...“There is a funny thing about “social protest” in its broadest and most inclusive sense,” Dorn wrote to Raworth in 1962, while drafting his thoughts for an essay (which would appear in Kulchur that winter) comparing and contrasting St. Louis-born, heroin addict and Beat icon, William Burroughs, and Glasgow-born writer, editor, publisher, poly-addict, polyglot and pornographer, Alexander Trocchi, …and here I ain’t talking about Look Back because I only saw der flick, but the difference in writers say like Orwell and Burroughs, and Trocchi. The first were and/or are middle class and no denying it, only Trocchi makes any real sense out of that area of concern. Burroughs is a coupon clipper and it shows thru everything he says. Orwell likewise, tho it isn’t so direct, it is implied in a certain half-assed benevolence, etc. … No tricks in Cain’s book, it is so much more up-to-date or whatever, and new, than Burroughs, it is etc.
Though the fact that Trocchi’s working-class upbringing created for Dorn an unassailable fraternity between them, it would be over hasty to interpret Dorn’s acclaim and admiration for Cain’s Book, for example, as a jostling for sociopolitical payback. In his piece for Kulchur, Dorn identifies the aspects of Trocchi’s singular method for prose writing that resonated with his own practices, and contrasted with those of Burroughs. Dorn begins his fragmented, modestly titled, “
Notes More or Less Relevant to Burroughs and Trocchi,” by establishing the social pressures and contusions that constitute the domain of the “normal” along the verge of which “anti-state” writers stake their claims. “By attaching significance to shoes and haircuts,” Dorn writes, “the definition of the normal is as defined as it possibly can be,” and as inflexible. For example, in the irredeemable shift of the illegality of a narcotic onto the identity of its user, the “subjective receptacle,” the inadequacy and misguidedness of normalizing doctrines are revealed—“normal is never a definition but is a temporary fact of instance in the human subject. When it is not recognized in that way it leads to a confusion of what is Subject and what is Object, one of the more brutal confusions with which modern man is beset, is beset by arrogancies originating on the outside.” For Dorn, and for Trocchi (so Dorn argues), “whatever enlightenment” one might derive from the use of drugs “revert[s] back to its conjunction with a ‘self.’”
From this perspective, the addict—like the homeless, unemployed father of Joe Necchi, Cain’s Book’s heroin-addicted protagonist, who lives on a scow and traces his own migratory exile, “just passing on my way from nowhere to nowhere”—through a refusal of the stagnant and craven forms of the real, legally-addicted, workaday world, generates his own world in, among, and outside of these constricting superstructures, a world always aware of “the exile that is.” Joe describes his feelings on the eve of a transatlantic voyage: This time, however, leaving France for no good reason, on my way to America for no good reason, with an acute feeling of being an exile wherever I went, I found it oppressive. I was heavy with the sense of my own detachment. And that has been with me for as long as I could remember, gaining in intensity at each new impertinence of the external world with which I signed no contract when I was ejected bloodily from my mother's warm womb. I developed early a horror of all groups, particularly those which without further ado claimed the right to subsume all my acts under certain normative designations in terms of which they would reward or punish me. I could feel no loyalty to anything so abstract as a state or so symbolic as an sovereign. And I could feel nothing but outrage at a system in which, by virtue of my father's name and fortune, I found myself from the beginning so shockingly underprivileged. What shocked me most as I grew up was not the fact that things were as they were, and with a tendency to petrify, but that others had the impertinence to assume that I would forbear to react violently against them. Contrary to what he’s heard, Joe finds nothing in America “in abeyance,” and consequently, “to escape this without going away,” he retreats to the nearly-subterranean, life “on a river scow.” To Dorn, this world seems “utterly sensible,” outside or beyond the mess of politics: “Burroughs I am aware is out to point his finger at this state. Trocchi is simply saying no matter what happens I will have the shit cooking, which strikes me as utterly sensible and clear.” In the following passage from Cain’s Book, one can detect both Dorn’s ‘rationale’ for drug use—“…one ought to take anything… because curiosity is
superior to temptation”—and a familiar refusal of the imprisoning tyranny of societal categorizations:
God knows there are enough natural limits to human knowledge without our suffering willingly those that are enforced upon us by an ignorantly rationalized fear of experience… I say it is impertinent, insolent, and presumptuous 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 in which such a prohibition becomes crystallized in law an alarming precedent is created. … Before we give up any sensual pleasure we should have explored it thoroughly, at least in sympathetic imagination; otherwise, history moving forward primly on its moral bicycle (in morals, nothing as complicated as the internal combustion engine has been invented) may leave something primal and essential behind.
And so the addict reclaims “centrality” for the person, “primal and essential,” and shields it from concretizing assimilative powers. “One of the simplest reasons addicts are never given their stuff free,” Dorn explains, “is that addicts enjoy addiction to the exclusion of what the giver considers to be the real world; i.e. the world they rule.” Hence, Dorn’s approval of Cain’s Book, and Trocchi, who “is using a drug which has a life only in terms of a man.
When the state fixes, it uses people,” and his rejection of The Naked Lunch, and Burroughs, who “doesn’t need dope?” No, Dorn surmises, Burroughs is “making use of [dope], but suggesting policies against it. This is a methodology derived from the State. Trocchi never makes the mistake of turning against the best interest of his subjective universe.”
In differentiating Trocchi’s “sensible,” almost sobering embrace of drugs from Burroughs’ despair at addiction, Dorn’s analysis motions toward corresponding, larger significances in their divergent modes of perception. Here is a passage from Cain’s Book:
It is as though I watched a robot living myself, watching, waiting, smiling, gesticulating, for as I prepare this document I watch myself preparing it. I have stopped at this moment, ten seconds? five? and the robot goes on writing, recording, unmasking himself, and there are two of us, the one who enters into the experience and the one who, watching, assures his defeat. To look into oneself endlessly is to be aware of what is discontinuous and null; it is to sever the I who is aware from the I of whom he is aware…and who is he? What is I doing in the third person? Identities, like the successive skins of onions, are shed, each as soon as it is contemplated; caught in the act of pretending to be conscious, they are seen, the confidence men.
“To look into oneself endlessly is to be aware of what is discontinuous”: Dorn celebrates
Cain’s Book’s achievement in aestheticizing the crucial tension between the author, and the “I” of his work—a creative synapse whereat merge the “External” world and the writer’s “inner mechanism.” The protagonist of Cain’s Book shares experiences with its author, who certainly used heroin, and who also worked for a time on a barge near New York City, but Trocchi exercises, Dorn writes, “a good-natured relaxed dexterity of the subjective I.”
Trocchi, he argues, possesses a “deeply intellectual gift,” a flexibility and “patience… when
rummaging reality, the careful picking and placing and mortising of incident and word.” The “dexterity” of Trocchi’s “gift,” of the daemonic energies surging through the writing’s circuits, echoes Duncan’s ideation of the poet, when Dorn writes: “If horizons are manageable it is because of such [an intellectual] gift; genius is shocking but largely incapable. The devil, because he is a primarily cognizant man, has made use of Trocchi in a quietly fulfilled illumination.”
Meanwhile, Burroughs, like Thoreau, appears more and more to Dorn like some mysterious instrument of the state that both writers, through each his own means, intend to reject. That the disjuncture between the middle-class status of many “social” novelists and the anarchic proposals central to the “protest” writer’s notion of resistance—e.g. “Burroughs is a coupon clipper,” that Thoreau “let someone pay his taxes,” that both are “of little use to anyone save a few hip middle class pricks here and there, or put otherwise, the very idiots they purport to put down…”—that this disjuncture is, first of all, overlooked, and secondly, that such a prerogative seems, in fact, a prerequisite for much “protest” writing, which itself often chooses to ignore such provocative realities, troubles Dorn’s sleep. “Irritating (imitative of the state?) that Burroughs is literally without presence,” Dorn needles, “—the writer not there—it seems less a question of masks than absence—(he is time-bound, i.e., to the present) one can accurately deduce he has led a terrifying life—o.k.—but before he made that aesthetic choice he probably didn’t bust his ass too much—it remains so sticky—where is he?” Whereas Trocchi’s gift involves the “intellect,” which “is always relative, to a mastering of material, i.e., what is external to man,” Burroughs Dorn roundly condemns “a genius, but not intellectually vigorous,” and “Genius unbalances,” like “a blow to the head.” Dorn imagines Burroughs locked inside, where “experience comes in,” but isn’t “kinetic” (as Olson instructed), isn’t “delivered back,” from the interior chamber, where it remains—like light into a black hole, or difference into the State. Dorn likens Burroughs to a prose-machine: “When a language becomes hyperpersonalized i.e., Joyce and others, Burroughs, the process takes place in a matter of seconds—from one word to the next there is no possibility. He may be saying plenty. He is. So does a treadmill.”And near the end of the essay, Dorn concludes: “Burroughs is continuous so long as he defies location, that is the cheapest trick in the industry.”917 So in the attempt to enact his criticism of state censure, Burroughs, as a locus of experience, disappears behind the superstructural guises and
mechanisms of his prose; the potentialities the writing means to activate are foreclosed upon by the exclusive formal demands of a “hyperpersonalized” voice. Dorn returns to this discussion of authorial presence later in the decade when applauding the work of Tom Raworth, and when composing his own—Books I and II of Gunslinger revolve around various distortions and uncertainties in narrative perspective, including the transmogrification of a character deceptively named “I”.
In 1966, nearly four years after his “Notes” piece appeared in Kulchur, Dorn met Alexander Trocchi and William Burroughs, together, on a mid-summer visit to London from Essex. Writing in early August to Tom Clark, who at the time was visiting Vence, on the French Riviera, Dorn tries to process the death of Frank O’Hara—“Jesus what a modern death O’Hara had…”—who was struck by beach buggy in the early morning hours of July 24 while walking on Fire Island, and just before ending the letter, adds: “I’m going to see Trocchi this aft and we’ll go see Burroughs which means I got to get to school to copy the enclosed and then london.” It’s unclear what Dorn’s thoughts about meeting Trocchi were, since no account exists in the available correspondence and Dorn never published anything about it. However, in a letter dated August 10, to Tom Clark, Dorn does describe an evening he spent with Burroughs, though it remains uncertain (in part because the letter contains no mention of Trocchi) whether this refers to the same occasion that Dorn mentioned in his earlier correspondence:
Spent a couple hours with William “Bill” Burroughs last night in his lush Park Lane hotel room where the radio speaker is the same as the T.V. and is operated from a grand kiosk by the bed. You can imagine the demonstration I got—he was flipping from bed
side to tape recorder to TV and somehow mixing all those messages up with a hand camera, 8 mm, which is its own projector. He cld superimpose his own street images with the camera onto the TV screen. Mixed data indeed. You cldnt understand a thing, ie, you cld understand anything it turns out because no matter what the sound and image they somehow go together, like an opera singer singing the news. that’s something! Finally its all gagetry. His notebooks are very damn interesting, sorry inneresting, and will sell for 1000 (pounds) whenever he’s ready, but he writes like anyone else, as we’ve guessed, when it comes down to it.
Not only as anti-state or “protest” writers were Burroughs and Trocchi suitable subjects for Dorn’s and correspondence with Clark, and especially Raworth, but as serious addicts who wrote sensitively and persuasively about drug use, they fit naturally into a correspondence that from its initiation doubled as a minor trafficking network, and with considerable success.
HERE
