Alexander Trocchi - Later Life

Later Life

In the late 1950s he lived in Venice, California, then the centre of the Southern California Beat scene. In October 1955, he became involved with the Lettrist International and then the Situationist International. His text "Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds" was published in the Scottish journal New Saltire in 1962 and subsequently as "Technique du Coup du Monde" in Internationale Situationniste, number 8. It proposed an international "spontaneous university" as a cultural force and marked the beginning of his movement towards his sigma project, which played a formative part in the UK Underground. He resigned from the SI in 1964.

Trocchi appeared at the 1962 Edinburgh Writers Festival where he claimed "sodomy" as a basis for his writing. During the festival, Hugh MacDiarmid denounced him as "cosmopolitan scum." However, while this incident is well known, it is little remarked upon that the two men subsequently engaged in correspondence, and actually became friends. Trocchi then moved to London, where he remained for the rest of his life.

He began a new novel, The Long Book, which he did not finish. Much of his sporadic work of the 1960s was collected as The Sigma Portfolio. He continued writing but published little. He opened a small book store near his Kensington home. He was known in Notting Hill as "Scots Alec." He died of pneumonia in London on 15 April 1984.

In the 1960s Trocchi lived in Observatory Gardens, Kensington, London on the two top floors of a 19th century terrace block comprising six stories. He had two sons: Marc Alexander Trocchi and a second son, Nicholas. The eldest son, Marc died of cancer at age 15 in 1974, and shortly after Alexander's American wife died. The final tragedy was the suicide of the youngest son, Nicholas who, some years after his father's death, returned to the family's home in London and leapt from the top floor of the five-storey building to his death. An interesting postscript: when the terrace block was extensively refurbished into luxury apartments in 1980s the number on Alexander Trocchi's house was removed, one assumes to avoid the house becoming some form of shrine.