Young Adam

A Novel

Alexander Trocchi

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780802189424
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A compelling existential thriller by the Beat-era writer: "Everyone should read Young Adam " ( The Times Literary Supplement ). Young Adam tells the story of Joe, a drifter who works on a barge traveling the Clyde River between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As the novel opens, Joe finds the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Was it an accident, a suicide, or murder? As the police investigate and arrest a suspect, it becomes clear that Joe knows far more than he's telling. Originally published in 1954, Young Adam was made into a film starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, and is now reissued with an introduction by PEN finalist and literary critic David L.Ulin. This is a psychologically suspenseful novel and an absorbing portrait of a haunted man, from an iconoclastic Beat writer praised by the New Yorker for "prose that is always clean and sharp and often ferociously alive with poetry" and called "the most brilliant man I ever met" by Allen Ginsberg. "Trocchi may be the greatest unknown writer in the world." — The Bloomsbury Review

Part One

1

THESE ARE TIMES when what is to be said looks out of the past at you—looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along. Past hours, past acts, take on an uncanny isolation; between them and you who look back on them now there is no continuity.

This morning, the first thing after I got out of bed, I looked in the mirror. It is of chromium-plated steel and I always carry it with me. It is unbreakable. My beard had grown imperceptibly during the night and now my cheeks and chin were covered with a short stubble. My eyes were less bloodshot than they had been during the previous fortnight. I must have slept well. I looked at my image for a few moments and I could see nothing strange about it. It was the same nose and the same mouth, and the little scar above and thrusting down into my left eyebrow was no more obvious than it had been the day before. Nothing out of place and yet everything was, because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance, the same break in continuity which I have always felt to exist between acts which I committed yesterday and my present consciousness of them.

But there is no problem.

I don’t ask whether I am the “I” who looked or the image which was seen, the man who acted or the man who thought about the act. For I know now that it is the structure of language itself which is treacherous. The problem comes into being as soon as I begin to use the word “I”. There is no contradiction in things, only in the words we invent to refer to things. It is the word “I” which is arbitrary and which contains within it its own inadequacy and its own contradiction.

No problem. Somewhere from beyond the dark edge of the universe a hyena’s laugh. I turned away from the face in the mirror then. Between then and now I have smoked nine cigarettes.

It had come floating downstream, willowy, like a tangle of weeds. She was beautiful in a pale way—not her face, although that wasn’t bad, but the way her body seemed to have given itself to the water, its whole gesture abandoned, the long white legs apart and trailing, sucked downwards slightly at the feet.

As I leant over the edge of the barge with a boathook I didn’t think of her as a dead woman, not even when I looked at the face. She was like some beautiful white water-fungus, a strange shining thing come up from the depths, and her limbs and her flesh had the ripeness and maturity of a large mushroom. But it was the hair more than anything; it stranded away from the head like long grasses. Only it was alive, and because the body was slow, heavy, torpid, it had become a forest of antennae, caressing, feeding on the water, intricately.

It was not until Leslie swore at me for being so handless with the boathook that I drew her alongside. We reached down with our hands. When I felt the chilled flesh under my fingertips I moved more quickly. It was sagging away from us and it slopped softly and obscenely against the bilges. It was touching it that made me realize how bloated it was.

Leslie said: “For Christ’s sake get a bloody grip on it!”

I leant down until my face was nearly touching the water and with my right hand got hold of one of the ankles. She turned over smoothly then, like the fat underbelly of a fish. Together we pulled her to the surface and, dripping a curtain of river-water, over the gunwale. Her weight settled with a flat, splashing sound on the wooden boards of the deck. Puddles of water formed quickly at the knees and where the chin lay.

We looked at her and then at each other but neither of us said anything. It was obscene, the way death usually is, frightening and obscene at the same time.

“A hundred and thirty at eleven pence a pound”: an irrele­vant thought . . . I didn’t know how it came to me, and for more than one reason, partly because I knew Leslie would be shocked, I didn’t utter it. Later you will see what I mean.

The ambulance didn’t arrive until after breakfast. I don’t suppose they were in a hurry because I told them she was dead on the tele­phone. We threw a couple of potato sacks over her so that she wouldn’t frighten the kid and then I went over and telephoned and went back and joined Leslie and his wife and the kid at breakfast.

“No egg this morning?” I said.

Ella said no, that she’d forgotten to buy them the previous day when she went to get the stores. But I knew that wasn’t true because I’d seen her take them from her basket when she returned. That made me angry, that she didn’t take the trouble to remember how she’d examined the shells because she thought she might have broken one of them, and me there in the cabin at the time. It was a kind of insult.

“Salt?” I said, the monosyllable carrying the cynical weight of my disbelief.

“Starin’ you in the face,” she said.

It was damp. I had to scrape it from the side of the dish with my knife. Ella ignored the scratching sound and Leslie, his face twitching as it sometimes did, went on reading the paper.

It was only when I had began to eat my bacon that it occurred to me they’d had an egg. I could see the traces on the prongs of their forks. And after I’d gone all the way across the dock to the telephone . . . Leslie got up noisily, without his second cup of tea. He was embarrassed. Ella had her back to me and I swore at her under my breath. A moment later she too went up on deck, taking the kid with her, and I was left alone to finish my breakfast.

We were all on deck when the ambulance arrived. It was one of those new ambulances, streamlined, and the men were very smart. Two policemen arrived at the same time, one of them a sergeant, and Leslie went ashore to talk to them. Jim, the kid, was sitting on an upturned pail near the bows so that he would get a good view. He was eating an apple. I was still annoyed and I sat down on a hatch and waited. I looked out across the water at the black buffalo-like silhouette of a tug which crept upstream near the far shore. Beyond it on the far bank, a network of cranes and girders closed in about a ship. “To sail away on a ship like that,” I thought, “away. Montevideo, Macao, anywhere. What the hell am I doing here? The pale North.” It was still early and the light was still thin but already a saucer of tenuous smoke was gathering at the level of the roofs.

Then the ambulance men came across the quay and on to the barge and I pointed to where we had put the body under the sacks. I left them to it. I was thinking again of the dead woman and the egg and the salt and I was bored by the fact that it was the beginning of the day and not the end of it, days being each the same as the other as they were then, alike as beads on a string, with only the work on the barge, and Leslie to talk to. For I seldom talked to Ella, who appeared to dislike me and who gave the impression she only put up with me because of him: a necessary evil, the hired hand.

And then I noticed Ella pegging out some clothes at the stern.

I had often seen her do it before but it had never struck me in the same way. I had always thought of her as Leslie’s wife—she was screaming at him about something or calling him Mister High-and-Mighty in a thick sarcastic voice—and not as a woman who could attract another man. That had never occurred to me.

But there she was, trying very hard not to look round, pretending she wasn’t interested in what was going on, in the ambulance men and all that, and I found myself looking at her in a new way.

She was one of those heavy women, not more than thirty-five, with strong buttocks and big thighs, and she was wearing a tight green cotton dress which had pulled up above the backs of her knees as she stretched up to put the clothes on the line, and I could see the pink flesh of her ankles growing over the rim at the back of her shoes. She was heavy all right, but her waist was small and her legs weren’t bad and I found myself suddenly liking the strong look of her. I watched her, and I could see her walk through a park at night, her heels clacking, just a little bit hurriedly, and her heavy white calves were moving just ahead of me, like glow-worms in the dark. And I could imagine the soft sound of her thighs as their surfaces grazed.

As she reached up her buttocks tightened, the cotton dress fitting itself to their thrust, and then she alighted on her heels, bent down, and shook the excess water out of the next garment.

A moment later she looked round. Her curiosity had got too much for her, and she caught me looking at her. Her look was uncertain. She flushed slightly, maybe remembering the egg, and then, very quickly, she returned to her chore.

The police sergeant was making notes in a little black notebook, occasionally licking the stub of his pencil, and the other cop was standing with his mouth open watching the stretcher-bearers who seemed to be taking their time. They h...

Table of contents

• YOUNG ADAM
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Underground Man
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Back Cover