with charts and diagrams, represented the design for an entire new social structure that was highly pluralistic, with legalized drugs, infinite tolerance, open education and everyone minding their own business instead of other people´s – even the abolition of money and brand-new means of exchange. I fell for it hook, line and sinker when, in the initial manifesto he likened contemporary society to a “parasitic organism ultimately suffocating the host it was intended to nurture”. Many of the ideas that Trocchi incorporated into Sigma were identical to the ingredients of the psychedelic philosophical sundae soon to be known as the counterculture.
Trocchi was also a little sensitive about Sigma having been mauled and ridiculed, when he´d first revealed it, by fellow poets and artists like Jeff Nuttal, Spike Hawkins and Michael Horowitz, the ones I tended to think of as the CND Fifties old guard, lovers of jazz and loathers of rock´n roll. The British have a tendency to ridicule anyone who actually has a plan. I guess it´s a reflex that protects us against the greater political excesses of the French, but it was also why the nineteenth-century revolution didn´t happen in England as Karl Marx expected. Maybe I was naïve, but I went for it, if for no other reason than that someone – anyone – actually had a plan beyond the Victorian economic critiques of Marx and Engels, with a little more fun and prankster flamboyance. Cuba was fun until the hard-scrabble Marxism set in and Che Guevara left town. Sure, Sigma was impossibly romantic, wildly utopian and fundamentally unworkable. Sure, if Trocchi´s Invisible Insurrection had been attained and put into practice, we would all have died of either starvation or cholera in the first eighteen months. Okay, so it was the pipedream of an opiate-dependant poet. Back in those days of golden haze, though, it was also exactly what many of us wanted, and within a year or so a great many of us would be playing variations on Trocchi´s initial themes and embracing them as our own.
Haut de la page - Top of the page
Retour à la page précédente - Return to the preceding page.
Les autres situationnistes.
Liste des auteurs.
Liste des titres.
Haut de la page - Top of the page
Page d'accueil du site - Welcome page.
Chercher sur le site ou sur le Web - Search the site or the Web.
Traduction - Translation - Ubersetzung - Vertaling - Traduzione - Traducción.
Ajoutez cette page à vos signets - Bookmark this page .
Notification des changements - Notification of updates.
Haut de la page - Top of the page
Ecrire à Franck Einstein - Write to Franck Einstein
ICQ: 46952896
Haut de la page - Top of the page
No copyright
Page 00030