Cain's Book is a work of fragments, purporting to be a novel while taking the avantgarde, selfreflexive position that novels are an exhausted genre. Trocchi, given his fixdominated, handtomouth existence, could not have written it any other way than in fragments (his editor, Richard Seaver, got him to finish the book by doling out the advance thirty bucks a clip, the amount of a score, in exchange for some new pages), so he made necessity a virtue, building a kind of structure out of memorypieces and short, tense scenes that had the veracity of diary entries. The best parts remain his descriptions of barge life and his memories of growing up in a boardinghouse in Glasgow, particularly the portrait of his father, a chronically unemployed Italian musician who seems to have "inspired" Trocchi's own congenital idleness. Again and again, in Cain's Book, Trocchi returns to the monotonous, consoling daily routine on the New York waterfront, the slowmoving pace of scowtime, and the life of the "harbor gypsies," families or social sets who lived in instant villages of nine scows moored together. "Mine was the last scow and I sat aft at my open cabin door and watched the dark west waterfront of Manhattan slide away to the right. I thought of a night a long time ago when I had a girlfriend aboard for a short trip and how at the same kind of midnight we went naked over the end of a long tow, each Ш hempen eye of a dockline, screaming sure and mad off Wall Street asthe dark waves struck." °t every such exhilaration, there were four epiphanies of defeat. To on a scow is to be a loser, Trocchi informs us; most scowmen are old, jMvashedup alcoholics, which is why tugboat captains despise them. В e miclfifties the big cargo ships had already begun the move to New Jersey, and scows like Trocchi's were left to haul sand and crushed ston the detritus of a oncevast commerce. A few decades later the barg( would become so much bigger that they could no longer be bunched together in floating communities; that whole way of life would be gone If Ernest Poole celebrates the harbor at its zenith, Alexander Trocchi is the poet of the port in decline. The New York waterfront he describes would be an ideal location for a film noir: "At 33rd Street is Pier 72. At the waterfront there are few buildings and they are low. The city is in the background. It has diners at its edge, boxcars abandoned and stored, rails amongst grass and gravel, vacant lots. The trucks of moving and storage companies are parked and shunted under the tunnels of an area of broad deserted shadows, useful for murder or rape. . . . After eight, when the diners close, the dockside streets are fairly deserted. In winter the lights under the elevated roadway shine as in a vast and dingy shed, dimly reflecting its own emptiness." Never does Trocchi make a historical observation about the comparative fortunes of the New York port: its "emptiness" is seen as a constant, a handy parable for his own exilic disquiet.