...Alexander Trocchi, Scottish born writer, poet, translator and author of 'Young Adam' and 'Cain's Book', was the smack-addled icon of beat literature, whose writings have been eclipsed by a lurid life of porn, pimping and dissolution in New York, Paris and London.

“No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats…these are the facts."

Cain's Book is a 1960 novel by Scottish beat writer Alexander Trocchi. A roman à clef, it details the life of Joe Necchi, a heroin addict and writer, who is living and working on a scow on the Hudson River in New York. Cain's Book was released to acclaim in the USA, but when it was published in the UK by John Calder it provoked an outcry and was the subject of an obscenity trial brought by Sheffield City Council due to its depiction of drug abuse and its sexual descriptions (not to mention the frequent use of the word cunt).

Plot

The book alternates between Necchi/Trocchi's attempts to score and flashbacks to his experiences as a child in Glasgow, and later as a young man in London and Paris. It is also an account of what it means to be a junky and an outsider from society. On occasion it can descend into ranting about the hypocrisy and stupidity of drug prohibition and the general inequities of the world. It describes with an eye for detail the rituals of heroin, the cooking up and the search for a suitable vein.

It gets more and more fragmented as it draws to a close with Trocchi realizing that he is incapable of a maintaining a conventional narrative. In being consumed with his addiction, Trocchi strives to document his alienation and his desire to use his creativity against the existentialist fear of being washed away by history with no sign of his life remaining.

"When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I was tomorrow is where I am today, where I would be yesterday. I have a horror of committing fraud. It is all very difficult, the past even more than the future, for the latter is at least probable, calculable, while the former is beyond the range of experiment. The past is always a lie clung to by an odour of ancestors."

 

Analysis

The title of the book gives a clear indication of Trocchi's intentions. He casts himself as beyond society, above laws and morals and wars and guilt. He did not see himself as just a junky but rather a crusader, the mind-expanding quality of drugs, as he saw it, outweighed any other argument against them. But as Trocchi's later life was to show, his own addiction prevented him from finishing his follow-up to Cain's Book before his death.

Publishing history

Cain's Book was released to acclaim in the USA, but when it was published in the UK by John Calder it provoked an outcry and was the subject of an obscenity trial brought by Sheffield City Council due to its depiction of drug abuse and its sexual descriptions (not to mention the frequent use of the word cunt).

The 1993 Grove Press reprint edition features a foreword by Greil Marcus and an introduction by Richard Seaver.