Cain's Book

by Alexander Trocchi, Greil Marcus (Foreword), Richard Seaver (Introduction)

This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe’s world is the half-world of drugs and addicts—the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the profligate, the rebel who lives by no one’s rules but his own. Like DeQuincey and Baudelaire before him, Trocchi’s muse was drugs. But unlike his literary predecessors, in his roman a clef, Trocchi never romanticizes the source of his inspiration. If the experience of heroin, of the “fix,” is central to Cain’s Book, both its destructive force and the possibilities for creativity it creates are recognized and accepted without apology.

Genres: Fiction, Drugs, Novels, New York, Scotland, British Literature, Literature

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Alexander Trocchi was a Scottish novelist and editor. He lived in Paris in the early 1950s and edited the literary magazine Merlin, which published Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Christopher Logue and Pablo Neruda, among others. Although he was never published in Merlin, American writer Terry Southern (who lived in Paris from 1948-1952) became a close friend of both Trocchi and his colleague Richard Seaver, and the three later co-edited the anthology Writers In Revolt (1962).

His early novel Young Adam (1954) was adapted into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in 2003.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pariahs of the world have dissimilar destinies… And different destinations…

Cain at his orisons, Narcissus at his mirror.

Time is fragmented, space is broken – the addict’s world is without causes or effects…

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.

Chaotic memories, spasmodic events, sporadic visions – the protagonist knows neither morals nor scruples… He obeys no human laws and he serves no rational purpose… To his existence there is no rhyme or reason…

Whatever increase of entropy in the external world, my response was relevant. The universe might shrink or expand. I would remain aware, a little pocket of coherence in the city of dreadful night. Or would I? The drug can be treacherous, leading through all the hollow recesses and caves of panic. An identity slips away and one can no longer choose to be immersed in it, voluptuously to be duped.

For some travellers there is no way but down.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trocchi’s final and most fêted work (apart from the odds-and-ends poetry shambles, Man at Leisure, also republished by Alma Classics), is a fragmented and not entirely unpretentious novel-of-sorts that seems to be more of a deeply psychological exploration of the author’s uncompromising outsider’s worldview than any sort of seminal “drug” novel as labelled by most, including Burroughs. The drug use is a mere fact of life and incidental to the more interesting business of what this scow-dwelling author-substitute Joe Necchi (the protagonist of Young Adam was named Joe and worked on a scow too) has to say about his Glaswegian upbringing (the father/son scenes are the kernel of the novel and Freudians needn’t look too smug about their implications) and his life of perpetual drift (although Necchi like Trocchi isn’t free from relationship obligations). The work is compelling despite occasional lapses into intellectual waffle (i.e. pseudo-philophastering) and unlike most “drug” lit, no doubt stands up to multiple readings and offers a greater depth (minus perhaps the trendier scenes with Trocchi and his lowlife mates) than works by his scuzzier contemporaries (i.e. Burroughs). An excellent work—one we must label (if we must label at all) a “masterpiece,” since Alexander rebelled against the obligation to write until his death. If only writers of lesser talent would rebel against that obligation—we may have less whiffy bookstores.

[RC Edrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was this book alone that convinced me that the life playing out between my ears needed release onto paper.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable novel by just about any standard. Forget those who say it's about addiction: It is not. It is rather an honest attempt to place a troubled and rebellious human consciousness into a literary space between the many false value systems offered it by all of the anti-existentialist power structures: the ethos of the capitalist religion of work, the moralist conformity of marriage, and all of the modern bourgeois and patriotic constructions of place, nationality, sexual mores, class and societal roles (husband, worker, citizen); as well as the various social, state, and religious institutions that legitimize all of our multiform willful slavery to structure and to those who the structures most benefit, in all of its multifarious forms of conformity and acquiescence. Our protagonist, Joe Necchi, opts for words, heroin and, primarily, play as models for escape from and the rejection of the world's many labels and expectations--each strategy presents itself, to greater and lesser degrees, as a tragic insufficiency perhaps, but they are all-too-logical and at least temporarily consoling actions in the face of the mind-numbing conformity that is still with us in the modern materialistic pseudo-Christian nation-state. I can think of no more important or pointed social novel to read from the last century.

[Ade Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's cut through the dread the moral authorities and sensibilities of timid readers which reacted against this book on its publication. Yes, horror of horrors, people do have sex, sometimes frequently, and they do take drugs. While not wanting to labour the point of the latter or offer any value judgment, I refer you to Trocchi's own polemic. That very dread (hatred is of dread) is more the point than the object of terror:

When he thinks in terms of kicking he’s hooked.
There are degrees of addiction, and the physical part has nothing to do with
it. The physical bit comes soon and I suppose that then technically you’re
hooked. But with the right drugs you can kick that in a few days. The degrees
of addiction that matter are psychological, like intellectually how long have
you been a vegetable? Are you riding the horse or what? [. . . :] It’s not the shit
that’s got you hooked. You shelve the problem when you think in those terms.
. . . There are doctors, painters, lawyers on dope, and they can still function.
. . . ]You’ve got to get up off your ass and stop believing their propaganda,
Tom. It’s too much when the junkies themselves believe it. They tell you it’s
the shit and most of the ignorant bastards believe it themselves. It’s a nice
tangible cause for juvenile delinquency. And it lets most people out because
they’re alcoholics. There’s an available pool of wasted-looking bastards to
stand trial as the corrupters of their children. It provides the police with
something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend
because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic
police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges
can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell
millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch
evil get its deserts. That’s the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out
of it except the junkie. If he’s lucky he can creep round the corner and get a
fix. But it wasn’t the junk that made him creep. You’ve got to sing that from
the rooftops.

and:

We cannot afford to leave the potential power of drugs in the hands of a few governmental “experts,” whatever they call themselves. Critical knowledge we must vigilantly keep in the public domain. A cursory glance at history should caution us thus. I would recommend on grounds of public
safety that heroin (and all other known drugs) be placed with lucid literature pertaining to its use and abuse on the counters of all chemists (to think that a man should be allowed a gun and not a drug!) and sold openly to anyone twenty-one. This is the only safe method of controlling the use of drugs.
At the moment we are encouraging ignorance, legislating to keep crime in
existence, and preparing the way for one of the most heinous usurpations of power of all times . . . all over the world. . .

Authorities, take this as a starting point for your condemnations and the laws you frame. This isn’t a book about chemistry and law though. Much has been written of its this and that existential themes or insights, commentary on art and writing etc. Much of it is good but safely radical, the sort of stuff any arty adolescent suffused with angst, ennui and the sweet anger at provincialism could come up with:

All great art and today all great artlessness must
appear extreme to the mass of men as we know them
today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From
the souls of men not formed but deformed in factories
whose inspiration is pelf. The critics who call upon the
lost and beat generations to come home, who use the
dead to club the living, write prettily about anguish
because to them it is an historical phenomenon and
not a pain in the arse. But it is pain in the arse and we
wonder at the impertinence of governments which by
my own experience and that of my father and his
father before him have consistently done everything in
their power to make individuals treat the world situation
lightly, that they should frown on the violence of my
imagination—which is a sensitive responsive
instrument—and set their damn police on me who has
not stirred from this room for 15 years except to cop
shit.

Humanity is homo ludens, man at play, and his soul is stifled by “the great mechanical monolith imposed by mass mind” . There is much about the “chemistry of alienation” (and expected stuff about death, eternity, anxiety, time) but not related to the specificity of a heroin fix in general, rather to the chemistry of a body that has become separated from its abstracting mind. Not that, says Trocchi, abstraction or intellect have negative valorisation, and indeed, “The steel of logic has daily to be strengthened to contain the volcanic element within.”

This is a useful book for the burgeoning industry of addiction bureaucrats to pick over, analysers to analyse, existential psychotherapists to refer to gravely and so on. The bottom line is that it is supremely well written, as near as words can get to inhabiting flesh. Thus, I suppose, many of its readers will never get to read it.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no memory of reading this book in the past, but it seems that I had read it some years ago. Nevertheless, I purchased this copy at the Red Wheelbarrow in Paris last week. It's excellent, because the character of Alexander Trocchi is on every page, and he himself is a fascinating figure. One could call this a junkie's memoir or journal, but it is much more than that. It's a portrait of a man who is floating between what culture wants him to be, and the refusal of that society. There is no plot in this novel, but more of a series of commentary on life as it is lived. Trocchi is a remarkable writer with great descriptive gifts. Amoral in a sense, but on the other hand he sees the world as a place of not allowing pleasures, so, therefore, he drifts between jobs on a boat to investigate an alternative life, that is chosen in a sense, but not clear if it's the right choice or not. Which I don't think is the point of the book. As a reader, we're sharing his moments, and that is part of the adventure.

[Caroline Bertaud · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book like no other, with a writing so sharp, a precise focus of details you weren't even aware about, it's like Trocchi used a scalpel instead of a pen, the acuity really astounding. Having recently seen the movie Limitless, it made me wonder if Trocchi had taken one of those little pills that expand your brain capacities in the movie. This book certainly triggers something in your own brain, whatever that is. As far as the prose is concerned, all the other books I've read lately suddenly feel like they were only just babbling, filling up space, tasteless, pointless, and as I read two books at once I could see all the things that weren't working in the other one—like I'd gained a new superpower which may or may not ruin my taste for other books. This book reads like the insane train of thoughts of a madman, the errand mind of a junkie, but it's so much more than a visceral ride about addiction, it's so, so smart and literate, it's simply brilliant…you read this and you think: This is momentous shit. I couldn't read it in one sitting, though, it takes breaks to take it all in.

[Martina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5*

Oboznamovať sa s autorom skrz jeho poslednú knihu, titul, ktorý je vlastne synonymom jeho vnútorného rozpadu či akýmsi posledným výkrikom na ceste k totálnemu úpadku, nie je veľmi bežné, no v prípade Alexandra Trocchiho, viac-menej zabudnutého autora pasujúceho sa s démonom závislosti, to inak ani nešlo.

Opis ničotnej a predsa bežnej každodennosti pozostávajúcej z drogových záťahov, bezbožného poflakovania sa či chvíľkových zábleskov kreatívnej inšpirácie slúžiacej ako maska zúfalého prežívania, pretkaný ponormi do vlastného vnútra, občasnými filozofickými úvahami i spomienkami na ranné roky života... 

„Nie, keď človek stisne nádobku kvapkadla a díva sa, ako bledá, jemne skrvavená tekutina mizne cez hrdlo do ihly a do žily, nejde len - nie iba - o dobrý pocit..."

Dysfunkčná rodina, drogové eskapády, rozpad manželstva a neutíchajúca bezradnosť. Alexander Trocchi rozpráva príbeh vlastného života - nie tak celkom, ale vlastne áno - ktorý podáva drsne, miestami nekonvenčne, no predsa s odzbrojujúcou úprimnosťou. Občas zmätočne skáče, stráca sa v prudkom víre vlastného vedomia i divokých (drogami vyvolaných) predstáv či snov, inokedy ponúka desivo presný sivastý opis svojho bezútešného života. 

Kainova kniha nie je tak úplne autobiografiou ani románom, hoci z každého si berie to svoje, je skôr zhlukom fragmentov (náhodných, no zároveň návzájom prepojených, svojsky so sebou súvisiaciach), kúskov ovplyvnených Trocchiho závislosťou či potrebou zohnať peniaze na ďalšiu dávku, úlomkov ponúkajúcich náhľad na západnú buržoáznu spoločnosť i život stroskotancov... 

Občas pútavá vo svojej brutálnej surovosti a nahote, inokedy trochu prerastajúca cez hlavu.

[Zach Shaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice. Very fun i really like the narration of this book. I think it reads less like a narrative and more like some guy’s musings on his life and heroin. Which speaks to me my second book where a disenfranchised outsider man lives on a barge and although i prefer suttree, i still think this is great!

[Jacob Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth reading just for the boat scenes

[Tatiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2,5 hviezdičky
Kniha o VŠETKOM a zároveň o ničom

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best heroin addiction book that exists, because it is much more than a heroin addiction book. If "Junky" weren't already a thinkin man's book, I'd call this the thinkin man's Junky.
So i don't really know what to say besides, go read it.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it like 18 years ago, I liked it but I can't really remember anything except for him for being all alone on the barge, and now and then having sex with various other lonely barge operators.

[Jack Spiegelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book review: cains book

This was many years ago when my wife and I moved to Los Angeles from New York and installed ourselves in a 7 room apt on Berendo street for $175 a month. That is correct. My wife got a job and I opted to stay home and write—or try to.

Each day I would sit down at the typer to bang and I would try this sentence and that sentence and the other sentence but it was no dice. There was nothing. Writing must have energy. Here there was the energy of a piece of pocket lint. It was a form of literary constipation.

But if you cant write you can at least read other writers who are. I was at Book Soup on Sunset waiting for my wife to finish work. I picked up a book—Cains Book. The writer was Alexander Trocchi. Id heard of this book--From Hank in San Francisco, fellow writer—or writer wannabe.

He said: I think you would like it. Its brilliant.

There was a blurb on the cover: the genuine article on the dope addicts life.

The publisher was Grove Press. This was the sixties and in the sixties there was a particular kind of writer—the Grove Press writer. Publishers have something called a stable—like a horse stable but instead of horses they have writers. In Groves stable were Henry miller, Beckett, Jean Genet, Celine, etc—the renegade outcast types—perverse, nihilistic, scatological.

I read a few bits and pieces. There was a preface—a quote from Cocteau:

Tout ce qu’on fait dans la vie, meme l’amour, on le fait dans le train express qui roule vers la mort. Fumer l’opium, c’est quitter le train en marche; c’est s’occuper d’autrechose que de la vie, de la mort

I translate though the French says it better:

Everything we do in life, even to make love, we do on a train that is rolling towards death. To smoke opium is to leave the train en route; to concern ourselves with other things than life, than death.

Also:

Ettie was a thin negress who shot up ten five dollar bags a day. She pushed everything, clothes, meat and other valuables she boosted, her own thin chops. “Man it’s a hassle what you do”, I said to her, “peddling around town all day with the heat breathing down your neck”.

“He kin breathe right up my vagina dear, jist so long as he don’t bust me”, Ettie said.

Also:

Claire was my sister-in-law. She didnt like me. Nor was I fond of her. MY brother was devoted to her. He did everything for her and his reward was to receive the impression he did not exist. She would have betrayed him for a dry martini.

I liked that line about the martini. It was perfect.

I bought the book and knocked it off that night. It was short but not too short—50,000 words—the perfect length for a book, as Poe has said, to finish off in one sitting.

Hank was right: an amazing writer.

The book is autobiographical, written in the first person by Joe, writer/junkie type living on a barge tied up in the Jersey docks across from New York. There is no plot. The action such as it is revolves entirely around Joe and his fellow junkies shooting dope or, when they are not doing that, running around in a frazzled state trying to score for dope. Here and there are flashbacks to his childhood and some good sex scenes. Thats the book.

But there was something about it—a rhythm. It wasnt a linear rhythm. It was a non-linear rhythm. I was reminded of Beckett and the way the element of time got bounced around—now here now there now somewhere else. The voice was strong--elegant, comic, salacious.

All great art and today all great artlessness must appear extreme to the mass of men as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf. The critics who call upon the lost and beat generations to come home, who use the dead to club the living, write prettily about anguish because to them it is an historical phenomenon and not a pain in the arse. But it is pain in the arse and we wonder at the impertinence of governments which by my own experience and that of my father and his father before him have consistently done everything in their power to make individuals treat the world situation lightly, that they should frown on the violence of my imagination—which is a sensitive responsive instrument—and set their damn police on me who has not stirred from this room for 15 years except to cop shit.

I went to the library to further investigate this Trocchi character but the pickings were slim. He had written Cains Book and another called Young Adam—long out of print. Also a handful of porno novels while living in Paris for Maurice Girodias—Olympia press—the European version of Grove.

There was reference to a writers conference in Scotland organized to discuss the current state of Scottish letters and Trocchi was invited to participate and his turn arrived to speak and he said: the greatest Scottish writer is me.

One of the other participants, a poet, Hugh McDiarrmid referred to him as “cosmopolitan scum”.

And that was it. Some years later, many years later, a movie was made from Young Adam and a modest revival of interest in Trocchi was the result. Cain's Book was reissued in a new edition and a few copies of the porno novels—White Thighs, Helen and Desire, Thongs—could be had at an inflated price on eBay

The movie, not a bad film, in fact a good film, flopped. I was curious to know, tho I never did know, how much the writer of the script got paid. My guess is much more than Trocchi ever made for anything--or everything--he ever wrote.

Meanwhile there on the internet I came across a piece written for An English mag—The Guardian--to coincide with the release of the film that filled in some of the holes bio-wise.

Trocchi was Scottish, or Scottish/Italian, born in Glasgow in 1925. He attended the university, married young and had two children. He wanted to write and in view of this, in his opinion, Scotland was a loser. The action was in Paris.

Once in Paris two things happened. He met Beckett and acquired a girlfriend—an American with money. The money was important because he had conceived a plan—to publish a magazine.

Writers write to publish and if the publishers decline—you can always publish yourself. Why not?

Trocchi had a gift. He had two gifts. He had the writing gift and he had the hustling gift. He had charisma—a terrific magnetism that drew people into his orbit and this he combined with gift #3—the ability to manipulate these people to satisfy his needs which were: sex, drugs, money. Any journalistic enterprise needs an angle and he had one—the existential angle. It was the fifties in Paris— and there was a mood—the existential mood. Existentialism is a slippery concept that can be interpreted in this way, that way or the other way but however you interpret it the one word that will never apply is: optimism. The war had finished that one off—in spades.

So that was the angle and in view of this the writers he chose to zero in on to get the mag rolling were the Olympia/Grove Press type—Beckett, Genet, Robbe-Grillet.

He had a name for the mag—Merlin

The life span of the average small press literary magazine is measured not in years but issues. They are issued monthly or quarterly or annually and if you manage to give birth to a half dozen numbers of the publication before your money or your enthusiasm expires—youre
doing ok. Merlin held on for 3 years and during that time established a bit of reputation—for the quality of the writing and the brilliant--and brilliantly erratic--behavior of the editor.

By this time he was on the junk, his wife and children had returned to England and less of his time was spent writing and more hanging out in cafes playing pinball. He was a drug addict and a pinball addict. He writes of the game in Cains Book:

In the pinball machine an absolute and peculiar order reigns. No skepticism is possible for the man who by a series of sharp and slight dunts tries to control the machine. It became for me a ritual act. Man is serious at play. Apart from jazz the pinball machine seemed to me to be Americas greatest contribution to culture; it rang with contemporaneity. The distinction between the
French and American attitude towards the “tilt” (teelt”); in America, and England, I have been upbraided for trying to beat the machine by skillful tilting. In Paris that is the whole point.

That was the first phase—the Paris phase. The second phase occurred in New York. It seems a questionable move for a junkie to relocate from Europe—that adopts a much more permissive attitude towards dope—to a country such as this—the US—with the most penal and pitiless
laws concerning this evil habit.

But here he was living on a barge, scoring for dope and trying to write a novel—Cains Book. He had a new girlfriend—a hooker. She wasnt a hooker when they met. She became a hooker after Trocchi turned her on to junk and now there was a double habit to support and this was the solution--for her to become a hooker—they arrived at.

He had a contract to write a book for Grove press wangled by an editor—Dick Seaver—a Trocchi groupie from the Paris days. Trocchi as I say was a master con artist who by this time had burned half a dozen publishers for advances but not Seaver over at Grove, who knew his man and kept him on a short leash. There was no advance. He got paid by the chapter.

This was the book that became Cains Book.

After that not much. He got busted for drugs—not only using but dealing. Seaver got him sprung on bail that he promptly forfeited by fleeing the country, first to Canada and then back to Europe, this time to England.

Yeah—the joint. That wasn’t for me. I remember Geo getting busted. The girl he was living with finked on him and one day they came pushing him back into his room, treating him like cattle.

“Ok Falk, we’ve come for you. Where’s your stash
knucklehead?”

This time they put him in the Tombs. If anything had broken him it was kicking his habit in the Tombs. When he thought of it he thought of destiny and he felt himself without will.

He was in a cell with a young Italian. Geo was in the bottom bunk. In the top bunk the Italian was sobbing. Why didn't the bastard shut up? They wouldn’t give him anything, not even a wet cotton. For a murderer yes but not for a junkie, a junkie couldn’t even get an aspirin. Then he felt the wetness on the back of his hand. Jesus Christ! It was blood. The Italian was committing suicide. Call the man. The man took a long time to come and when he came he said: ”Why you dirty little junkie bastard!” They dragged him out bleeding at both wrists.

Back in England the writing dried up. There was the occasional story, review, magazine piece but the sustained energy and discipline required to write a book was gone never to reappear. Once a junkie always a junkie.

At some point, in London, he got into business—selling books. He was a good businessman, oddly enough, and was able to make a living wheeling and dealing in the antiquarian book trade, working out of a stall in a fleamarket. He had a new girlfriend, a young girlfriend, the best kind, and it was in her arms following one last shot of heroin that he died in 1984, age 58

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

connected hard with this. had heard of the trochh man from reading about the SI in mckenzie wark's beach beneath the streets overview of them. man can plop out some nice words. plot was a mix of any of the sundry heroin movies ive seen from the 70s with inside llewyn davis. throw in musings on art that feel akin to the SI's stances, throw in a well balanced slacker ethos (that meshed well with my reading about Linklater), throw in some juicy erotic stuff, and A lot of heart and you got this solid solid book. recommend!

[Veronika (arvonkine_knihy) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Heroín, homosexuálne scény, sex so ženou bez jednej nohy, rebelantsvo - to je koktail, ktorý musel v šesťdesiatych rokoch, keď Kainova kniha vyšla, vyvolať rozruch. A nielen musel, ale aj v skutočnosti vyvolal, pretože v Anglicku túto knihu dokonca súdne zakázali.

Je to autobiografický príbeh (aj keď ťažko pri tejto knihe hovoriť o príbehu a deji) drogovo závislého muža - outsidera žijúceho a živiaceho sa na člne prebývajúcom v dokoch na rieke Hudson.

Strieda sa tu jeho snaha o napísanie knihy s uspokojovaním jeho potrieb a upokojovaním jeho absťákov a filozofické úvahy o slobode a spoločnosti, v ktorých som sa poväčšine strácala, nič mi nehovorili, nijako sa ma nedotýkali a možno ma aj trochu rozčuľovali.

Bol to pre mňa jeden chaos, presne taký, aký by ste si predstavili v mysli človeka závislého na heroíne, z ktorého som sa nevedela vymotať rovnako ako hlavná postava.

Čakala som, že niekedy počas čítania mi to v hlave klikne, že aha, toto tým chcel autor povedať, no to sa nestalo a ja vlastne ani neviem, čo si z tejto knihy mám vziať. Asi len to, že nie každá kniha sadne a nie vždy sa mi podarí z anotácie odhadnúť, či je pre mňa.

Za knihu ďakujem @brak_vydavatelstvo 🖤

[Chris Flakus · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unapologetic and existential book about addiction that will linger years after it has been read like the persistent symptoms of an incurable disease. Bleak, funny, raw, and honest. Trocchi was a master.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not my usual reading this,but I was intrigued when I spotted this 1st edition.
And my oh my what a brutally honest book it was.Its a fictional story of a junkie,Joe,who works on a scow in New York. The "shooting up" is quite brutal,although,in its openness and honesty,regarding the use of said substances,and quite offhand attitude of having sex with women and/or men is startling.But the story is so much more than this,it is not the sum of all its parts.Which explore finding a purpose ,your own purpose in life,your part in history, not conforming etc.
Trocchi himself was a user all his life and apart from this and Young Adam,drugs did consume him,and atleast to this reader,denied us a very accomplished and gifted writer.
Cain,s Book is not your normal structured novel,it was never meant to be.But what it does do in a very literal way is lead you through the life of 1 individual, a lost(perhaps?) soul.
Although the drug taking frees his mind,takes him away from himself,any inhibitions, and having to conform as Society dictates,it does make Joe,from the outside looking in,an unhappy soul,a nomadic and estranged person.
A must read book that you should not judge before having read.

[Jim Rayder · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just reread Cain's Book for the fourth time, and as ever, Trocchi lost me near the end, the book stalling out at the last 40 pgs or so. It is a wordier narrative than Burroughs' more economical, linear Junkie: Trocchi subtly suggests the causes of his addiction in autobiographical passages concerning his weak, defeated father and dark sexual encounters w/men and women; Burroughs' sums up his past in about two pages in his terse intro, and his only sexual passage, a one-night stand w/ a hustler, runs for about half a page./ Both books have detailed depictions of the shooting up process, and sordid circles of unreliable junkie friends, but per the latter Trocchi aims for an off-kilter compassion, while Burroughs is either caustically dismissive or in the cases of Bill Gaines and Old Ike, sympathetic and nostalgic./ As Burroughs directly blames his more privileged background for his addiction, both writers' theories here don't hold much water./ For a putatively life-long addict, Burroughs was astonishingly productive while Cain's Book is Trocchi's sole novel excluding the porn sagas he cooked up for Maurice Girodias./ Though uneven Cain's Book is still a worthwhile read.

[Tori · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't remember feeling this torn on how many stars to rate a book on here. I'm going with 4 stars for now because I did enjoy it enough to read it within a 24 hour period. At various points as I read, I thought it might be anywhere from 1 star to 5 stars. I was so angry by the time I was done at the wasted potential. I felt like it could have been so much better than it was. I loved the first half but didn't feel like the second half really added much to the book. In some ways, I thought it was brutally honest in a very refreshing way, and in others I felt like he was believing his own lies. I think I kept hoping for more insights. I did think the book stands up very well to the test of time. Other than a little bit of slang, it didn't seem that dated to me. It still felt really relevant to read.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 4 out of 5]

What begins as a junkie's self-indulgent narrative slowly opens up to become a engrossingly nihilistic portrait of a solitary and broken man who has ended up alone on a barge in the Hudson River. A thinly veiled autobiography, Cain's Book is part metafiction, as the writer moves back and forth in time from Scotland, where he grew up in a boarding house, to NYC, either planning or working on the ms, to shooting up H, philosophising about inaction and meaninglessness, and drifting either on the water or into the city, with other junkies, to get fixes. The portrait of lower Manhattan and the docks in the late '50's is indelible, the characterization strong, and, though essentially very bleak, the book has a tremendous dark power.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the time it was published it was a brutally honest insight into the life of a heroin addict in the fifties. Times have changed and it seems almost quaint now in comparison to the grittier life on the streets that has become more prevalent these days. Provides an important glimpse of a time when there were perhaps other possibilities for how 20th century culture could have formed. The Artists life.

[Brendan Boehning · Rating 4 out of 5]

The closest thing to a Situationist novel in existence. Trocchi mined far more poetry out of a peripatetic junkie lifestyle than could ever be expected, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he never published again. Cain's Book finds hidden eddies in the seemingly static water of banal everyday life, and the vistas this book opens up remain hardly explored 50 years on.

[Dozy Pilchard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read this book every ten years or so and have done since I was a teenager (I'm approaching 50 now). I see it totally differently every time I come back to it. I find the isolation in it refreshing. It is a world in itself, part liberation, part desperation. Quite a tale.

[Unclemark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second read of Trocchi.....very disturbing almost Burroughs-like book about addiction and degradation.....if you love Burroughs you'll love this one......

[Denis Mačor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edícia Outsideria vydavateľstva Brak priniesla k dnešnému dňu už tri hodnotné publikácie — Opýtaj sa prachu, John Fante (2019); Kainova kniha, Alexander Trocchi (2022) a do tretice: Zberateľ, John Fowles (2022). Spoločným menovateľom týchto kníh je príťažlivosť fiktívnej čiernej diery, do ktorej vťahujú svojich sympatizantov, pretože každá individualita odkrýva najexplicitnejšie formy svojho prežívania. Byť na okraji je posolstvom, nie remeslom a my nie sme iba prijímatelia, ale aj svedkovia prežívania, v ktorom nie je garantovaná žiadna forma očisty, a čo nám ostane, je vyrušenie, z ktorého sa nemusíme už nikdy dostať.

Trocchi ilustruje svoje putovanie bez vymedzených bodov — stáva sa námorníkom, zblúdilým narkomanom v zakliatom bezčasí svojich viet, pokojne aj v jednej osobe. Kladie samote tú najvyššiu hodnotu a vďaka podporným látkam v nej hľadá myšlienkovú prapodstatu. Netúži byť ani telom, ani jeho nehmatateľnou časťou. Predovšetkým má ambíciu zostať slovom a jeho tvarmi bez striktných pravidiel, no napriek tomu si zachováva autentickosť uvažovania nad prítomným momentom, akokoľvek je tento moment manipulovaný alebo podrobený experimentu. Vždy je ukotvený v konkrétnej osobe s tvárnymi defektmi vlastnej psychiky.

Aká je osobnostná pozícia Joea Necchiho, zapisovateľa, rozprávača? Nie je samoľúbym intelektuálom ani bonvivánom, energickým cestovateľom, nenávistným mizantropom, bohémom v pravom zmysle slova. Na okraji svojho prežívania necháva najvýraznejší priestor takým skúsenostiam, v ktorých sa môže bezprostredne dotknúť emócie vystupujúcej z akútnosti momentálnych potrieb. Ak z nich vyplýva túžba po blízkosti, nezáleží na tom, kto je ten druhý, hoci slovo „potreba“ môže pôsobiť v tomto prípade mätúco, pretože skúsenosť učí, že ak je silná, nekontrolovaná, impulzívna, zostane po nej niekto neúplný, dotknutý, v najhoršom prípade zneužitý.

V Kainovej knihe sú však potreby intímne, neskrotné len vtedy, ak sú závislé od okolia, vtedy sú súčasťou komplikovanej cesty. Jej hybnou silou je imerzia. Na jej pozadí Trocchi s jemnocitom opisuje estetickosť detailu každej fázy dňa v ľubovoľnom kúte toho najškaredšieho mesta. Tu počuť ozveny nadpozemského v prízemnom, rušnom, kalnom prostredí, ktoré má na pár chvíľ spisovateľ v moci, dokáže ho ohýbať vlastným rytmom. Napriek tomu, že si uvedomuje zrejúce nepohodlie, prchavosť pokoja, do ktorého sa dostal umelo. Počúva mesto s takou vášňou, ako Denis Diderot načúval prírode. Preto je ľahké napadnúť ho, zahubiť v zárodku alebo odviesť do nežiadanej polohy, kde sa usadilo cudzie teleso, uzurpuje si pozornosť a ruší to sociálne neakceptovateľné ja Trocchiho charakteru, do ktorého podniká dobrovoľné, aj keď riskantné exkurzie.

Kompozícia Kainovej knihy obsahuje zážitky, ktoré môžeme prirovnať k aplikácii narkotík. Po nich sa totiž obsah protagonistu otvára a ožaruje mátožné vyčíňanie preludov, ak si od nich nesľubujeme také, aké nám s vervou priniesla maľba Williama Blakea alebo Francisa Bacona. Takéto vizuálne skratky sú len naše mimikry. Potrebujeme diskomfort ochudobniť o jeho reálne tvary. Alexander Trocchi však necháva veciam svoju skutočnú podobu. To, čo je na nich iné, je jeho vlastné pôsobenie na ne. Schopnosť vysielať neurčité a nevyspytateľné signály — v tom spočíva sila jeho premýšľania.

Škótsky prozaik Alexander Trocchi ostáva v skromnej úlohe apoštola nedefinovaného náboženstva — aby nechal vyprovokovaný odkaz ďalšej generácii, a tá vie, že jeho vety nemôže deklaratórne hlásať ako nejaký poriadok, kodifikovať z nich kánon, reptať o nejestvujúcom alebo len matnom, načrtnutom deji, kde figúra alter ega — Joea Necchiho, úprimne hlása svoju záľubu v písanom slove a v látkach, ktoré ho vzďaľujú od svojej prítomnosti alebo ju, naopak, maximalizujú. Tie musí hľadať, stretávať hľadajúcich, rezignovať s nimi na silu tejto chémie, objavovať v nej čosi vyššie, báť sa jej dosahov.

Tieto denníky krvilačne nehľadajú prienik na výslnie, ostávajú na periférii, ale tento kút, kde ich môžeme nájsť, je napokon aj tak pre zasvätených. Vstupnou potrebou je porozumenie samoty a rešpektovanie samoty cudzej. Akýkoľvek spôsob dialógu medzi autorom a čitateľom je oslabený a ostáva prijať skutočnosť, že to celé mysteriózne rozprávanie je skôr kázňou ako spoveďou. Kázňou, ktorej poslucháči sú anonymní, k ničomu sa nehlásia — ak, tak k povahovým črtám, kde vina nie je žiadnym problémom. Naopak. Vina je nutnosťou. Bez nej sa takáto literatúra čítať nedá, pretože je bedekrom po miestach, kde ste už raz boli, no nikdy ste sa odtiaľ nevrátili.

[Glass River]

Once considered a ‘very dirty book’, contemporary readers who dig up Cain’s Book will find it no more offensive than The Tiger Who Came to Tea. Certainly a lot less offensive than Little Black Sambo. Times change. Exile was the theme of Trocchi’s writing and of his life. His first major départ was from post-war Glasgow, where he had taken a philosophy degree. In the early 1950s he drifted into the coterie of bohemians, avant-gardists, existentialists, layabouts and pornographers in Paris clustered around Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, where Trocchi presided as ‘the erratic pope of my pagan church’. Girodias specialised in what he called DBs (dirty books) for the porn-starved Anglophone tourist. Under the pseudonym ‘Frances Lengel’, Trocchi turned out such hot numbers as The School for Sin and White Thighs. In the late fifties he followed the action to New York and became involved with the Beats, pop art (he was a gifted sculptor) and, pre-eminently, the hard-drug culture. Out of this cosmopolitan mix came Cain’s Book – the story, as in Genesis, of a criminal wanderer. It is a random performance (High again, Alex? one rather wonders) – ‘my little voyage in the art of digression’ the author archly, but all too accurately, called it. It is presented as the journal of ‘Joe Necchi’ (does one hear a rhyme?), someone like the author (ritually denied in the prelims), living a hand-to-arm existence on a scow, somewhere on the Hudson River. ‘Half an hour ago I gave myself a fix’, opens the first chapter. The narrator’s mind, memory and prose style apparently permanently disjointed by the heroin coursing through his veins, he muses – sometimes reminiscently, sometimes philosophically.
The philosophy that protrudes through the rhetoric is egotistic. Two sets of laws in particular are defied in Cain’s Book: those imposing censorship (‘I say it is impertinent, insolent and presumptuous of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions on me’) and those prohibiting psychotropic drugs (‘To think that a man should be allowed a gun and not a drug’). ‘I demand that these laws be changed’, Necchi/Trocchi tells his readers, the American authorities, the world at large, and possibly God. None of them seem to be listening. The most coherent passages in the book return to blackout Edinburgh (as a very young man, Trocchi served in the wartime Royal Navy):
I made love for the first time with a prostitute. Princes Street, Edinburgh. Ten shillings for a short time in an air-raid shelter. I had never seen such ugly thighs nor ever imagined it like that, exposed for me in matchlight, the flaccid buttocks like pale meat on the stone stairs, the baggy skirt raised as far as her navel and with spread knees making a cave of her crotch, the match flickering . . . She told me to hurry up.
Even from his ‘pope’, one suspects that M. Girodias would not have been happy with a DB called Ugly Thighs or Flaccid Buttocks by Matchlight.
Hounded out of the US for supplying drugs to a minor (then a capital crime) Trocchi returned to the UK in the 1960s, where, promoted by the avant-garde publisher John Calder, he became a cult figure – Britain’s Bill Burroughs. He now got his drugs from the NHS and claimed his habit was ‘controlled’ and ‘experimental’. He was, however, hopelessly hooked and wrote nothing readable between Cain’s Book and his death in 1984.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three-and-a-half stars. This is an unusual book by an unusual writer. I had first come across the name Alexander Trocchi in memoirs of the literary scene in 1950s Paris, and I knew that he had been considered a man of great gifts by his peers. An existentialist and Beat, friend of Allen Ginsberg and George Plimpton, onetime ally of Guy Debord, editor of a literary magazine that had published Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett, he had become hooked on heroin in the late 1950s and left Paris for New York City. There he lived as a “scow man” on a barge, did some writing, and generally lived from fix to fix, pimping out his young wife and begging money off his former friends, “to pay for the baby’s milk”. Arrested on charges of possession with intent to distribute, he made his way to Canada (being met at the station by Leonard Cohen, who immediately went into an overdose situation after scraping out the pan in which his new guest has just cooked up some opium), and from there back to the UK. His last public hurrah was a poetry reading/happening at the Albert Hall in 1965, and from then on until his death in 1984 he seems to have experienced a prolonged writing block, and to have lived as a registered addict, getting his daily dose of dope courtesy of the National Health Service.

The book (published in 1960) reflects a number of these experiences and interests. At the most superficial level, there is the daily life of a junkie scow man with vague literary ambitions. As far as I can tell, a scow is a barge that carries cargo around New York, but always pulled by a tug boat. In the 1950s, that seems to have been a very passive life: waiting until the order came that your scow was going to be tugged from point A to point B on a particular evening. This suits our narrator, Joe, perfectly fine. He does a bit of writing, a bit of staring out the window, and occasionally goes into Manhattan to score and shoot up with fellow junkies. Every once in a while there is a sexual encounter (misogyny alert!). Intermingled with this are the reminiscences of his early life in Glasgow, the boarding house his mother ran, his Italian father’s obsessive cleanliness and disinclination for paid work, and the relationship with his first wife.

Those parts are relatively straightforward – there is an undertone of an existential sense of unreality, of meaninglessness, but one can follow the narrative. When the heroin starts to flow, the author’s thought processes become hard to follow, but that makes sense as well, in a way.

But then there were parts where I found the author to become insufferably didactic, expounding on his personal philosophy. Sentences like “I say it is impertinent, insolent and presumptious of any person or group of persons to impose their unexamined moral prohibitions upon me, that it is dangerous both to me, and, although they are unaware of it, to the imposers, that in every instance where such a prohibition becomes crystallized in law an alarming precedent is set.” (P 40) or “For centuries we in the West have been dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify” (p59) sound like college dorm debate material. One has the sense of the author struggling to sound like a prophet for his generation, the intellectual of the Beats… and failing.

The passages dealing with drug use suffer from a sort of schizophrenia. On one hand, there are factual descriptions of scoring drug, preparing the drug, squabbling with other addicts over who gets what part of the drug, shooting up, nodding off, eventually coming out of it… and then, pretty soon, doing the same thing over again. These have a certain sociological or anthropological interest. (The matter-of-fact mentions of needle-sharing made me shudder, and sure enough, one or two of the junkies are described as “yellow”, and the author’s second wife died of liver disease.) Then there are the above-mentioned woolly thoughts that can be classified as “opiate dreams”. Finally, Alexander Trocchi feels compelled here and there to insert some passages that come close to advocating for free heroin use. The police should leave the poor junkies alone and not waste their time chasing down dealers, and the medical establishment, those squares in white coats, have no idea what to do with junkies, either -that type of thinking.

So I can see how this book was a succès de scandale when it came out – bisexuality, marginality, drug use, adultery, petty theft, and a dose of vague anti-establishment thoughts. A lot of this has aged poorly. That being said, many passages were very well written, especially those dealing with life on the scow, the junkie underground in NYC in the 1950s, and the author’s childhood in the Scottish lower-middle class.

[Imbroc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Non sono mai contenta quando un libro come questo è fuori catalogo da decenni. Sui miei scaffali ci è finito perché ai mercatini raccatto quasi ogni titolo che trovo della collana Mine Vaganti.

Alexander Trocchi, autore scozzese, amico di Burroughs e Leonard Cohen, stimato da Ginsberg e tanti altri. Famoso anche per essersi bucato in diretta TV. In questo racconto autobiografico è Joe Necchi, eroinomane che vive su una chiatta ormeggiata a NY. Si droga, scrive, si droga, parla con altra gente che si droga. Il Libro di Caino è un diario romanzato, un progetto a cui Joe lavora da anni per sentirsi ancora uno scrittore. “Caino e le sue orazioni”.

Definirlo un libro sulla tossicodipendenza sarebbe riduttivo, anche se Burroughs lo considerava il miglior romanzo sulla dipendenza da eroina. Sono 180 pagine intense, da leggere con calma, soppesando le parole, lasciandosi trasportare dalle immagini che Trocchi/Caino crea dalla sua chiatta, con una scrittura curata e commovente, per quanto talento emerge. Le citazioni sono raffinate. Vale la pena lasciarsi guidare da questo fratello cattivo, senza aspettarsi di avere tra le mani un romanzo fatto secondo le regole dei romanzi.

È un libro filosofico, che passa dalle riflessioni sulla droga a quelle sui legami familiari, dalla critica politica a quella sul lavoro non creativo che Joe, come suo padre, detesta. A differenza di suo padre, però, non se ne vergogna. Cominci a drogarti e quella diventa la tua professione, dice un amico di Joe. Il senso di solitudine e il fallimento sono, in definitiva, i temi più profondi del libro.

Per gli amanti della Beat Generation, ma non solo. Consigliato a chi non cerca lo storytelling e non ha paura delle mele marce. E a chiunque abbia la fortuna di trovarlo usato. Qualche copia si trova online.

“Per dirla francamente, i miei lettori non esistono, sono innumerevoli individui sconosciuti, ciascuno dei quali mi macina nel suo mulino per motivazioni di cui non posso essere ritenuto responsabile. Non c’è mai stato un libro responsabile.”

[Side Real Press · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although the book preview talks a lot about drugs, this book does not strike me as being essentially upon that topic. For sure, much of the action revolves around the narrator of attaining his next fix but it would seem to me that is the main thrust of the book is about the pleasure of doing, and being, nothing.

The narrator flits between memories of his childhood, especially in regard to his unemployed father and his activities in New York, primarily spent looking for drugs and women but the majority of the novel is spent on a barge floating or docked somewhere off New York (literally and metaphorically adrift) where he spends his time thinking about drugs, sex and the possibility of writing the book; Cains book.

The narrator has no qualms about undertaking these musings. For him this is an ideal existence, Even if it appears to the rest of the world (by which I means the characters that he engages with during the novel and by extension the reader) that this is time 'wasted'. The passages relating to drugs (another type of wasted) and sex (hetro and homo) are quite graphic for the times but it would seem to me that even these shared activities, sordid or otherwise (Trocchi was very pro drugs), both also seem to me to essentially reveal his alienation from the world.

If you're looking for 'action' in a book there is not really so much of it, but if you are interested in the literature of the 'beats', Let us say Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs (though Cains book is very different to 'Junky'), or enjoy novels of the existential crisis, then I think you would find it and enjoyable (if thats the term) read. Though I have given it to stars, the thoughts that it has been provoking in me probably make it worthy of three.