Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984): Photo by Marvin Lichtner (1967)
'I Groaned with Pain' shirt design by McLaren-Westwood for SEX (1974)
I groaned with pain as he eased the pressure in removing the thing
which had split me and then his huge hands grasping me at the hips
my blonde hair forming a pool on the dark wood between his feet
he raised me to doting love soothing the bleeding lips and
causing the tearing commotion at my loins to subside
in a soft corrosion
I.
Malcolm McLaren's obsession with the above lines extracted from Helen and Desire (1954) - an erotic novel by the writer Alexander Trocchi - was one that can be traced across at least a twenty-year period: you can find them printed on a shirt sold at SEX in 1975 and you can hear them still echoing on McLaren's concept album Paris in 1994.
II.
Born in Glasgow in 1925, Trocchi was the son of a music-hall performer of Italian heritage.
After working as a young merchant seaman aboard ships transporting food, fuel, and vital military supplies from the UK and US to the Soviet port of Murmansk during WWII, Trocchi studied English literature and moral philosophy at university.
In the early 1950s, he moved to the Continent, living in Paris and editing an avant-garde literary magazine - Merlin (1952-55) - which featured work by writers including Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Later, in collaboration with the satirical author Terry Southern and publisher Richard Seaver, Trocchi co-edited the 366-page countercultural anthology Writers in Revolt (1962) - which featured work by the above trio alongside contemporaries such as Genet and Ginsberg and ghosts from the past such as Sade and Baudelaire (i.e., all the usual suspects).
III.
When not occupied with his editorial work - or shooting up with heroin - Trocchi was busy with his own writing and many of his novels were published by the Olympia Press, i.e., the publishing house that specialised in literary fiction likely to be described as pornography by the old guard and pornography hailed as literary fiction by the vanguard.
Under the pseudonym Frances Lengel, Trocchi churned out numerous erotic works, including McLaren's favourite, Helen and Desire (1954).
IV.
An interesting character - to say the least - Trocchi was not only pally with members of the American Beat scene, but involved with both the Lettrists and the Situationists.
And, after moving to London in 1962 - where he stayed for the rest of his life - he then became a formative influence on the UK underground scene, working for an invisible insurrection that would promote sodomy as crucial to creativity.
Less than impressed with the direction he was taking, in 1966 the Situationists announced their disapproval and expelled him from the movement. Trocchi continued writing, but, sadly, published little new work.
It was in 1969 that a young art student named Malcolm McLaren was introduced to "the heavily addicted Trocchi, who by then was reduced to selling second-hand books and manuscripts and living in a shabby flat on the Kensington and Chelsea borders" [1].
As Paul Gorman explains, the invitation to McLaren was extended "because Trocchi was eager to meet radical students to help him work on his utopian Project Sigma texts" [2] - but Malcolm was more interested in Trocchi's past work and connections rather than his future plans for a network of intellectuals interested in non-traditional ways of living and expanding their consciousness with drugs.
V.
Skip forward a few years to 1974, and McLaren is now installed at his shop on the King's Road, with his partner Vivienne Westwood (and sometimes collaborator Bernie Rhodes). It has been decided to produce a new range of screen-printed T-shirts to sell at the shop that will soon be rebranded as SEX.
And the first of these designs is the 'I Groaned with Pain' square sleeveless top (shown above) with a text taken from Helen and Desire, hand-written by McLaren:
"The Trocchi shirt represented the first formal annexation of text in the sphere of fashion [...] McLaren transformed the T-shirt from humble undergarment into a powerful means of communicating social and political commentary." [3]
Later, McLaren would enlist the support of Saturday boy (and future Sex Pistol) Glen Matlock to assist him in decorating the interior walls of SEX with various spray-painted slogans taken from May '68 and Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1968).
Trocchi's 'I groaned with pain ...' paragraph was also added and while McLaren often says punk is all about sex, style, and subversion, it could also be characterised as a mix of porn, politics, and provocation.
VI.
The story, however, does not end at 430 King's Road. To fully appreciate the depth of McLaren's obsession with Alexander Trocchi, one has to fast-forward to McLaren's 1994 Paris project, in which he composes a love letter to the French capital and traces out a musical map of feeling.
On the opening track, titled 'Mon Dié Sénié', McLaren doesn't just vocalise lyrics based on his favourite lines from Helen and Desire - "Your blonde hair formed a pool on the dark wood between my feet", etc. - he seamlessly weaves them together with excerpts from another of Trocchi's Olympia Press novels, School for Wives (1955): "She felt the seed stir at the pit of her belly in response to my strong tonguing movements."
Years after selling shirts at SEX and Seditionaries, McLaren was still obsessing over Trocchi's words and looping back to his own past in an attempt to live yesterday tomorrow and perhaps breathe new life into the literary pornography that had so inspired him and influenced look of punk [4].
Notes
[1] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable Books, 2020), p. 103.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 219.
[4] Readers might like to note that by 1994 there was the beginning of a resurgence of interest in Trocchi and his role in the avant-garde movements of the mid-20th century. A biography written by Andrew Murray Scott titled Alexander Trocchi: The Making of the Monster was published alongside Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader, edited by Scott. Both books were published by Polygon (1991).
Musical bonus: another track from McLaren's Paris (1994): 'Rue Dauphine'. It's perhaps my favourite track on the album, bringing together as it does Serge Gainsbourg and Sid Vicious, as well as containing the 'I groaned with pain' line from Trocchi's novel (though somewhat amusingly this in used in relation to licking a postage stamp).
