Alexander Trocchi & Leonard Cohen

Friendship, art, drugs and chaos

Alexander Trocchi shooting up heroin live on American television in the 1960s. Credit: Unknown

In preparation for a holiday on the Greek island of Hydra, I am reading I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, by Sylvie Simmons.

So far I have reached Cohen’s early 30s and I have to say my attitude to him is vacillating between admiration and irritation.

Cohen complains about the state of his life in his thirties and says: “That’s the age when you finally understand that the universe does succumb to your command.”

Simmons, the biographer, raises an eyebrow at this. “It could be argued that the universe had done quite a good job of succumbing to Leonard,” she says, in a line that made me laugh out loud.

Cohen, after all, had a congregation of female admirers, the recognition of the Canadian literary establishment, a grant that allowed him to write while living on a Greek island, and the patient love of a beautiful Scandinavian woman called Marianne who kept house for him on Hydra while he bedded other women on trips back home to Montreal.

Leonard Cohen in 1960. Credit: Unknown

The biography tells a story of which I was only dimly aware: Cohen’s intense friendship with the Scottish poet and novelist Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi seems to have made a deep impression on Cohen, shaping his sensibility as a writer and influencing his work.

Trocchi is scandalously neglected in Scottish literature, despite a level of fame in his lifetime of which most Scottish writers can only dream. Trocchi drew international attention as part of the Beat Generation of poets. He was a friend of Allen Ginsberg and performed at the Beats’ famous Wholly Communion reading at the Albert Hall in 1965.

Trocchi edited an influential literary magazine called Merlin in Paris in the 1950s, publishing Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda and Jean-Paul Sartre. No Scottish literary figure of the 20th century was better connected internationally.

Alexander Trocchi with Allen Ginsberg and other poets at the Albert Memorial, 1965. Credit: Sydney O'Meara / Intermittent / Getty

Why has Trocchi been so overlooked in his homeland? In my view it is because the Scottish literary establishment was, and still is, irredeemably timid and couthy. A mouthy, transgressive, situationist, sex-obsessed drug addict who escaped Scotland at the earliest opportunity and reportedly introduced Marianne Faithful to heroin, was frowned upon by the respectable middle-class gatekeepers of Caledonian culture.

Hugh MacDiarmid, the most lauded Scottish poet of the 20th century, once called Trocchi “cosmopolitan scum”, an insult that perhaps reveals more about the insulter than the insulted. The two poets debated onstage at the Edinburgh Festival in 1962. Trocchi called MacDiarmid “an old fossil” and dismissed most Scottish literature as “turgid, petty, provincial”, claiming to be responsible for the only Scottish writing worth a damn in the previous twenty years.

Less well known is the influence Trocchi had on Cohen, both personally and artistically. Simmons tells the extraordinary story of how Cohen helped Trocchi escape a possible death sentence by electric chair in New York.