... Rereading Cain's Book after many years, I am struck by a morbidity in the relationship between sex and drugs, and sometimes death. Whereas he never waxes lyrical over women, Trocchi forges a poetic mythology of junk, which fills the space marked "Love" in the novel: I remember Jody saying: "When we do make love, Joe, it'll be the end!" The end-love, she meant, the ultimate.-Like an overdose, Jody? And again: I thought of Jody, and of how plump she is from eating too many cakes, of the soft wad of her belly, of our thighs without urgency interlaced, of her ugly bitten hands . . . into which she drives the needle each time she fixes. "That's your cunt, Jody." At other times, Trocchi dwells on the separate parts of women's bodies like a lecherous mortician: "the flaccid buttocks like pale meat on the stone stairs"; "this first sex shadowy and hanging colourless like a clot of spiderweb from the blunt butt of her mound"; "her belly dangling like an egg on poach"; "the skin close, odorous, opaque, yellowish, and pitted almost like pumice-stone"; "a French woman's vitals would be sweet to the taste, while with those of an Englishwoman one risked being confronted with a holy sepulchre, a repository for relics"; and plenty more in the same vein. In Cain's Book, from which all those quotations come, the most affectionate liaison (apart from one with a man) is with Jake, a woman with one leg cut off above the knee. Necchi desires her genuinely, but at the same time he cannot help whipping back the sheets and saying to the reader, Look what a monster I am. Trocchi's "Divine Marquis" mode is even less gorgeous in his pornographic oeuvre, It may be that artists reveal themselves more in their moments of lowbrow frivolity than (as they like to think) at times of highbrow seriousness; in any case, what is shown up by Trocchi's obscene writings can be unappealing in the extreme. ...
