(1925-1984)
The erudite erotica writer Frances Lengel, author of a series of shocking novels that titillated the adventurous subscribers to the Olympia Press in the 1950s, was in reality the brilliant Scottish writer and heroin addict Alexander Trocchi. Early in the decade, Trocchi had left his studies at Glasgow University armed with the seed money of a scholarship to study European cultures. He settled in Paris. A terribly unworldly fellow in the beginning, he soon fell in with the Left Bank bohemian and expatriate crowd in the years after World War II. Trocchi founded what would become a legendary literary journal, Merlin, a launching pad for many of the interesting British and U.S. writers of the 1950s.
Like most of the foreign layabouts and would-be artists around the Saint-Germain-des-Pres, Trocchi was ever short of cash. He found a source of occasional income in Maurice Girodias, the owner of the controversial Olympia Press (see kenton, Maxwell), a small Parisian publishing company that specialized in unusual English-language paperback editions, both avant-garde and daring literary properties and semi-explicit erotica intended for subscribers and Anglo-American tourists, printed in what was known as the Traveller’s Companion series. Girodias was impressed by Trocchi: “Alex was always busy cultivating extreme attitudes, extravagant styles and wild dreams with great gusto and appetite.” Girodias offered Trocchi the opportunity to write some of the sex novels on Olympia’s seasonal lists (the lurid titles were heralded in Girodias’s catalogs long before the topics were ever written). The pay was minimal—something in the neighborhood of a few hundred dollars—but Trocchi, already under the allure of heroin and eager for funding, grabbed the assignments. He returned value for money in a series of elegant, shocking, and arousing novels that included such cult classics as Helen and Desire, a coming-of-age story in the form of a diary of a young Australian woman prone to erotic hallucinations; School for Sin, about a young Irish country lass en route to Dublin who falls into the clutches of an irresistible seducer and finds herself receiving an unsentimental education at the institution of the title; and Thongs, following yet another female’s downward path, this time from Glasgow to Paris and London, as she becomes initiated into the world of bondage and discipline, ultimately becoming London’s legendary “Painmistress.”
Trocchi’s Olympia dirty books were concerned with spoiled innocence and the darker side of human nature and relationships, based on subjugation and pain. They were highlighted by bouts of sadomasochistic sex. Girodias would call Lengel/ Trocchi “the first of Olympia’s all-out literary stallions.” So pleased was he with Trocchi’s pseudonymous porn that he handed him the prestige assignment of writing volume 5 of My Life and Loves by Frank Harris, the legendary Edwardian rakehell and erotic memoirist. While the late Harris himself had written the first four volumes, the fifth, which Girodias had arranged to publish through license with Harris’s widow, turned out not to exist. The developer, ever resourceful, hired Trocchi, who was pleased to pretend to be Harris and created from scratch a work that was a brilliant imitation, every bit as boastful and orgiastic as volumes 1 through 4.
Trocchi later moved on to New York and Canada, and produced Cain’s topic (1960), a masterful, autobiographical novel of a drug addict, one of the key works in the Beat canon of the ’50s and ’60s. Trocchi often was trumpeted by fans as the British William Burroughs after the controversial American author and drug addict. Indeed, the two men were longtime friends (“He used to help me shoot up,” Burroughs recalled. “Old Alex could find a vein in a mummy.”) Unlike the American writer, Trocchi’s addictions destroyed his ability to go on writing, and although he was busy in the ’60s and ’70s with various revolutionary and artistic causes, he produced no other significant literary work. His last years were depleted by the ravages of addiction.
Works
- Carnal Days of Helen Sefereris (1954);
- Helen and Desire (1954);
- School for Sin (1955);
- White Thighs (1955);
- Young Adam (1954)
