Introduction
It is always an event when a master stylist of the language is at hand. One feels it in his bones. One knows that the terms are matters of distinction. The book becomes more than an experience. Any good book is capable of evoking rich experience in the mind and imagination of the reader; and by this time along the routes of our evolution, we know that even the so-called run-of-the-mill novel, the mystery story, the science fiction tale-all of these draw us into them, carry us along their byways. So, too, in a popular culture, does the picture magazine, the horror book, the sex thriller, the best-seller and the worst-seller find at least one mind it can call its friend.
Yet in an age of mass media, of fantastic new dimensions in publishing, the old, the oldest terms still maintain their silent continuity. For as it is man's nature to try to be as widely and comprehensively accepting of the total range of human possibilities, it is also his nature to bestow on what is especially well done, especially fine, that distinction which is its due. What is especially well done, especially fine to my mind has always been a matter of style-style which defines a certain state of mind relative to a given epoch-whether it be the style of a Hemingway come from the Midwest to take its place in the consciousness of an entire world, or the style of an Emily Dickinson with its cramped but diamonded depths immediately evocative of the narrow-cut streets of the New England which was her curse and her glory, and our continual pleasure.
White Thighs was written by Alex Trocchi, one of the foremost writers of the contemporary Western world, under the discreet pen name of Frances Lengel. I say discreet because, frankly, the word seems sensibly English enough, and Trocchi comes from the British Isles, a place which-like most-apart from containing the general hard knocks which countries and their peoples must suffer in these difficult and spinning times of the earth, also contains its fair shake of discretions, by which I mean nothing more than a kind of comportment or style which makes it (simply) easier to see things and, in the case of a writer, to make others see as well.
Now I know right off that the cry if not shriek is ready to make itself heard to the effect that, after all, Trocchi is that writer who wrote that Cain's Book which was about that drug addict like that book Naked Lunch was about that drug addict. Drug addiction being a difficult subject for many to comprehend.
The deeper truth however is that Trocchi wrote a book about human alienation in a language so precisely beautiful, so richly uncompromising in his quest to express the truth of a man at a given period in his life, that Cain's Book still stands as a sort of poetic documentary of the horrors of drug addiction, and anyone who feels romantic about that loveless world can read the book and if he still cares to go that route, I can only suggest that he be sure to take his typewriter along.
And it is precisely there that the strength of Trocchi lies: I mean, he always took his typewriter along. He always said, and still says: I am a writer. No matter how difficult, even horrible the journey, it is always with the imagination that I am concerned. And I (this commentator) might add that I've recently seen a section of Trocchi's latest novel, published in London by the Trigram Press, which concerns itself with the problem of global paranoia and which, in my view, is going to be one of the important works of the next decade. And the beauty of its prose, of its whole disposition, lies in Trocchi's ability to transcend-by the style of his language itself-the very horrors of mass war, of lunacy and terror,-to see them as a writer, as one, that is, who is ever urged to confront those innermost places of the human heart in the name of the Love which is the governor of the imagination. For with every line I have ever read of this man, he has told me: Life, however dark, is the drug I am involved with, in order to re-create imaginative life in order that a reader borne along by the nameless terrors which beset men and women on this earth may find in his work and out of the dark that quiet light which is Friend.
Horrors, physical and mental; degradations, physical and mental; the accouterments of the 'underground' (though in 1967 such a term really is a cliche, what with so much being borne to the surface of things)-these have been the subject-catalysts of Trocchi's writings. In White Thighs we are given an erotic exploration. It is written in the mainstream of Trocchi's style: with a brutal irony and an excruciating discretion. Trocchi's genius as a writer has always been in the act of renouncing himself completely at the same moment that his heroes are incapable of that renunciation. In this he tells all by telling nothing but giving all.
White Thighs is dominated by dominance itself; it plays about the idea of the masterslave relationship at the point where people cannot renounce themselves for love. In this the book is an expression as old as history and as contemporary as the house next door. Kirsten, the woman to whom the hero Saul becomes bound as a slave, is given almost deific proportions, for the hero's need for the pleasure of humiliation is so great that, the smaller he grows, the larger must the object of his pleasure loom. Indeed, such a scale is the measure of the book: all the women with whom he becomes involved very quickly are mounted and pedestalled, rendered omnipotent and therefore beyond his ability really to be humanly involved with them. At the opposite pole, the women, it would seem, are called forth from that place in themselves which, ever assenting, recognizes the call, perhaps even indulges it. I am reminded here by way of the book of another book, touching upon the subject of hypnosis. A group of people in Colorado, after the exposition of the Bridey Murphy case, arranged for a woman to undergo deep hypnosis, their interest lying in the realm of reincarnative lives. The woman, once detached, passed through three 'layers' of life, each one moving backward in time and eastward (from the direction of Colorado) in space. In the final 'life' the woman appeared to be of royal birth, a queen of some sort in a country out of classical antiquity. So magnificent was she that she simply refused to answer the questions of her interlocutor, who was conducting the experiment. She ordered him to keep quiet. She was more than annoyed; she was positively livid with the intrusion of his words. And at one point, on being questioned about her will and its direction of choice, she cried: "I do not choose."
In the same way, the women of White Thighs do not choose but act insofar as they are chosen by the hero-narrator. But it is obvious that, once chosen by him, they take over. It is he who, desiring to use them, becomes the medium for their narcissism, tender and cruel as well. It is he who, desiring to artificialize their bodies with what Trocchi calls "the accouterments of humiliation," becomes the victim of humiliation. But where the women truly escape (from the man's point of view, and precisely because of that awful need to have a manly point of view) into an acceptance of conditions of insanity-perhaps because from their point of view insanity is only another way of looking at the moon, as in luna or lunacy-the hero, less able to deal with the uprush of this underground life in terms of its integration into the conventions of daily life (Saul continually marvels at how the women can go about their business of keeping house, of feeding his vanity as master of it, etc); the hero, I say, is continually verged, no, fixed on a point of desperate madness. That Trocchi is able to sustain that incredible discretion, that tone throughout of the book's being a sort of common sense, is a tribute to a writer confronted by such materials. Another writer would have smudged the lines, or slickified them. Trocchi presents his inevitable descent with the dispassionate eye that is able to paint brilliant portraits of virtually all the characters, and at the same time leave room for one to smile at one's own excitement, the mark of a good book.
Looked at from still other vantage points, White Thighs may be viewed as a travesty of the traditional English life involving the master and the servant; or, despite what the hero says to the effect of his name's having no biblical significance in the absurd world which he chooses to find himself, a play on the witches' brew well known in the Book of Kings. Psychologists, I'm sure, will find ample room for speculations on infantile behavior. Someone is certain to remark on the relation of the characters to an aggressive modern world. Francophiles and Germanophiles can, I suppose, have a field day.
For my part, White Thighs is a book whose style (language, perceptions)-the voice of a contemporary poet-commands the highest respect.
Jack Hirschman, Ph.D. Los Angeles, California, January 1967