Cain’s Book. No plot, no beginning, no middle, no end ─ only the present matters. Or doesn’t matter. “The meaningless texture of the present moment”, a key phrase in the book, says it all. A writer is worthy to be honoured if he coins a single memorable phrase and Trocchi coined two, the other being “the city of outrageous purpose” (New York). Cain’s Book : random reflections interspersed with anecdotes, but that’s the marrow of life. And lyrical passages about the pattern the sunlight makes on the wall.

        Sixties. Although no one as far as  I know coined the slogan, the catchword was “Sensations are more important than possessions”. This takes you very far, much further out than it seems. It is a denial not only of neo-capitalism but also of ‘progress’, even of civilisation itself. What sensations? Strong sensations, sharp, thrilling ones… What gives such sensations? Well, sex obviously, especially casual, revolutions, also (so they say) triumph on the  battlefield, also, (again so they say) the samadhi of the barefoot Hindu ascetic. But why go through all the hassle of working up to the peak sensation, the interminable machinations of the seducer, the rigours of military campaigns, the years of abstinence and solitary meditation of the yogi? Drugs get you there immediately. Such a conclusion seemed to many at the time to be both logical and inescapable.

        But do drugs get you there? They certainly seem to get you somewhere. One would like to deny outright that LSD, magic mushrooms or whatever are the equivalent of the mystic’s hard-earned break through ─ it all sounds a bit too simplistic. But the argument falters in this day and age: if everything is just a matter of connecting up synapses in the brain as Dennett & Dawkins & Susan Blackmore claim, what’s the difference?

        This was the first generation in history to have effective contraception on demand and the result was that the sex act was separated from what was/is supposedly its raison d’etre, reproduction. (But a lot of people, especially males, couldn’t be bothered with the paraphernalia of condoms or enquiring if your partner was on the pill, so girls still did get pregnant.) It was the ‘kick’ that mattered, not the result (offspring). The Sixties generation was perhaps the first in history to have pretty much entirely rejected the reproductive urge. ‘Having kids’ was not so much to be avoided because one found children a pain ─ on the contrary one might well prefer them to stupid boring ‘grown ups’ ─ but because it led to the living death of a ‘steady job’, taking out a mortgage, living in a semi-detached in suburbia and all the rest of it. Better to have a fling, die young and leave no trace on the earth beneath your feet.

        The Sixties saw the meteoric rise of Darwin’s Rottweiler, Richard Dawkins, but far from being the era of the selfish gene that Dawkins likened to Al Capone, it was precisely the era when Homo sapiens defied outright the inner demons driving everyone on the planet towards reproduction, reproduction and yet more reproduction. Better to close it all down ─ I used to say to people, “Thank God the line will end with me.” (And it has.) In the past there were plenty of women who got rid of babies to safeguard their status in society, or simply because they felt too poor to be able to support them adequately. But in the Sixties some women passed on babies to other people out of disinterest. I knew a French boy in Paris who used to cycle around the streets with a charming Asiatic toddler on the back-seat extension. He told me the child’s mother was Vietnamese and had ‘given’ the boy to him and he was on his way to meet with a lawyer who would duly authorise the transaction after the mother signed a form. I met the girl briefly and she didn’t look especially poor to me, just a normal student. My acquaintance seemed genuinely attached to the child and they made a striking pair, but he did say, by way of explanation, “I’ll do better with him around” by which he meant people would be more likely to put him up or give him money. He was a good-looking boy from a ‘good’ family ─ his father was a French general ─ and he had no intention of getting a job or settling down. What happened to them both who knows. They seemed at the time happy enough.    

        There was definitely something monstrous in the self-centredness and narcissism of the Beat/hippie generation ─ also something one can only call impressive. There is a certain clarity and honesty about Cain’s Book, one of the seminal texts of the Sixties, that you find in hardly any books, novels or autobiographies. Trocchi has been portrayed as a monster which I guess he was in many respects, reputedly he had his first wife prostitute herself for him in Las Vegas and abandoned her when she was put in prison. Even at the time I thought Trocchi’s attitude to drug addiction ridiculous: he seemed to think that addiction was somehow ‘society’s problem’ if not exactly ‘society’s fault’ while to some extent piggy-backing on the notoriety ─ hard drugs were new to England in those days, hence fashionable (sort of). His oft repeated line was, “It’s not the horse, it’s the pale rider”, whatever that meant. (‘Horse’ was slang for heroin.)

        I actually got to meet Trocchi. The ‘alternative society’ in London and Paris was a very small world then and everyone more or less met everyone else. I only just missed meeting Christine Keeler but  I clearly remember ‘Lucky Gordon’, one of her lovers, an extremely stylish black guy who did simple card tricks in cafes and told me how terrified he had been by Stephen Ward following him around at night in a black taxi. (Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler’s ‘minder’, committed suicide in order to avoid a court trial.) Anyway, having already read Cain’s Book which was for the time breathtakingly explicit about heroin addiction and casual sex, both hetero and homo, I was quite unprepared for the person I was actually introduced to. The Trocchi I encountered came over as a sort of working-class aesthete. Very quietly spoken, he was handsome in a gaunt way that strongly appealed to women and with just a touch of the poète maudit about him to make him all the more interesting. I had just emerged from a night in a prison cell for a shoplifting offence with the threat of an eventual prison sentence hanging over me. Trocchi was most sympathetic (though vaguely disapproving!) in a paternalistic way and, to boost my spirits, he told me that it was not current government policy to lock people up. I had been introduced to him as someone who could help him translate a couple of books from the French, one of which was a biography of the medieval Hungarian child-murderess, Elzebeth Bathory, a female Dracula who literally bathed in human blood to maintain her youthful looks. The other was about a man growing old and decrepit ─ a suitably depressing couple of books to get one’s teeth into. My French wasn’t that good at the time and anyway I didn’t think scholarly exactitude mattered too much. Trocchi tactfully pointed out to me the stupid mistakes I had made when I showed him a hasty draft and to my amazement came up with a wonderfully apt translation of a particularly difficult sentence. I suddenly felt ashamed of my shoddy work like a fractious apprentice in the presence of a master craftsman ─ Trocchi was a bad man but a good prose writer. He was at the time in charge of a nebulous cultural project called Sigma subsidized by the government ─ the Harold Wilson government made a heroin addict a culture tsar, sounds too good to be true! Trocchi had doubtless already run through the advances on the translations of these two books and wanted someone else to do the hard work. He never paid me a penny but in the end he did give me a note to show to a French writer of his acquaintance on my return to Paris where I was based. To my astonishment, this guy, a prominent Lettrist (sort of successor movement to the Surrealists) wrote me out a fat cheque on the spot, saying, “I am doing this because I really like Trocchi”.

        Trocchi was undoubtedly one of the many dangerous and self-destructive individuals swirling around Soho or Saint-Michel in Paris or Greenwich Village at the time but like many of these people he could also be charming and exuded what I can only call a certain ‘integrity’. He tells it as it is, lives it as it is, no shit, man. He wrote about his own life, not the lives of other people he’d stalked to get hold of advertising copy. He wasn’t an ambulance chaser. As a besotted girl-friend said to a sometime close friend of mine, also a writer of sorts, “You’re a complete bastard but at least you’re an honest bastard”.

        Nihilism. Clearly this was the theme, the medium and the message. It wasn’t that this generation was complaining about their lot, there was just a general sense of “Is this all?” Thousands of years of civilisation, victory over fascism and the post-world-war economic recovery on the way, a Welfare State so you didn’t have to bother about your health…..in theory this was a great historical moment, the greatest time to be alive. But it didn’t look like that to us at the time. I remember standing with Andy Mowatt looking up at a giant billboard advertisement saying “1066 Battle of Hastings, 1966 Bottle of Guinness”. As Andy said, “That just about sums it up.” Early Sixties Britain (pre-Beatles): a place without a trace of glamour or adventure, a washed out anaemic population living in ugly streets that all looked the same, eating spam and steam baked Mother’s Pride bread ─ was this the end result of centuries upon centuries of improvement? Fed on Rousseau and Shelley, I was an easy convert to the idea that people were ‘noble savages’ perverted by education and progress. This was the era of “Rebel Without a Cause”, an apt title, the era of the Californian Beats who were just hitting Europe. There was a pop song, I forgot who by, which just had an endless refrain “Nada”, “Britain Nada”, “France Nada” “Europe Nada”, “Culture Nada”, and so on. Famille, Travail, Patrie ─ who the hell wanted that sort of crap ─ I couldn’t believe it when I learned it was actually a slogan of the Vichy Government and appeared on coins.

        At bottom, this wave of nihilism was a protest not against society or morality or the establishment but against life itself. This gave an edge to the movement since, viewed in a certain cock-eyed manner I no longer subscribe to, there really is something to condemn about life as Schopenhauer and the Buddha understood very well. Get me out of here! Heroin was the drug that took you the closest to nirvana, to a kind of vaguely pleasant nothingness ─ nirvana literally means ‘extinction’. Buddhism is the anti-life religion par excellence but this seemed at the time almost a recommendation, only Buddhism tells it like it really is. Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” compares New Yorkers to slaves being sacrificed to the hideous Carthaginian god Moloch, Trocchi goes on and on about the “city of outrageous purpose” ─ but, wait a moment, this was the richest city on the planet where everyone in the Third World aspired to be! Heroin, unlike cocaine or LSD, doesn’t give you ‘kicks’, it just gives you temporary release from “the fever of living”. I didn’t get into it enough to get anything particularly memorable, all I remember is being sick on a carpet and (possibly) being landed with a retrovirus dormant in my liver that nearly killed me decades later. As an American addict told me, “Don’t Robert, don’t !” I didn’t. I moved on. Where to? Anywhere. Ixtlan. (To be continued.)