Free Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi

a grocer allows dried peas to fall from his brass scoop, one at a time, his head cocked, regarding the indicator needle fixedly, until
it reaches the appropriate mark. I didn’t mean to keep him waiting. Finally without saying anything I fetched the unbroken bottle of whiskey and poured him a drink.
    “Happy New Year,” I said.
    “Happy New Year!”
    We clinked glasses and he drank his down with obvious relief. Then he looked at his watch and said he had to be on his way. Claire was waiting for him. Claire. I always thought of Claire as
strawberries and cream, cream, red and pink. He looked guilty for her. As well he might. She would have betrayed him for a dry Martini. She told him she didn’t like me.
    I helped him on with his coat and he wrapped the scarf round his neck. At the door we shook hands. As he left he turned back for a moment and said he was counting on me. I waved him down the
stairs. Back in the room I finished my drink and smoked a cigarette. I might have laughed. But I always found it difficult to laugh alone.

Don’t you suppose – since I am in a confidential and confessional vein – that when they have accused me of not being a good
     Spaniard I have often said to myself: “I am the only Spaniard! I – not these other men who were born and live in Spain.”
    – Unamuno 6

F OR A LONG TIME now I have felt that writing which is not ostensibly self-conscious is in a vital way inauthentic for our
time. For our time – I think every statement should be dated. Which is another way of saying the same thing. I know of no young man who is not either an ignoramus or a fool who can take the
old objective forms for granted. Is there no character in the book large enough to doubt the validity of the book itself?
    For centuries we in the West have been dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify. It is no doubt because conventional classifications become part of prevailing economic structure that
all real revolt is hastily fixed like a bright butterfly on a classificatory pin; the anti-play,
Godot
, being from one point of view unanswerable, is with all speed acclaimed “best
play of the year”; anti-literature is rendered innocuous by granting it place in conventional histories of literature. The Shakespearean industry has little to do with Shakespeare. My friends
will know what I mean when I say that I deplore our contemporary industrial writers. Let them dedicate a year to pinball and think again.
    Question the noun; the present participles of the verb will look after themselves. Kafka proved that the Great Wall of China was impossible, it was a perpetual walling; that the burrow was
impossible, it was a perpetual burrowing... etc. A “distance theory” of writing could allow for pockets of Stanislavski, of spontaneous prose.
    Thus I take soundings. It’s a complicated business this living it over again and apart from the forgotten judgements that were part of it. I am engaged in a complicated process of
knitting, see myself as one of those old crones who during the Reign of Terror sat in the shadow of the guillotine as the heads fell, and knitted, on and on. Each time a head falls I drop a stitch,
and from time to time I run out of wool and have to go off in search of a new ball. It’s seldom easy to match colours.
    Someone said somewhere that one doesn’t marry a woman but an idea. That is rather imprecisely put, overstated. Still, it
isn’t
very useful to suggest that we should go into
marriage without preconceptions, go anywhere without them; if we hadn’t such preconceptions we shouldn’t think of marrying. I knew a very gentle and troubled Englishman who settled in
Paris and married a dark, thin Negress from Sierra Leone. She didn’t speak English. She bore no resemblance to the romantic conception of
la belle négresse.
A fat, bluish
purse of lips, a flat broad nose, eyeballs set outwards with the gleam of billiard balls, flat-breasted, thin shins long on which rayon