Helen And Desire Read online

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 1997 by Rebel Inc.,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Copyright © Alexander Trocchi, 1954

  Introduction copyright © Edwin Morgan, 1997

  A Note on the Text, copyright © John Pringle, 1997

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 0 86241 629 9

  eISBN 978 0 85786 942 5

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books

  Introduction

  EDWIN MORGAN

  Alexander Trocchi’s reputation always had elements of the problematic, though unease rather than opposition seems to have been the main factor, where doubts existed. Many of his works had an underground life only, and their non-respectability made them suspect, even though – or perhaps because – they sold well and were much reprinted and were translated into several languages. Even his ‘accepted’ novels, Cain’s Book and Young Adam, whose quality and power of writing must be clear to any reader, were frequently out of print, or if in print, proved elusive in bookshops, whether through a sort of moral censorship by booksellers, a deliberate under-promotion by publishers, a timid public demand, or a mixture of the three. The result of all this was, in any case, that it was hard for any interested person to get a sense of Trocchi’s oeuvre, and so to weigh its worth. The situation improved when Andrew Murray Scott brought out his biography (Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster, Polygon, 1991) and selection of extracts (Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, Polygon, 1991), but the anthology still did not contain anything from the erotic novels, and missed an opportunity to help readers see if the links between underground Trocchi and overground Trocchi bring forward values that ask to be taken into account. In fact they do, and it is good to have the best of these books, Helen and Desire, first published by Olympia Press in Paris in January 1954, reprinted now.

  The erotic novels Trocchi wrote in France in the 1950s were obviously a means of making money quickly, but they have also to be seen against the background of his work as editor of the magazine Merlin (1952–55), which published Beckett, Sartre, Genet, Henry Miller, Hikmet and Ionesco, and championed the exploring of alienated (Sartre) or forbidden (Genet) or absurd (Ionesco) experience. The first number included a critique of existentialism (by A.J. Ayer), and this philosophical marker, placing existence before essence, was to pervade Trocchi’s fiction, where, as the narrator of Cain’s Book says, a writer should ‘annihilate prescriptions of all past form in his own soul’ and should judge what he writes ‘solely in terms of his living’. This must involve not only subject-matter but also language. In the joint introduction to Writers in Revolt, an anthology co-edited by Trocchi, Richard Seaver, and Terry Southern (1963), we are told:

  The exploratory nature of art should be welcomed, for it may reveal an answer. But while we have grown conditioned to accepting implicitly, and welcoming, each new advance or discovery in medicine or science – or now in space research – limiting our reservations, if any, not to the scientist’s methods or even his ends, but at most to the applications, the writer still struggles for the freedom to use his tools – language – without restrictions . . . What is required, then, is the deliberate avoidance of lip service to assumed values, and adherence instead to deeply personal impulse, as well as the active response to the most private value inclinations.

  The exploring, the deconditioning, the freeing, the transvaluing are seen in the outsider heroes of Cain’s Book and Young Adam, but equally in the outsider heroines of erotic novels like Helen and Desire and Thongs, published under the female pseudonyms of Frances Lengel and Carmencita de las Lunas. And just as the first-person narrator of Cain’s Book is shown as actually writing that novel through the course of the action, so too the first-person narrator of Helen and Desire is shown writing her own story. Joe Necchi types his novel on a scow in New York harbour, and Helen Smith scribbles hers with a pencil in an Algerian tent or room, but in each case we are given a strikingly immediate insight into the mind and feelings of the existential exile. Doubtless Trocchi became ventriloquially female in order to satisfy the assumed demands of the male readers of erotica, but he obviously relished the challenge of the transformation and entered into it with zest and thoroughness. In addition, he uses the sexuality of his heroine, in those proto-feminist days of the early 1950s, to establish a formidable presence: not only a beautiful, fair-haired, physically strong young woman who can make the ‘editor’ of her story exclaim, ‘What a superb creature she must have been!’ but something much more interesting, being on the one hand a boldly inventive and intelligent wordsmith and on the other hand an almost primal embodiment of sensuality, the very incarnation of desire as the book’s title suggests, a desire that is virtually Lacanian in its insatiability, its identification with her existence.

  Beginning as an adolescent loner in an Australian village, rejecting the received ideas and expectations of a narrow, restrictive, parochial society, she is ripe for escape, travel, adventure, exile, her quick-witted and often ruthless sense of self-preservation making her the natural heroine of a picaresque novel, where the action moves from Australia to Singapore to India to France and finally to Algeria. The lushly described sexual encounters, with both men and women, which punctuate the book are of course the raison d’être of an underground publication and yet are also one of the means Trocchi uses to transcend the genre. On an obvious level, which must strike any reader, there is the fact that Trocchi hardly ever employs the so-called taboo words which a novelist today would freely indulge in; the language is positively baroque, even to the borders of parody (Trocchi’s wit can sometimes be seen behind Helen’s, dropping a sly over-the-topness – just a pinch! – into the olla podrida), and has a recurring kinaesthetic strangeness as Helen gropes for verbalisation of the sensations her whole flesh seems designed to receive. The imagery is memorable. ‘The lilac putty of my nipples was as heavy and ambiguous as mercury.’ ‘The cutting shingles . . . crackled like china chips.’ ‘My glistening torso slithered under discs, flats and surfaces, under flanges of containment and protrusion.’ ‘His white skin gleamed moistly, like a mushroom in moonlight.’ ‘We had writhed on soft gimbals . . . gliding on soft graphite, passing and repassing.’ ‘The hairs of his chest were like live terminals against the amorphous sludge of my breasts.’ ‘The shifts, the slips, the slides, the slithers, the glides, the rolls did not move so much as concentrate a stranded passion.’ ‘The seed, as incandescent as magnesium, in my loins.’ ‘In the lonely meadow of her bed.’

  But Helen is more than a stylist. As she sits in her Arab tent in Chapter 2, a sexual prisoner, well fed, solitary yet available to all, thinking of her last anonymous partner, she meditates on the apparent paradox of her existence, rejoicing in her separateness, her non-attachment, yet at the same time overwhelmed again and again by ‘the terrible joy of annihilation, the deliverance of my whole being to the mystery of sensual union’. She writes because she is conscious of, and interested in, the paradox. She has, as a genuine existential hero, a story no one else can tell: ‘I am anxious to record everything, to break through the shameful shell of civilised expression.’ In another of her Algerian ruminations (Chapter 9) she finds a defence of oriental languor and passivity and subtle cultivation of pleasure against the western work-ethic which her Australian father, as a businessman, would have wanted her to believe in and (on his death) profit from:

  Everything is computed in terms of time, so much
time for this, so much time for that; it must not be ‘wasted’. Geared for industry, those stupid westerners never pause to analyse the word ‘waste’. Time is accepted without questions as valuable; like money or land or food, it must not be ‘wasted’; at the end of an hour one must have something to show for it. The question for them is: What ‘excuse’ for passing the hour in such and such a way? If one can produce riches at the end of the hour, then the time has not been ‘wasted’. But if one has merely derived pleasure from living? If one considers living important – in itself ?

  The western God, the Jewish God, was invented to make the hatred of life logical.

  She sees the non-postponement of satisfactions as logical, even though she knows desire is infinite. We are reminded of what she wrote at the start of her travels in Chapter 2, after surrendering herself to a young man in the toilet of a train:

  As I slipped the dress back over my warm satisfied flesh, the true immensity of the adventure before me filled me with an ungovernable joy of living.

  Could that teenage joy survive the extraordinary variety of her sexual encounters, with Ursula, with Duke, with Captain O’Reilly and his steward, with Chen, with Lieutenant Hawkes, with Abdullah, with Nadya, with Mario, with Devlin, with Youssef, and with the dozens of anonymous partners who filed through her flesh in the Algerian desert? Could it survive her own necessary deceits and manipulations as she struggled to outwit male oppression, male assumptions, male proprietorialities? Could it refuse to be sentimentalised by the unexpected and non-physical kindness of her only good angel, the wealthy Indian Parsee, Mr Pamandari? In her latter stages, as she is being fattened and lightly drugged on a diet of honey, almonds, and hashish by her Arab captors, she retains her clarity of mind (e.g. her wish to be revenged on Sheikh Youssef) but tries to describe how she is torn between ‘the terrible pleasure I experience in approaching the unconscious state of an object’ and the still unquenched desire to record what is happening to her. She almost argues herself out of her writing obsession: it’s a bore, stupid, a ‘ridiculous waste of time that might otherwise be lived’. But no, that won’t do. Trocchi inhabits her. ‘I think I write because it is a triumph. I feel the need to express that triumph.’ Her manuscript ends in mid-sentence, and we never find out what happens to her, but if her last musings are valedictory, they are eloquently so:

  What am I doing still wielding this pencil? It seems to have stuck to my fingers. I can’t get rid of it. Shores of experience slide away from me. The sky will be red tonight from my slit of a window. The roof-tops and the minaret at sunset will glow softly and noises of beasts and men and perhaps music will drift up to me before – after, oh yes after my beloved potion! – the door opens for another time and with a rising of my juices a male spine drives me to delirium.

  It is a kind of defiance. The reader is not allowed to switch into a lulled mode of orientalism, with sunset minaret and street music; it is the fever of hashish and anonymous sex which lies in wait, and Helen is ready to ride the fever as it rides her.

  Edwin Morgan

  Glasgow, 1997

  A Note on the Text

  Helen and Desire has been abducted and abused more often than the heroine herself. Trocchi’s best and most successful ‘dirty book’ has frequently fallen victim to pirate publishers or to the sharp practices of legitimate publishers who didn’t honour their contracts, where they existed, with the author. Needless to say the text itself has undergone many minor, and some not so minor, changes during this existence in the hinterland of pornographic publishing. This makes fixing on a definitive text somewhat difficult.

  Immediately successful on its first printing by the Paris-based Olympia Press in early 1954 (#2 in the Atlantic Library series), under the pseudonym of ‘Frances Lengel’, it was reprinted later the same year, again in 1956, and in 1962 appeared retitled as Desire and Helen in order to foil the unwanted attentions of the French vice squad.

  Helen and Desire finally appeared under Trocchi’s name from Brandon House, California, in 1967, and again in an Olympia edition, now based in London, in 1971. This edition, incidentally, qualifies for an award for the tackiest book cover ever. The novel had appeared in the United States even earlier, published by Castle Books of New York as Angela by ‘Jean Blanche’. Understandably annoyed by this pirating, Trocchi secured a promise not to reissue this edition, but on the condition that he provided Castle with a ‘new’ Angela. This he did, retaining from the original only Helen’s upbringing, dispensing with the performance of writing her memoirs, and confining the rather dull story entirely to an Australian setting. Angela appeared in Britain in 1968 from Tandem Books.

  As recently as 1991 a certain American publisher issued an unauthorised new version with the original narrative ‘improved’ by the addition of extra sex secenes, some so graphic that even Trocchi might blush.

  As far as possible this Rebel inc. edition follows the original 1954 Olympia version. However, perhaps due to the haste with which Olypmia issued books, even that text is marred by a number of errors. Some of these have been corrected by comparison with later editions. In a couple of instances of doubtful syntax and punctuation the text has been corrected despite the lack of hard textual evidence to support these changes, but only in cases where all texts are deeply ambiguous to the point of confusion. The urge to tamper to any great extent has been resisted in order to preserve the full flavour of Trocchi’s inimitable, if occasionally oblique, style.

  John Pringle, 1997

  Contents

  Letter One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Letter Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Letter Three

  COPY OF A LETTER SENT BY MAJOR PIERRE JAVET TO HIS FRIEND, CAPTAIN JACQUES DECOEUR OF THE FRENCH GARRISON AT MASCARA, ALGERIA.

  Ghardaïa,

  5 July 1949

  Dear Jacques,

  Here is a pretty little thing indeed! You, who were always going to be a writer, what do you make of it? Officially, of course, no more than a routine enquiry. But for you! Could your imagination have created such a woman? What a superb creature she must have been!

  The facts are as follows: the original manuscript, of which I enclose a copy, was found on some stray Arab who was pulled in here for theft. We don’t quite know what to make of it. The man says he found it. Of course, he’s lying, but there isn’t very much we can do. We have a good idea as to the identity of the sheikh mentioned in the manuscript. But again, we have to move cautiously.

  If anything breaks, I’ll write you about it immediately. If the woman is ever found – well, we shall see what we shall see!

  A bientôt,

  Pierre.

  Chapter One

  It is dark where I am lying, alone, in a tent, on a few sheepskins that they provided for me. They have taken my clothes away from me and have given me the clothes of an Arab woman.

  Outside, I can hear them speaking but I cannot understand their language. They are watering their camels. Soon I suppose someone will come in. But I am not really afraid. In the past I have always found that to be a woman is enough. I have only to wait. Some time we must reach a town where someone speaks English or French and then I will be able to explain. They will have to give me up. And then it may take a long time. But I shall plan. And I shall have my revenge.

  How terrified I was when I saw the camels of Youssef’s caravan move off in single file! And Youssef himself, the only living soul to whom I could speak, turning his eyes away as though I no longer existed!

  One day I shall make him pay for all that.

  Meanwhile I am going to go back to the beginning and write it all down – oh, I regret nothing! Not even this. Or what happened on the sand dunes a few hours ago. And Youssef,
the poor fool, thought he was humiliating me! How like a man! I have met many men, and some of them have been fine strong beautiful men, but at bottom, I’m afraid, all men are fools.

  It seems a long time ago now since I bathed in the coral-spined water in the little cove below our village. That was where life began for me, I suppose. It was, anyway, almost the beginning . . .

  How difficult it is to explain! The terrible mute hunger in our bodies! If I touch my thigh here in the near-darkness of the tent my whole body is again instinct with the driving urge that brought me here, and I cannot explain it. As always, it is stronger than fear. For me it has always been that way. It is as though my whole history were contained in the touch, asserted again in the pressure of fingers, all my life laid out with the smooth curves of my body, maturer now, but young still, and waiting silently, yes, waiting, on these hard sunbaked sheepskins that they threw in after me. Oh, I could laugh! For I have only one feeling. I have only to touch the smooth slab of my thigh again and I feel triumphant!

  And it was the same then, I suppose, as it is now. I was lonely. I climbed down over the rocks to the little cove.

  In the northwest of Australia there is a long stretch of beach, wild and desolate, which gives on to the Coral Sea. This part of the Pacific is so called because of the vast pink stretches of coral reef which spread for hundreds of miles like pale wounds in the smooth turquoise shimmer of the sea. From the window of my room I could look out right across the sea shelf and the scores of coral were sometimes almost scarlet and sometimes, in the evening, almost black. Few boats came there except those of the fishermen of our own village, and most of them belonged to my father, who owned four boats and employed ten men.