Young Adam: A Novel

By Alexander Trocchi and David L. Ulin

A compelling existential thriller by the Beat-era writer: “Everyone should read Young Adam” (The Times Literary Supplement).
 
Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder?
 
As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he’s telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L. Ulin.
 
This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for “prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry” and called “the most brilliant man I ever met” by Allen Ginsberg.
 
“Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world.” —The Bloomsbury Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780802189424

Book preview

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YOUNG ADAM

YOUNG ADAM

ALEXANDER TROCCHI

With an Introduction by David L. Ulin

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 1954 by Alexander Trocchi

Introduction © 2017 by David L. Ulin

Cover design by Anamaria Morris

Cover image courtesy of Young Adam Productions Limited

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [e-mail].

First published in Paris by the Olympia Press in 1954;

in revised editions by William Heinemann Ltd. in 1961;

by The New English Library in a paperback edition in 1966;

and by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. in 1983.

First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: 2001

This Grove Atlantic edition is from the 2013 edition by Alma Books LTD.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-8021-2617-7

eISBN 978-0-8021-8942-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

The Underground Man

ALEXAN DE R TROCCHI liked to call himself a cosmonaut of inner space. It’s a phrase he invoked for the first time in August 1962 at the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference, where he clashed with Scottish literary icon Hugh Mac­Diarmid, and argued that the novel had become obsolete. For ­Trocchi, narrative—or at least the idea that narrative could be instructive—was a hopelessly middle-class construct, sentimental and naïve. Instead, it was the writer’s responsibility to turn inward, to explore the relationship of the individual to society through the filter of a personal rebellion, to stand inviolable and apart. All art, he declared in a speech to the conference, can be considered as man’s expressive reaction to his state of being in the world. If this is understood it’s not difficult to understand why modern art should be as it is. The modern artist—sensitive to the feelings of modern science as well as the religious and political disorders of his time—reflects and expresses the need for new forms, new categories. Modern art begins with the destruction of the object. The irony is that even as such statements put Trocchi briefly at the center of the international literary avant-garde, his own disintegration (to steal the closing line of Young Adam ) was already taking place. Only thirty-seven, he had been a heroin addict for the better part of a decade, a condition he celebrated as a philosophical choice. He was also, in the most profound sense, a nihilist, intent on nullifying his life. Although he lived for twenty-two years after his appearance at Edinburgh (he died in 1984, of complications from pneumonia), he never finished another book. In the end, the inner space to which he aspired grew ever more constricted, until it collapsed on itself.

Trocchi still remains something of a cipher, a lost writer remembered, if at all, for his dissipation rather than his work. Of his eighteen books, just two—this one, and Cain’s Book, which was first published in 1960—are in print in the United States, leaving him to linger on the periphery, tangential and ignored. Still, despite his willful self-abnegation, Trocchi was possessed, by all accounts, of an enormous ego, which makes his dissolution less a leaning towards oblivion than a conscious gesture of superiority. Trocchi believed he was so powerful, both in his mind and in his body, recalled his British publisher John Calder in a 1995 interview, that he could resist anything, and of course he got hooked [on heroin] very quickly and was never able to get off it for the rest of his life. Or, as the author puts it in the closing lines of Cain’s Book: Ending, I should not care to estimate what has been accomplished. In terms of art and literature?—such concepts I sometimes read about, but they have nothing in intimacy with what I am doing, exposing, obscuring. Only at the end I am still sitting here, writing, with the feeling I have not even begun to say what I mean, apparently sane still, and with a sense of my freedom and responsibility, more or less cut off as I was before.

Read one way, such a statement seems a lot like Trocchi’s epitaph, the final declaration of an extreme life. At the same time, it’s a logical endpoint, for he was a subversive all along. Born in 1925 in Glasgow, he worked as a merchant seaman during World War II, and moved to Paris after graduating from university. There, in the early 1950s, he—along with George Plimpton, Terry Southern, and Peter Matthiessen—played a central role in the expatriate bohemia of the Left Bank. He was, observed his friend and collaborator Richard Seaver, the most talented writer on the scene, the one who, had a straw poll been taken, would have been voted most likely to become our generation’s Joyce or Hemingway or—more likely—Orwell. Compared with Trocchi, who was only a year or two older than most of us, we were babes in the woods, fumbling toward knowledge or the hope of knowledge. He on the contrary was sure of himself, and his writing reflected it. Trocchi was the first editor to publish Samuel Beckett in English, in his short-lived but influential journal Merlin; he also wrote six novels (including Helen and Desire, The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis, White Thighs, and School for Wives) in three years, mostly what Maurice Girodias, his publisher from Olympia Press, referred to as dirty books, or dbs. While it’s tempting to dismiss these efforts as work-for-hire, that’s not exactly accurate. Girodias was the son of Jack Kahane, whose Obelisk Press had published Henry Miller in the 1930s, and Girodias, too, had literary aspirations: at a time when many books were being challenged for obscenity in Britain and the U.S., he brought out Lolita, Naked Lunch, Candy, and The Ginger Man in English for the first time. Trocchi, who went to Paris to emulate Miller, clearly responded to Girodias’s willingness to push the boundaries, and his Olympia novels reveal his double-edged cast of mind. Thongs, for instance—which, like most of his Paris work, was published under the pseudonym Frances Lengel—tells the story of Gertrude Gault, a young woman from Glasgow who becomes Grand Painmistress of a secret order of sexual sadists and libertines. By modeling the cult’s structure on the Catholic Church, Trocchi frames a trenchant critique of bourgeois culture, which hides its shameful secrets and half-articulated desires behind a sanctimonious public face. In 1954, Trocchi also helped Girodias pull off a legendary hoax, writing in ten sleepless days and nights a fifth volume of Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves after the publisher paid a million francs for a manuscript that turned out to be a few sheafs of typed pages, yellowed by time. As Trocchi later recollected: [C]andidly, those pages for which Girodias paid so much, were some of the worst writing it has ever been my misfortune to read.

Young Adam was the third of Trocchi’s Paris novels, published only a few months before My Life and Loves. It wasn’t a db—according to Jane Lougee, Trocchi’s girlfriend at the time, It was disappointing for Alex to have Girodias do the book—although Trocchi did dirty it up for Olympia. Yet unlike, say, Thongs, the sex in the Olympia edition comes off as false, gratuitous, and was scaled back in subsequent reprints. That’s not to say Young Adam doesn’t have a strong erotic sensibility; like most of Trocchi’s work, it’s rife with longing and desire, a sense that, in the physical, we might free ourselves, however temporarily, from the strictures of the world. More than anything, however, this is a philosophical novel, a tautly written existential thriller narrated by a Scottish barge worker named Joe Taylor who lets an innocent man hang for the murder of a young woman, a death that Joe himself has caused. Whether or not the killing is intentional remains an open question: [W]as it an accident? Joe wonders. I suppose it was. It had never occurred to me to kill her. I was merely walking away. Such a set-up has more than a little bit in common with Albert Camus’s The Stranger, on which Young Adam was obviously modeled. Trocchi, though, takes Camus a long step further by framing his protagonist as unwilling to take, or even to acknowledge, responsibility for his actions; his alienation is directed outward, not at the self, or even the absurdity of the universe, but instead at the complicity society requires. Go to the police? Joe asks late in the novel. Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny. For such a character, guilt and innocence are merely convenient social fictions[s]. In that regard, Joe’s intentions are directly related to the inviolability Trocchi would espouse in Cain’s Book—the idea that, in a corrupt culture, engagement itself is a form of capitulation, which leaves no other option than to stand apart.

This, of course, is a difficult concept—both for Trocchi’s readers and for the author, who, one might argue, willed himself into silence by taking such an unrelenting stance. It’s not just an amoral perspective, but one that’s almost actively anti-moral, an attack on the very notion of ethics, which Trocchi sees as capricious and impure. Over the years, certain sympathetic critics have tried to make apologies for such an outlook, to frame his work as socially redeeming, as a kind of metaphor. In a 1996 essay on Young Adam, John Pringle calls Joe self-obsessed, probably self-deluded, possibly insane, as if this might make him more attractive, or at least more easily defined. But if Pringle has a point—among the pleasures, and discomforts, of the novel is the slipperiness of its narration, our inability to know, with any surety, the depth of Joe’s intentions and manipulations—it’s also fundamentally misaligned. For Trocchi, after all, the question of sanity or insanity becomes another irrelevant boundary; his whole career, including (or especially) his final quarter century of silence, represents an assault on such distinctions, a vision of humanity so stark it’s no wonder he turned away. Your way out, he writes in Thongs, is sheer Nihilism, and there’s a strong core of Nihilism in all the religions. You call life meaningless, and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other. He is addressing his protagonist, but he might as well be talking to himself.

That relentless self-examination, that sense of the futility of both capitulation and resistance, is why Trocchi’s work may never be embraced in any lasting way. Over the years, there have been moments (a biography and an anthology of his uncollected writings in the 1990s, a film adaptation of Young Adam, with Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, in 2004) but for the most part, it’s too hard—not the language, which is astute and deftly rendered, but the perspective, Camus’s absurdist universe without the consolation of absurdity. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, Camus declares at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, although for Trocchi, one imagines, this does not go nearly far enough. And yet, that seems to me not an expression of lunacy but its opposite: a willingness to see things without the softening of social fiction, the assurances of guilt and innocence by which we imagine the universe to be a moral one. Trocchi knew better, and his work reflects that unrelenting point of view. His is the voice of a particularly individual sort of consciousness, in which, as he insists here, [i]t is necessary only to act ‘as if’ one’s conventional categories were arbitrary to come gradually to know that they are.

—David L. Ulin

Part One

1

THESE ARE TIMES when what is to be said looks out of the past at you—looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along. Past hours, past acts, take on an uncanny isolation; between them and you who look back on them now there is no continuity.

This morning, the first thing after I got out of bed, I looked in the mirror. It is of chromium-plated steel and I always carry it with me. It is unbreakable. My beard had grown imperceptibly during the night and now my cheeks and chin were covered with a short stubble. My eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. I must have

Reviews for Young Adam

[msarki_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved the film made of this book that starred Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor. And because of the great film I read the book which was just as good. I had forgotten all about this particular little novel. I remember it being pretty damn sexy throughout the first half and then, as life generally goes, turning into despair.

[damemuriel · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ignore the "beat generation novel" label (because who cares anyway...I know I don't). This is a grim but very well-written book. I'd love to see Stuart David go in this direction. Well, maybe not. But it would be interesting.